Freakonomics Radio - 355. Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don't assess the things we value. All these elements factor into the long, mysterious march towards a creative life. To learn more, we examine the early years of Ai Weiwei, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Maira Kalman, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Egan, and others. (Ep. 2 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

I don't understand why you're not in prison in China. It sounds like obviously they did it for a little while. Why did they let you go? I tell the truth. I try to think about it. And suddenly, just this moment, I realized the answer. The jail in China is not large enough to put me in. What do you mean? I'm just too large. My ideas penetrate the wall. Are your ideas big enough to penetrate walls? His apparently are. My name is Ai Weiwei. I'm 61 years old. I was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. By the year I was born, my father was exiled. In our previous episode, we asked the art economist David Galanson to name a true creative genius. I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant. Ai Weiwei, I believe, is not only the most important painter in the world, he's the most

important person in art. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. You know, with his art, he has made a contribution to political discourse. This is a unique person in art almost in the last hundred years. So we went to Berlin to visit Ai Weiwei. We interviewed him in his subterranean studio, a former brewery in the former East Berlin. And how do you describe what you do now? That is a little bit confusing because it's a profession, you know, because most things I did is related to so-called art. So people call me artist.

But since I have been also working in defending human rights or freedom of speech or human conditions, so they call me activist. Do you care what people call you? I don't really care. I think I live my life. I don't care if I still can't wake up next morning. I don't care if I can't walk to school to pick up my son. You can see why people are confused by what exactly Ai Weiwei is or does.

He spends a lot of time making things, but also a lot of time on Twitter, calling out institutional hypocrisies or cruelties. He once created a museum piece comprised of 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. He also made a series of photographs in which he drops a Han dynasty urn to the ground and smashes it to bits. Lately, he's been consumed with the global refugee crisis. He hung 14,000 life vests around Berlin's main concert hall. He installed a sprawling public art project in New York

called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, and he made a documentary film called Human Flow. The officials came here and told him, look, there's no way you're going to get papers to continue. Either you go voluntarily or we arrest you. Ai Weiwei's enduring obsession has been to stick his finger in the eye of the Chinese government. He helped design the Olympic Stadium for Beijing's 2008 Games, but by the time

it was built, he'd attacked the organizers for cronyism and corruption. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands, he launched a citizen's investigation into the poorly built schools where so many children died. He gathered up the mangled rebar from quake sites and he turned it into a sculpture called Straight. When the government placed him under surveillance, he responded by making a sculpture called Surveillance Camera. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was kidnapped and jailed by the Chinese government. Upon being set free, he decided it was best to leave China. Since I was born, I have been seen as a son of the enemy of the people.

They say you are dangerous. They say you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble. They were right. They were perfectly right. But I tried to live up to that kind of condition. Still, I am not satisfied with what I did. Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was a prominent poet and intellectual. Before the Communist Revolution, he was considered a leftist subversive.

When Mao took over, Ching started out in the new regime's good graces, but eventually fell out of favor, and the family was exiled from Beijing. So I grew up in Xinjiang province, which is a scurvy desert, and spent about 18 years in that location. So when you were a kid, you were growing up in,

we call them labor camps or re-education camps. I don't know what you call it. We call it re-education camps to make you become a better part of society. It didn't seem to have worked on you, did it, though? It did work on me. Well, if the state was trying to re- worked on you, did it, though? It did work on me. Well, if the state was trying to re-educate you, you... But that re-education is very important,

because building your reactionary to this kind of brainwash or trying to limit individuals' rights and freedom of speech. So you got somehow immune to these kind of attacks. For several years, the family lived underground in a cavern. For two decades, Ai Qing did not write. My father is so scared. There's no single day he comes home not physically shaking because he's been so mistreated. And he tried to kill himself several times, I understand.

He attempted three times. How did he try? Do you know? He wants the electric, how do you call that? Socket? Socket. Of course, the whole light went off because of the shortage. And once he tried to hang himself, and he's so lucky, the nail is loosened. And you were a teenager then or younger?

I was about eight or nine. And did you know what happened? I don't know at all. He told me. Later? Yeah. Concerning Ai Weiwei's upbringing, at least two questions come to mind, both of them probably unanswerable. The first, what are the odds that that boy living in a labor camp in the Gobi Desert would become one of the most influential artists in the world? And how much did that environment have to do with who he became?

Today on Freakonomics Radio, the second episode in our series called How to Be Creative, ideas big enough to penetrate walls. Where do they come from? How does an artist's or inventor's family and background shape their creative lives? We'll hear from well-known creatives who are the offspring of well-known creatives, like the singer and writer Roseanne Cash. Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician. We'll look at what science can tell us about the predictors of creativity. This factor is so powerful that you can actually tell by going to someone's dorm room in college. We'll talk about how well or even if our schools encourage creativity.

I don't think it's impossible to reorient the way we teach. It's not going to be easy, but I think we can do it. I think we have to do it. And the small topic of how creativity and family intersect. Did you say that's a small topic? Yeah. Oh my God. From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Ai Weiwei's childhood was, of course, atypical. And a lot of his art is clearly a response to his family's treatment during China's Cultural Revolution. But is there any way to say that his upbringing was a cause of his creativity?

Yeah, that's very important. We actually have a term for it. We call it diversifying experiences. Dean Simonton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis. He spent decades studying the biographies of great artists and scientists to help understand where creativity comes from. What diversifying experiences means is you're exposed to one or more events in childhood or adolescence that puts you on a different track from everybody else. So instead of being raised just like all the other kids on your block in a very conventional fashion, you all of a sudden find yourself different. You see yourself as different.

