Freakonomics Radio Archive

68 Ways to Be Better at Life (Ep. 419)

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. We have just launched a new, spinoff podcast with my good friend Angela Duckworth.
It’s called No Stupid Questions. We take turns asking and trying to answer questions about everything from friendship
and parenting to immortality and the classic conundrum of whether dogs are better than people.
DUBNER: I superimpose onto the face of every person who’s annoying me, the face of some dog.
DUCKWORTH: This makes you nicer to them?
DUBNER: Suddenly, I’m empathetic toward every person.
No Stupid Questions is the name of our new podcast. Please subscribe right now, wherever you get your podcasts. I’d
like to tell you how hard we worked on it but honestly, we just sit down and unload our brains. But we have a great time
making it, and I think you’ll enjoy listening. So: I hope you give No Stupid Questions a try, and let us know what you
think. Thanks.
*       *       *
Who doesn’t love a little wisdom once in a while? We all seek it out — in the people we know, or would like to know; in
philosophy and science and religion; in adventure and travel and all sorts of mind-bending encounters. Most wisdom is
presented in a manner befitting its ambition, with an important-sounding title and a package designed to impress. But
sometimes the wisdom is just sitting there — on a website, with a title like, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice.” That’s
what Kevin Kelly called the list he wrote on the occasion of his 68th birthday. And he published it on his
website: kk.org.
Kevin KELLY: Yeah. It bounced around far more than I thought it would. So it has gone viral.
And why did he compile 68 bits of wisdom?
KELLY: At the beginning of this year, I made a deal with my 23-year-old son, that we would each write something every
day or make some art and that we’d try to hold each other accountable. And I decided to write some advice for him as
my little thing for the day.
For the day that happened to be his own birthday.
KELLY: Yes. I decided to do what hobbits do. As you might remember, hobbits don’t get birthday presents on their
birthday, they give birthday presents.
By now you may well be asking yourself: who is this 68-year-old hobbit by the name of Kevin Kelly? And why should I
pay attention to his wisdom?
KELLY: I am officially the senior maverick at  Wired magazine, a magazine that I co-founded 25 years ago.
He has founded some other things too.
KELLY: Yeah, things like The WELL, which was the first public access to the internet. Things like the Hackers
Conference and V.R. jamborees. And these days, I package ideas.
Most of his ideas are packaged as books — like the 2016 book called The Inevitable: Understanding the 12
Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.  That book was read by many as a blueprint for how artificial
intelligence will unfold. We interviewed Kelly back then, too. The episode was called “The Future (Probably) Isn’t as
Scary as You Think.”
KELLY: Most of A.I. is going to be invisible to us. That’s one of the signs of the success of a technology — is it becomes
invisible.
Kelly is often called a futurist.
KELLY: I don’t use that word for myself.
And how does he feel when other people stick that label on him?
KELLY: I understand where it’s coming from and I don’t refuse it. I think it feels like calling yourself a visionary. It’s like
you can’t call yourself a visionary. But I do spend a lot of my time thinking about the future, which is paradoxical in many
ways. If I was to come back from the future 100 years from now and tell you things, they would almost be unbelievable.
Yet to be useful, you have to be plausible. So if what you’re talking about is too improbable, you won’t have any effect.
If it’s too accepted, it’s not going to be useful. So there’s this really weird place in the middle where it’s just about
implausible and just about plausible at the same time.
It strikes me that giving advice — especially 68 pieces of unsolicited advice — is similar to thinking about the future. You
have to be original enough to be useful, but not so implausible as to be reckless. Kelly says his 68 bits of advice are
meant for younger people. And in this age of virtual graduation ceremonies, a lot of them do feel like aphorisms you
might hear in a commencement address. But (to me at least) they read like little wisdom bombs that can benefit anyone
of any age — at least if you’re still looking to get better at something, or just to be a bit more self-aware.
*       *       *
In addition to packaging ideas about technology, Kevin Kelly is also a hardcore tinkerer. So a few of his 68 pieces of
unsolicited advice are coming from someone who’s plainly spent a lot of time in a workshop. For instance:
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Don’t trust all-purpose glue.
