Child Prodigies: Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we're all feeling pretty precocious today here on Stuff You Should Know.

You know, judging from what just happened, I think if we release a little five-minute mini-episode mini-episode every week of the five minutes before we, where we're recording, but before we start

the stuff that we're doing,

I bet people would eat that up.

Yeah.

Rated R.

So, yeah, I'm sure some people would like that.

The stuff you should know Army definitely would.

Yeah, for sure.

Everyone else would be like, who cares?

What these guys are talking about off my exactly.

I tune in for facts, and that's it.

Yeah.

You know who else would probably eat it up, Chuck?

I'm thinking about names in this.

I don't know.

Well, I was just going to start with Mozart.

Oh, okay.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have loved that kind of thing.

He was really into hearing people

talk candidly to one another.

It was one of his things.

Well, we're talking about child prodigies, and that's why you bring up Mozart, obviously.

Thanks to Julia for help with this.

And also, this is the first time, I think, that we're covering something that was a chapter in our book.

No, we've done it before and I can't place it.

But we definitely, there was one other one that we definitely did.

Yeah.

Mr.

Potato Head?

No.

No, I'll try to think of it and I'll allocate about 5% of my brain to coming up with it while we do the episode, okay?

Okay.

At any rate, this was one of the chapters from our book, and we were both individually relieved when we texted each other that we each read, reread the chapter.

And it was basically the same.

And I was worried.

I was like, man, this is going to be so different that one of them is going to be sort of wrong.

But long way of saying why we talked about Mozart is because if you read anything on the internet about child prodigies, Mozart's a name that's going to probably come up.

One of the more famous prodigies.

And Julia found a pretty fun story about Mozart as a teenager, right?

Yeah, I actually went and listened to this Miserare.

Yeah, Miserare.

It's a choral piece for like, I think, think, nine choral parts.

And it was written by Gregorio Alighieri back in, I don't remember when he wrote it, but at least before 1770, because that was the year that a young Amadeus Mozart, who was 14 at the time, went to Vatican City to hear this.

And the reason he and his father traveled to Vatican City is because this choral piece was so beloved by the people,

I guess the Pope and all of his buddies

that they forbade anybody from performing it outside of Vatican City.

And so, you know, a corollary to that was no one could transcribe it.

So that

it was just to be heard in Vatican City.

They thought it was that beautiful.

And it's, if you heard it, you probably recognize it.

Your mom probably listened to it while she was cleaning the house, or you heard it on like America's Top 40 in the 70s or something.

I've just, I've been distracted ever since you said the Pope and his buddies, because now all I can think of is a sitcom called Pope and Company.

That's not bad.

Ampersand, CO dot, obviously.

Right, and the Pope has his like favorite recliner that's almost like an extra character.

Yeah, don't sit in it if you're not there.

That's right.

Yeah, so anyway, very revered thing within Vatican City.

And did you mention that no one could transcribe it?

I certainly did while you were

spaced out.

Yeah, I was really thinking about what the opening credits of that sitcom would look like.

Do you have the theme song in your head?

Oh,

it's clicking around up there.

I'm no prodigy, so it'll take a minute.

All right.

But you mentioned the transcription because Mozart, as a precocious 14-year-old, couldn't fall asleep, apparently, the night after the performance.

So he woke up from his slumber and transcribed it, even though he wasn't supposed to, from memory as a 14-year-old, went back, heard it a couple of days later, and was like, oh, I made a couple of mistakes from memory.

He realized this and went back and fixed them.

He had hid it in his hat because, you know, he wasn't allowed to have this transcribed.

But just kind of a fun story of Mozart's precociousness.

Yeah, and so he was at, he was age 14.

So technically, by this time, he was a former prodigy.

Oh, is that the cutoff?

No, 10 is the cutoff.

You have to have achieved this by 10 to be considered a prodigy.

But the reason I said generally is because

if you go by the strictest definition of prodigy, there are only a handful of the ones we talk about in this episode or we'll we'll talk about actually qualify as prodigies.

And technically, Mozart, you could make a case if he was a prodigy, he was kind of a poor example of a prodigy because he went on to do great things as an adult, which is also something that's not usually characteristic of a prodigy.

Yeah.

And we also need to kind of spell out the difference between genius and prodigy because they're not necessarily the same thing.

Well, they're not the same thing at all, but they can overlap at times, I guess, is the better way to say it.

Yeah, and I think Mozart would be an example of that.

Yeah, for sure.

But genius usually is a high IQ or a high Q score of 140.

But they may not, you know, ever achieve anything.

You can be a genius and not achieve anything great.