You have different goals. And these diversifying experiences can take a lot of different forms. And often you look at the lives of a lot of creative geniuses and you see more than one of them operating. So you're saying that diversifying influences would lead, would tend to lead to higher creativity then? Yes. Tend to lead to creative genius. I didn't realize that he was a spy until, you know, I was a teenager. That's the scientist Pat Brown. He grew up all over the world, in Paris, Taipei, in Washington, D.C. The way I figured it out was that a good friend of mine,

my dad was his boss in a way, and he made some mention of the fact that his dad worked for the CIA, and I thought, well, that's weird because... My dad doesn't. Yeah. For a time, Brown was best known as an inventor of a method of genetic analysis called the DNA microarray, which has become useful for the study of cancer. Was this research primarily within the context of solving cancer, addressing cancer, or no? No, it originally was, let's put, this is why it's kind of hard to, for so many of these things that I would do or any scientist would do,

it's not necessarily there's this single reason why you're doing it. You just realize that if we could do this, there's all these cool things that you could apply it to, okay? And in fact, in the early days when we had first got this thing working, you know, we had a few good ideas. There was reason enough to do it. And then as you're actually doing experiments, you realize, oh, we could do this. Oh, we could do this. Until a few years ago, Brown was a sort of high-end researcher without portfolio at Stanford. Then he took a massive left turn and founded a startup with rather modest goals.

I am currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, which is a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035. I asked Brown whether he saw any connection between his globetrotting childhood with a CIA dad and his scientific career. I think the fact that I traveled and lived in multiple places in the world and, you know, in those days, kids were a lot more like free range at a young age. And I felt like I had a lot of freedom to explore all these places and so forth, I think had an impact on me in the sense that it just made me aware of the fact that there's basically no place on earth that's inaccessible.

Probably the base of everything that I do is a fantastic curiosity about people, intense empathy that we're all in this kind of, we're all struggling, we're all heroic to just even wake up in the morning. That's Myra Kalman. And I am an illustrator and author. And she's got a son. My name is Alex Kalman, and I am a designer, a curator, a creative director, a writer, an editor, and someone with generally many ants in their pants. Can one or both of you, you can take turns, you can interrupt, whatever you want. Just describe briefly the family.

That's a small topic, but just a little bit about the family growing up and until now. Did you say that's a small topic? Yeah. Oh, my God. That's an epic. I think that's the epic topic. There's no bigger topic than the family. Myra Kalman is best known for her children's books

and her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style and her work for The New Yorker, including one of its most famous covers ever called New Yorkistan. If you don't know it, go look it up. Her work manages to be whimsical and melancholy at once. Paintings of cake and dogs and demure old ladies in plumy hats. She once bought a pair of the conductor Arturo Toscanini's pants at auction,

just to have them. Actually, she bought the whole suit. Right, but his pants, they have a lot more panache when you say his pants. For years, Myra Kalman was best known as the right-hand woman to her husband, Tibor Kalman, a wildly creative and influential designer. He died young, nearly 20 years ago, when their two children were young. I've known them since around that time. Pretend I don't know either of you at all, and we're sitting next to each other on an airplane or something, and I say, who are you? Oh, you guys are a mother and, you know, tell me a little bit about yourselves. What kind of family was this?

Where did you live and what was that household like? I think we'd say, do you mind if we swap seats so that we don't have to sit next to each other on this eight-hour flight? And we'd prefer not to talk, actually. I'm going to be in business class and he's going to be in business class. No, anyway, so go on. Mom! Alex and Myra are collaborators, too. They created an installation called Sarah Berman's Closet.

Sarah Berman being Myra's mother and Alex's grandmother. And the installation consisted of the contents of Sarah's closet, artfully curated and arranged. It's appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So I was curious what the Kalman House was like to grow up in. It was a really joyful and kind of wild and fun childhood. I know that we were all very close and we went on many adventures. And days were filled with looking around and making books when we were bored and cooking dinner and listening to music from all corners of the earth and just a real,

really deep exposure to everything and anything that was not familiar in our day to day. And I thought that a house where we're making books and dancing and making costumes and turning the furniture upside down is that's, how could you not do that? So the creativity in the home, in the family, was a sense of play and a sense of loving language and art and music. I think that real creativity isn't this thought to say, okay, now let's be creative. It's just a kind of a natural feeling or understanding of saying, this is all opportunity to play with. All these rules are opportunity to create new rules or bend certain rules,

and the joy in kind of that type of experimentation and that type of play, hopefully with some result that is meaningful or profound or funny or entertaining. My parents, to their enormous credit, were really not that pushy. That's the composer Nico Muley, the youngest person to ever have a commission from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He grew up in New England with a painter mom and a documentary filmmaker dad. And, you know, it's the usual, you have to be driven to the thing, And, you know, it's the usual,

you have to be driven to the thing and then you have to get all the books and you have to kind of pay for these classes and whatever. And so they were really great about that, but it wasn't this version of the thing where it's like, we're going to press you so hard to become a concert violinist,

nor was it, you know, isn't this a cute hobby, but you need to work for Goldman Sachs. I think they found the good middle point. You know, it's less about them being artists and more about them creating a household in which ideas were spoken about. And I think that's the real luxury of my childhood was not necessarily being surrounded by art in that way

but by, you know, people who read and thought about a million things and channeled that into not just artistic expression. I mean, I think we all know, we all have horror stories of people raised by artists. Horror stories maybe, but also success stories. Growing up in a creative household means learning not only that a creative life is possible, but if you pay attention, you can learn how to do it. That was the case with Elvis Costello, the singular singer-songwriter whose father was a singer with a popular dance band. Nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest, but the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late 20s to the 80s. You know, he was a remarkable character in English light entertainment.

