The Genius Suppression Apparatus: The Secret System Engineered to Keep You Small

Genius isn't rare. It's suppressed. 

Almost every child starts out a creative genius, but by adulthood just 2% remain. 

Why? A global system Dr. Dave calls the Genius Suppression Apparatus (GSA) has been training us for centuries to be obedient, predictable, and small. 

In this episode, he'll unmask the 7 heads of the GSA and reveal the one proven state that breaks its grip. You'll discover: 

• Proof of Genius: The landmark creativity test that shows genius is your default setting.
• The 7 Heads of Suppression: How schools, work, media, and government quietly train genius out of you.
• The Entrepreneur's Key: Why leaders hold the power to unleash genius in themselves and their teams.

If you've ever felt like you're "too much" or "not enough," this episode will show you the truth—and the path to break free. 

Hit play now and learn exactly how to dismantle the Genius Suppression Apparatus once and for all. Your genius is waiting—but the GSA isn't.

🧠 Want profits that grow stronger as AI gets smarter? Every Friday morning, FlowCode delivers you a GPT-powered profit prompt rooted in flow science — the same edge Navy SEALs, elite althletes, and top founders use to outperform. Subscribe for free: FlowCode.news

Transcript

I want you to imagine this. It's night, 20,000 years ago. You're sitting by a fire with your tribe. The fire crackles, sparks drift into the night sky. Shadows dance across the cave wall. Everyone here carries genius. One can track an animal for miles through the forest. Another knows which plants heal and which ones kill. Someone else tells stories that keep the tribe's courage alive through the long, dark winters. And yes, there's a leader, but not the kind of boss that you picture today, the leader's genius is collaboration, spotting the gifts of others, weaving them together, guiding the tribe through danger. Back then, genius wasn't rare. Genius was survival. But then everything changed. We planted seeds, we built walls, we crowned kings, and slowly, something new emerged, hierarchy, landowners at the top, laborers at the bottom, priests and rulers deciding what was true, what was false, what was safe to think and what was forbidden. For the first time in human history, predictability mattered more than creativity, compliance was rewarded, Curiosity was punished. That was the birth of something none of us chose, but all of us were born into the genius suppression apparatus. Over centuries it evolved. Education was standardized, sit down, memorize, don't make mistakes. Industry turned humans into cogs. Frederick Taylor with his stopwatch measuring every movement, stripping work of the artistry. Media preach scarcity. You're not enough. There's not enough. Religion often demanded obedience. Stay small. Don't question different costumes, same script. Stay in line. Don't trust your genius. And here's the part you felt yourself when that teacher told you not to color outside the lines, when a boss shut down your best idea, when you swallowed your words because you didn't want to be laughed at. That wasn't you being not enough. It was the genius suppression apparatus doing its job. So here's the question I want us to wrestle with today. If the GSA has been shaping us for 1000s of years, how do we finally break free? Because here's what I believe the very place the GSA has suppressed genius the most the workplace is also the number one vehicle. We have to unleash it. And if you're an entrepreneur, you hold the master key. The greatest delusion in history wasn't genius, it was lack and limitation. And today, we're going to expose the machine that created the delusion and the path to dismantle it once and for all. Let's get started. Here is the uncomfortable truth that we need to sit with today. Genius is not rare. It's just suppressed. We've been told that only a few people are gifted, and the rest of us should be grateful to do our jobs, keep your head down, pay your taxes and save the best days of your life for retirement. That's the script that we were handed. But the data suggests otherwise. In the 1960s NASA hired a system scientist named George land to design a test that could measure creativity in their engineers. He built it, then later he gave that same test to 1600 kids. Here's what he found. At age 590, 8% tested as creative geniuses. By age 10, 30% by 15, 12% by adulthood, wait for it, just 2% think about that. Almost every child starts out as a genius. By the time we're grown, the system has trained it out of us. If you've ever watched a five year old, you've seen it wild imagination, endless curiosity, everything's an adventure. By High School, that same kid only raises their hand if they're sure they won't look stupid. By adulthood, they're coloring inside the lines. Waiting for permission. The tragedy here is that the whole system rewards obedience over originality. So here's how I want you to look at it. Genius is not a rare gift. It's your default setting. It's your employee's default setting. The problem is the genius suppression apparatus has been rewiring our code since the moment we entered school, probably earlier. So here's the question, if almost all of us are born geniuses, Why do so few of us live that way? Well, it's not biology. It's not fate. It was designed over centuries. The genius suppression apparatus evolved. It didn't stay in one place. It grew heads like a Hydra. This monster has seven heads. Each one is a system that was built to keep people predictable. Each one rewards obedience and punishes originality. Each one slowly training the genius out of us until only the scraps remain. And here's the part that should keep you up at night, these heads are very much alive today. They're in your schools, your workplaces, your governments, your culture, even the stories we tell ourselves about what's possible. So what I want to do now is unmask that monster. Let's look at each head of the genius suppression apparatus in the face and see exactly how it's been training us to stay small. The first head of the GSA that I want to talk about today is school, and I'm certainly not opposed to learning. Humans are born to