StarTalk Live! at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin with Bill Nye

Are creativity and innovation contagious? Can they be taught? Bill Nye the Science Guy and Eugene Mirman travel to Austin, Texas to find out, with a little help from their guests Dr. Roberta Ness, Dr. Arthur Markman, and Maeve Higgins. Recorded live.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:13Eugene Mirman?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome to StarTalk Live. Yeah. We have a wonderful show for you. It is my very great pleasure to bring up to the stage a hero to science. Multi Emmy Award winning champion of science, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

• 0:44Bill Nye?

  Woo! Woo! Woo! Whoa, whoa, yes, yes. Austin! Woo! Woo! Oh, you are, I love you guys. StarTalk Radio, I'm your host, Bill Nye. I'm onstage with the inimitable, the amazing Eugene Mirman. And then also with us this week is Mary Higgins. Also with us this week to talk about cognition, innovation, creativity, and things having to do with creating, with your brain. We are joined by two professors from two different universes, universities of Texas.

• 1:28Bill Nye?

  First, Professor of Psychology at UT Austin, Dr. Art Margon. And then with us also, from the University of Texas at Houston, is Dr. Roberta Ness. So, Dr. Ness, may we start with you?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  You certainly may.

• 1:48Bill Nye?

  You're an epidemiologist.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Has nothing to do with skin. I just want to make that point.

• 1:54Bill Nye?

  But it has to do with epidemics.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  It, it, thank you, yes it does.

• 1:58Bill Nye?

  But we are here talking about creativity.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:01Bill Nye?

  And for you, there's some connection.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  I, I'm hoping for an epidemic of creativity. That's why I'm here.

• 2:07Bill Nye?

  An epidemic of creativity, so is this something...

• 2:09Speaker 03

  That would work well for me.

• 2:10Bill Nye?

  So, okay, uh, is this something that you think is infectious and is transmittable?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  I do think so, as a matter of fact, yeah. I mean, I think that, that it can be taught. Here's the deal. We think, we know, actually, that innovation, creativity, is what makes science go round, right? It's absolutely what fuels science. Wow, we don't teach how to think innovatively, so how crazy is that?

• 2:36Bill Nye?

  Uh, it sounds a little crazy, uh, but only a little. Uh, doesn't it depend on your teacher? Aren't some teachers more cra... Does anybody here had a, did anybody here have a sugar baby? In middle school? So this is where they give you a bag of sugar, and you have to treat it.

• 2:55Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I see. I thought you meant, you date someone younger but very wealthy. Who, who takes care of you, and there is no upside for them.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would be done with that.

• 3:13Bill Nye?

  Well, I claim it's the creative, uh, it teaches innovation, or you have to innovate in order to take care of your bag. You have to keep it with you all the time.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  The, the bottom line is, I'm, I believe strongly, and in the books that I've written, um, that not only can you teach people how to innovate, but there is a systematic way that you can teach people to innovate, and in fact, this is exactly how genius scientists think.

• 3:38Bill Nye?

  That genius scientists think in the way that your proposed teaching?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 3:42Bill Nye?

  Or they teach this?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  They wish they could teach it. Actually, genius scientists don't know how they think, which is really an oddity. I've asked a number of them, they have absolutely not a clue.

• 3:53Bill Nye?

  I was gonna ask Dr. Mark. So, these two comedians are creative for a living, which enables the purchasing of...

• 4:00Eugene Mirman?

  Commodities, mostly it's shrimp and chicken and paper. That's what mostly my money goes towards.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  I spend a lot of money on tickets to my own show, and that way I keep us. You know?

• 4:12Bill Nye?

  See, that's creative. Sold out. One just line. And then, Dr. Ness, you teach creativity, or teach how to be creative. What's going... Dr. Markman, what's going on in our brains?

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I think that one of the things that's really important to understand is that we assume that when people are being creative, that they're fundamentally doing something that no one else is able to do, that they've somehow brought some new process online. And in fact, a tremendous amount of what's going on when people are being creative is, for one thing, they know a lot. So if you look at creative people, they've actually had to learn a lot of stuff. And not, and generally speaking, not just in the narrow area that they do their work in. A lot of them really have to have some breadth of knowledge that falls a little bit outside of what they do as well. So, you know, the fascinating thing to me about things like creativity

• 5:02Speaker 05

  is that we often assume that it involves these very basic elements of what the brain is doing. Like, there's this thing called working memory, which is the amount of stuff you can hold in mind at one time.

• 5:16Bill Nye?

  I forgot about that.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. And we think, well, if we could just increase that working memory capacity, then we would immediately become more creative.

• 5:26Bill Nye?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's...

• 5:28Bill Nye?

  No, no, wait a second, cause and effect.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:31Bill Nye?

  Don't we all presume that children are somehow inherently creative, and we stomp it out of them? And I mention this because kids don't have the life experience.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  Uh, right, but I think what kids do is they're willing to just try things and look stupid.

• 5:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  They are so stupid. When they're small, they can't even sit up.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  But it's not just that they're stupid, it's that they're willing to look stupid. So, that skill is certainly a part of what's required to be creative. But, another big piece of it that's really important is having a very broad base of knowledge to draw on. Which is why, it often takes a fairly long time before somebody in any field goes from learning the skills that are part of that and learning the basic material to really being able to be creative in their craft.