And:
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): If you are looking for something in your house, and then you finally
find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.
But the vast majority of his advice is about dealing with other humans. Some of it’s pretty obvious; but quite a lot is
devilishly original, or at least clever.
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Being enthusiastic is worth 25 I.Q. points.
DUBNER: This is one of my favorites. It makes my whole body smile to read that. It’s one of those things that in
retrospect is so obvious, although I don’t know if it really is, provably, demonstrably true.
KELLY: Yeah, I noticed in looking at the kind of people that I wanted to hang around that often it was because of
people’s enthusiasm and not so much because they were geniuses. And I also noticed that I probably thought they
were smarter than they were because of that enthusiasm. And finally — this is a self-confession — I’m not the smartest
person in the room by any means, but I’m often the most enthusiastic person in the room. And I will get invited back.
DUBNER: And what does enthusiasm produce that’s useful?
KELLY: That’s a great question. It produces — well, improvisation. In improv, there’s this fantastic bit of advice that you
always want to say not “no,” but you want to say “and.” You want to add into what someone had built before you and
add onto it rather than kind of undermine it. And enthusiasm is kind of — I have never thought about this — but it’s
almost a kind of empathy in a certain way.
DUBNER: You know, when I was just starting out in New York journalism, and— I mean, I wasn’t terrible, but I was new
at it. And one of the first assignments I had was for a rather high-minded literary magazine. And I wrote the piece. I
thought I did pretty well. And the editor wrote back to say, one, we’re going out of business, so we’re not going to
publish it. But two, I wouldn’t have published it anyway. He said — which was obviously a little bit on the gratuitous side
— but I’ll never forget what he said. He said, “If I were you, I would consider myself less of a writer and more of a writing
enthusiast.” And I, maybe it’s the enthusiast in me, I was not at all insulted. I know he was trying to insult me.
KELLY: It’s a compliment. Yeah. Right. I like the term enthusiast. You know, we have this word, “amateur.” But amateur
is a little bit derogatory in some ways. Enthusiast is maybe the more dignified term. But it’s about people who are
obsessively interested, you know, doing things. They are making things happen. And they have a deep interest that I
think is often the fountain in the foundation of new things, big new things.
DUBNER: And is 25 I.Q. points at all a realistic estimation? Because that’s a lot.
KELLY: It is. But let me just qualify that with a caveat. I don’t believe in I.Q. at all. I think it’s a terrible, terrible,
misleading idea.
DUBNER: Why do you say that?
KELLY: Well, because this complicated procedure that we would call intelligence — that we’re using right now — is
probably made up of at least, I don’t know, 12 — maybe 100 — different types of cognition, ranging from deduction,
induction, to memory, long-term memory, intuition. All kinds of things. And I think this is going to be one of the side-
products of artificial intelligence as we try to make minds, is we’ll come to understand that there isn’t just a single
dimension to intelligence. This idea that you can kind of rank things in this ladder. Up, kind of, a mouse or rat, you
know, monkey and stuff, and then there’s us. And then there’s Einstein and then there’s A.I. Well, this is just ridiculous,
because it’s a very complicated, multidimensional thing that we’re doing.
And as we make more of these artificially, we’ll begin to actually populate that space and we’ll find out that humans are
way at the edge. Just like we are on the galaxy, we’re not the center of anything. We’re always at the edge. And we’re
going to be at the edge in the corner of the space of possible thinking. And it’s not a single dimension. It’s much more
complicated.
DUBNER: Do you think, therefore — or however, I’m not sure which one — that there are elements of human cognition
that are not able to be replicated at all by artificial intelligence, or too early to say?
KELLY: Well, no. What I would say is that the mix would be un-replicable. And that’s because the substrate that you
use to make thinking matters. So one of the kind of cornerstones of computation is this theorem, the Church-Turing
hypothesis, which says that given infinite time and space, that all computational processes are equivalent. Well, the
kicker is the unlimited time and space, which is not reality. So when you are limited, there isn’t the equivalency. And
what the platform is that you’re using makes a difference. So the only way that we’ll get this mix of human cognition is if
it’s running on the same kind of hardware that we’re running on. And there is really no reason to replicate that because
it’s so easy to do with untrained labor in nine months. Okay?