They weren't by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that. Young Elvis, actually his name was Declan McManus back then, young Declan would hang out in the darkened balcony of the Hammersmith Palais in London during the band's Saturday afternoon set, watching his father emerge into the limelight in jacket and tie, which is why, to this day, Elvis Costello pretty much always wears a jacket and tie.

You have a sort of admiration for your parents' ability to do whatever it is they do. That was just, you know, that was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcast later on after my parents separated you know he his life transformed he he then sort of took on an appearance closer to sort of peter sells him what's new pussycat he grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable

clothes and listen to contemporary music because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band and decided he wanted to do his own thing so that striking out and being independent thing was sort of like from his example no matter what the music was or the style and bear in mind my tastes in music changed us like any teenager from every it was all one thing. The next day, it was all about another. It was always about the song. I'd spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool, which at that time was musically very quiet in the early 70s, and tried to make my own way playing my own songs.

I had a partner. We sang in bars and any evening way they would let us on the stage really we're making tiny little bits of money just about covered our expenses and i learned a little bit how to do it but i never really thought that i was you know i looked at the television every thursday to see top of the pops and saw the distance between the way i looked and felt and sounded and what was a pop singer right then which was a lot of people in Baker foil with eye makeup on. That was, that was the music of that moment,

the glitter moment, you know, glam moment that seemed very distant from a 17 year old, you know, did you kind of wish you could do that? I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music that, you know, that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie while still loving everything he did.

My father really struggled a lot. He couldn't make money playing modern jazz. Wynton Marsalis is one of the most celebrated musicians alive. A jazz and classical trumpeter who also composes, teaches, and runs the landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center program. His father, Ellis Marsalis, is also an accomplished jazz musician, a piano player. He played with great musicians, but people didn't really want to hear the style of music they were playing.

In the 1960s and 70s, when Wynton was growing up in New Orleans, the dominant popular music was funk and R&B, not the modern jazz his father played. I had grown up around the music. So my father and them played, they listened to their music. No one else was listening to it, but I heard it. So Ellis Marsalis supported the family by teaching. Well, my daddy, you know, the first jobs my father had paid like $5,000 a year, $6,000. He was a band director for segregated high schools in towns like Opelousas, Louisiana,

Brobridge, Louisiana. But Ellis was still an influential musician in New Orleans and for his son. Musicians kind of knew what he was. People in the neighborhood respected him for his opinions. Yeah, you can't say nothing to jazz musicians. They know stuff, you know, in the barbershop or something. And also because in the barbershop, at the height of kind of black nationalism, my father was always the one who was not nationalistic. And that was a great embarrassment for me.

I'd be saying, man, why are you always talking this stuff that's against what everybody is saying? And he would always be very philosophical. Man, you don't attack people that's not there. You got to tell the people in front of you what they don't want to hear. And he was always a big one. He used to always say, all of everybody never does anything. If you said they, he would always say, who is they, man? Can you tell me who they is? Do you know them? Tell me, who are their names? Wynton's mother was also a big influence. My mama was unique, and she had an originality. Her food tasted different. She had her own way of doing stuff, and she was a big creative kind of person. The way she decorated your house,

I understand, was artistic, yeah? Everything about her, you know, everything. She grew up, she was from the projects, so she's very unusual because she was very much had the street element, which has become a cliche now. Then it wasn't as cliche. And she was she also was her first graduate from college. She went to Grambling University. She was extremely intelligent in terms of just her ability to do, she could do my chemistry homework when I was in high school and any kind of spatial problem she understood. But she also had a very deep social consciousness that was not, that was not cliched. And Wynton Marsalis distinguished himself at a very young age. Well, I played the Haydn trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14 and the Brandenburg concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14, and the Brandenburg concerto with the New Orleans Youth Orchestra when I was 16. How did you recognize that trumpet was going to be what you were good at? Well, I didn't know until I was 12 that I was going to be interested in it.

And then it was just a matter of applying, practicing and stuff. So I noticed if you practice, you got better. Because a guy in my neighborhood was always picked on. And he saw Bruce Lee enter the drag and he decided to get some nunchucks. And man, he was swinging these sticks. And then all of a sudden, maybe like five months of him swinging these sticks every day, he became a virtuoso at it. Then there was no more picking on him, calling him fat,

taking his money, the stuff that people like to do him. All of a sudden, he was, hey, say fat, come swing them sticks for us. His name was Theodore. We called him Theodore. We're in the country, Kenner, Louisiana, the black side, segregated side. I noticed one day he had an encounter with a guy, a name we call Big Poe. And after that encounter, he definitely was not picked on. And I thought, man, practicing is something. This guy, six months ago, everybody was picking on him. Now he practice swinging these sticks. And his whole position in the hierarchy of this food chain has changed.

And so I understood from watching him that just the kind of diligence and repetition, intelligent repetition, you could become better at things. Couple years later, Wynton and his brother Branford joined a funk band. I was good at making up bass lines. I'm left-handed, so they would always say, put a bass line on this, bro. So I put a bass line on something. We rehearsed in the Night Ward. We had a band called The Creators at that time in New Orleans.

My brother and I were the two youngest musicians on the whole funk scene. I was 13 and Brantford was 14. Our band was mainly older men, maybe in their early 20s and teens, late teens. There were maybe 10 to 13 bands. They all had names like Cool Enterprise, Flashback, Stop Incorporated, Vietnam, Blackmail, Family Players. So we would have battles of the bands. We would play dances. We played gigs everywhere, wedding receptions.