I mean, you probably will if you're a genius, but not necessarily.

Right.

A prodigy doesn't necessarily have a high IQ.

They often do.

But oh, yeah, there it is right there, generally by the age of 10.

But what a prodigy is, is a kid that achieves like, like surpasses adult

levels of mastery by the time they're 10.

Like stuff that, you know, a lot of adults can't even achieve in expertise or, you know, like I can do this math or this chess or this, play this, you know, instrument better than an adult who's been doing it for decades before the age of 10.

Yeah, they reach like the elite level where you can't really get any better as far as adults go by the age of 10.

And then one of the other things about being a prodigy then is that by definition, you have achieved something.

Yeah.

Whereas like you said, but being a genius, you are a genius throughout your whole life, but you may or may not achieve something.

Right.

To be considered a prodigy, you have to have achieved something.

That's just part and parcel with it.

Yeah.

And prodigies were all the rage sort of in the beginning of the 20th century when tabloid journalism started and when IQ tests started.

They were all over the newspapers.

People just were, you know, amazed and want, you know, in awe of these kids who could do these amazing things.

They were all over the place.

Yeah.

The term pint size was thrown around a lot.

But they would, they would, like reporters would interview them to ask them their thoughts on like current events and stuff like that.

And they'd be quoted extensively in the paper.

And people, I mean, people, like you said, were in awe, but they were also like, oh, that's a pretty good point.

I hadn't thought about that.

So they were taken seriously too.

And then there's a couple of other points that kind of make up Prodigies that we've kind of figured out over the years.

One of the things we should say about prodigies is that there's a surprising lack of people working on this.

There are some people who study prodigies and they're experts in the psychology and neurology of prodigies.

But because there's so few people working on it, we don't have a full grasp on it.

So it's largely speculation, but it seems like we're starting to get on track about what makes a prodigy.

But even still, there's not like a cut and dried, uniform definition of a prodigy some extra things though that usually show up is in particular is that they usually excel in just one field of knowledge a domain and then in that specific field of knowledge they excel in one kind of subsection of it so for example if you were a um

a music prodigy, you probably are a prodigy in, say, classical music.

You're not like classical jazz, ska, right?

You're prodigy in just one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's another, another frequent thing too.

You just get really, really, really good at one specific thing.

That's a characteristic of prodigies.

Yeah.

And they're, you know, you can be a prodigy in anything.

A lot of times you'll see it in music and the maths.

Chess is another good one that you see a lot of prodigies in, but you can really be a prodigy in anything.

But it's, like you said, a narrow range, but they usually exhibit one intelligence type.

If you're talking about like psychological intelligence type, linguistic, mathematical, logical, spatial, visual, musical,

kinesthetic, yeah, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

And, you know, it's a rare that a prodigy excels in more than one of these.

Yeah.

And the, um, that's multiple intelligences theory that Gardner, I can't remember Gardner's first name, put out in the early 90s.

And it basically overturned the idea of general intelligence, which up to that point, that's what everybody thought people had.

And Gardner was like, No, actually, I think it's like carved into different areas, and people can kind of take from each of those.

Then that would, that's that makes up your intelligence, not just a big general encyclopedia version of it.

Yeah, but it seems to be pretty well, um, pretty well accepted these days.

But, like you said, um, most of the time they'll excel in just one of those.

Again,

you know, you're probably not a linguistic prodigy and an

intrapersonal prodigy where you are really good at examining yourself.

Yeah.

And how you get to be a prodigy is, you know, pretty complex.

And we'll see later.

It's probably a...

a combination of a bunch of different things.

It's definitely a combination of nature and nurture.

And they've done some studying and we'll get to some studies later on about the genetics and the biology of it all and like brain function.

But there is a psychologist who is also in our book, Ellen Winner.

And she's one of the people, if you look up Prodigies, she's one of the few experts you talked about

that knows a lot about this stuff.

But she

believes in both nature and nurture, but she very much is like, there's got to be a genetic component.

And she has a quote, if a child suddenly at age three, goes to the piano and picks out a tune and does it beautifully, this has to be because that child has a different brain.

And I totally agree.

Like there's something you're born with.

If you've ever seen the videos of Tiger Woods when he's like two years old with a pretty perfect golf swing, like it's that it's something that someone is born with.

Right.

There is also,

Julia found a quote from an editor of Vanity Fair who mentioned Elizabeth Benson, who we'll talk about a little bit more.

But he agreed that it was probably biology, but but he ascribed it to a perfect functioning of her endocrine glands.

So interesting.

He figured it was glandular is what was behind being a prodigy.