learn. What I'm talking about is schooling. The system that we inherited was from 18th century Prussia, rows of desks, bells ringing to start and stop the day, a centralized curriculum. And one idea we rarely question is age grading. That's the practice of sorting kids into grades purely by their age. We want the six year olds over here, the seven year olds over here, the eight year olds in the next room. It made schools efficient and scalable like factories, but it had nothing to do with unleashing genius. Horace Mann, who is often called the father of American public education. Saw the Prussian model, and he imported it to America. He wanted nation building, predictable citizens, obedient workers, and later, French philosopher Michel Foucault studied these same systems. He noticed a pattern, schools, factories, even prisons, used the same methods. He called it the creation of docile bodies, human beings trained to obey, ranked and normalized. And guess what? It worked. Compliance went up. Initiative went down. Students didn't learn how to think for themselves. They learned how to wait for permission. And the bell here doesn't just end recess, it ends curiosity, a potent flow trigger the second head of the GSA is work. When the Industrial Revolution hit the goal wasn't unleashing human potential, trust me, it was maximizing throughput, and no one embodied this more than Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was a mechanical engineer in the late 1800s famous for scientific management. He carried a stopwatch into factories and timed workers shoveling coal or moving iron, then he made a radical separation. Managers would do the thinking, workers would do the doing. Jobs were broken into tiny, repeatable motions, tasks atomized so they could be measured, standardized and controlled the results. Yes, those factories became more efficient, but the human beings were reduced to interchangeable cogs. Agency, initiative and creativity stripped out. Taylorism was the art of killing. Initiative, the third head of the GSA is metrics, tyranny. And let me be clear, I am not against numbers used the right way. These numbers can be very powerful. They help us see what's happening. But here's the trap. Numbers are only representations of reality, and the moment the representation becomes the goal, you start to lose truth. That's why I hear questions like this all the time. How do you measure morale? How do you measure trust? How do you measure culture? How do you measure flow? These are good questions, but here's the danger, if you start serving the number you stop. Stop serving the mission. Economist Charles Goodhart said it best when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure and history government and business all prove him right. In Vietnam, Robert McNamara filled dashboards with body counts. The numbers went up, but the war was being lost in the Soviet Union nail factories were told to hit quotas. When they measured by number, they made millions of tiny, useless nails. When they measured by weight, they made giant spikes that no one could use. The quota was right on, but those nails were worthless and in business not so long ago. Wells Fargo set very aggressive account quotas. Employees opened millions of fake accounts just to hit that target. The dashboards were green, but the reputation was eventually destroyed and billions were lost. I'm not saying that the numbers always lie. What I'm saying is that when numbers become the only truth, we start lying to ourselves. The bottom line here is metrics should guide the mission the moment they replace the mission. You've built a GSA in your own company. The fourth head of the genius suppression apparatus is government. Every government wants to see its people and want to tax them, draft them, control them. Political scientist James C Scott called this legibility in his 1998 book, seeing like a state. It's the drive to make messy human life simple and standardized so the state can manage it. Examples would be surnames imposed in Europe, farmland standardized, local customs, steamrolled on the surface, it looked efficient, but it crushed the kind of wisdom that Scott called meatus. Meatus is that local tacit, practical knowledge, the kind you only get by living in a certain place, working with your hands, being amongst the people solving problems on the ground. It's a farmer who knows which fields flood after a heavy rain. It's a shopkeeper that knows which neighbors can and can't be trusted. It's an employee on the front lines who knows customer friction better than any executive dashboard, centralized plans almost always miss it. They look efficient on paper, but they flatten the messy genius of human life, and when ideology joins in the mix, the damage multiplies. In 1933 Nazi Germany launched gleicheltung, a campaign to synchronize culture, education and media under one story, no dissent, no curiosity. Now China has their social credit system. It tracks every purchase, every post, every Association and their citizens self censor, not because they fear prison, but because they fear losing access to housing, travel and other opportunities. And here in the United States, surveillance expanded after 911 with the 2001 Patriot Act. By 2013 Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting the phone records, emails and internet activities of millions of ordinary Americans. On paper, it was all about safety. In reality, it normalized mass surveillance. This is what happens when disagreement becomes dangerous, when curiosity is punished, and when truth loses to ideology. Government loves legibility, but every time life gets flattened with the plan, human genius gets crushed in those gears moving on the fifth head of the GSA is the media. Most people think that propaganda means censorship, someone in power, stamping out stories or barking orders in a newsroom. But in 1988 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed how propaganda really works without sensors. They called it the propaganda model, and they identified five filters, five built in forces that decide what counts as news before you even see it. The first one is ownership. News outlets are big business. They