• 6:24Bill Nye?

  So along that line, I was gonna ask you for an example, but I'm thinking out louding.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Well Eugene and I were talking about how long it takes to be like a good comic.

• 6:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  And before he told me it took seven years, when I was doing it for six years, he told me it took seven years. And now he's changed it to ten years.

• 6:42Eugene Mirman?

  I've always, yeah, but I've largely said, you were already doing well, she's a star in Ireland, but now she's here as a gift to us.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  And I can't go back for legal reasons.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  But is there like a number, like ten years doing something, or?

• 6:58Speaker 05

  We want there to be a number, isn't that great? We'd love there, I mean, some of it has to do with the complexity of the domain that you're in.

• 7:06Eugene Mirman?

  So would you say Ted Nugent is at his most creative right now?

• 7:11Eugene Mirman?

  Not to challenge any theories, say whatever you think is true.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:16Eugene Mirman?

  That's great!

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Yes, but.

• 7:19Bill Nye?

  Let me ask you this specifically.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 7:21Bill Nye?

  My understanding, this is from memory now, well some part of it, that over half of patents are by people twenty-six years old and younger.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, but twenty-six is not twelve.

• 7:36Bill Nye?

  Yes, so you're saying that is the number.

• 7:38Eugene Mirman?

  Are you sure?

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Part of what happens is you've got to be willing to continue learning, right? One of the things that happens in any field is, you know, when you're twenty-six or twenty-eight, you've been studying the latest work for most of your life, you've been internalizing all this. And then, a lot of people after that, they go off to work and they decide, you know what, I don't need to learn anything ever again, now I'm just gonna apply what I know for the rest of my life.

• 8:02Bill Nye?

  Now, when you say decide... Did they just get too busy to do it?

• 8:06Speaker 05

  Well, I think, you know, I think, yeah. I think what happens is, you know, you, your career starts and suddenly you have all these other responsibilities and there just isn't the time. I mean, college and if you go to graduate school, graduate school are wonderful years because they give you all of this time to just, you know, get stuff into your head and, and move it around and see how, how something that you've learned here might be related to something that you've learned here without, you know, having to go and, and, and teach a class.

• 8:33Eugene Mirman?

  That's eventually all replaced with just Tinder.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  I do, I do have to add to this, that there does appear to be kind of this sweet spot whereby people are knowledgeable enough, but they're also naive enough that they haven't kind of become really ingrained in a field. So it actually turns out, I mean, this patent thing at about 26, I mean, it's about right. But, um, it also turns out that most Nobel Prize work is done about a dozen years after the end of training. So people are quite young typically when they do the work that eventually gets them the Nobel Prize.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  Of course, if you don't succeed early in your career, you don't get to have the second half of the career in order to be able to do stuff, which is another part of the problem. Right? Is, is that, is that, you know, by, you know, at 26 or, you know, at 26 or 28, you get out of graduate school, you get a job, then, then you have, you have somewhere between seven and nine years to prove yourself so that you can keep your job, particularly if you're in an academic setting, after which if you didn't prove yourself in that period in time, you get set free. So it's sort of hard to, to be a late bloomer.

• 9:38Bill Nye?

  Where does a new idea come from? Like, brand new. You were talking about building on your work, uh, you go to grad... By the way, did you notice, how many people in grad school? Woo! Did you hear? They just presume you're gonna get a job. Okay? Just keep that in mind. Uh, but, but, yes, he's... Ha, ha, ha, ha. Of course, what could go wrong?

• 10:00Speaker 03

  So I think that the most brilliant new ideas come from what is called frame shifting or frame shattering, frame breaking. So what's a frame? A frame is your expectations and your assumptions such that when new information comes at you, you interpret it in a particular way. And all of you, all of us, have an enormous number of frames working at any given point in time. They are so innate to us that we don't even recognize that they're there. And in order to do something that is truly innovative, you have to do something that is truly surprising and shocking, which is in fact to shatter a frame.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Well, genius scientists basically broke frames, almost always broke frames. So I'll just give you one example. Darwin. So at the time, obviously, when Darwin was working on evolution by natural selection, the going idea, the dogma, was creationism, right? I mean, that kind of God created every species. And Darwin came along and said, "I don't think so. I think, basically, that Mother Nature really doesn't care in the slightest what comes out of her really rough and tumble environment. It's not about ideal forms, it's not about unchangingness. Everything's changing."

• 11:27Speaker 05

  But there's more to it, too, because when you talk about having new ideas, sometimes what we need, if you're going to do something new, a lot of creativity involves the recombination of things that we know. And so, one of the things that often really fundamentally changes the way we think about things is also an influx of new data, right? And new information. So, you know, research and development is slow and laborious in part because it's hard to create really good data. And in addition to Darwin being away from church for a long time, you know, he had opportunities to view, both on his own and in, you know, Royal Society meetings and things like that, all sorts of wacky creatures and skeletons and things like that that changed the nature

• 12:11Speaker 05

  of the data that was available for...

• 12:14Speaker 04

  If he didn't have, like, that backup of education, because like if I came across a platypus or whatever, I'd be like, "Somebody has sewn a duck to an otter," or whatever, like, I wouldn't... I don't think I'd be like, "Hang on a second, evolution." Like, I'd just be like, "Yuck, put that away." You know?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Frame breaking is a super hard thing to do, which is why it took Darwin quite a number of years. Now, interestingly enough, some of you may know that Darwin kept these wonderful diaries. So we have this, literally, autopsy of his, uh, of the process by which he was thinking. And this is also what I teach, is that there are these tools on the way to frame breaking. Frame breaking is really hard to do, okay?

