Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is creativity? (featuring Dr. Moiya McTier)

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Daniel and Kelly interview Dr. Moiya McTier about how we define and measure creativity, and the impacts of the modern world on creative pursuits. Check out her new book, Mothers of Invention.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And frankly, I'm finding the pressure of creating a creative introduction to an episode about creativity overwhelming. So let's just move on to the main episode. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's creative universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who thinks about aliens and I have no idea where my ideas come from. Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space. And when I am struggling to be creative, I read more.

And that is my secret to getting the creativity juice back. For me, it's pacing. I get off my computer. I stop reading and I just walk either the hallways here or I do a loop around campus. And inevitably my brain bumps into something. And I'm like, ooh, I got to write that down. That's a good idea. And then you see Daniel sprinting across campus to get back to his computer.

I go on goat walks too sometimes and that helps also. Yeah, you think that goats are an important part of your creativity? You know, I was listening to this great podcast. by Russ Roberts called Econ Talk. And he had an expert on who studies creativity. And for the life of me, I can't remember their name. But he was saying that the trick is to do something that does not involve the thing you're doing at all. Yeah.

Like completely distract yourself. But the back, like, part of your mind is still working the problem while you're distracting yourself with something else. And so I do feel like when I come back after a walk with the goats, I'm paying attention to how silly they are and how cute my goats are. and please stop eating that. My hair is not a snack. Get off my back.

And like all that stuff distracts me. And when I come back, I feel like I'm like ready to tackle the problem again. Yeah. It's mysterious. It's amazing. And as far as I've experienced, it's still not automatable. Every few months I do the experiment where I give the latest chatbot like, here's my last five papers. Think about my approach to physics.

Come up with an idea for another project. And not once. They generated anything useful or interesting or at all creative. It's all derivative nonsense. So far, we'll see if that changes. Yeah, almost once a month, Zach and I will ask the various AI programs. Like, okay, create a Saturday morning breakfast cereal comic and show us what you come up with. And for a while, they were just like, it was just absolute gibberish and the panels didn't connect to each other in any clear way.

It was just like, what is going on? But it's been getting better over time. And now every once in a while, it will get something where you're like, I get, I understand the joke you were trying to make. Okay. And you had the right characters saying the right things. You didn't, like, jumble the characters. But I would still say that, you know, Zach is much funnier than Claude. So I'm still team Zach.

But that might change. Well, this sounds like a good topic for an SMBC comic. The metacomac about the comic. I do feel like science is creative in a way that AI hasn't. quite captured yet. And I think one of the things I miss about when I used to do science much more regularly was designing experiments.

Like, I think my favorite experiment to design with Scott Egan, who we had on the show to talk about what is the species, was when we were essentially trying to figure out, like, what would it be like to be a wasp living inside of a stem? And how do we test how the manipulation that we were studying, like, how it would benefit it?

And so, like, that exercise of, what is the wasp experiencing and what the wass life be like and how can we manipulate what the wasp experiences to try to actually get a handle on the answers to our questions? Like, I don't know, that was fun. And I thought we came up with creative ways to test different hypotheses that we had to see which one was correct. And I don't know, that was like, I'm not a good painter. When I try knitting, I look angry. But like this kind of creativity I really enjoy. Yeah.

I thought a little bit about what creativity means in science. And for me, part of it is coming up with a new idea that's exciting. Like, I know I've succeeded when I have a new project that when you mention it to people, they're like, oh, wow, that's cool. I wonder the answer to that. You know, something that excites the curiosity in the audience, in the customers. And, you know, sometimes I think of science as a creative art. sometimes I think of it like entrepreneurial.

You know, you're like running a little business. You know, you have a limited set of resources and you need to produce, in this case, a product, which is science that people are excited about and want to consume. And you can't just like be totally blue sky about it. You've got to be practical. Like what tools do we actually have? What problems can we solve in a reasonable amount of time? It's such a funny blend of like creativity and entrepreneurialness and then just, you know,

like hard work. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the nice things about science, I think, is that there's so many different, like, it's so multifaceted. And you've got to kind of juggle all of those things at once. And it's hard, but then it's almost, it's like a puzzle. If you can figure out the way to, like, answer an interesting question on the budget you have, well, training five new graduate students so that they're learning something too. It's like, woo. Like, at the end, it feels like there should be, you know, confetti coming from the ceiling. Like, you did the thing. But of course, that's not, that's not how it works. And the amazing part is that we don't get trained in most of those skills at all, right? Managing, budget. budgets, mentorship, teaching, all of this stuff. Anyway, so you got to be creative on the fly. But neither you nor I are an expert in the topic of creativity. So, Kelly, you invited somebody on the show who is. Oh, my gosh. She's amazing. So today we have Moia McTier, and she wrote a whole