report what protects their owners and investors. Second is advertising. Media isn't selling news to you. They're selling you the advertisers. If a story risks scaring off sponsors, it will never run. Third is source. Forcing journalists rely on government officials and corporate insiders. Those voices get amplified, independent ones get ignored. The fourth one is called flack push back and punishment. If a network challenges the status quo, powerful people will bury it under lawsuits, complaints and smear campaigns. And the fifth one, I think, is the most obvious. It's fear ideology. There always has to be an enemy. During the Cold War, it was the communists. I remember being in grade school, maybe fourth or fifth grade, looking at my Weekly Reader as it notified me exactly how many missiles the USSR had. It absolutely terrified me after 911 it was the terrorists. Today, it's whatever narrative keeps people divided and afraid. Those five filters quietly shape what enters your mind before you even see a headline, and now they've all been super charged. Algorithms have replaced many of the editors. The feeds aren't neutral. They're optimized not to inform you, but to monetize you. What spreads faster, not nuance, not clarity, outrage, insecurity and comparison. Think about Instagram. If a post makes you feel strong, you might scroll past it. But if the post makes you feel less than, less rich, less fit, less successful, you stop. You compare, you linger, and that insecurity gets monetized. Your doubt is data, your genius, that ability to focus, to create, to trust yourself, is slowly siphoned away on paper. They call it engagement in reality. It's engineered doubt. Listen, propaganda doesn't always silence you. Sometimes it convinces you to silence yourself, and nothing kills genius faster than insecurity on repeat, the sixth head of the genius oppression apparatus is religion. And let me be clear, this is not about faith. I am consistently working to deepen my own spiritual practice, because at their best, faith traditions unleash genius. They inspire courage, compassion and connection to something greater than ourselves. But it's fair to say that many institutions do the opposite across centuries and cultures. Many of these institutions drew hard boundaries around what was truth. They built official canons of what was acceptable and declared everything outside of it to be dangerous. Curiosity became suspect. Doubt became disobedience. Asking the wrong question could cost you your position, your freedom, even your life. I'm talking about different religions, different eras, similar pattern when protecting authority mattered more than seeking the truth. Genius was suppressed. Faith calls us to seek. Many of the institutions tell us to stop. And when the Canon becomes a cage, the GSA wins the seventh and final head of GSA is what I'll call the creativity kill switch. In the last century, entire industries in film, music and publishing wrote down what could and couldn't be shown, said or sung, movies cut before release, songs pulled from the radio, books buried. Careers ended, not because the work wasn't brilliant, but because it crossed a line today that kill switch is digital platforms don't have to ban you outright. They just bury you. The safe, ad friendly content rises, the daring original work quietly disappears and eventually, creators flip the switch themselves. The boldest films never get shot, the most original songs never get recorded, the most daring ideas never shared. And I'm going to be honest with you, I felt it myself recording this very episode. I hesitated. I caught myself wondering, Am I crossing a line here? Will people be offended? Will this be too much? Well, that's the creativity kill switch in action. It doesn't just live in industries or algorithms. It lives inside of us. And no one understood this better than George Carlin, he spent his whole career testing the boundaries of what you could or couldn't say on stage. In fact, he once said, it's the duty of the comedian to find where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. Now I hope you see how the creativity kill. Switch works. You don't have to crush genius outright. You just have to make people hesitate, and the genius dies in the hesitation. So there it is, the seven heads of the genius suppression apparatus, seven ways the world has trained you and me to stay small, and now the question is, what are you going to do with it? Because genius needs to be released. And the most reliable release valve that I know of is flow. Flow is that state where you perform your best and you feel your best, and when teams experience group flow, genius multiplies, collaboration sharpens, innovation accelerates and trust deepens. The workplace, the very place the apparatus has done the most damage, can also be the number one place where flow and group flow are engineered, where genius is no longer suppressed, but systemized. And that starts with you. If you are an entrepreneur, you hold the key. You can keep running your business the old way, permission seeking, compliance driven and safe, or you can design a new way, one built on flow science, one that multiplies the genius inside you and your people. This podcast is only the beginning, and in the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more resources to help you build that system, a flow driven foundation that unleashes genius instead of suppressing it, because the greatest delusion in history wasn't genius, it was lack and limitation. And the future of business belongs to those bold enough to unleash genius in themselves and their people. Thanks for joining me today. If you found value in today's episode, now's the time to pay a small feat. Take a moment right now and share this show with an entrepreneurial friend who might be, without realizing it, building their own genius suppression apparatus. And while you're at it, leave a five star review on your podcasting app of choice. This helps more entrepreneurs discover the tools to dismantle this suppression and build workplaces that unleash genius through flow and group flow and until next week, this is Dr Dave reminding you to stay focused and flow driven.