But the point is it was biology.

And this is 1913, by the way.

So.

Like right now?

Right now, it's no, it's not 1913.

It's 1983.

Oh, God.

Thank God.

I've got all my sunbreeches and my OP tank top.

I know.

You look kind of out of place, man.

So the other thing about genetics is you can see it in like, you know, there can be siblings that are prodigies, like together, I guess co-prodigies.

So it definitely sort of leans to the idea that it could be genetic.

There are quite a few male, very famous male composers who had sisters who were also prodigies and amazing composers and pianists or violinists or what have you, but they didn't get the, you know, the attention that their,

you know, brother sibling counterparts got because they were girls.

Maria Mozart was one.

Felix Mendelssohn had a sister named Fanny who was a music prodigy.

And then others that you often see mention, obviously, are Venus and Serena Williams.

And then the Polger sisters who were Judith, Susan, and Sophia, they were chess prodigies.

Right.

And you were thinking about Pope and Company as a sitcom.

Well, I was studying this.

I noticed Felix and Fanny would make a good children's book series, right?

Oh, yeah.

Like, I just imagine them as little kids, and in between piano lessons, they go off and solve mysteries together, Felix and Fanny series.

And so, anytime I think of children's books, I think of our literary agent, our former agent, Stephen Barr.

Oh, yeah.

So, I looked him up to say hi, and

I was looking him up on the internet.

He has his own children's book that he wrote and published.

It's called The Upside Down Hat.

And so, I emailed him and congratulated him.

I was very excited to see that.

Yeah.

And he's got two more coming, too.

Stephen was the best.

And I knew he had a kid since we had worked with him.

So that's super cool.

I love that.

Yeah, he's got two now, he says.

Two kids or two children's books?

Two kids, three children's books, including the two that are coming out soon.

Well, I guess he needs to get a third kid.

Yeah.

Right.

One for each.

Yeah, it's called The Upside Down Hat, and it's pretty cute looking.

Oh, that's wonderful.

So I guess let's take a break.

Well, I guess the last thing we should say is, you know, I mentioned sort of the perfect storm of things to make a prodigy.

And that definitely seems to be the consensus.

Like there's, there's some genetics at play,

but the cognitive, developmental, and environmental factors are all kind of coming together at the same time to lead to that, what Ellen Winter calls a rage to master, which we're going to talk about out of the break.

That seems to be the recipe.

Right.

It makes me wonder, like, how many things have we just not understood that we could have already?

Have we not constantly been trying to boil everything down to one thing?

Like, this is one cause for all this other stuff.

Like, is it nature?

Is it nurture?

No, it's both.

And I'm glad to see that Prodigy researchers have accepted that fact.

Agreed.

Okay, well, let's take that break then.

All right, we'll be right back.

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This Sunday at 3 p.m.

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The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game, where your favorite stars compete in Big Three 3-on-3 basketball.

Then, the first of two semifinal games features Dwight Howard and the LA Riot taking on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J's first-placed Chicago Tripletts.

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All right, so I mentioned the phrase

rage to master, and that was something I believe Ellen Winner came up with, and that's kind of exactly what it sounds like, which is something that they found with Prodigies that these little kids come out of the womb.

They get to be like...

two, maybe, three years old.

And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they exhibit a gift, and that's the only thing they want to do.

And this is not some kid who's like, hey, they turned out to be pretty good at this and they played a lot of piano.

Like we're talking about prodigies, like they become obsessed with, they have a rage to master this thing.

Yeah.

And it's just basically like they ignore everything else, even stuff that little kids would want to do, like fun playing stuff or going to the movies or whatever.

Making friends.

All they want to do.

Yeah.

All they want to do is that one thing over and over and over again and master it.

And so there's a researcher named Larry Vandervert who

believes that it has to do with the

connection between the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex.

And the reason he focuses in on the cerebellum is because apparently that is where we learn things, we become experts in things, we learn to practice things.

And the cerebellum has a bunch of connections to the cerebral cortex.

Cerebral cortex is in charge of our higher functioning.

So with those two combined together, working together,

us doing things repetitively is how we learn to get better and better at it, right?

His whole thing is that with a prodigy,

what we're seeing is the evolution of humanity at its brightest point.

Like these are examples of what could conceivably be every single person if that perfect storm you're talking about came together.

And it's just like the

most finely tuned functioning example of what our brains have evolved to be able to do.

That's what he says prodigies are.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

He theorizes that the cerebellum creates some kind of feedback loop is what he calls it where you have some kind of selective affinity or a talent or an interest in something.