book about creativity, how it's change over time. This concept of, like, the lone geniuses is something she dug into also. We didn't get to talk about that during the episode, but that's another cool thing that she deals with in the book. And, you know, she talks about the current moment and how things like the internet and social media and AI or impacting creativity. And what, if anything, we need to do about that. And so let's stop hearing me talk about Moia's book. And let's go ahead and bring her on the show. Yeah, yeah. Dr. Moia McTeer grew up in a cabin in the woods with no running water, no TV, and no heating. She went on to become the first Harvard graduate to double major in astrophysics and mythology and the first black woman to

graduate from Columbia University's astronomy PhD program. She's a podcast host, does creative consulting, write sci-fi, and has published two pop sci books, the most recent of which mothers of invention, we will be talking about today. Welcome to the show, Moia. We're so excited to have you. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks, Daniel. It's so nice to be here. How you doing? Awesome. I'm really intrigued by your background. I had a good friend in college who studied physics and classics. and I think because he was torn between the two topics, is that what happened for you? Or did you feel like they come from the same core curiosity? No, that's exactly what happened to me.

I'm very stubborn and very bad at making decisions. So when I fell in love with both of these departments, I refused to let either of them go. And then they let me study both of them. It actually wasn't on the pre-approved list of double majors. But I told them I could write a science fiction novel that was set on a real exoplanet. that I studied and they were like, oh, yeah, that sounds interesting. Go do that. I love that they embraced that, though, and they weren't like, no, no, that breaks the rules. Because I feel like sometimes there are very silly rules that will not get broken, you know, for any reason.

And so, yay. Yeah, especially at these old places. But I think it worked to my advantage that the astro and mythology departments were two of the smallest departments at the school. So they just couldn't afford to lose bodies. I guess that's good. Yeah. And I bet both of those trainings are useful. when it comes to the most important thing in science, which is naming stuff, right?

Yes. Understanding mythology and context, right? And then, like, understanding the science that's going on out there. Like, if you had been in charge, would we have a better categorization of stuff in the solar system? Not all this crazy, like planets and dwarf planets and centaurs and insanity? No, we'd still have all of that stuff. We might even have weirder stuff if I was in charge. Wait, what about, isn't it Neptune or Jupiter?

the rings are called like ABCD and E or something like that, like very uncreative. Am I misremembering? Saturn's rings are lettered and they are not in alphabetical order from the center, if I recall correctly. It's really frustrating. It's like the buildings at MIT. Let's give them numbers, but then not have that be useful. All right. Well, let's focus.

So we've gotten to some examples where there wasn't a lot of creativity, the naming of the rings, for example. But so you wrote this amazing book about creativity. So how do you personally define creativity? Ooh. I am personally kind of agnostic. I like people to use their own idea of what creativity can be. But broadly speaking and scientifically speaking, when you're testing this, according to psychologists, creativity is the ability to divergently think and to come up with novel and useful ideas.

And that's a modern definition. That is not what people throughout history have considered creativity, or that's not the bounds of art that people have always agreed on. But I think that's useful. Divergent thinking is vague enough that we can all understand it without being too boxed in. Wow, it's intriguing that you added useful ideas. So, for example, somebody who just like comes up with clever jokes that end up in web comics online, would that be not creative? Is that a burn there? No, I think that useful can be a lot of different things.

So there are definitely people who can read your web comics and get joy from those. And that is useful. I'm not talking about like completely practical hard usefulness, hard utility. Yeah. So I was trying to figure out like what is an example of something that isn't creative? And I think that I, you know, first of all, I would. feel bad telling someone that they are not creative in their work. And so I think that I tend to have a particularly expansive definition of creativity because I don't want to like exclude anyone. And so I was

thinking, you know, like my first job when I was 16 was a bagger at Kroger at Kroger's in Perrysburg, Ohio. And I feel like I was thinking of creative ways to like efficiently do my job in different ways that other people. And so I guess I feel like I can almost imagine any job being creative if you are like coming at it creatively. But what do you think? Are there jobs that are not creative? I don't know if I could think of any task that I would say is inherently not creative, but you can do any task in a not creative way. You can be derivative. You can just be wrote and you can be formulaic. So I think that I've read books before where I was like, this plot doesn't feel like it's doing anything new. It doesn't feel like the office.

author was trying to experiment or have fun with this. They were just following a formula. And to me, that's not creative. I think, Kelly, your example is a good one because there's an opportunity there for you to make decisions, right? And you could, for example, like, I don't like this guy. I'm going to put his ice cream next to his, you know, rotisserie chicken or whatever. But my first job was at McDonald's. And one of the things that I found so mind-numbing about it was that there was absolutely no room for decision-making at all. Like, you press the friar button, and then it dings at you, and you take the fries out. And I felt like completely trapped by the fact that I was essentially just like a robot following instructions. And I know it's designed that way. So you get

your fries exactly the same way, no matter who's pressing the button. But it was frustrating to me precisely because there's absolutely no room there for personality. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Part of divergent thinking is the choices you have to make. So if the more choices that are from a situation, the less opportunity for creativity there will be. So you mentioned that the definition of creativity has changed over time. Can you give us some examples of how people used to sort of perceive what counted as creativity or not? Would love to. The ancient Greeks only considered poetry a creative art form.