However, the thing about these artificial minds — the benefit is we don’t want them to think like humans. That’s why
we’re going to make them. It’s because they’re not thinking like us, because they’re going to think differently, because
they’re going to approach problems in a different way. And so we’re going to make 1,000 different species of thinking —
all different than us — because that’s where the value is.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Learn how to learn from those who disagree with you, or even
offend you. See if you can find truth in what they believe.
DUBNER: So the value of doing this one seems obvious, especially in a moment where so many people are so quick to
take offense, and to be offensive. Can you give me an example of where you’ve actually done this?
KELLY: There are parts of my books where I’ve written something, and somebody will say something very strong,
about, “That’s dumb,” or it’s stupid, or wrong. And that’s pretty harsh. But my take is to say, “Let me see if there’s any
truth to that.” Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes there may be some sliver of something. And what I’ve learned to do is
to respond to that little sliver. To try to get underneath why they’re saying it and where is it they’re coming from. I don’t
have to necessarily always agree with them or change it, but I have to pay attention to that signal. And so I’ve learned
to treat these things as signals rather than as insults.
DUBNER: And is the goal there to learn more about the idea you were writing about? Is the issue to mollify a potential
enemy? Is the goal to make yourself feel more right, perhaps?
KELLY: That’s a fair question. I would like to be right. I should add this to this list, but  Esther Dyson  says it so well, she
says, “Keep making new mistakes.” So, yeah, I would like not to make that mistake again. It’s not to mollify my critics,
because I have learned that’s a no-win game. It’s more of, I want my argument to be better. I want it to be right, but for
the right reason. And it’s about educating myself, primarily.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from
their mistakes.
DUBNER: I love that one, because I’m a golfer. And, to me, one of the biggest differentiators between a professional
and an amateur, besides putting, is that pros hit bad shots and they recover twice as well as an amateur, if not more.
And I was curious whether this had anything to do with golf. I’m guessing no. But where this comes from and if you
could give me an example.
KELLY: Yeah, I’m the opposite of a golfer. But I’m a maker, and I watch way too many YouTube tutorials in the making
field —people who are working in workshops. And it’s very clear as you’re watching them — if they’re an honest
YouTuber — you see that they’re making mistakes all the time. And for the same dumb reasons that all of us make
mistakes, where they just forgot. It was upside down. And what’s interesting to me is the way in which they have a set of
tools or techniques for recovering, whereas my first impulse would be like, “I’m screwed. I’ve got to start over again.”
No. They’re not going to start over again. They’re going to recover from this.
And I also had some experience in the speech-giving, talk business. And I had a couple of times when you have these
sort of interruptions, we’ll call them, where the projector fails or the sound goes out or someone starts heckling in the
back, whatever it is. And also being in the audience of other people doing the same thing, and the ones that I really
admired were those to whom these were not like setbacks or disruptions at all. These were just little quirks in the turn.
This was just another little plot twist in the talk itself.
DUBNER: So is that ability to recover about anything more than just experience, however? Is there an actual skill
there?
KELLY: It’s both. The pros probably have a bigger toolkit because of their experience. But I think there is a mindset that
is an attitude that you can learn, which is that these little things that happen are just part of the journey, that they’re
going to happen, and that you should expect them to happen. And that you have to recover from it. And all the
entrepreneurs that I know that are successful have also adopted that in the large scale, which is basically, there’s going
to be a day when they’re not going to be able to make payroll. That is to be expected. And so they sort of incorporate
that as part of what they’re doing.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to
someone you love, keep asking them, “Is there more?” until there is no more. A rule of three in conversation. To get to
the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they have just said. Then again, and then once more. The third
time’s answer is close to the truth.
DUBNER: So tell me a little bit about you as a listener and maybe something important you’ve learned that it took a lot
of listening to get there.