We did a series of talent shows that the police department would sponsor to make community relations. And people come up out of the audience, whatever the area was played, the worst areas in New Orleans, the most fun we ever had. And they would come up and sing or play. And we had to learn their 15 or 20 songs. And we learned it. We never looked at music. Of course, most of the times it was never music. We just learned the music and we played.

And it was great. I actually didn't want to join the band because at that time, when I was 12, I wanted to play jazz. And my daddy is the one that said, man, play in the band. Oh, really? Yeah, he said, man, join the band.

Because why? Because you have to have experiences to know what something is. You can't, don't cut yourself out of experiences when you're young. He was always saying, don't adopt my prejudices, develop your own. Jay and I were just kind of like this little two-person team. That's the filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass,

one half of another New Orleans brotherhood. We would sleep in Jay's single bed together for like way too late. Like Jay had already like gone through puberty. I mean, it was kind of weird. But I think we started to develop this sense of we might try to become artists. And that seems like an impossible thing to do and be financially sustainable. So we better link arms and souls. Mark and Jay Duplass both write, act, and direct, sometimes together, sometimes not. They had a pretty standard issue suburban upbringing.

Like mom's home with us. Well, dad's cranking away 50 to 55 hours a week, kind of building the American dream. So like we can one day take a vacation that's not in the car, like one day fly to a vacation. That was like the goal, you know? So what that meant practically for me and Jay is that we didn't have a lot of stuff. Our parents gave us a lot of emotional support and a lot of love, but they didn't buy us a lot of stuff. So we were very bored. And I think when cable arrived, which was like a marker of success, my dad was like, we're getting cable and we are doing it. That's when HBO came into our lives. And that really lit us up as storytellers. Because, you know, for those of you who don't remember in the early to

mid 80s, there was no curation as to when certain kinds of movies were shown. They generally leave the R-rated movies for the nighttime now. But back then, we would come home from school and, you know, it was Ordinary People and Sophie's Choice and, you know, we were just enjoying the hard-hitting dramas of the late 70s and early 80s. And I think it really shaped a lot of of who we were i'm curious like so you guys are what you're maybe like 10 and jay's 14 or something at this point yeah right around that age yep yep yeah so you're watching ordinary people and sophie's choice which

are not exactly teen or tween um fair were you aware that you were outliers in that regard? It was still very subconscious because we would take our bikes to the streets and still play with the other kids and play football. They really wanted to talk about Star Wars. And we were fine and we watched those movies to keep up. But it was this feeling, which I think a lot of people have maybe later in high school when you start to realize like, oh, this is not my tribe. I know how to play this game. I know how to talk about the things to get along. But when I go home, I've got my one or two people that really are my tribe

and we're talking about that stuff. That sort of dynamic happened to me and Jay much earlier than most people talk about it happening. The Duplass brothers pretty much built their mental model of a creative life from scratch. For Roseanne Cash, the opposite was true. She is the daughter of country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian. As for Roseanne following in his footsteps...

My mother was afraid of the life it would lead to. So she didn't encourage me that much. My mother was very creative in other ways. She, you know, she crocheted and she painted and she was president of her garden club and she was creative in some domestic realms. But writing and music just carried a, you know, a lingering fog of fear around it for her. But I remember my dad was on the road, and I remember secretly writing him when I was 12 and saying everything I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to be a writer, that I wanted to do something important, that I wanted people to read my words, that I loved language,

that music was so important to me and had changed my life. I told him all of these things, and he wrote me back and he said, I see that you see as I see. It was powerful. Even to a 12-year-old, it gave me encouragement. Her parents got divorced around this time. Her father had become a heavy drinker and a drug addict. This made her rethink putting music at the center of her life. Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician, and I grew up thinking that fame was a terrible thing that happened to you, like a disease.

And I thought, why would I go into that? Why would I try to attract that kind of attention? And you never have any privacy. And privacy is so important to me because a writer needs privacy. And I don't want to go on the road and I don't want to take drugs and get divorced. Well, actually, I did want to take drugs in the beginning. So that was okay. So, but, you know, most of that imprint came from my mom because she was really afraid of fame because of what happened in her life with my dad.

For Roseanne Cash, it was a cautionary tale, but in the end, not enough to stop her. Yeah, I started writing songs, and then I wanted to sing them myself, and then I made demos, and then I showed them to a record label, and there's no turning back. Roseanne Cash went on to put out many records, mostly country and pop, some of them big hits. She's also written four books. She's about to release a new record called She Remembers Everything. A childhood like hers, a musician father always traveling, drugs and alcohol, fame and its attendant burdens, her parents' divorce.

It's practically the model for what we think of as a dysfunctional family. And having a dysfunctional family is often seen as the model for living a creative life. It's false. That's Teresa Amabile, a social psychologist from Harvard who studies creativity. Many creative people do have dysfunctional families, but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family. There's some interesting research on this by David Feldman and Robert Elbert and a number of other people who have looked at the biographical backgrounds of people who have distinguished themselves for their creativity. Very often, they faced a lot of adversity in childhood. Maybe they had a serious illness themselves. Maybe a parent was seriously ill or died. Maybe there was an ugly acrimonious divorce or they lost a sibling. Those kinds of events can crush a child. They can lead to a lot of problems. They can lead to substance abuse. They can lead to various forms of emotional illness. incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact.

I don't know if we, we being the field in general, have discovered what the keys are, what makes a difference for kids. It is true, however, that eminent people in a range of fields are much more likely than the average person to have lost a parent at a young age. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8%. For high-performing scientists, the rate is 26%. For U.S. presidents, 34%. For poets, 55%. But, we should note, the rate of parental death is also disproportionately high for prisoners. So it may be that a parent's death is a shock to any child's system, but that it's hard to predict the direction of that shock. Too much depends on the circumstances,

like how talented the kid is or whether they have some key guidance. Sometimes it's one key adult who can somehow rescue them in their lives. And sometimes it seems to just be a trait of the kid, something within themselves. There's also the notion that creativity itself can be a kind of coping mechanism, as it was for the graphic designer Michael Baruch.