What? Huh. Yes. What about all of their amazing statues and stuff? I know. I know. To them, those were considered crafts. They were technique and crafts like sculpting, painting, cooking, art.

architecture, they were done according to rules that existed before. So you weren't creating anything from scratch. You were just discovering something that already existed. And poetry was special. It had its own word poises meant to make. And the idea was that poets are actually kind of synthesizing something new that hasn't existed before. Although that changed. The ancient Romans then added that visual arts can be creative. And then in the medieval Christian period, we kind of regressed to saying, actually nothing a human makes can be creative because the only being who can create is God. Oh, wow. Okay. Yes. And then in the Enlightenment period, people start to insert themselves into creativity again. So the ancient Greeks might have said web comics are the only

people being created today. If your comics are poetic, yes, but the drawings wouldn't have been considered creative. All right, let's not make this too specific, yeah. We should stop picking on Zach. Yeah, because Zach isn't here. I never mentioned him. I don't know what you're talking about. But on your comment, like, does that mean that they didn't think philosophy was creative?

Like, exploring the universe and having ideas, that was like a craft? That was a craft. You were discovering truths about the universe or truths were being whispered into your ear. And this is really the whole inspiration, the core of my latest book, Mothers of Invention. Thousands of years ago, the idea of a genius was external to the person. It was a guide, a tutelary spirit, if you will. And they whispered inspiration into your ear. They breathed it in.

That's why inspiration has the root inspire to breathe in. What? Oh, my gosh. Yes. And then much later. That's so obvious now that I've been. We started saying instead of that person has a genius, we said that person is a genius. So we absorbed the genius or the muse into ourselves.

Why do you think that historically we saw it so differently? Do you think people imagine that all of their good creative ideas came externally because they couldn't account for where they came from? Yeah, I think they were still trying to figure it out. It was a more mystical time back then. a lot of explanations for the natural world were magical. We explained eclipses and weather patterns and the seasons with God, so why not also explain what's going on in our brains with mystical beings as well. Well, then zooming forward to modern times, do we have any idea where ideas come from?

You know, like, I think a lot of people struggle with this. Like sometimes you sit down and you're like, okay, time for me to be creative and, you know, either it happens or it doesn't. So I'd love to blame somebody else for my dull periods. Do we have any understanding with modern science about how creativity happens? A little bit. We have a better understanding than Plato did, for sure. We have done some experiments. My favorite was actually done twice, once in 2008 and then again in the 2020s, I think 2025. Both of these tests were done with jazz musicians, putting them inside fMRI machines and having them play music from. memory, music from paper, and music improvised. Oh, my gosh. And seeing what parts of their brain lit up during each of those activities. And in 2008, they found that there were some parts, like the prefrontal cortex, that are lighting up when you're being creative, when you're improvising, which is like the most creative you can be as a jazz musician for sure.

But in the 2020s, when they did this same study again, they were emphasizing. networks of the brain more than individual parts of the brain. I guess the field had advanced in those intervening years. And what we've found in the more recent study was that three networks in the brain are very active when the jazz musicians were improvising. One was the default mode network, which made sense to a lot of people. The default mode network is what some people describe as like your back burner thinking. It's parts of the brain that are working when you're not paying attention to that particular thing. And then the salience network was also lighting up when the musicians were improvising,

which is the exact opposite of the default mode network. It's the parts of your brain that are paying attention to what's in front of you right now. What is salient to your focus? And then the third network was the executive network, decision making about what you should do based on the stimuli you're receiving. And people, I think, were shocked a little. bit that those three modes of the brain were working at once because it doesn't seem like they should be able to. But really, that is a long-winded way of saying we know a little bit more,

but just enough to have more questions. Science. Science. Yeah. Yeah. There are things that we've found that can help you be more creative that can kickstart some creative thinking and divergent processes. My favorite is almost falling asleep. What? Go on. Apparently, right before you enter a deeper sleep, you're in a state called a hypnagogic state where I don't know how it works, but studies have shown that when you wake people up right before they completely fall asleep and give them a creative task after that, they will do better on that creative task. And Salvador Dali, who was a complicated person, but a very creative artist, he used to start taking a nap with a nail or something. metallic in his hand so that when he drifted off, it would fall and make a noise, and he would be awoken from that hypnagogic state, and then he could come up with his ideas. That explains all of his paintings, wow.

Yeah. I think all of my creative work would be angry. If I'm not, Kelly. Because I don't like being woken up. If I was like, oh, I just fell asleep and then I woke myself up again, I'd be like, here's another angry poem about how the world is unfair. But is there a language? between creativity and intelligence, or are these totally different things?

