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# Smart person derangement
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/smart-person-derangement/
- Published: 2026-10-18T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T13:59:59.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler

I'd like to coin a term: smart person derangement.

There are people who are very smart. Sometimes they're smart in a specific field or they are just generally pretty damn intelligent. Either way, they're clever and importantly, they've become aware that they're smart. This on its own is not a problem, but there's something this smart people do when smart person derangement takes hold.

The specific thing you'll see is that they will not know something, they will learn that thing, and they will believe nobody knew that thing until now. "Nobody knows this, but…"

You hear Trump do it all the time and I recently heard Ari Emanuel (who I don't know much about, but he appears to be quite smart generally, but a guy I wouldn't get along with personally), said this in [an interview with Ben Thompson](https://stratechery.com/2026/a-conversation-with-ari-emanuel-about-entertainment-and-ai/?ref=birchtree.me) about how he uses AI:

> I was having this conversation — maybe this is way too political. I just didn’t understand why people, both on the far left and the far right, were using the phrase “genocide” as it relates to Israel and I said, “How the F did that work?”, there was that book about how words were created, I forgot the name of the book, long time ago I read it.  
>  
> So I used Grok, and it said, “This guy, 1944, [a lawyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael%5FLemkin?ref=birchtree.me), family went through the Holocaust, etc”, and I’m like, they’re trying to take a word that was created because of a genocide, by a Jew, and make it their own — the whole thing blew me away, we all constantly use it.  
>  
> Every time I ask somebody, “Do you know where that came from?”, I just did it with [Bill Maher](https://x.com/billmaher?ref=birchtree.me) — nobody knows. This guy in 1944 was adopted by the UN in ’48, and they defined the term in two different — a Latin word and a Greek word, and it was crazy.

First off, someone saying they use Grok is already a red flag, but that aside, it really comes across in the interview that he thinks no one knows what the word genocide means or where it came from. Congrats you stumped Bill Maher, I guess. 🫠