I was a really good elementary school and junior high school and high school artist. I was very accomplished. I could do very realistic drawings that impressed people. And boy, did I take pleasure in impressing people. Otherwise, most of my other physical attributes and mannerisms were the kind of things that would provoke many strangers just to beat me up. But this magic ability to draw things actually seemed to be a kind of like thing that even bullies would be impressed by. And so, you know, early on, I kind of started associating creativity not with just something that I would do in a lonely room for my own satisfaction, but something that somehow would give me a way of operating in the

larger world. You know, if you were designing a poster for the school play, you got to go to rehearsals. So even if you couldn't sing or dance or act, you got to make a contribution to the overall effort that went into bringing that play to the stage. Well, that's another example of a diversifying experience, being on the outgroup. Dean Simonton again. Being a minority. As long as you're not oppressed. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of minorities are oppressed. And so they're not going to realize the potential, even though they are more inclined to think outside the box. If they can't get a job, then it's not going to help them much. I mean, a good example of that is the Jews in Europe are well known to be overrepresented in a lot of domains of creativity, particularly in the sciences. For example, Nobel Prizes in the sciences, the Jews are overrepresented. Yeah, it's something like 20% or something. Yeah, but guess what? That's most likely to be in the case where Jews were emancipated, where they were no longer subject to the kind of anti-Semitism

that they saw in medieval Europe. So like in Switzerland and a number of other countries. So Switzerland, that kind of disproportion is much, much higher than you see like in Russia, which actually has many more Jews, but had a much longer history of anti-Semitism. I used to use the Nazis invading my studio as a motivator to finish an assignment that I was kind of dragging. Myra Kalman again.

And I would say, well, if the Nazis came in two hours, would it be done? What if they came in one hour? Would it be done then? And that was a kind of, you know, expecting the worst. And I was brought up, of course, especially from my father, that sense of you never know what's going to happen. Horrible things will happen. Kalman grew up in Israel, her parents having escaped Belarus before the Holocaust, but the rest of her father's family did not make it out.

In our family, all roads lead to the Holocaust. It's kind of an inescapable part of a section of our lives. And it's a reference point for so many things. You know, when we talk about politics or things being bad, and we say, well, it's not the Holocaust, so, you know, get a grip. When I visited Kalman recently in her Greenwich Village apartment, one room was dominated by cardboard boxes recently freed from storage. They contained the possessions of her late husband. She and her son Alex are planning to make a documentary about Tibor Kalman. Would it be fun to open a Tibor box and just see what's in one? No. I mean, it could be. Oh, you know what? I take that back. Let's open this box. This box is...

No, not that box. Aha. This box? Yes. Okay, this is... he used to take this extendable fork to a restaurant and he'd open the extendable fork and then all of a sudden this is well this needs to be repaired but he would kind of reach over to another another plate from customers next to us and take the food out of their plate no not at our own table what would have been the fun of that the fun of this was that he would reach over into somebody else's table and take their food. He did it in Italy, and everything is much more jolly and festive there, and everybody's laughing a lot at this guy who's reaching over. And these are Karl Marx communist potato chips, which I made for the T-Burosity show.

We created a mock store, and this is after he died, of course, and I thought, shouldn't we have Karl Marok's communist potato chips as if that was part of our collection? Myra and Tibor Kalman's son, Alex, is now 33 years old. It's pretty obvious that a lot of his creative spirit comes from his mother and his father. His main project at the moment is a small museum called Museum. That's M-M-U-S-E-U-M-M. He calls it a contemporary natural history museum in a form of object journalism. This is where Sarah Berman's closet originated before it landed at the Met. Museum is very, very small. How small? It's housed in an old freight elevator. About three people can fit comfortably. And yet, it is a museum. This is nicely done. Museum quality. It is museum quality. Seriously.

Yeah. Well, the idea is that it's a museum. So there's certain rules we felt we had to follow. And if we did that, then there's other rules we could play with. So this collection is called Modern Religion, and it's basically exploring how these ancient traditions stay relevant in today's society and one way of staying relevant is redesigning the elements or the tools of that religion to fit in with modern trends so today everybody's gluten-free so now there's gluten-free communion wafers or everybody's on the go so there's on the go communion kits and so it's looking at these kind of seemingly banal objects and... This one here is the...

Yeah. Really? It looks like a piece of Nicorette and... Oh, is that wine and a little host then? That's right, yeah. You know, the idea in Museum is that we want to kind of touch on many different notes of what it means to be human. So there's things in here that are totally devastating, and there's things in here that are completely absurd. And we don't want the trick to be on you.

We want you to be also kind of a part of it. I asked Kalman how his father and his father's death influenced him as a human and as a creative. There always felt to be a really deep and natural and profound connection between Myra and Tibor and Lulu and me. Lulu is Alex's sister. So there's just a sensibility and a way of kind of feeling and interacting and thinking and doing and why we're doing and what we're doing that feels very just binding and natural.

And I often think that kind of subconsciously that the work that I do today feels like a way of maintaining a dialogue with Tibor. And he feels very present and very active in it all. Coming up after the break, if a childhood environment and dramatic events like the death of a parent can have a strong influence on how creative someone turns out to be, how influential are things like incentives for being creative?