KELLY: So, I’m married. Do I need to say anything more? I’m still married. I’ve been married for 30 years. And I have
found that talking to my kids and my wife that the first answer is maybe more superficial, even though it’s genuine
intent, and that you have to kind of probe a little bit more to get at a real reason. And that even that second one is not
enough; you have to go for a third one. And then the kind of, “Is there more? Is there more?” It’s a very similar kind of a
process where you are inviting the person to talk, and your job is to listen. You’re not judging, qualifying, investigating.
You’re simply absorbing. And that stance of being open and hearing for some people is difficult. And you can learn to
be better at it, is my point.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.
DUBNER: I was kind of taken aback by this one because I do nap daily and I’m not embarrassed. I didn’t know I was
supposed to be embarrassed by napping daily.
KELLY: Well, I am also a napper. In fact, I’m coming up to my naptime. But I— I do exactly a 20-minute nap and found
that additional 20 minutes allows me to shave off two hours of sleep. So I go to sleep at 1:30 in the evening and at 1:30
in the afternoon. And the afternoon is 20 minutes. The other one is six hours. And so, that seems to be enough for me.
DUBNER: And you write about the need to do this without embarrassment. Do you have friends, family who ridicule you
for this?
KELLY: Well, I’ve been doing it for so long. I guess when you’re like 68 or 70, people are kind of, yeah, it’s old grandpa.
But when I was younger, it seemed like cheating or something. I mean, at least I was embarrassed by the fact that I’m
taking a nap.
DUBNER: It was just the appearance of, you know, you couldn’t hack it, kind of, was the idea?
KELLY: Yeah. It’s like, okay, like I’m checking out.
DUBNER: Do you have any advice for lessening that stigma? There’s been really good research lately which shows
that napping is demonstrably, a good thing for productivity — not to mention physical and mental health. And it makes
sense if you look at the history of electric light and how we used to sleep, etc. But the stigma, like in a corporate
environment, still seems to be pretty strong. So let’s just pretend that I’m a public-health official and I want to start a
movement that everybody on every job around the world feels empowered — and obviously has the circumstances — 
to take that 20-minute nap. Can you think of the biggest impediments, and any ways to address them?
KELLY: Well, one of the things that I know — because my wife grew up in Taiwan — is in Taiwan, it is a national thing
that they do. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but at least when I was in Taiwan, in the afternoon, everybody in
the office had put their head on the desk and was asleep. And the office just closed down.
DUBNER: But how do you make it part of the culture if it’s not?
KELLY: Well, I think going to this word, “embarrassment.” I think today, if you found a coworker asleep with their head
on a desk, they’d be taking pictures and you know, you’d be the butt of Instagram or Facebook. I think part of it is we
have the sense that it’s undignified to fall asleep at your desk. And so when we were making Wired  and kind of
inventing the offices, one of the things that we wanted was a nap room, very early on. And in Silicon Valley, there are
nap rooms. And I think more nap rooms would be a part of the culture saying, “This is okay. We expect this.”
DUBNER: So what if— let’s say there’s a financial firm and there’s all these young people who are really competitive,
really smart, and the C.E.O. says, “You know, I’ve read the research. It’s a no-brainer. Everybody needs to take a nap
every day.” But then there’s others who say, like, “Well, you know, I’m going to skip the nap because I’m competitive
and I want to use that 20 minutes to do more work and get ahead.”
KELLY: Oh, it’s very, very easy. The C.E.O. has to take a nap. Then the C.F.O. takes a nap, and if all the C-suite are
taking naps, you’re going to take a nap.
*       *       *
Kevin Kelly is an author, a maker, and a sort-of futurist who’s had a hand in shaping our online culture for the past few
decades.
DUBNER: And would you say the internet has turned out exactly as you and your fellow pioneers envisioned it would
be?
KELLY: I think it’s far more powerful and pervasive than what we imagined. I would say so far, the net gains have
exceeded net losses. So I am incredibly optimistic about where we’re going from here.
DUBNER: Say a bit more about that, net gains exceeding net losses. I think most people, if they stopped to think about
it, would agree. I think, however, many people don’t stop to think about it, and their attention gets captured by some of
the losses, some of the invasions, some of the noise. And they think, “Ugh, internet, what a pain in the neck.” So talk
about the balance there.