• 13:00Bill Nye?

  So what's a tool?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  So, so one of the tools is analogy, another tool is reversal, expansion, there are a whole bunch of them. I'll give you an example of reversal. So, Rutherford, who's the father of the atom, um...

• 13:15Bill Nye?

  He was shooting electrons in gold foil.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:18Bill Nye?

  What did he do?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  And they were popping back at him, and he went, "Whoa, that's really weird." How does that happen, right?

• 13:25Bill Nye?

  His famous quote was, "As though you shot a howitzer shell at a piece of tissue."

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Exactly, and it bounced back.

• 13:31Bill Nye?

  Which you wouldn't expect.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  That's right, you would not expect.

• 13:34Bill Nye?

  I haven't shot that many howitzer shells.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  So he did that experiment, and he was completely shocked, and he didn't know how to interpret it, right? So he basically goes and he thinks for a year, right? And he comes back a year later and he goes, "Aha, I've got it." So the conception of the atom at that time was that it was kind of this homogeneous bunch of mass, right? In fact, his predecessor, his mentor, said, "It's kind of like a bunch of electrons embedded in English pudding." That was literally... Yeah, J.J. Thompson, that was literally what he said. Okay, so that's what Rutherford is thinking. Rutherford comes back and he goes, finally, "Whoa, actually, what it is, is it's like the solar system,

• 14:20Speaker 03

  whereby the nucleus is about the size of a pin."

• 14:25Speaker 03

  If the electron cloud was the size of Saint Paul's Cathedral, if you've ever been to London, this thing is big, alright? So, the reversal is that, you know, J.J. Thompson goes from "it's a bunch of stuff" to Rutherford saying "it's the absence of stuff, it's mostly nothing." Well, that's kinda weird, isn't it? I mean, that's a frame break, and that's obviously the idea.

• 14:50Bill Nye?

  Well, it revolutionized chemistry and physics and everything we have in this room.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 14:54Bill Nye?

  But let me ask you this: so, Rutherford is one guy, J.J. Thompson's one guy, there are billions of people running around.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  For one thing, you know, the guys who make these discoveries, first of all, they know a lot, but also, they have a lot of time. Right, I mean, one of the things about creativity that I think we don't appreciate is, we live in a society that wants productivity. So, we wanna be making slow, steady progress towards stuff, and to be able to show that progress. And if you can't show that progress, people are like, "What's wrong with you? You're not, you're not..." But if you actually watch people being creative, you know, it's like, "What do you got today? Nothing." "What do you got today? Nothing." "What do you got today? Nothing." And then, "Oh, I got it!" Right, but it might take three months of nothing until you've got it.

• 15:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, it might take a year of thinking about atoms until you're like, "Oh, maybe it's the opposite thing."

• 15:39Speaker 04

  But when you say it was a year...

• 15:40Eugene Mirman?

  A year? Couldn't it do that in a month, or maybe it's the opposite?

• 15:43Speaker 04

  In that year, was he, was he like, just thinking? Or was he taking actions? Or what was he doing in that?

• 15:49Eugene Mirman?

  Was he swimming?

• 15:50Speaker 05

  If you look, if you look inside, if you look at the notes of scientists, I mean, so, we did a lot of work with Kepler, who, you know, Kepler was...

• 15:59Bill Nye?

  He was a diligent guy.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  He was, and he, but the thing about Kepler was, he gets a bad rap, because mostly, you think, "Well, he's just that guy, that math guy, who noticed that there was a very small error in the orbit."

• 16:10Bill Nye?

  Everybody says that.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  That's what they say. On the street, just today, walking in.

• 16:16Bill Nye?

  But hold that thought, because we have to take a break. We'll be back with StarTalk Radio right after this.

• 16:38Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Bill Nye. And we are talking about creativity and innovation. And you were talking about Johann Kepler.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  I was.

• 16:52Bill Nye?

  And you said he got a bad rap.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  He got a bad rap because while he did was the guy who figured out that the orbits of the planets are elliptical. One of the things that he spent a lot of time doing was trying to figure out what was it that made the planets go around. And he didn't get it right. Newton was the one who ended up getting it right. But he actually, if you read his notes, and this is to your question about, "Well, what are you doing all that time?" He was trying out different ideas. And so he would try all of these ideas. Now, he may not have been a happy camper while he was doing that because he didn't succeed.

• 17:25Bill Nye?

  But Kepler got some stuff right. Kepler's laws are the real deal, right?

• 17:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, no, he was actually learning a tremendous amount about the planets. But he was interested not just in the motion of the planets, but why they moved. And that's what he struggled with, was what was it that was making the planets move around?

• 17:45Bill Nye?

  So, along this line, when I remember watching Cosmos,

• 17:53Bill Nye?

  Carl Sagan at first, and then my beloved Neil deGrasse Tyson,

• 17:58Bill Nye?

  Kepler is depicted as a kind of miserable guy. Is that a true fact or a false fact?

• 18:03Speaker 05

  He seems to be miserable. I mean, his writing is certainly miserable. He...

• 18:07Bill Nye?