So this showed very clearly that intrinsic motivation can be undermined by the expectation of reward. So how does creativity happen? You know, there's the expression, we get ideas. We don't get ideas, we make ideas. And what does it take to make ideas? Maybe it's my arrogance, but it didn't occur to me that I couldn't be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter. That's coming up right after this. Dean Simonton, you will recall, is a psychology professor who has studied the biographies of creative geniuses. To get back to just pure psychology, there's something called the Big Five personality factors.

The Big Five are conscientiousness, extroversion slash introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and... One of those big five factors is the openness to experience factor. And it has a lot of different facets to it. It's openness to values, openness to actions. You know, you're willing to try out different foods or, you know, try out different music out different music, all sorts of different things. And this factor is so powerful as a predictor of human behavior that you can actually tell by going to someone's dorm room in college whether or not they're high or low in openness to experience. Well, it turns out this correlates very, very highly with creative genius. Creative geniuses tend to be very, very highly with creative genius. Okay?

Creative geniuses tend to be very, very high in openness to experience. They're willing to explore different values, different approaches. We did find a lot of openness to experience in the creatives we've been speaking with, often starting in childhood. I was very much interested in the arts as a child. That's Margaret Geller, a path-breaking astrophysicist. Then my mother, who was a walking dictionary and loved literature, used to take me to the beautiful Morristown, New Jersey, library. It was in a very old building, and one of the things that we read together were plays by all the famous American playwrights.

And from that, I really inherited a love of the language, and I became fascinated by the theater and by the human condition. So I demanded that I go to acting school. I don't think my father was that fond of this idea, but it was impossible not to do it. Giller's father was a chemist at Bell Labs, the famous tech incubator. I think he started taking me there when I was around 10. And he used to have a mechanical calculator. Probably nobody listening or virtually nobody knows what one of those are, but they were called Monroe calculators, and the fascinating thing was all the noise they made. And the best thing was to, say, divide one by three so it would just go, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, that it put out all the threes it could.

I learned how to load an X-ray camera, and I learned how to measure an X-ray diffraction photograph, how to use a vernier, and people would come in and chat with me. And also Bell Labs had in its lobby a Foucault pendulum, which I used to be fascinated by very many stories high. The inventor James Dyson, he of the multi-billion dollar vacuum fortune, was not predestined for a life of engineering. My father was head of the classics department at my school until he died.

My brother was a classics scholar and my mother was an English scholar. So there was no engineering or manufacturing, architecture or anything in sight. So how'd that happen? So all I knew about creativity, or the only creative thing I did at school, was art. And I went off to art school or art university to pursue art as a career, as a painter, in fact. But when I got there, and this is in London, I discovered that you could do quite a large number of forms of design, like design interior design architecture ceramics printmaking sculpture filmmaking and so on and I became interested in design but ended up doing architecture and while I was doing architecture I discovered that I was very interested in structural engineering

I don't know why except that at that time it was the time of Buckminster Fuller and his triodetic structures a geodesic structures and Friotto with cable tension structures and it was a time that that, and for that matter bricks, were disappearing as the structure for buildings and being replaced by steel structures of one sort or another. And I realised that architecture was going to be about the structure and the engineering and not so much the form. And I found engineering fascinating. I don't know why. I'd never come across it in my life before. I'm curious if you were at all intimidated by the notion of architecture and engineering,

as much as it appealed to you, did it strike you as something that lay outside the realm of possibility for a boy who came from a family where the classics were, you know, the foundation? Did it seem at first just too hard? Not at all. You have to remember, or maybe it's my arrogance, but I mean, you have to remember this was the mid-60s in London, where anything was possible. And it didn't occur to me that I couldn't be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter.

It's probably no coincidence that moving to a big city like London changed the way James Dyson thought about his creative prospects. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago when he lived in New York City for several years. Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago, when he lived in New York City for several years.

Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. It's not everywhere like New York City. The world has gotten increasingly urban over the past few decades. And that's probably a good thing for the sake of creativity and innovation. Economists like Harvard's Ed Glazer argue that cities play an outsized role in economic growth. I think the city is our greatest invention because it plays to something that is so fundamental in humanity. It plays to our ability to learn from one another. Our ability to learn from one another in cities. Ideas colliding on purpose and by accident. Also, there's competition in cities. And with that competition comes strong incentives to create.

But this raises its own larger question. Is creativity best served by external incentives and motivation or internal? When Wynton Marsalis was first thinking about pursuing a career in music, his father warned him. He said, don't do it unless you truly love it. Don't sit around waiting for publicity, money, people saying you're great, he told him, because that might never happen.

Things obviously worked out well for Wynton Marsalis, but he remembers his father's message well, and he passes it along to his own students in the jazz program at Juilliard, where he teaches. My first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement. And that mission statement has three sentences. What do I want to do? How do I achieve it? And why am I doing it? And based on that mission statement, I teach them. And my fundamental teaching to them is I want you to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward.

I'm not going to reward you. I'm not going to punish you. This is information. And you can do what you want with this information. So you're always actualizing. And I always tell them, if you want to learn something, I can't stop you. If you don't want to learn it, I cannot teach you. What Ellis Marsalis taught Winton and what Winton teaches his students is supported by the academic research on creativity

and children. A few decades ago, the Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper ran an experiment with nursery school students in which he first watched them doing various activities, one of which was drawing with markers. Teresa Amabile, who studied under Lepper when she was getting her PhD, tells the story. He then took all of the children, if they had shown any real interest in these markers, he put them into his experiment and had them go into a separate room, and they were randomly assigned to one of a couple of conditions. The experimental condition was one where the children sat down and the experimenter said, Hi, I've got some magic markers and some paper here for you. I wonder, would you be willing to make a drawing for me with these materials in