KELLY: Yeah. It’s very clear that technology does not bring us utopia, that almost as many problems are created by
each new technology as problems solved. I’m a little bit techno-centric and differ from maybe the critics of technology,
because I believe that the solution to the problems that technology makes is not less technology, but better technology.
It’s sort of like if I’m to sit here and utter some really dumb idea, you’re not going to say, “Kevin, you need to think less.”
You have to have a better idea.
So I see the problems, whatever it might be — from having phones kind of take over their lives, or the way we have
surveillance and we feel uncomfortable — that these things are there and they’re real and they’ve been made by
technology. But that the solution to them is not to retreat, to say, “I’m going to give this up,” because everybody who
tries it, it doesn’t really work. It’s to say, “Let’s do this better. Let’s figure out a way to civilize this. Let’s figure out a way
to tame it, domesticate it, and make it better.” And that will take new technology — which, by the way, is going to make
new problems.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an
optimist, you don’t have to ignore the many problems we create; you have to imagine improving our capacity to solve
those problems.
DUBNER: So let me ask you this. Many of the optimists I know happen to be people who are rather successful and
comfortable in life. And many of the pessimists I know are not. So I’m curious whether you think optimism is a cause of
material comfort or a result. And if it’s only a result, then maybe it’s not so trustworthy as an indicator of where the future
lies.
KELLY: No, it’s a fair question. But I have noticed that, over time — if you read history carefully — it’s people who have
visions about where they want society to go, those ideas, in the end, triumph. And just as there are people trying to
make things happen today, there are also people who are concerned about what’s happening today and want to slow it
down, to stop it or to change it. But it’s the vision of the builders, of the makers, that actually, in the end, will triumph.
And so I see it almost like a car. It’s like, there’s two kind of instrumental parts in the car. There’s this engine, which is
running forward. But there’s the brakes. And without the brakes, you can’t steer. The brakes are essential. We need
them. But it’s the engine that’s actually going to determine where we go.
DUBNER: Let’s talk for a second about this pandemic. There are some elements of the pandemic itself and the
resultant lockdown where technology has been a huge help. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a quarantine like this without
the technology and the digital communication that we’re all really used to now. You know, everybody is Zooming and
communicating and watching Netflix — and access to email and text and so on. And in medicine, there are multiple
technologies, obviously, that are helping to some degree, at least, in the search for therapeutics and a vaccine and so
on. On the other hand, technology seems a little bit impotent in some realms, like, “Wait, we don’t do that already? We
don’t have that capacity now? How can that be?”
KELLY: Yeah. So my wife is a biochemist. She works for 23andMe genetics. It’s very clear that biotechnology is very
different from digital technology. We get used to the speeds of digital technology and how it improves and how we can
apply it. And biology is just so much slower. You can’t really speed it up. There was an old joke about trying to speed up
the nine months of pregnancy by having two women do it in half the time. It just works at kind of biological time. And
that’s sort of what we’re confronting, is we have this expectation of the digital era and we want this thing to happen
instantly. This whole thing is happening faster than the speed of science happens, which is slow and requires
consensus. And so I think technology’s not letting us down. It’s just that we have to understand that biotechnology
operates at a slightly different speed than the digital.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Anything real begins with the fiction of what it could be.
Imagination, therefore, is the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life
that benefits from ignoring what everybody else knows.
DUBNER: Okay, that’s interesting, an argument in favor of ignorance. Can you explain a bit further?
KELLY: Right. So I’m really interested in the idea of what everybody knows and doesn’t know. Because in the world of
Silicon Valley and innovation, there is this belief or this honoring of the hero who challenges what everybody knows.
Everybody knows that you can’t have a business of people staying in your bedroom. That’s crazy. Everybody knows
you’re not going to have a business where strangers are going to pick you up and drive you around town. But it turns
out that, actually, most of what everybody knows is true. And it takes this process we call science to check and have
this very long back and forth to determine whether or not something we believe is actually true. And so we have this—
we have a way in which we can kind of know things. And I’m really interested in how we— how we know things are true
or not true. And I— I just lost my train of thought. I’m sorry.
