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at medialabs.intuit.com. Hi,

0:57

I'm Frances Frye. And I'm Anne Morris. And

0:59

we are the hosts of a new Ted

1:01

podcast called Fixable. We've helped leaders at some

1:03

of the world's most competitive companies solve all

1:06

kinds of problems. On our show, we'll pull

1:08

back the curtain and give you the type

1:10

of honest, unfiltered advice we usually reserve for

1:12

top executives. Maybe you have a co-worker with

1:15

boundary issues, or you want to know how

1:17

to inspire and motivate your team. Give us

1:19

a call and we'll help you solve the

1:21

problems you're stuck on. Check out Fixable on

1:24

Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I

1:27

love intellectual arbitrage, where you find

1:31

solutions someone has over here that could

1:33

apply to a different area. Hey,

1:38

everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back

1:40

to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of

1:42

what makes us tick with the Ted Audio

1:44

Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist,

1:46

and I'm taking you inside the minds

1:48

of fascinating people to explore new thoughts

1:50

and new ways of thinking. My

1:56

guest today is Nathan Mirvold. He's something of

1:58

a modern Renaissance man. He

2:00

earned a PhD in applied math,

2:02

did a postdoc with Stephen Hawking, and

2:05

became Microsoft's first chief technology officer. He's

2:07

the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a

2:09

company that develops and acquires patents, and

2:12

he loves to invent solutions to problems. When

2:15

we recruit other scientists, I always like to say,

2:17

I need to find someone who's crazy

2:19

enough to think it's possible, but not so crazy

2:21

as to think they already did it.

2:23

Nathan has also moonlighted as a dinosaur hunter.

2:26

Yep, his team has discovered a record

2:28

number of T-Rex skeletons. He's

2:30

published peer-reviewed research in fields ranging from

2:33

paleobiology to astronomy to climate science, and

2:35

in his spare time, he's an award-winning

2:37

nature photographer and chef. He's won a

2:39

James Beard Cookbook of the Year award

2:41

and been a guest judge on Top

2:44

Chef. Today, he's going to challenge

2:46

you to rethink some of your creative processes. I'd

2:51

love to kick off by asking you, when

2:53

did you know that you wanted to become an inventor? Oh,

2:56

probably my whole life. My mom says that when

2:58

I was two, I told her I was going

3:00

to be a scientist. What

3:02

were you tinkering with in childhood? Oh,

3:05

I took lots of things apart and put

3:07

them back together again. The dreaded

3:09

thing is when you had spare parts at

3:11

the end, and you think, hmm, were those

3:13

really necessary or not? When I

3:15

was a kid, an old DV meant it had tubes in it,

3:18

and the tubes are really cool because they

3:20

would glow when they were running. And

3:23

of course, there's also super high voltage in

3:26

there, and so I kind of knew that

3:28

if I screwed up, it could end badly,

3:30

but fortunately it didn't. But

3:32

later I took my mom's car apart and put

3:34

it back together again, rebuilt the engine. Of

3:36

course, these days, you don't need to take something apart

3:38

to know how it works because the internet will tell

3:40

you. If I was

3:42

a kid today, that's probably what I

3:45

would do. In fact, I do

3:47

do that a lot today. Something

3:50

that you can look up the answer so quickly now.

3:53

Is it a little bit like a magic trick that's

3:55

been ruined when somebody tells you the secret as opposed

3:57

to figuring it out for yourself? Ready

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15:51

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15:54

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15:56

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15:58

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16:01

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16:03

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party audiences from Intuit SMB

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Media Labs. Learn

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more at medialabs.intuit.com.

16:15

Let me see if we can run to a

16:17

lightning round. You ready for some rapid fire questions?

16:19

I'll try. All right. What is the

16:22

worst advice you've ever gotten? Life

16:27

rewards you for specializing in something,

16:30

and I've never been able to

16:32

stop being interested in many things.

16:35

So it's actually good advice. I've just never been able

16:37

to handle it. What is

16:39

an unpopular opinion you're happy to

16:42

defend? We

16:44

made the world closer together by

16:46

flying around a lot. We

16:49

were just waiting for there to be some

16:51

germ to take advantage of

16:53

it. And I wrote these long memos and reports

16:56

about that and say, oh, there's going to be

16:58

a real problem. There'll be a natural pandemic. There'll

17:00

be bioterrorism. There'll be something else. It'll be horrible.

17:03

It was completely predictable, but

17:06

the world did nothing about it. Let's

17:09

go to a more optimistic prediction then,

17:11

which is if you

17:13

could take a time machine 50 years to the future,

17:16

what do you think is going to

17:18

be the biggest surprise or most exciting breakthrough?

17:21

That's almost impossible by definition, of course,

17:23

because if I expect it,

17:26

then it can't really be much of a surprise, can

17:28

it? Surprise to the rest of us.

17:30

They're clear to you. How about that? Oh,

17:34

evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence

17:37

would be a super cool one. It

17:40

might cause humans to stick together a little bit

17:42

more to know that we're not alone. Because

17:46

humans are so good at doing

17:48

that us-them thing. And

17:50

it'd be great if it was us or them, but

17:53

they were too far away to actually worry about.