There's kind of a link, but they are distinct. We have found that people with high creativity scores can have low IQ scores and vice versa. We've also seen on mass that our IQ scores as a society are increasing. This is called the Flynn effect, where every generation seems to be doing better on IQ tests than the generation before. At the same time, our scores on creativity tests are decreasing. Oh. Steadily. Yeah.

How do you measure that? Yes. The creativity part? Yeah. I'm so glad you asked. I love thinking about creativity tests. Right now, the gold standard for creativity tests is really a barrage of different tests that are called the Torrance tests.

Name for, I think his name is Paul Ellis Torrance. He was a psychology researcher in the, 60s and 70s. And some of these tests are written. Some of these tests are verbal. You might have to finish a story like what happened when the cow jumped over the moon. Or you might have to answer a weird hypothetical. Like if humans had a third arm, where would it be? How would we use it? Or you might have to do some drawings. So one of the common tests is that you get a bunch of boxes that all have the same incomplete shape in it, and you have to complete that shape in as many ways as possible in some kind of time limit. And all of these tests are meant to see how quickly can you come up

with an idea that is statistically different from an idea that an average person would come up with in that scenario. I get that all these tests are a way to quantify something, which is very, very fuzzy. And I could be convinced that they're somehow correlated with something like creativity, but I always find it frustrating that we use that to measure and define creativity the same way, like the IQ test is testing something, but it's not really intelligence, right? There's cultural factors, et cetera. So what are we really measuring with these tests? That's a great question. Yeah. In the Torrance test, I like that it's so many different types of tests that you can get a more holistic view. But really, you know, what if a person isn't comfortable in that testing environment?

What if a person doesn't have that cultural knowledge of something in that test? One of the other tests that they give is something called an alternative uses test where you would ask, how many ways could a person use a brick? That was the original format of the test. But eventually, Torrance realized that he was giving this test to children and they didn't have that much experience with bricks. So he changed. it to a tin can. So there really is a lot of, like, you have to be aware of the cultural knowledge that people will have. There are other tests that are more language-based, but none of these tests are perfect.

Like if you're testing Kelly, you'd have to know that you have to get her angry to be creative, right? Well, no, I was going to say, my concern with that creativity test is that, like, I don't do anything well on the fly. And so, like, I like to imagine that I write creatively. but it takes me a long time to get that chapter done. And like, if I'm on the spot, I don't know that you'd be measuring my creativity in the most, I don't know, effective or efficient way. Yeah, it's like if somebody said, okay, let's measure your funniness, be funny.

Yeah. So true. I agree with you. I don't do well with time tests either. I think they try to get around that by having the test take a long time. So one of the big landmark creativity studies happened in the late 50s. And it was something like over 100 architects gathered on the UC Berkeley campus to get this barrage of psych tests done. And the fact that they were there for the whole weekend meant that they might not have felt that same time pressure also meant that you could do multiple tests to get a kind of average score for a person.

Okay. Cool. Yeah. So creativity is fuzzy, but it's also deeply human. What was it about this topic that made you decide, I want to dig into this? I have spent almost my entire life around creative people. My mom's a writer and some of my favorite friends are comedians, musicians. And I have seen them struggle lately. I have struggled as a creative writer and as a person trying to sell comedy shows.

And I wanted to dig to the bottom of that. I had seen that we are in the era of reboots. I think I started noticing that in like 2018, 2019. and it really annoyed me. But once I realized that it's hard to find good art and hard to make good art, I had to write something about it. Yeah. I would love to dig into that more.

So let's take a break. And when we get back, we will talk more about how the internet is impacting creativity. Hmm. What would change if you stopped letting money stress run your life, sis? I'm Mandy Money host of Brown Ambition, the podcast. And right now, I'm taking you through my six-part Money Reboot series. This is your chance to hit reset, break the debt cycle, get honest about where your money's going, build a savings plan that actually sticks, and start making financial choices that

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Oh, damn. He knows more. He's better than me. What do you think is harder? Scoring a penalty kick or scoring a field goal? He's in the NFL and I'm like, just a big fact. I do enough. That's crazy.

Join us each week for a quick chat with your soccer-loving bros about the best sport in the world. Soccer. Just don't tell my coaches I said that. Listen to Big Kick Energy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And so, Moia, you were saying that you've noticed that we're in. in the era of reboots and that, like, you know, being a person who's online, creativity is maybe changing over time. Could you dig in a little bit more and talk about what you think is causing that change?

There's so much. A whole book's worth. Yes. So I argue in the book that we have entered this new phase of human imagination that I call the age of celebrity. And this is different from every phase of human imagination we've experienced before, according. to this Irish philosopher of imagination named Richard Kearney. In this age of celebrity, the point of art is no longer primarily to express something, but to redirect attention back to the creator so that the creator can make more stuff and make their fame even brighter. That leads to the era of reboots. The majority of movies and TV shows made today are original IP, but the majority of the popular movies and TV shows made today, like an overwhelming, like 75%, those are based on pre-existing intellectual property.