And

getting better at that, I mean, it's got to be like a dopamine reward or something.

Like it hits those reward centers and there's some sort of psychological gold star that you give yourself.

And that feels so good that

the kid with a prodigious brain is constantly seeking that reward.

And it creates what he calls a maximal grip.

Like this grip has just got hold of this kid because they're always seeking that mental gold star of getting better and better and better at that one thing.

Yeah, right.

So it's almost like they're.

They have no chill.

Right.

It's like their brains get stuck in a natural progression or natural part of developing as a human being from childhood to adulthood, and they just go off like a rocket on that one tangent.

Yeah, that was not me.

No, it wasn't me either.

I can do a lot of things pretty good.

Yeah.

A dilettante.

Yeah.

I mean, that's always been my thing.

Like with sports, I was never like built the way you needed to be built to play like varsity sports.

But I could throw a football and catch a football and punt a football and I could play a little tennis.

I can play a little golf.

I can, you know, I played, you know, a little baseball, a little softball, a little soccer, and kick a soccer ball.

Wow.

I can throw frisbee.

Like, you know, I'm well-rounded athletically, but I was never going to be on a, like a, an, a high school team.

Right.

I gotcha.

I was okay in church league.

Everybody went.

But I wouldn't embarrass myself in anything, you know.

Um, I excelled as a child in hiding my knockoff flintstone vitamins in my Lincoln log houses because they were so disgusting.

I couldn't eat them.

Man, they were gross.

I can actually almost make myself nauseated thinking about them now.

Really?

Betty was not a vitamin.

I don't remember that.

Was she not?

She was missing?

I don't think so because I there was a b local band in Atlanta called Betty's Not a Vitamin.

Oh, okay.

Because of that factoid.

Well, had she been in the Flintstone knockoff vitamins I had, she would have looked all misshapen and her name would have been like

Teddy or something like that

with three T's.

I love it.

There's one other thing about Larry Vandevert's hypothesis about the cerebellum.

Because he said, you know, this is a weird

example of natural human development.

He pointed out that part of what being a prodigy is excelling at something cultural, right?

Like

everything that prodigy kids do, they're not inventing anything.

They're just getting good at something that already exists.

Yeah, yeah.

So part of his theory or hypothesis is that you couldn't have a prodigy by definition before the advent of culture.

So he theorizes that probably about 10,000 years ago is when the first prodigy started to pop up.

Oh, interesting.

I thought that was...

Tuk-Tuk's son.

Or daughter?

Yeah.

Maybe great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandson or daughter.

Okay, yeah.

Good point.

That's my posit.

I never remember when Tuk-Tuk lived, so you know me.

I get a little confused.

He's all over the place.

So another really interesting biological

piece to this is memory.

And

working memory is something that they found.

I think there was a paper in 2012 by researchers Erbach and Ruth Satz.

They gathered cognitive data from eight child prodigies.

And they looked at a couple of things.

They looked at their developmental history.

They looked at scores on the Stanford-Binet

fifth edition intelligence test and the autism spectrum quotient.

And they found, you know, there were different range of IQs, but even the ones that had high IQs weren't on the extreme end of like, you know, super genius or anything.

But what they did find was that

every single one of them were the 99th percentile for working memory.

I saw some also scored in the 99.9th percentile.

So like there's something there.

I was reading, I think, a Scientific American article on this, and they said that if you just randomly selected eight people and gave them this test, like there's a zero chance that they would all score in the 99th percentile.

So, yeah, it is quite a finding.

But I think also like a really important finding, too, is that their IQs aren't particularly eye-popping.

Yeah.

You know, some of them were, I think, past 140, and that's the

140 is the minimum for genius.

130, I think, is where being gifted starts.

At least one of them had an IQ of 100, and that is exactly average IQ.

Yeah.

So IQ or intelligence, or at least the way that we understand measuring intelligence with IQ, see, it doesn't seem to have that much to do with being a prodigy.

It has some, because again, 100, I think, was the minimum, and they went up to genius level and passed, but it doesn't have nearly as much as you would think.

Yeah, for sure.

But working memory, like, that's really interesting to me because that's the last like that's your act of working memory the last few things that have happened calling those up really easily so if you're talking you know about obviously with you know musicianship and chess and math and things like that like being able to really quickly recall the last few notes you played or the last few parts of this logarithm um that's that's gonna have a big impact, obviously.

For sure.

There's a good example that I found of that.

John von Neumann, who would go on to become a great mathematician, physicist, pioneer in computer science.

He, as a child prodigy, would entertain his parents' friends at their parties by, they'd give him a phone book, and he would read over one of the pages and then hand the phone book back.