17:57

At a more practical level, every

17:59

day, Everything except accidental death ought

18:02

to be solved in 50 years.

18:04

That would be exciting. If we solved things

18:07

other than accidental death,

18:10

we'd still have an expected lifetime of about

18:12

300 years because there's enough accidents. It's like,

18:14

oh God, that kid, that Adam, it's such

18:16

a shame he was a kid. He was

18:19

only 103 when he died when a bus

18:21

hit him.

18:25

We got to stop this bullshit. Of

18:29

course, if that's true, I don't need

18:31

a time machine. If that happens, I do not need

18:33

a time machine to know what happens 50

18:35

years from now. Fair

18:37

enough. All right, Nathan, you were talking

18:40

about physics. I have to ask you, how did

18:43

working with Stephen Hawking change you? Well,

18:47

I think two things really stuck with me

18:50

a lot. One was his tremendous support for

18:52

the people that worked with him. There

18:55

was an invitation-only conference

18:57

that Stephen was

18:59

invited to, and it was only for the

19:02

head of each research group. It was a

19:04

very small group. Stephen

19:06

wanted to send one of his students

19:09

because that student's thesis was on exactly

19:11

this. The

19:13

organizers said, no, I'm sorry. You can only send

19:15

one person from your group. Stephen

19:18

sent the student with a note saying,

19:20

I'm sorry you didn't have room for me. Of

19:25

course, the idea you would jump

19:27

rank and send this

19:29

kid in your stead was shocking

19:32

to everyone. What could they

19:34

do? The other thing, and the main

19:36

thing about Stephen is, here's a

19:38

guy with insane amounts of physical

19:40

challenges, and yet

19:42

he had a great

19:44

upbeat attitude. He loved to tell

19:47

jokes. The

19:49

jokes were frustrating to the point of being almost

19:51

painful, but he still did it. Because

19:53

in the era I was with him, he

19:55

didn't have his speech synthesizer yet. So

19:59

he would... talk and the talking

20:01

really wouldn't sound like human speech. You had

20:03

to listen extremely carefully and then you also

20:05

had to guess what the words were going

20:07

to be. So he would repeat the punchline,

20:10

you know, three, four, five

20:13

times and the tension was

20:15

just going to be unbearable.

20:18

But he would just soldier on

20:20

and then finally we'd get it and of course we'd

20:22

all burst out laughing. But if

20:25

a guy can do that with that sort

20:27

of a situation, what the hell right do

20:29

I have to feel sorry for myself? You're

20:32

an endlessly curious person. What's a question

20:34

you have for me as a psychologist?

20:38

Well, the rude question, but it's

20:40

one I think about a lot, is

20:42

does the science of creativity actually help

20:44

people to be more creative? Or

20:47

is it more about a study into itself? I don't

20:49

mean it to sound quite as rude as it sounds.

20:52

I don't find it rude. Comparative

20:54

literature is a academic field and

20:57

it's not obvious it has any impact on

20:59

how people write books. You have people that

21:01

are creating literature and you

21:03

have people that are studying it and

21:06

they rarely intersect and it often doesn't

21:09

go well when they do. You

21:11

could fill a room

21:13

with books on brainstorming and creative

21:16

idea generation and so forth. And

21:19

I've tried to read some of those

21:22

and some of them I may have taken

21:24

on board in some implicit way.

21:26

But anyway, respond. Yes,

21:28

no, I don't think it's a rude question at all. I

21:30

think it's the kind of question that I

21:33

care a lot about as a social scientist wanting to know,

21:35

does the knowledge we're generating actually help anyone? And

21:38

the answer may well be no. I think in this case it's

21:40

qualified yes. I think that I found

21:42

the science of creativity useful in three ways.

21:44

One is that it helps people rule out

21:46

things that are counterproductive. So

21:48

we know, for example, that large group

21:50

brainstorming sessions produce fewer ideas and worse

21:53

ideas than smaller groups that

21:55

begin with independent thought. That's an easy one.

21:57

Yep. I think the second

21:59

thing it does is. is it sometimes helps

22:01

people avoid becoming their own worst enemies. So

22:04

we know, for example, when people run out of ideas, they

22:06

tend to stop. But if you give them a little nudge

22:09

and say, actually, your first ideas are rarely

22:11

your best ideas, why don't you spend another 20 minutes on

22:13

this? Then they start to go on

22:15

more random walks, and that's useful. And

22:17

then I think the third thing is that

22:19

I think that the science of creativity probably

22:22

teaches us a little bit about

22:24

what kinds of creative collisions are most likely to

22:26

yield fruit. So we know, for example,

22:28

that if people have a mix of shared and

22:30

unshared experiences, if you have some

22:32

people that you know really well and other people you don't

22:34

know well, then you get that

22:36

nice balance of creating a common language but also

22:39

bringing in some fresh ideas. And

22:41

so I think about those ideas as pretty useful, but

22:44

they might be more helpful for

22:46

kind of incremental innovation than major

22:48

breakthroughs. But incremental

22:50

innovation is super important. I

22:52

think so too, but I'm biased. So let's talk

22:54

about... No.