  What?

• 18:07Speaker 05

  And I don't mean bad.

• 18:09Bill Nye?

  What are you writing, Seth?

• 18:09Speaker 05

  No, no, no.

• 18:10Bill Nye?

  Listen to this. "All right, his writing was miserable." Ha, ha, ha. That's rich. But wait a second.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  Here's what I mean by that. So luckily, he wasn't constrained by editors of modern journals to keep his paper down to four pages. So he writes pages and pages and pages of stuff where he goes off on some blind alley. And then at some point, he goes, "The candy reader will no doubt have noticed by now the error I made four pages back." And you can hear him banging his head as he's writing.

• 18:38Bill Nye?

  So is there a connection?

• 18:39Eugene Mirman?

  What year is this, just to get an idea of when he was doing this?

• 18:42Bill Nye?

  Fif- fifteen... gosh.

• 18:44Eugene Mirman?

  Fourteen or fifteen hundreds?

• 18:45Bill Nye?

  Fifteen eighties, I think.

• 18:46Eugene Mirman?

  Fifteen eighties.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Fifteen eighties.

• 18:48Bill Nye?

  But here's the thing, is there a connection between creativity, between innovation, between these new ideas, and being mentally stressed, like, to having what everybody nowadays calls mood disorders? We used to call these people a pain in the neck, but now they have mood disorders.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Well, I would say, as like, as, when I'm writing, and it's the worst feeling in the world when you're trying to get to something and you can't get to it, and I feel lazy, and I feel like bad, and I feel like angry, and that it's never gonna come, and I, and I've lost it, I feel all those things, and then like, something happened, but I don't know what happened, I would love if you had some kind of answer, because it's really the worst feeling in the world, and I don't blame him for being grumpy.

• 19:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he was trying to figure out how the solar system worked, and he didn't really do it.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:40Eugene Mirman?

  And that sounds like a bummer, that would bum me out.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:43Eugene Mirman?

  And it sounds like he did it for a while, not like that was a horrible week, but like...

• 19:47Bill Nye?

  Horrible second half.

• 19:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, horrible, yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Thirty years.

• 19:51Eugene Mirman?

  However long he kept...

• 19:52Speaker 03

  As it turns out, there is actually data to suggest that there is a relationship between mood disorders, not only in the person, but in the family, and high levels of creativity. But, I think for, you know, kind of, the average student, whatever it might be, um, this is hard work, so, it really is hard work. And, we do have this real misconception, that great innovators kind of seem to do it through insight, that you know, you got this epiphany, they do it on the spot, that could not be more untrue. They do, exactly as Art said, they work at it and work at it, they try all these different tools.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  And come to all these wrong conclusions, generate an enormous number of different ideas, and then, at some point, they get that insight, that aha, oh, this actually happens this way. You know, Einstein is a perfect example. In 1905, right, he has this Annus Mirabellus, where he produces these four papers that completely overturn physics.

• 20:59Bill Nye?

  This is the miracle year.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, right.

• 21:02Bill Nye?

  It's a miracle year, applause for Einstein. Right on.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Einstein, yeah.

• 21:07Bill Nye?

  The geek physics crowd here, yes.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Um, but in fact, it turns out, he had been thinking about a lot of that stuff for decades. I mean, there's good data to suggest that he was thinking about his special theory of relativity for ten years.

• 21:23Eugene Mirman?

  Did he call it my special theory of relativity? It's fine if he did, it's a little weird.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  He didn't call it my precious.

• 21:31Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Bill Nye?

  So Einstein thought about it for years, and then he had these ideas that changed the world, but are there... when we think about history, we often equate innovation, or rather invention, with creativity. And I think you can make an argument that if somebody invents a steam engine, he was working at it for a long time. Right now, is that true? Is that rather generally true, that these create... what we take as innovations are inventions are a result of years of messing around?

• 22:06Speaker 05

  And communities. I mean, I think, you know, the other thing that's really important to bear in mind is, it is rare that there's a lone scientist or inventor who works all alone and comes up with this stuff out of nowhere. And I think, you know, I mean, you know, the steam engine, there are two people who are credited with the steam engine, you know, Alexander Graham Bell, presumably is the inventor of the telephone largely because he got his patent into the patent office a few hours before Alicia Gray did, and they knew each other and were working together. You know, I mean, there are communities of people who work on these kinds of problems. They're hard problems, they take a long time, but they also require a community of people who are interacting with each other and sharing ideas. We love, in this culture, to crown a winner.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  And to say, "These are the people who did it." Right? Newton's famous, you know, saying was, "If I've seen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants." And that's really much more true about what's going on when people are doing creative things, is that they're actually embedded in a culture of people who are working on difficult problems.

• 23:12Bill Nye?

  So is, okay, right, yes. Culture people working on problems. So the city of Austin is growing at 183 people a day, is that right?

• 23:21Speaker 05

  That's correct.

• 23:21Bill Nye?

  And it's mostly high-tech jobs? So why aren't you people at work?

• 23:25Eugene Mirman?

  And, and a few. A few guitarists.

• 23:28Bill Nye?

  A few.

• 23:30Eugene Mirman?

  Like 80 a day.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And that, this actually gets to the issue, one of the, the issues that I talk about in the creativity crisis, I mean, kind of like what's wrong with science today? So, you know, clearly, the greatest invention of the last generation or two is the internet, right? I mean, I think we'd all, we'd all agree with that.