order to get this good player award? And the experimenter then held up this little award certificate with a big shiny gold star on it and a place to write in the child's name. And so that was the expected reward condition. The kids in this group, as promised, got the certificate for making a drawing. A second group of kids were invited to make a drawing with no mention of a reward and got the certificate as a surprise afterwards. This was called the unexpected reward condition. And a third group of kids, a control group, made drawings but were neither

promised a reward nor surprised with one. The results were amazing. They were very strong. The kids who were in the control condition, who were in the unexpected reward condition, were just as interested in playing with those markers and drawing pictures in their free play time as they had been before they went into the experimental room. The kids who were in the promised reward condition, the contracted for reward condition, were significantly less interested in playing with those markers. So this showed very clearly, and there were many subsequent experiments showing that intrinsic motivation, intrinsic interest in children and in adults can be undermined by the expectation of reward. This finding that extrinsic motivation can erode someone's intrinsic desire to create came as a surprise. It was revolutionary at the time, which was the early 1970s, because behaviorism still held sway in much of psychology. The notion that rewards are purely good, that they motivate behavior, that you can shape behavior with reward. And that is true.

It, in fact, is still true that rewards can be very powerful shapers of behavior. But Mark discovered this very counterintuitive, unexpected, unintended negative consequence of reward. Amabile herself, in a follow-up experiment, explored how extrinsic motivation affects the quality of creative work. She gave kids a bunch of art supplies and asked them each to make a collage. Without a really strict time limit, although we generally guide people to finish the collage in 15 to 20 minutes. The kids were divided into two groups.

The first group was not promised any sort of reward. The second was told that the best collages would win an Etch-a-Sketch or a Magic 8-Ball. This was called the competitive reward condition. Now all Amabile needed were some judges. I brought in people from the art department at Stanford individually and asked them to rate each collage relative to the others on creativity on a nine-point scale, something like that. And when I analyzed the data, I found that the kids in the competitive reward condition made collages that were significantly less creative

than the ones made by the kids in the other condition. Based on this research and more, it would seem that the promise of extrinsic rewards, the kind of incentives that economists think encourage productivity, that that actually discourages creativity and decreases the quality. At least for kids, in these settings, it's impossible to generalize. But the evidence is strong enough for Amabile to draw some conclusions. I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I'm talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how their work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and for the past several years. Part of it is the way curricula have been structured even before the current major push on testing. There is too much focus on what is the right answer. What are people going to think

of what I'm about to say? And too little focus on what am I learning? What cool stuff do I know now that I didn't know last week or a year ago? What cool things can I do now that I couldn't do before? And I think that if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids' creativity. Kids come intrinsically motivated to learn, and we stamp that out of them through the educational system. I don't think it's impossible to reorient the way we teach. It's not going to be easy, but I think we can do it. I think we have to do it. I think we all see kids

who are slightly rebellious, who talk back, who question the teacher. That's Walter Isaacson, who's written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. And at a certain point, the teacher either spends more time and lets the imagination wander or punishes them and says, you know, quit questioning me. Einstein ran away from his school in Germany because he was expected to learn by rote and he was, you know, swatted down every time he tried to question the teacher. So he was lucky. He gets to run away and go to Switzerland, where they have a new type of school system that nurtures questioning authority. One institution that has raised the questioning of authority to an art form is the MIT Media Lab. It has research units called Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics and

Lifelong Kindergarten. That last one is run by a professor of learning research. Okay. My name is Mitch Resnick. Resnick argues that randomized controlled experimentation, the gold standard of a lot of science, just doesn't work very well for a subject like creativity. One problem with this is it changes one variable at a time. And I don't think any one variable is going to be the key to creativity. So I think that what we see is the most creative environments have lots of different things that work together in an integrated way.

So it's really not so easy to take the classic approach of, you know, make a tweak in one variable and see the changes, I don't think is going to be the way that we're going to get a deeper understanding of the creative process. Resnick argues that the lack of clear, quantifiable outcomes is a big reason why schools don't prioritize creativity. Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids

and valuable for thriving in today's society. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to, you know, assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed. Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group develop software that lets kids make things like animated stories or interactive Lego models. Very often, traditional learning has taken the form of delivering information, delivering instruction. And the view has been if we just find a better way to deliver the instruction, kids will learn more. But I think research has shown that, you know, learning

happens when kids and adults, for that matter, actively construct new ideas. You know, learning happens when kids, and adults for that matter, actively construct new ideas. You know, there's the expression, we get ideas. We don't get ideas, we make ideas. So I think that, yes, there's some role for just, you know, delivering information, but I think the most important creative experiences come when kids are actively engaged in making new ideas through their interactions with the world. The program is called Lifelong Kindergarten because Resnick thinks the ideas should extend well beyond childhood. We focus on four guiding principles that I call the four Ps of creative learning. Projects, passion, peers, and play.