That's a problem. Wow. We see the same faces in media over and over again. I just saw The Odyssey last week and I enjoyed it, but it did take me out of the experience to see Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway because I know that they are Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, but the studios want those big names because that's who's going to bring. the audience. It's not about the art anymore. It's about whose name is on the billing. And spell it out for us, why is it a problem that we are recycling ideas and names and faces?

It's less exciting. It's not making us work our creative muscles anymore. And it's leaving an entire swath of independent artists undiscovered. There used to be much more of a practice of apprenticeship and of bringing people up the ladder behind you. when you made it in media, there were pipelines for getting undiscovered comedians their own TV shows. They would work the comedy club circuit and then they would get like a five-minute slot on someone's late-night show. And that would work up to being a correspondent and then they would eventually get their own show. That type of pipeline doesn't exist anymore because the studios are incentivized to keep pouring money into the famous people and not incentivized to use their resources to bring others up.

Do you have any thoughts on how we got here? Because I can imagine having new people on your show is a chance to be able to say like, oh, I'm the one who discovered this new amazing comedian or something. Like, why are we not doing that anymore? How did we get here? I will trace it back to Nielsen ratings. It goes further than that. It's a bigger problem.

But right now I'll trace it back to Nielsen ratings. In 1950, the Nielsen company switched from monitoring radio activity, primarily. They continued to do that. But they started monitoring TV activity. So they sent these devices around that could monitor what channels different TVs are tuned into so they can get statistics for what shows are popular. And eventually, those statistics got so good and so granular that you could see when are people turning off a particular show. So you can see, like, which actors are really popular, which types

of tropes are really popular. And eventually there became an overabundance of data in a creative space so that business people are making decisions based on what the algorithm says people will like, which is kind of the antithesis to creativity, which is where you're experimenting and you're just trying to see what people will like instead of defining it ahead of time. It's the problem with turning something fuzzy into something numerical, right? The metric then becomes the target. Exactly. But let me take the other side of that argument just for the other side of the argument.

Like, if that's what people want, if that's what people like and the data says people like Matt Damon, then if I'm a business person, why shouldn't I give people what they want instead of, you know, risking money on five brand new folks who might be terrible? To that I would say, what, like 100, 150 years? ago, people wanted faster horses. They didn't want cars. People don't necessarily know what they want if they aren't exposed to it. But if you just keep putting the same thing in front of their faces, then all of a sudden they feel like they need that thing. We need to be exposed to new ideas, new faces, new people, new perspectives. That's part of growing and that's part of fostering creativity.

Wow. That's a great analogy. I love that. So to express the Weiner Smith's sort of grumpy opinion about how things are changing. So, you know, we've alluded to the fact that my husband is a web cartoonist. And when he started doing web cartooning, you know, I remember he would be up to like 2 a.m. putting out a new comic every day. And he like, it was brutal. It was really hard. And every day he like tries to read a new book or at least every couple days to get new

ideas. He works really hard at what he does. And when he started, it was pretty easy to connect with an audience. But now over time on the different social media platforms that he has to be. be on now because people expect to go to like Reddit to see all of their comics in one place instead of going to Zach's website. All of these different places now have algorithms that you need to maximize. And then places like Facebook will change their algorithm. And now Zach's like, I can't reach my audience at all anymore. And so so many of the different people in this

community are spending a lot of time optimizing algorithms to make sure that people see their art. And that takes time away from doing the art. And I feel like that's also selecting for a different community because Zach is talking about like, I don't really enjoy doing comics anymore because I don't want to figure out what the algorithm wants. I want to like make a joke about population ethics because that's what I'm reading right now. But maybe that's not what the algorithm's going to want. And yeah, how do you think the algorithms are sort of playing into all of this? Oh, majorly. In a similar way to the Nielsen ratings. It's data being used to make something fuzzy into something clear. I like how you put that, Daniel. But the algorithms, they play into the age of

celebrity heavily because they will direct attention to what's already getting attention. It's like gravity out in the universe. Once you have some attention, it's easier for you to get more. And that leads to influencers, that leads to content creators who are not, they're not artists. I think that that that's derivative. When we get people following trends, when we get people doing like the same dances over and over again when they're not really adding anything new to it. Can we talk about that phrase content creator? That takes like all of the joy and the art out of, you know, this process for me. Like, I mean, you're like extruding content or something like, oh, it's such a terrible phrase. It is. It's like sweat and you're just sweating it out. Yeah. I feel like some device in a factory

and there's just like a tube of content, you know, being extruded from me. It's like, ugh. Anyway. But I feel like it's an apt comparison, though. Or like it's an apt phrase because I mean, remember when my kids were young and we started like watching stuff on YouTube, it would be like an unboxing video. It's like you're not doing anything creative. You're just opening a toy.

But then on the other hand, like, you know, trying to see things both ways. And one of the things I really liked about your book is that it made me sit back later and think like, well, what is creativity? and what is the problem with giving, like, my daughter what she, like, she wanted to see these unboxing videos, even though it made me, like, angry. It's like, you should not be enjoying this. Yeah, what is the problem with their, yeah, I can't remember where I was going to go with this. I've just gotten angry and forgotten.