22:57

Before we wrap, I want to ask you

22:59

about your comment about breath and depth. Because

23:03

I think on the one hand, it sounded

23:05

like self-criticism. On the other

23:07

hand, you might be the closest thing we

23:09

have to a modern-day Renaissance man. Yes. Some

23:12

people are born before your time. You're telling me I was

23:14

born 500 years too late. Too

23:17

late. You missed your window, Nathan. You're

23:20

stuck improving windows and hunting for

23:22

dinosaurs when you could have been

23:24

painting the Mona Lisa. Well,

23:28

so as I

23:30

say, the world rewards specialization.

23:32

The more specialized you become,

23:35

often the better you can become at an area,

23:37

and the more likely you are to get lots

23:40

of societal rewards,

23:42

income, all sorts of other things. It's

23:45

true that it's hard for me to focus

23:47

on just one thing. I'm

23:50

not scatterbrained or have

23:52

ADHD in the conventional sense.

23:54

I can go very deep

23:56

in things, but I

23:58

find lots of things... interesting and I'm

24:01

always very curious. And

24:04

that's actually one of the great things that the internet for me

24:06

is when I was a kid,

24:08

if I was curious about how does this

24:10

work, it was a

24:12

lot harder. The threshold of being curious enough

24:15

to go find out was very

24:17

high. And now the

24:19

threshold is much, much lower. This

24:21

is what works for me. And

24:24

I've found ways to make it

24:26

actually a little bit of an

24:28

advantage. I can even tell you, oh,

24:30

that's the secret, Adam. That's the secret in all of

24:32

this. But

24:34

to go back to Stephen, I

24:36

once had a serious conversation with

24:39

him about his disability and this

24:41

condition he had, ALS. And

24:44

he said, oh, it's

24:46

actually an advantage. I

24:49

said, Stephen, look, it's

24:51

a great thing to say. But

24:54

like, we're alone here. And he said, no, no,

24:56

no, no. Obviously,

24:58

his life would have been different if he didn't

25:00

have it. But given that he has it, he

25:02

saw it as an advantage. Because

25:04

he said, they don't make me go

25:07

on committees. They don't make

25:09

me do all this bullshit I'd have

25:11

to do otherwise. He

25:14

said, when it came to an idea, he

25:17

was forced to always simplify it. Because

25:21

if he had a pencil and paper,

25:24

he could keep 10 things in his mind

25:26

at one time. But doing it

25:28

all in his head, and with

25:31

people writing some stuff down and so forth, but

25:33

still, he had to focus on a smaller number

25:35

of things. Well, who am I

25:38

to edit Stephen Hawking? But I don't know

25:40

if I'd entirely buy the case that

25:42

this disability was an advantage.

25:45

But I think there's a profound

25:47

point there that every disadvantage has

25:49

advantages. Well, and you find

25:52

that with people, for example, who are

25:54

dyslexic, who they think in a

25:56

different way than people who aren't dyslexic, particularly

25:58

when it comes to tax. and linear

26:01

thought, so they have to think

26:03

non-linearly, and yet they can be

26:05

incredibly successful. Although the

26:08

school system and lots of other

26:10

aspects of ordinary life penalize them

26:12

heavily, which is unfortunate. That's

26:15

an example of the

26:17

world missing a

26:19

resource that could be great for all

26:21

of us. Other people that are not

26:24

neurotypical, people that are on the spectrum,

26:26

as they say, also have

26:28

a tremendous amount to offer, or can have

26:30

a tremendous amount to offer, but because they

26:33

have unusual ways of interaction, it's hard

26:35

to work with them, and

26:38

so we tend to underutilize

26:40

that intellectual resource. That's

26:42

a tragedy. Now, it's a tragedy

26:44

that has a hopeful element, because

26:47

over time, we've also managed to

26:49

stop being quite so prejudiced against a whole

26:52

set of other folks that we also used

26:54

to marginalize and not gain

26:56

the full fruit of their intellectual efforts.

26:59

So hopefully this will

27:01

continue. I certainly

27:03

hope it does. Well, Nathan, I think we

27:05

are at time, so I'll wrap us here,

27:07

but this was utterly delightful,

27:09

and I look forward to the next one.

27:12

Okay, great. Thanks, Adam. Nathan

27:18

underscores that people who live in fear

27:20

of others stealing their ideas generally don't

27:22

have that many good ideas. Ideas

27:24

are a dime a dozen. The real

27:27

barrier to innovation is people figuring out how

27:29

to make their visions a reality. What

27:31

prevails is rarely the best idea.

27:34

It's usually the best implementation. Rethinking

27:40

is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show

27:42

is part of the TED Audio Collective, and

27:44

this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic

27:46

Standard. Our producers are Hannah

27:48

Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our

27:50

editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker

27:53

is Paul Durban. Original music by

27:55

Hans-Dale Su and Alison Layton Brown. Our

27:57

team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick,

27:59

and Samaya Adams, Roxanne

28:01

Highlash, Ban Ban Cheng, Julia

28:04

Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.