And they'd ask him questions like, what's...

you know, they'd pick a name and say, what's their phone number and address?

And he'd tell them.

And then they'd say, well, recite this whole page.

And he would recite it verbatim just after looking at it for a little while, which is an amazing example of working memory.

But that's also, I mean, he was a phone book prodigy, pure and simple.

As you know, I recently had lunch with a friend of the show and pal, Kevin Pollack, the actor and comedian.

And sadly, you were out of town, so you couldn't go.

But Pollack's

first act was...

Not doing it, because he's a great impressionist, as we all know,

not doing impressions of comedy albums.

Like a a lot of kids, the first thing they do is like just repeat the bits from comedy records or specials.

Right.

He would mouth them in perfect synchronicity.

Oh, wow.

So he would do air comedy and he would do like the throat clears and everything.

And he did it, you know, as like, I don't know how young he was.

He said he was like six or seven to where like one of his mom's neighbors or one of his neighbors or one of his mom's friends was like, you're doing this at the, you know, the Sheinbombs Bar Mitzvah next week.

Like I'm booking you.

And he was like, for the first six years or so of his life, like he did it at school.

Like, my act was completely just mouthing these comedy bits.

That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, that's pretty fun.

That's impressive.

He was a Richard Pryor comedy album prodigy.

Well, I mean, he made a good point, which was he was like, the material killed because the material was great because it was like the best comics.

And he went, and then I got it down so good, that part killed.

And he was like, I couldn't fail, basically.

That's pretty great, man.

Yeah.

Fun story.

Oh, yeah.

So one other thing about working memory, Chuck, before we move on,

one of the things that it helps with is learning things like chess or math or things that have steps to them.

You're keeping the information you need to complete this step so you can move on to the next.

And you're probably also thinking about what the next step is too simultaneously.

Working memory really comes in handy for that.

So it makes sense that they have just amazing working memory levels.

Yeah.

And the connection to autism is really interesting too, because in that paper, you know, and from 2012, I mentioned that they looked at cognitive data for several things, one of which was the autism spectrum quotient.

And they found it, you know, they found a pretty undeniable connection.

They found that subjects who were prodigies had definitely had more autistic relatives than the general population does

and very high scores in the attention to detail part.

of the autism spectrum quotient.

So,

you know, attention to detail is something obviously if you have a gift for, you might wind up a prodigy.

Yeah, but they didn't score high or beyond the

general population in the other parts of the autism spectrum quotient.

Yeah.

So they don't have autism.

I think that's because there's a separate group where if you have like severe autism or some other cognitive difference,

you are a savant.

You're not a prodigy.

You're a savant, even though the stuff you're doing is prodigious.

Yeah.

You're considered separate for some reason.

I don't know why, but that seems to still be the case.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Those same two researchers, Ruth Zotz and

Ulrock?

Erbach.

Ulbach.

Urbach?

Jerry Orbach.

Jerry Orbach.

They authored a second paper, and this is from 2014, where they studied 18 prodigies this time.

And they were masters, these 18 in either math, music, or art.

And some of the patterns they found were pretty interesting.

They all had that same great working memory.

So that was sort of proved out a little further even.

But the music and math prodigy scored a lot higher on working memory than even the art prodigies.

And this was super interesting to me.

The math prodigies displayed the highest levels of overall intelligence and extraordinary visual-spatial skills, whereas the art prodigies had the lowest visual-spatial scores.

Yeah, which is weird.

Yeah, counterintuitive.

Yeah.

Should we take a break or keep going?

Yeah, let's take a break.

Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody.

Here we go.

The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.

And to cap off the season, iHeart presents the Big Three Basketball Playoffs.

This Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, the remaining four teams battle it out for the right to make the Big Three Championship in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game, where your favorite stars compete in Big Three 3-on-3 basketball.

Then the first of two semifinal games features Dwight Howard and the LA Riot taking on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J's first-placed Chicago Triplets.

The finale will see popular Miami 305 with stars MVP Michael Beasley, and last will make you Dan Stevenson take on Nancy Lieberman's Dallas Power who finished the season winning five straight weeks to capture second place.

Can Glenn Rice, Greg Monroe, and Paul Milstaff stop Miami's physical assault or will Miami and Beasley put an end to Dallas's winning ways?

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Okay, Chuck.

So

we've talked a couple of times about how prodigy experts agree that it does seem to be a combination of nature and nurture.

I think perfect storm is a term that people use a lot.

So

the parents of a prodigy definitely do have a role in their development as a prodigy.

