Imagine trying to navigate downtown Manhattan with a map from 1905—no highways, no subways, half the neighborhoods missing. You'd laugh and ask for GPS, right? Yet we're doing exactly this with human intelligence, using assessment tools designed when horses pulled carriages to evaluate people living in 2025.
In this episode, we examine the significant disparity between century-old intelligence tests and the skills that truly determine success in our rapidly evolving world.
Key insights:
How Alfred Binet's 1905 diagnostic tool became a global obsession (against his own warnings)
Why the skills IQ tests measure heavily—like working memory—are now largely irrelevant
What Lisa, the marketing consultant, reveals about real-world intelligence
The navigation skills you actually need to thrive in the modern world
The outdated metrics: Speed of calculation (we have calculators), information memorization (we have Google), isolated problem-solving (real work is collaborative)
The skills that matter: Filtering signal from noise, collaborating across differences, adapting to constant change, creating meaning from ambiguity
Reality check: Your smartphone has more computing power than entire universities had decades ago, yet we're still measuring human worth with pre-digital tools.
💬 What intelligence do you use daily that no test ever measured?
🎧 Listen on Spotify | Apple Podcasts
📱 Share with anyone feeling limited by outdated measures of success
🔜 Next week: How schools are preparing students for a world that no longer exists
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