Oh, oh, no, did you wake up from a nap? Look, I am not going to sit here and say that all of those types of videos, the dance trends, the unboxings, the get ready with me's. I don't think it's bad that they exist. Like we can have things in our society that are entertainment but aren't creative and aren't artistic. That's fine. The issue is when people get a lot of attention and praise and adoration for doing those things that are not creative. When we start idolizing an individual for like who they are and not what they do,

then we leave ourselves vulnerable to a lot of the terrible things that are happening in society right now, where we're letting people do bad things just because we like who they are or what they've maybe done in the past. And I think you're making another argument also, which is that even if what you want to do is appeal to the audience to give Kelly's daughter the most satisfying YouTube experience or whatever, the best way to do that is not to double down on what you think is the risk minimizing IP. but to fund exploration of that artistic space, because in the end, that will yield transformational, new creativity that invents like whole new forms of art and whole new stories that in the end will make Kelly's daughter happier. Yes.

Yeah. And it's not that that stuff doesn't exist. It's out there, absolutely. It's just way harder to find. And the algorithms make it even harder. And I think we're facing exactly the same problem in science. You know, it's harder and harder to get, like, crazy ideas funded because, you know, budgets are shrinking and funding agencies very understandably are like, well, do I give my

million dollars to this big group at MIT that's pumping out science reliably? Or do I spread it out to a bunch of crazy groups with insane ideas, one of which might revolutionize science? But, you know, they could also just turn into nothing. And so, you know, they get more and more conservative. And we starve out the fringe ideas and the new directions. Yeah. I mean, one of the chapters in the book is about the invention of the internet, which started as ARPANET, which was a collection, a network of research computers at civilian research institutions so they could share resources. And the idea there, for a while at least, was that they should be able to just research what was interesting to them. Yes. And then we will find an application for it later. And that was beautiful.

Give the nerds money, exactly. Please. I say with no skin in the game at all. I feel like there was so much optimism when the internet started that has kind of gone away lately. Yeah, seems like the internet is no longer a great place for creativity. But how do you think AI is going to further impact things? Hmm, deep sigh. Ooh, heavy sigh. Look, I have spent the last, I think, two or three years working with a group that's trying to get regulations passed for generative AI specifically.

Great. so that we can protect artists' rights. And everything that I have done with this campaign has been about maximizing people's choice. I want people to be able to choose how much they engage with AI as creators of art and as enjoyers of art. The issue now is that it's being pushed on people.

It's not labeled. So people have to use their own discernment to figure out if something they're seeing is AI. But we're not trained to do that. There was there's never been any reason throughout human history that we've had to look that closely at the uncanny valley to see if it's in in our part of the hills or something. And really the only time we've had to do that is in monster stories about shapeshifters and people who steal your face and voice. And yet we're freely giving over our faces and our voices and our critical thinking, our writing skills to this thing that. our ancestors would have seen as a monster. It makes me really sad. I don't want to use it at all,

and I don't want it to touch my work, but I know it has. How has it touched your work? Oh, I know that my books have been scraped for data training. Yeah. If I were a teacher, I would see it in the classrooms. If I were a music producer, I would see it in some of the beats that I've been getting because I talk to artists, and I see that there is a huge range of opinions. Some are willing to run with it. I've heard some people describe generative AI right now without regulations as the Wild Wild West. And you should just run and use AI to make as many beats as possible to make as much money as possible. That broke my heart when I heard like an old school hip hop producer say that.

But I also have talked to many artists who don't want to use it or are thinking very critically about how they use it and making sure that they're using it as a. a tool and not as a crutch or a replacement. Because there are creative ways to use it. Not for me, not in my work that I've done right now, but other people. And like that's the beauty of art, right? That we continue to expand what has been done before. I was going to push back on that a little bit just for the sake of argument. Yeah.

Like I understand if you say, hey, chat, GPT, write me a new hit song. You know, there's no creativity there. but if you use it as a tool to allow you to do things you haven't done before, and allow you imagine new directions you could go in, you might see it as an extension of a series of tools that have been given to artists. Other tools that have changed the way music happens, you know, resampling in many tracks and technology, definitely opened up new areas of creativity, but crucially because they haven't given up that core guidance, right? that they're still the person being creative.

And I mean, I'm basically just speaking from my experience in science that I see people using AI as a tool, but then I also see other people just like, you know, giving over their entire program to AI. Yeah, it's happening everywhere. Do you have any advice for like, what the heck do we do? Like, how do we get out of this situation? Because it feels like, you know, there's fewer ways to be creative or there's fewer ways to make a living being creative. you know, with the internet and with AI. Solve the problem, Moya.