And there have been parents of prodigies who have really kind of claimed that they're essentially responsible for their child's prodigy.

There was, I think, William James Sittis's dad.

Remember, we did a whole episode on that poor guy.

Oh, yeah.

His deal.

He was

one of the most amazing child prodigies of all time, just beyond gifted, just dusted other prodigies, like made them look like just lumps of unmolded clay done by a artist prodigy with terrible visual spatial skills, essentially.

I love it.

But he was worth his whole his own episode.

It was a good episode.

But his dad, Boris, was taught him from a very early age, essentially, from basically when he was born.

And he essentially claimed responsibility.

There's another very famous prodigy whose name was Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.

And her mom was Winifred Sackville Stoner Sr.

and her mom claimed responsibility for her child's prodigy.

We'll talk a little bit more about them, but parents do play a huge role, even when,

even if it's not quite as far as some of them boast.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if you're going to be a prodigy at golf or tennis or, you know, piano or something like that, it requires, you know, those, those things aren't cheap.

I mean, certainly there are stories of people who from a family that maybe, you know, didn't have the kind of resources that other families might have that.

that, you know, find a local municipal golf course where they can go and play super cheap.

But those are like, those are kind of rich kid sports.

Pianos cost a lot of money.

So a lot of times with these, if you look at the parents and the family situation, they are very involved parents who have resources to make it happen, not only with equipment, but dedicating the time and hiring a lot of times at very expensive hourly rates, like masters in that thing to help teach that kid.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, you can boil it down to a handful of factors that parents play a large role in.

First, you have to start with the kid has a natural ability, right?

You don't teach that.

That has to exist already.

Yes.

Then

the kid has to have access to those teachers.

And like you said, these aren't Joe Schmo teachers like teaching out of their house on the side for a little extra cash.

These are like the best of the best teacher experts in this field.

That's who the parents need to have the resources to pay.

And those teachers have to come in at just the right moment.

I don't think it's it's necessarily down to the minute, but they have to come pretty early in the kid's development so that the kid doesn't get bored because they've gone as far as they can go or because they don't necessarily understand what would even be next.

Yeah.

Or, you know, you might get lucky and have that within your own family.

Like I

mean, I think Wolfgang Van Halen,

I don't know at what age he achieved his level of talent, but, you know, he had a built-in situation with his father and was the touring bassist and backup singer with Van Halen when he was like 16 years old and can play everything.

Like, I mean, he's, he's not just a guitar guy, but he can, he plays on his records with his band Mammoth.

He plays it all.

He plays the drums.

He plays the keyboards.

He plays the bass.

He plays the guitar.

He does all the singing.

He's like, you know, he's a prodigy.

And he had a built-in teacher as a, you know, one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

I thought you were joking.

I didn't realize that Eddie Van Halen's son is named Wolfgang.

I thought you were making a joke about Mozart.

Well, no, I mean, that is kind of funny.

Well, Mozart's father is, he was a music teacher as well.

Or a musician.

And his name was Eddie Van Halen.

Ironically, right.

So, yeah, if you have, like you said, a built-in family member already that's that's knows what they're doing and can teach you at least early on,

that helps a lot.

I think also Picasso, his father was an art instructor, but he.

Oh, I didn't know that.

He, yeah, Picasso just excelled way beyond his father very, very early on.

I think his father also kind of took that a little personally, seems like the type.

Yeah.

And, you know, there are some exceptions here, like with everything.

It's not like every single prodigy has had the means and the resources and the parents that threw everything at them to try and help them.

And one notable exception, Julia found, was

Blaise Pascal, the French math prodigy.

He was born in 1623.

And at the beginning of his schooling, his dad, very famous mathematician, Etienne Pascal,

said,

I want my kid to learn more than math.

And math is so interesting.

If he gets a hold of these math books, he's going to ignore everything else because math is so incredible.

And so he hid all the math books in his house.

But young Pascal.

um got an outdated math book somehow that was in english even though all he only spoke french and he was so smart and such a prodigy he uh translated that and reinvented parts of that

like geometry in that book that weren't in the book.

Right.

Yeah.

He also came up with probability theory later on.

Like he was definitely a math prodigy.

And so he overcame an absence of material.

There's also some good examples of prodigies who overcame

an absence of resources, right?

So like they came from very poor families.

Like Stevie Wonder is a a very good example of that.

Self-taught musician on all sorts of different

instruments.

And his parents did not have the resources to buy him all these things.

There was another guy from the turn of the last century named Srinivasa Ramanujan.

And he was very poor in India.

He came from a very poor family.