So we feel that the best way to support kids developing as creative thinkers and developing their creative capacities is to engage them in working on projects based on their passions, in collaboration with peers, in a playful spirit. We lead most of our lives by working on projects. You know, a marketing manager coming up with a new ad campaign is to work on a project. A journalist writing an article is working on a project. A journalist writing an article is working on a project. In our personal life, we plan someone's birthday party. That's a project. So we want kids to learn about that process of making projects. We also want them to work on things that they're passionate about. We've seen over and over that people are willing to work

longer and harder and persist in the face of challenges when they're working on things they really care about. They also make deeper connection to ideas when they're working on projects that they really care about. The third P of peers, we've seen that learning is a social activity, that the best learning happens in collaboration and sharing with others. We learn with and from others. And then the final P of play, I sometimes call the most misunderstood P. Often when people think about play, they just think about fun and laughter. I have nothing against fun and laughter, but that's not the

essence of what I'm talking about. I see play not just as an activity, but a type of attitude, an approach for engaging with the world. When someone has a playful approach, it means they're constantly experimenting, trying new things, taking risks, testing the boundaries. And I think the most creative activities come about when we're willing to experiment and take risks. I remember when I would come home from school and no one was home and I didn't have a plan. There was this kind of almost mysterious excitement that I would feel about just being alone. That's the writer Jennifer Egan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I have to say, I feel like I lost touch with that through maybe even decades of my life, where I was so worried about what everyone else was doing, how I measured up, what I should be doing as opposed to what I was doing, whether there was some important thing everyone else was doing that I should be doing too. And this was before social media. I think this is like a scourge for young people now, from everything I hear. But if I can get that out of my head, which I find easier and easier as I get older, there's a feeling that there's sort of a mystery that's waiting for me that I can possibly enter. So many childhood narratives that are really about this. I mean, The Secret Garden, all of the Narnia books, you know, about passing through a membrane or a border or door or jumping into a pool and being in another world.

It's a really basic, fantastical longing. And to touch something outside it, which is, first of all, thrilling in and of itself, and second of all, returns you to your real life charged in some way. That's what fiction writing does for me. Well, I think that when we're young, we really indulge our wonder years. Walter Isaacson again. You know, that notion of playing and being imaginative and having downtime where you can be creative, that's something we sometimes lose in our school systems today. One beneficiary of this creative downtime? Leonardo da Vinci. He had the great fortune to be born out of wedlock, which meant that he couldn't go to one of the Latin schools that middle-class families of the Renaissance went to, and so he's self-taught. He sits by a stream and puts rocks and different obstacles in it to see how the water swirls, then he draws it,

and then he looks at how air swirls. All of these things you get to do when you're young, you're full of wonder, and you're using your imagination. We see that in Ben Franklin as a young kid, just being interested in why does condensation form on the outside of a cold cup? The type of thing that maybe we thought about, but somehow we quit thinking about. So that's the number one secret of being imaginative and creative, is almost being childlike in your sense of wonder. Albert Einstein said that. He said, I'm not necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I was able to retain my childlike sense of wonder at the marvels of creation in which we find ourselves.

But Walter Isaacson, like Mitch Resnick and Teresa Amabile, isn't calling for a ban on conventional instruction. I think that creativity is something you can nurture and even try to teach. But more importantly, creativity without skill, creativity without training and learning can be squandered. If Louis Armstrong had not found somebody, King Oliver, to teach him how to play the cornet, all of his imagination would have been lost. So we should not disparage the role of training, of learning. I mean, the same is true of Einstein.

As a little kid, he's wondering how the compass needle twitches and points north. What's kind of important that he creativity to be turned into action, to allow for things like applied creativity, they're being too romantic about it. Leonardo had to work in Verrocchio's workshop and learn how to do a brush stroke. There are, of course, plenty of obstacles that may keep a person from gaining both proper instruction and the latitude to play and imagine. Nor is every kid lucky enough to grow up with two parents as talented and creative as Tibor and Myra Kalman, or with parents like Margaret Gellers, taking her to Bell Labs and indulging her passion for acting. These are privileges, not rights, and they're not always fully appreciated.

Here's John Hodgman, the comedian, author, and former Daily Show correspondent. People who are hand-to-mouthing it and are really economically anxious, of course they're going to have a disadvantage to say an affluent white dude from Brookline, Massachusetts who was an only child who had the full benefit of all of his parents' love and never had to share anything in his life. when I went to college, you know, my dad said, I don't care what you do in college. I ask you only that you take a single course in bookkeeping and finance. So you know how that world works. And I was like, Dad, I love you, but no way. I was like, even that. Really? That wasn't a big ask on your father's part. I know. I know. And- What a spoiled brat you were. Seriously, John.

No, this is what I'm saying. I've regretted it every day of my life. But it was an incredibly selfish and ridiculous thing to do because I was spending his money to go to college. And yet I was like, no, I'm going to sit on the grass and read A Hundred Years of Solitude for the fifth time. You could make an argument that it paid off for me to a certain degree. But I mean, look, art comes out of all communities everywhere. Communities of means and communities of no means. I mean, the greatest art movement of the 20th and 21st century that is probably the most globally meaningful art movement is the development of hip-hop, which was a grip on the causes and consequences of creativity,

wouldn't you say? And that he's got his own creative ducks in a row. He's had a lot of creative and commercial success. But do not be deceived. If you think prior success insulates a creative person from, well, anything, you should think again. I mean, let me put it this way. I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying. It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day, and that I will not be able to support myself or my family because I have now finally run out of ideas. For sure, this time I mean it. It's not even a fear. It is a certainty that I'm done, that I have no further ideas, and I've been doing this, and this and only this,

whatever this is now for 21 years. We will explore that fear and many other aspects of creativity in future episodes of the series. Until then, keep your ears open for a bonus episode, my full conversation with Elvis Costello, who's had one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music. He's just put out a wonderful new record called Look Now. And coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, what if I told you that our political system is not at all what you thought it was?

We always thought of politics as a public institution, that the rules were somehow codified in the rule of law and in our constitution. But politics is really about competition between largely private actors. And at the core of it is what we call the duopoly. Are the Democrats and Republicans really just like Coke and Pepsi with worse TV ads? Is our political system really just an industry primarily interested in making money and creating jobs? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. And oh yeah, don't forget to vote.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica, with help from Harry Huggins and Alison Craiglow. Our staff also includes Greg Rippin, Alvin Melleth, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. The rest of our music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app

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