• 23:55Bill Nye?

  The kids use it.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  And, yeah. And it's not just because it's a communication tool, it's because it has created the democratization of society.

• 24:05Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Right?

• 24:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  So, um, so, and, and here's the problem. Sorry. I know, I keep over-talking you.

• 24:16Bill Nye?

  No, bring it on. We got a problem. I can feel it.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Here's the problem. Science, academic science, can't use crowdsourcing. Wow, why is that? I mean, crowdsourcing is just this unbelievable, powerful tool.

• 24:32Bill Nye?

  Well, academic science doesn't use crowdsourcing?

• 24:34Eugene Mirman?

  Doesn't it a little, like to find planets and stuff?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  A little.

• 24:38Eugene Mirman?

  Ah!

• 24:39Speaker 03

  A little. But not...

• 24:41Eugene Mirman?

  Chipping away at your lives!

• 24:46Bill Nye?

  Wow. Eugene, pull back, pull back.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  I admit it.

• 24:50Eugene Mirman?

  But why doesn't it largely not...

• 24:52Bill Nye?

  No, it's just a little mood disorder. It's just...

• 24:55Speaker 03

  I readily, I readily admit it. I stand corrected. But, um, but, uh, but the fact of the matter is, you know, kind of you can't get promoted in tenure on the basis of being part of the crowd of, you know, kind of finding all those planets, right?

• 25:09Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  And the reason for that is because the way that academic science works is it's all about idea ownership. It's all, you know, I have to prove that that was my idea, thank you very much. I have to either get a patent on it, I have to be first or last author on the publication, I have to get the grant on it, whatever it is. That's a real problem.

• 25:28Bill Nye?

  Right on. Applause for first or last authorship.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  One person.

• 25:31Eugene Mirman?

  That person clapping doesn't like the system, right? That's...

• 25:35Speaker 03

  That was, that was somebody who did not...

• 25:37Eugene Mirman?

  I don't like it.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:39Eugene Mirman?

  Just trying to clarify.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  That was, that was the only person out there that didn't get tenure.

• 25:42Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  So, anyway.

• 25:44Eugene Mirman?

  Oh. Some people might not have applied, I didn't.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I don't know what that is. I'm so glad, I'm so glad that the rest of you did get tenure. Congratulations.

• 25:54Bill Nye?

  It's all room for all of them.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. But, but the fact of the matter is, so, so what happens is, because you have to have, you have to prove this idea ownership, you can't be part of the crowd. So, really, we don't use crowdsourcing anywhere near to the degree that it would be useful to use it.

• 26:10Bill Nye?

  So, this is the crisis in creative...

• 26:12Speaker 03

  It's part of it, yeah.

• 26:13Bill Nye?

  So, is there a difference between stumbling on something and working, working, working hard at it and coming up with a new idea?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:22Bill Nye?

  Or is it part of the same process?

• 26:23Speaker 05

  Well, there's lots of ways that we get new, that we get new ideas, and every once in a while, you just get lucky and stumble on something. In fact, the scientific process, when it works well, actually creates a lot of opportunities for serendipity. So, that, you know, so you often, I mean, people walk into experiments often hoping that their pet theory is confirmed by it, but if you look...

• 26:44Bill Nye?

  No, I've never done that.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  But if you look at where science advances, it's often in those situations where you set up those circumstances hoping to find something and you actually found something completely different. And now everybody's got to stand back and scratch their heads, right?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  I feel like it's the same with literature and art too.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  Like if you go, if you're just writing, if you're like, "This is really popular at the moment, it's gonna sell." And then you just like write some book about vampires falling in love with wolves.

• 27:14Eugene Mirman?

  So science is partially the search for more questions.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, and a lot of times the surprising data then leads to a little bit of consternation because we've got to figure out, "Well, how do we take this into account?" And that really disrupts the field. And so, anyone who's doing good research, whether it's in a scientific context or a research and development aimed at solving a particular problem, doing that research systematically is the way that you can discover things that are surprising. But along this line, is it going faster than ever? Are inventions being created faster than ever? Is it accelerating?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  The answer to that is inventions are being created faster than ever. However, breakthroughs are not. And perhaps just the opposite. So if you look at the turn of the 20th century as compared to the turn of the 21st century, think about what's happening at the turn of the 20th century. You know what's happening at the turn of the 20th.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 28:14Eugene Mirman?

  William McKinley is murdered.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 28:17Eugene Mirman?

  That's awesome.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  You've got...

• 28:20Eugene Mirman?

  What else?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. You've got Einstein, you've got Rutherford and the atom, you've got Montessori creating, you know, a completely different system of education. You've got Ford basically creating assembly, you know, plants for the first time. You've got, there were this enormous number of complete frame shifts. I mean, complete shattering of everything that had come before and replacing it with something disruptive and new. And then you have the turn of the 21st century now where we do have an enormous amount of innovation, of invention, I'm sorry, rocketing forward, technology inventioning rocketing forward.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  But we don't seem to be having these same frame shifts, these same disruptions of kind of basic knowledge, everything we know. So, think about this for a second. Think about, this is what makes me not able to sleep at night, these kinds of problems. Climate change, water scarcity, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, obesity, preterm birth, I can go on and on, schizophrenia, depression, I mean, I can go on and on. What do they, what do they have in common? Yeah, really.