And he, like Blaise Pascal, got his hands on an outdated math book and just taught himself math and became,

he ended up studying at Cambridge.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, there are definitely those examples.

But there are also on the other side, like plenty of examples of, you know, the nurture thing going in a bad direction.

Yeah.

Where the parents have, and I know we, Julie didn't cover this, but in our book, we covered, do you remember who wrote that chapter, by the way?

I think it was yours.

I think it was too.

It was so long ago, I don't remember.

I know what you mean.

But I think it might have been mine because I I remember very much wanting to include and did include in the book the story of Todd Marinovich,

who was a prodigious quarterback.

And another, you know, example is Jennifer Capriotti, the tennis prodigy.

Like they were kids who were both excelling to the point where they were young teenagers and Sports Illustrated being written about.

And they were pushed by these overbearing fathers in their case.

And they both burned out and washed out and ended up, you know, having problems with drugs drugs and problems with the law and stuff like that.

So there are some pretty sad cases there where parents take what could potentially be a good thing and just ruin it because they're parents.

You know, I was reading today about Venus and Serena Williams and their tennis prodigy

status, I guess.

But

Richard,

their father, Richard Williams, he had Venus turned pro at age 14 because the USTA was about to release the Capriotti rule, which was like you can't turn pro after a certain age because Jennifer Capriotti was such a cautionary tale.

So before the rule could be passed, Richard was like, you're turning pro now.

And her debut, she beat number 66 and almost beat number the top seeded player at

her first professional tournament.

Age 14.

Yeah, boy, those Williams sisters were fun or still are fun to watch.

I didn't see that movie, did you, King Richard?

No, I didn't.

Okay, moving on.

Yeah, we have nothing to say about it then, apparently.

Well, speaking of moving on, we're to the point where we talk about when you're not a prodigy anymore, because you mentioned early on,

you know, once you have mastered this thing, that's it.

And a lot of times that is it.

Some, you know, there are different stories.

Some flame out and go down a bad road.

Some go on to have, you know, great careers doing their thing.

Like you mentioned, Mozart, obviously, but some go on to have great careers and it's not like a super famous situation like Mozart, but they do great for themselves.

But, you know, it's like being a child movie star.

Like once you reach a certain age, that sort of appeal might be over, the adorableness of the kid that can play the piano at 10 years old.

Right.

And you're just an adult who can play the piano really well.

And all of a sudden, you're not special anymore.

And that can lead to a big fall.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It can.

Cause you're essentially, especially at the early on in the 20th century, when the papers would track you down and ask your opinion as a child prodigy, you were a child star, essentially.

And that is not something that society has figured out how to handle properly.

We don't know what to do with child stars.

So instead, we just chew them up and spit them out and say, Good luck.

We don't need you any longer.

That same effect in general can happen to child prodigies.

And one really good example is Bobby Fisher.

He's the cautionary tale for child prodigies and how bad things can get after you're not a prodigy anymore.

Yeah, for sure.

He was the chess prodigy.

I've recommended it before, but the great, great film, Searching for Bobby Fisher is so, so good.

Highly recommended.

But he was born in Chicago in the 40s, was playing competitive chess by the age of eight and won the U.S.

Open at 14 and became the youngest international grandmaster at 15 years old in 1958, 15 years old in six months.

But when his career fell,

he fell hard and spent a couple of decades roaming around Southern California, destitute.

He spent nine months in a Japanese prison and is kind of known for the last couple of decades of his life as being a pretty hateful anti-Semite.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know if he had a blog or something like that, but after 9-11, he like he publicly celebrated it on his blog.

Like, he, yeah, he really just took some seriously weird turns.

Um, and yeah, he was, he's just a great example of how bad things can get after society's done with you and you're not, you're not useful anymore, not adorable or, or noteworthy.

I think also he, he clearly had some mental health issues that were

probably going to, to, um, emerge either way.

But

being a child prodigy and just such it's such a weird way to grow up that could not have helped at all.

Yeah.

Uh, and you know, there are other cases of kids, and here's a piece of advice.

You can do what you want if you've got a really pretty genius kid, but don't send your kid to college at like 12 years old.

No,

I just, I don't see that ever leading to good things.

I think you should try and normalize a child's childhood as much as possible, even if they're, you know, unchallenged in school.

There are other ways that you can foster that, I think, besides saying, you're going to Harvard at 11 and you're going to be in the newspapers for that.

The case of Elizabeth Benson, she was a 214 plus IQ kid who went to college at 12 and graduated and disappeared.

And later on, there was one of those like, where are they now articles?