Okay, okay, here's the secret sauce. No, I think that it's one of those problems that we have to chip at incrementally, starting on an individual scale and then growing up from there. A lot of individual people have just accepted that they're not creative, have just accepted that it's not a part of their lives. We need to nip that in the bud right now. Everyone can be creative, and this is a skill that you can practice. So I'd say everyone should practice small creativity every day. It doesn't have to be like go

out and paint a whole mural. You don't have to be Daniel's daughter painting walls out here. But you can cook a new recipe. You can do your hair in a new way or try something new with your makeup, try a new outfit. There are so many ways to express. And I wish we just actively did that more. And once we're doing that on an individual level, we'll start to approve. appreciate it in others more. So then it will see that societal change. Yeah, I like that. Let's take a break. And when we get back, we will talk about the amazing creative act that was you writing Mothers of Invention because I thought you had a really creative way of bringing all of this information to the reader.

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And I tried writing fiction once. And it nearly killed me. I was like, I am not good at this. Even if I wake myself up from sleep, I'm not good at it. But you managed to combine a really, like, informative pop-s-eye book in like this jacket of a fictional environment. So like tell me about the process how you decided to go about writing the book in this like super creative amazing way. Thank you. Yeah, this is kind of my thing now. My first book was written from the point of view of the Milky Way galaxy. And from there, how can you get bigger than

that? Obviously by going to the gods. And so I told you before that I was seeing we're in the era of reboots. I was seeing this creativity crisis as some are calling it. And I was remembering a TED talk that I absolutely loved as a high schooler by Elizabeth Gilbert called Your Illusive Creative Genius. And all of that made me really want to write something from the perspective of the muses. Because who better to talk about creativity and inspiration than the goddesses of that? And it was the biggest creative challenge I've ever given myself. Oh, wow. Because I wanted all of the muses to feel like distinct characters. I know that character work is a weakness of mine in fiction. So I use this book to practice that and give them each distinct voices and personalities and writing styles all while

making sure that it was in service to teaching people information, teaching people about the history of these inventions. I cover eight different inventions and combining that, kind of braiding it together with commentary on creativity. So it was, I saw it as kind of like a three-dimensional puzzle coming together in my brain. I don't know if that's a helpful image. It is, yes. Okay. Okay, good. And how did you pick those eight topics? Because there's so many topics you could have picked. Yeah, how did you pick the eight? Oh, there are notebooks full of my thoughts on this for sure. I wanted to make sure that each of the inventions made sense for the muse that inspired it, but wasn't too obvious. So, you know, I have Arania, the muse of astronomy,

helping us with the invention of the telescope. That was obvious. But I also have Palimnia, the muse of sacred poetry, helping with the invention of electricity, or like the harnessing of electricity. That one was unexpected because the muse of sacred poetry, you know, maybe she would do something with the church. Maybe she would do something with organized religion. But I wanted to flip that on its head and turn her into like a power hungry spy master. And she's trying to get control of electricity so she can overthrow Zeus on his throne on Olympus. And so it really was just like looking at these muses as characters and figuring out what would they have the most fun inspiring among humanity that I can then flip into this useful narrative. And it almost like a

ranging an astronomical observation, like all of the constraints kind of fell into place and led me to this list of eight. Awesome. Wow. And I liked the way at the beginning of the book you dealt with the fact that this is a pop-s-eye book with fiction and you sort of explain how you dealt with that. But yeah, can you tell us about that now? Like, how did you deal with the fact that you were like layering on, you know, an imaginary

world, well-telling pop-s-eye? Did that make it more challenging? Or, yeah, how did you deal with that? I think that's just how my brain works. I have spent so long thinking about the myths that humans have told about the night sky and how that is actually a cover for true science. So my brain kind of understands that translation very well. Wait, back up. Hold on. How is astrology and the mythology of the night sky a cover for true science? Because it's based on real observations. You know, people were telling me. myths about the star serious coming above the horizon at a particular time, like in the summer, and using that to predict when the Nile River would flood in ancient Egypt. And that's real science,

but they explained that with a story of their goddess Isis going on a trip around the world to try and recover the body parts of her husband, Osiris. And the reason the Nile is flooding is because she is that star and she's coming above the horizon, weeping. because she misses her husband and that causes the floods. And so I've gotten very good at kind of seeing the truth behind all of the fiction to the point where that might just be how my brain sees information now. And so it was really easy to put this fictional filter over it. And my favorite chapter to write was the final chapter on the invention of the internet

because I present it as an epic fantasy story of this queen. engaging in this epic war against Obscuro. Obscuro is this evil figure who's trying to steal people's legacy. And the queen, Calliope, is trying to give people a way to make their legacies permanent through writing, through publishing, and through the internet. So the battle is the battle of internet null. And there are war unicorns and Ares intervenes. And it sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. But this is how real stories in ancient times, real deeds were mythologized and exaggerated to the point where they became myths.