• 29:32Eugene Mirman?

  I would like to be more scared, keep going.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Thank you. So if you weren't depressed when you came in, no. But, so, so what do they have in common? They actually have one thing in common, which is, we don't know what to do about them. We really fundamentally...

• 29:46Bill Nye?

  I just wanted to agree with you, doc. I love you more than life itself.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Well, I appreciate that, thank you.

• 29:52Bill Nye?

  People used to die so much sooner than they do now.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 29:56Bill Nye?

  So many fewer people used to have clean water than they do now. So many fewer people used to have communication tools than they do now.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And that is because of germ theory that basically dates back to the mid 1800s.

• 30:09Bill Nye?

  Yeah, but the Higgs boson was proven to exist, and you know what that's gonna do? Nobody knows what that's gonna do.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  So again, that's...

• 30:18Bill Nye?

  No, but you guys, it may lead to some extraordinary discovery.

• 30:22Eugene Mirman?

  Light saber.

• 30:23Bill Nye?

  If you're passing through a plane of dark matter, and you know what that's gonna do? I don't either.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Right, and that's a result of invention. So I, I'm agreeing with you, in fact, that invention is rocketing forward, but this, kind of the basic understanding of a whole lot of things that could potentially deep six us, really is not happening at this point at a rate that may be required to make sure that, you know, humanity and the planet are not harmed. So, the question is, why are those frame shifts not happening?

• 30:57Eugene Mirman?

  For me, what's the difference between an invention and a frame shift? So like, what are, what's the difference between...

• 31:04Speaker 04

  Well, you know what I keep thinking when you're saying, I keep thinking, I meet all these brainiacs who went to like the best college, Ivy League colleges in America, and they're working on like an app to make like laundry delivered faster or something like this, or like... They're like working, they're doing finance and then they're just like keeping that money. So maybe that's like something.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  There's something else too, which is, which is a lot of the, of the things that really fundamentally changed the way we think about a lot of the sciences, were, were these very basic elements of, of, of, of our knowledge that we'd gotten wrong. And we, and we corrected some very basic mistakes. And what we've reached is a point where a tremendous amount of what we need to know next is not just how do individual components work, like what's an atom? But rather, how does a whole system work? So if you're gonna try to understand what the brain is doing, you can't do that by understanding what this area of the brain does, and then what this area of the brain does, and what this area of the brain does. You have to be worried about the entire system of the brain, and the body that it's a part of,

• 32:13Speaker 05

  and the society that that brain and body occupy. All of that is ultimately gonna influence our understanding of the brain. And when you think about, about disease processes, that's a, that's a system. And when, you know, so, so at the point where you have to worry about systems, you actually have to shift from having lone investigators who do work, to having whole teams with very different kinds of expertise, working at very different levels of description, actually collaborating on stuff in order to really understand the entire system.

• 32:45Bill Nye?

  Okay, collaboration is good. That's how you build ships, big airplanes.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  And big size.

• 32:52Eugene Mirman?

  And even small airplanes, I think.

• 32:54Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Bill Nye?

  Although I do some...

• 32:58Speaker 04

  I could do a model airplane alone.

• 33:00Eugene Mirman?

  Agreed. Small but not tiny.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  But do you need...

• 33:06Bill Nye?

  Right. Do you need stress? Just think that things have, you'd have to be confronted with problems.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Why do you keep asking me that?

• 33:15Speaker 05

  Yes. I mean, that is, I think that, I mean, it's a little hard to tell whether you need stress to do it, or whether the act of engaging in this causes stress, right?

• 33:25Bill Nye?

  That's what I'm, I guess that's what I'm driving.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  And I think they feed on each other, right? When you're in the midst of trying to solve a problem, that is in fact, very difficult to solve, you have this goal, that you want to achieve, and...

• 33:37Bill Nye?

  So James Watt, the steam engine guy, was trying to solve a problem.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  And so, and so you're solving, you're trying to solve this problem, and, and that, you, you feel unsettled, when, when there's something out there you're trying to achieve, and you haven't reached that goal yet, and, and that, that, that feeling of being unsettled is part of what gives you energy, or what psychologists usually call arousal, for the goal to keep working on this.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  That's what they call, "Oh."

• 34:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, that's...

• 34:04Speaker 04

  "Oh." No, it makes sense, that's not what he was talking about at all!

• 34:11Speaker 05

  We're aroused by science.

• 34:29Bill Nye?

  Welcome back, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Bill Nye. We are joined with the, the cornerstone, I think, of StarTalk comedy, Eugene Mirman. And this week, we are talking about creativity and innovation, and we have some remarkable people, including from Ireland, and looking for a gig in Austin, Mae Higgins. And they've seen her on Amy Schumer.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Thank you!

• 35:00Bill Nye?

  And they're up here on stage with me, the creative innovation professors of creativity innovation. From University of Texas, Austin, Roberta Ness, and from University, University of Texas, Houston, Roberta Ness. Science guy ends career with offhanded confusion. Dr. Arndt Rickman, professor of psychology at University of Texas, Austin!

• 35:28Bill Nye?

  So as we went to commercial break, we were touching on this big idea that people have to share ideas. And they do that, in the old days, they would do that in a tribe, it is presumed. But now, people can share information all over the place. But is there something about where you get together? Like, when we think now, when you get together, you might do it by conference call.