And

this is no shade at somebody who's a cashier.

It's a fine job and we need cashiers.

But

the article very much was like, this former child prodigy is now just a cashier.

And that was sort of how it was framed.

Yeah.

But despite that, she kept like batting away that, that kind of sentiment and just talking about how happy she was.

She was married.

She was very happy with her very normal life, with her very normal husband.

And this is a person like a 214.

It has a plus next to it, which might as well be an asterisk.

She scored perfectly on an IQ test.

And the reason that plus is there is because they imagined she could have kept going, but they ran out of questions.

Anybody Anybody got a question?

Yeah.

So she, and she even considered herself in the article, she said, you know, based on the stories of some of my peers, like I actually got off pretty well.

Like I'm happy with life as an adult.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, she's, she's an example of one that went pretty well.

But the best that you could do if you don't eventually turn into an adult who starts contributing greatly to your fields of interest, like Mozart, like John von Neumann, like Pablo Picasso.

The best you can hope for is to lead a normal life as an adult, you know?

I keep thinking you're going to say John Von Joey every time.

I know.

I keep wanting to call him Johan, too, and it's not.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

You mentioned Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.

early on.

She was a language prodigy in the early

20th century,

probably most famous for

in 1400.

92, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue was written by Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.

But her mom was one of those parents that really, really pushed her, apparently,

and gained a lot of fame like the mother did.

She wrote books about, it was sort of like Royal Tannenbaums when

Ethelene Tannenbaum, you know, talked about her prodigious family of children.

And I think we mentioned the tannenbaums in the book, of course, because I wrote the chapter.

And that's one of my favorite movies.

That's so good.

The mom gained a lot of attention and was on the like the lecture circuit and stuff like that.

and the the daughter was like you know take my advice dear mothers spare your children from so-called fame which easily easily turns to shame and be happy if you have a happy healthy contented boy or girl

amen to that yeah it's great advice great advice so if you have a child prodigy on your hands tread carefully consult experts maybe get in touch with ellen winner i'm sure she'd be very happy to to speak with you and tell you what not to do um

So there you go.

That's our annual dose of advice for the parents of child prodigies.

Yeah.

And I also want to say, I bet it's not the easiest thing, though, to be fair to parents.

You know, it's, it puts them in a tough position if your kid is obsessed with this one thing and clearly super gifted because you don't want to squash that.

So it's a it's a tightrope you're walking there.

So you know, I get it.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it's not a position I would necessarily want to be in, but heck no.

You've got some really great fodder for your annual Christmas letter that you send out with your christmas card yeah for sure you want to make your uh your sister and boise um feel jealous you talk about you talk about your child prodigy and what they're doing yeah i've only known one person in my life that does that and that is uh in emily's family

uh her aunt peg sends out the annual Christmas sort of family catch-up thing.

And I've always just been delighted to read it and thought it was super cool and wondered why no one in my lousy family ever cared enough to do anything like that.

That's a very Sohio thing to do.

Oh, is it okay?

Yeah, for sure.

I get it.

Before we go on to listener mail, Chuck, I just want to point out a couple of at least one good band and album name, Rage Samaster.

Oh, very nice.

And then I think you could make a pretty good Bon Jovi tribute band with Johan Bon Jovi.

Right.

Or John Von Yochi.

Yeah, there you go.

John Von Neumann.

No one would get that except for stuff you should know, listeners.

Yeah, that's true.

What were you going to say?

Because I wanted to know.

You know what I was going to say.

You say it.

Bada bing, bada boom, bon jovi.

And there, Chuck has unlocked listener mail.

This is a correction of sorts, and this is something I didn't know.

I'm glad to know.

When we did our USAID episode, we were talking about condoms for Gaza.

This is from Bernie.

He said, I think you guys did a great job.

Just wanted to clarify something.

The $50 million for condoms was not for Gaza, as in Gaza next to Israel.

It was was for Gaza province in Mozambique.

Elon Musk even corrected this in one of his weird Oval Office press conferences.

But as you said, the sound bite had already gone out and people did not want to hear any retraction to what they now believe.

So glad you guys covered this topic.

It's so important globally.

As someone who's been in this line of work for my entire adult life, this episode really hit home to me.

Keep up the great work.

All the best.

Bernie F.

Chavez.

Thanks a lot, Bernie.

That was very gentle correction and we appreciate those.

Rather than I can't believe you guys screwed this up this badly, which we get once in a while, but for the most part, we hear gentle corrections like Bernie.

So hats off to you, and thanks for setting us straight, Bernie.

If you want to be like Bernie and send us an email, you can.

You can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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