Like Hercules 12 labors were probably firstly done by multiple different people. But they were much more mundane. You know, the labor of him killing a river monster probably actually started as a human figure diverting a stream so that it didn't flood a city. and then that turned into a hero killing a water monster. So I just like thinking about those translations. Totally. And I love how you did this in this untraditional way, which in the end makes an argument about how creativity links what we typically think of as creative things like creative writing as well as science. Effectively, you're making an argument that there is creativity in science.

And I mean, that's the way I think about it. I think of like theoretical physicists and science fiction authors. others is like, you know, different parts of the same spectrum, not like different in kind. Is that something that was intentional in your work? 100%. Yes. I wanted people to expand their ideas of what creativity could be because a lot of people don't consider science creative, but that's just because they don't know how science is done. So I wanted to show them some of the process behind a lot of these inventions and how it was actually made so they could see the creativity in it. Awesome. So one of the things that

I love about writing a book, especially when it's on a bunch of different topics, is that often there's a topic where you expected the story to go one way. And then when you dive into the research, you're like, what? This isn't what I had expected at all. This isn't like, my understanding of this was clearly superficial. Was there like a chapter where you were doing the research and you were like, this is not going where I thought it was going to go? I feel like almost every chapter was like that. There is a chapter in the book about the invention of jazz music, which if you had asked me like three years ago, hey, Moia, what kind of music do you like? My standard answer was, oh, I'll listen to pretty much everything, but I don't like Christmas music or jazz. Yeah. And then I decided to write a whole chapter on it, and now I have a much deeper appreciation for it. And I did not expect that going in.

Also on the electricity chapter, I started that thinking, oh, this is going to be a story about Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, because those are the two names that I've heard throughout my entire life in this story. I had no idea who George Westinghouse was before I started researching this. So that was a fun extra character that I got to spend time with. Excellent. So are you starting on a new book? Yes. Can you tell us about it? I'm starting on a new book and I'm going to try to adapt mothers of invention into a

TV show. So I'm working on a screenplay for that right now. But the next book, I've known about this for years, I think since 2022, I'm going to call it cosmophobia. It's going to be about people who are afraid of space. And I'll interview psychologists and daredevils, people who have been to space, hopefully. And the whole structure of the book will be a kind of classic dialogue, a la Plato or Aristotle. and it'll be between the universe and a person who is afraid of it, a conversation about really what fear is and what we can do with it. I don't think that I've encountered this category of people who are afraid of space or what are they? Really? No, what are they afraid of?

Is it just the overwhelming? What are they afraid of? Yeah, they find me. I'm afraid of going to space. Same. You and me same, yes. I feel like almost every talk I give has one person coming. up to me at the end saying, I'm afraid of space. Like I, it's really big or it's been around for so long or

it's so mysterious. So how do we know an asteroid isn't going to come and kill us like it did the dinosaurs? Fair. Or I'm scared that we are actually moving and that like there is a lot of stuff happening in the universe that I'm not aware of right now. There are a lot of reasons. Yeah. These things are all terrifying. I guess it's just a point of view, right? It's like either terrifying or it's exciting or both. Mm-hmm. And a lot of people have heard about big, scary space stuff like black holes or solar flares, but they don't have a good understanding of the scale of space or of what is actually possible.

So they think that we are in danger of a black hole coming and sucking us up or something. I feel like I encounter. So for my PhD, I studied parasites. And parasites are like my big thing, which you might not expect, given that I don't write about parasites at all in my books. It's always space and technology. But anyway, and I find that a lot of people when you first start talking about parasites, they're very scared because they start seeing,

like, imagining parasites are everywhere. They think they're probably getting infected by parasites. But the more they... Especially now. Yeah, right. Yes. Yeah, right. It's in your lettuce.

And there's invasive ticks all over the place. And anyway, but when I explain parasites in more detail, and I'm like, okay, you know, ticks tend to be in these locations, and here's what you can do to protect yourself. And, like, the more you know, the less. scary it is. Do you, for a lot of these people, is it just like, if you tell them more about space, they'll stop being scared of space? Or is it not like parasites in that way? For a lot of them,

it is kind of like parasites. Yeah, the kind of the whole point of a podcast that I've been hosting for a few years now. I say that it's the astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe, but still want to be its friend. I truly believe that the more you learn about space, the more familiar it becomes, the more you feel like you are a part of it. So there's no reason to be afraid anymore. But some cannot be helped by learning more. I've made that mistake a couple times where I'm like, oh, no, it's okay. Here's how far away the nearest black hole is.

And then they hear a really big number and they get scared again. So there are different techniques to deal with it. And that's why I'm really excited to dig into the research for that one. Awesome. I can't wait to read that book. Tell us where else folks can find. you. You can find me online at moya mictere.com. I'm on all the socials at Go Astro Mo. And there you can find information about my book and my podcast, Pale Blue Pod. All right. Well, thank you so much for

being on the show. I had a ton of fun and hopefully we'll have you back some time. I'd love that. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. Come engage with us.

You can email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www. www. danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author, Patra Mathers and her husband Michael, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honies, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland.

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Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace. On crime stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend.

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