• 35:55Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 35:56Bill Nye?

  But was there a turning point, or is there a turning point, where people were, did they build buildings to get together like this and share ideas?

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, people like to think that you need to actually see other people to really synergize. That actually turns out not to be true.

• 36:16Bill Nye?

  That's why we have a podcast, they can't see.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  So it actually turns out, this is really odd, that brainstorming over the web turns out to be more creative than brainstorming in the same room with each other.

• 36:31Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And there's a reason for that, probably.

• 36:35Bill Nye?

  Okay, but to that assertion, you said at the turn of the last century, there were more breakthroughs. But at the turn, than there were at the turn of this century. But at the turn of this century, they, we had at least a rudimentary form. Let's call it five years ago, not 15 years ago. There was, we have this ability to share things electronically, yet you express concern about frame breaking.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Well, because, as I said, academia unfortunately is not engaging in this greatest opportunity of the 21st century, right?

• 37:08Bill Nye?

  But let's not lose the thread of what you were talking about, because I think there's a really important point here, which is, one of the things that, so one of the things that's important to me is that almost nobody knows how their mind works, and yet we ask people to think for a living.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  And the more you begin to learn about the way your mind works, the more you can use it more effectively. So one of the things we know about creativity is that individuals, when they think about a problem alone, diverge in their ideas. And that one of the things that happens when groups get together is that they converge on ideas.

• 37:41Bill Nye?

  They get a consensus.

• 37:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  That's right. What's called group think.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Groups are great at creating consensus. And so, one of the things that you want to do, whenever you have any kind of a process of developing ideas, is to manage that. When you want people to diverge in what they're thinking, make them work alone. And when you want people to converge, get them together. Now, if you think about what was going on in the late 19th, early 20th century, because people weren't necessarily living right next to each other and couldn't pick up the phone because darned it, Gray and Bell hadn't invented it yet, they had to send letters to each other, which meant they had long periods of time of divergence, followed by correspondence that might help them to converge a bit. Okay? Now, because we can be instantly interconnected by conference call, all of these people getting together and converging,

• 38:29Speaker 05

  and because it feels good to have a conversation with a group of people, ideas flow back and forth, you feel good when you leave, you think you must have been really productive, when in fact, what you were, was you created a consensus too quickly.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, what I feel when, if we have brainstorming meetings for like comedy shows, I go in there and I'm always like agreeing with other people. And then when I go home and think about it, I'm like, that's not even funny, but I didn't want to be rude. Or like, you know? But what does help is like a bit of brainstorming and then being on your own.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, what Art is saying is exactly the reason why the data shows that over the web, people in, you know, in combination and brainstorming are in fact more creative because they don't tend to converge as much as you do in the group think of, you know, sitting there and kind of looking at other people's faces. But there's another aspect of this too, which gets to the web, which is, the more heterogeneous the group is, the more likely they are to come up with something really creative.

• 39:35Bill Nye?

  Is there a way, is there a formula? Is there a way to manage the too close together, too far apartness?

• 39:42Speaker 05

  You know, we're not giving people any time to think anymore. I mean, I think that's fundamentally the problem. You know, our, the ability to... So your students are ticked off, Professor, listening to them. They don't have time to think. And, and so we, we need to give people more space to engage in learning things, in trying to combine ideas, in trying to try things out. And, and, and that actually requires not just time on the scale of, you know, days and weeks and months. It actually requires being able to put an uninterrupted hour together. Now, anybody who works for a living, when was the last time you had one full hour with nothing else on your schedule and no emails came in that you had to deal with? Right? Huh? No.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  One, one.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  There was like seven of those hours today.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  I don't have any money, though.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  You know, one of the things we're trying to... One of the things that the internet provides is this opportunity for more people to potentially get involved in the process. But if more people are gonna get involved in the process, we have to give them the time to do it. And, and I think that, you know... Who's "we" and who's "they" and who's "giving"? See what I mean? No, no, no, I see what you're saying.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I read that, like, people have to work a certain amount of hours, but they, like, work even more than those hours. Like, they don't take their vacation.

• 41:01Speaker 05

  But not only, not only that. I mean, what happens in the workplace is that we mistake being, being near your desk for working. Right? And so, people...

• 41:13Speaker 05

  Validation! People, people engage in a lot of what I call fake work. Right? You're talking about me. You're talking about me. Sorry, I didn't mean to bring it up. But, but people sit at their desk and they look like they're busy, but they're, they're, they're one, they're half a step away from a kitten video. And, and...

• 41:31Eugene Mirman?

  I work alone at home and I pretend all the time.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  But, but, but rather than, but rather than chaining people to their desk like that and saying, "Look busy, darn it." What if, because companies, the same companies that chain people to their desk, keep saying, "We want to be more innovative." Right? I mean, you can't, you know, you can pick up any business magazine, and innovation is still a buzzword there. So, but you can't be innovative if people are constantly trying to do stuff, rather than giving them an opportunity to step back, to read something, to think. Look at a kitten video. Well, the occasional kitten video to calm yourself down, probably not such a bad idea.

• 42:09Eugene Mirman?

  Put wheels on them and just put them in the street.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  I mean, so, so, we're not creating an environment that is at all conducive to people engaging in creative acts, in part because we mistake hard work for that's going to somehow lead to creativity, which is a misunderstanding of the way that the mind works.

• 42:31Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 42:33Bill Nye?

  So, I, you brought me back again to this question. Is there an optimization, is there a formula, is there a certain number of hours you should be left alone, you should leave your workers, if you're, let's say, the CEO of a nonprofit involved in space exploration, hypothetically.

• 42:52Bill Nye?

  Is there, is there a certain amount of time you should let people mess around on their own? And is there a certain amount of time they should be brought together to, for a coffee house meeting?

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Well, I, you know, yeah, I think, I think that, for one thing, you...

• 43:07Bill Nye?

  No, I want numbers, Doc.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  You want actual, no, you're an engineer. No, but I, I think it's, it's not just numbers, it's, when the, when the group feels like it's explored the, what it can do, and when you feel like you're repeating yourself internally because you're, you're working alone, that's the time to get together with some other people and to start talking.

• 43:26Bill Nye?

  So, what is it we need to know, both of you guys, gal and guy, what, what is it we need to know to, you claim, both claim that we can become more creative, that you can teach creativity, you can induce creativity in people.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  So, here's... So, here's the deal. Forty years of research and hundreds of experiments have actually shown that you can, in fact, teach people to be more creative. So, again, using tools...

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Kind of getting to the point of frame shifting. These programs, these training programs that have been done, will actually show, pretty consistently, that you can get people to generate more original ideas by two to threefold. I mean, it's a big, big deal.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  You know, there's a lot of things culturally that make it very hard for us to do good creative acts. And one of them is that our education system, the thing it teaches us best is to minimize the number of mistakes that we make. Right? So if you...

• 44:36Bill Nye?

  Well, you're an airplane pilot, you don't want too many.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  Sure, sure, but most of us aren't. But actually, you know, I mean, we have to be able to... You know, let's put it this way. You would be a little worried if the stewardess got on, if the flight attendant said, "Our pilot today is our most creative pilot."

• 44:56Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Eugene Mirman?

  But you do want to keep passengers on their toes.

• 45:00Speaker 05

  That's right. I mean, so, you know, there are certainly jobs that tries doing the same thing over and over again exactly right. But creativity is not one of them. And I think that one of the things that you have to be willing to tolerate when you're doing something creative is making mistakes, failing at things.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  And what you're learning in school is mistake minimization. Right? It's getting as few things wrong as possible. And so what we need to do is to make people more comfortable with error.

• 45:36Bill Nye?

  But is there something different now than at the turn of the last century? Are we losing our creativity, are we becoming more creative? Are machines making us more or less creative?

• 45:50Speaker 03

  You know, capitalism makes us very fearful about making mistakes. Because the fact of the matter is, you know, if you've got kind of a quarterly bottom line that you've got to hit, and you don't, you're in real trouble with your shareholders. And so if you're working on some project and you're saying to your boss, "Okay, yeah, it's true, I failed last quarter, I failed this quarter, but man, next quarter, I mean, I've been thinking about this really, really hard, and next quarter I absolutely for sure are gonna get it," it doesn't sit real well.

• 46:29Bill Nye?

  So that is why we have the Science Guy Show, by the way. I was working for people that were obsessed with making money every quarter. And you can do that when you're landing planes, or also you want to have them take off. Or if you're making sheets of paper, you can do that when you have a manufacturing process. But when you're trying to make an autopilot for a business jet that's a third of the size of the competitor, you can't do that in four months.

• 47:00Eugene Mirman?

  I could. I mean, not well, I mean, it wouldn't work.

• 47:03Bill Nye?

  You would've fit right in, man, that's all I'm saying. This expectation that you can do things quickly, I mean, I think it's been around a long time. But you claim you can change that. Is that true? You claim, you two, professors of creativity, claim that there's research that shows that we can change this old way of doing things.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  I don't think that we claim that we can change people's necessarily, well, maybe we can, but necessarily totally eliminate the fear of failure, although I wish we could. I mean, I wish we could have a conversation...

• 47:45Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I don't think we want to eliminate the fear of failure completely.

• 47:48Bill Nye?

  Right. You know, we don't want to be...

• 47:50Eugene Mirman?

  A little softer would be very dull.

• 47:53Bill Nye?

  I can't wait to fail today.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 47:56Bill Nye?

  That's not a great attitude.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:58Eugene Mirman?

  But I don't mind it if it happens.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  That's right. I don't mind it if it happens is what's really important.

• 48:02Bill Nye?

  The attitude is we want to punish negligence, not failure.

• 48:06Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 48:07Bill Nye?

  We really, you know, we want to get people doing the things that we think are related to what it is that is going to ultimately lead to create an outcome.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  And science really needs to have or wants to have kind of a conversation, in a sense, with society, or certainly its legislators.

• 48:27Eugene Mirman?

  Good luck.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  That says, yeah, right. That says, you know, there's a price to failure, and I understand that, but there's also a price to not failing, and that is missing the opportunity to really solve these great threats to humanity and our planet.

• 48:45Bill Nye?

  Yes, right on. On that note, this has been StarTalk Radio. I've been joined by Eugene Mirman, Maggie Higgins, Dr. Art Markman from the University of Texas, right here in Austin, and Roberta Ness from the University of Texas in Houston. Join us next week for more exciting science star talking. Keep looking up for them, and let's change the world. I'm Bill Nye.