DUBNER: It really is naptime. I can tell.
KELLY: Right. So — but in looking at how science actually works and trying to come up with a new idea, that’s a
moment where you actually don’t want to pay attention to that process of what we know. And that moment of not being
blinded by what we know or what we think we know is difficult, because we know what we know because everybody
else agrees with it. And that kind of a group mind or that kind of a consensus is very powerful. And I’m not exempt from
it. And you’re not exempt from it either. We don’t have the bandwidth to challenge every single statement. We have to
accept most of the things around us on faith. We have to accept on the consensus.
*       *       *
KELLY (reading from 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice): Trust me: There is no “them.”
DUBNER: What’s that about? Is that about paranoia? Is it about discoordination, the fact that people aren’t organized to
form a “them”?
KELLY: Yeah, both of those. One is, I’m very anti-conspiracy theory, because generally— conspiracies require a lot of
coordination and aptitude that most systems and institutions don’t have. So it’s usually incompetence rather than
conspiracy. So I’ve had the privilege to talk to C.E.O.’s of Fortune 500 companies, to be in the highest levels of
governments and three-letter agencies and other kinds of things. And when you get there, you realize there is no adult
supervision. It’s sort of frightening and alarming. There isn’t a “them” trying to do something to “us.” And I think that kind
of a stance is actually harmful and is something that would diminish your chances of accomplishing good things,
because that kind of us-versus-them stance consumes way too much resources and energy. And if you can be released
from that, you’ll be unleashed in a way that’s very powerful.
DUBNER: So not only do you write, “There is no ‘them.’” In other words, take your paranoia or your conspiracy theory
and set it aside. As one of your later aphorisms, you write the following: “The universe is conspiring behind your back to
make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia,” which I gather is the opposite of
paranoia, yes?
KELLY: Yes. Pronoia is exactly what I define as this idea — you have this hunch that “they,” the universe, they’re
actually out there to help you. And so this is probably the closest that I have in this list here of disclosing my spiritual
and religious orientation, because I actually— I do believe that. That, all things considered, there is a way in which the
universe is moving towards goodness, is moving towards all the things that you want, as well.
Now, not everybody is starting at the same place. And for many people, even getting going in that direction is hugely
difficult. But even behind that difficulty is a more underlying bias. And that bias is towards the things that we find good,
which means diversity, increasing options. It means love, empathy, all those things. And I would make the argument
that that bias is visible in looking at the history of the universe, which is moving in this general direction.
DUBNER: You mentioned your spiritual and religious orientation. Can you put some labels on that for those of us who
like labels?
KELLY: Yeah, I’m reluctant to put labels on it, but Wikipedia says I’m a devout Christian. Okay. That’s true. But it
doesn’t really say very much, because the Christ I follow is a kind of the universal, cosmic Christ. And so I fully endorse
the idea of God, that there is a God. And my agenda in life is to believe in the biggest God possible, because I think
whoever has the biggest God wins. And so my God, is a God that has unleashed this universe and — he’s unleashed
the universe to be surprised by it. And so I think it’s our religious duty to surprise God.
One of the things that we have with our complicated consciousness is a sense of being able to put ourselves into others
and make everybody’s life more interesting and better by understanding how they think. And part of this idea of
progress, of moral progress, is that we keep widening that circle of things from our brothers and sisters, to families, to a
clan, to a state, to other ethnic groups, to other species now. And I believe in the long-term that we’ll also go into
machines, and we’ll be able to have empathy for even artificial intelligences. And so, from that empathy, I think then
comes good behavior — all the other things that we would want to be, I think in some way stem from that primary step
of being able to see the world outside of our own eyes.
DUBNER: Yeah, that’s a really nice way of putting it. And I guess that multivariate empathy you’re describing is a form
of enthusiasm really as well.
KELLY: Yeah. And then what I just said would — I don’t think anybody within an organized religion would disagree with.
You know, especially the Buddhists have been probably preaching that for a very long time. And I think as we start to
change ourselves, we’re going to have to change the vocabulary and the framing of those beliefs. And so I think the
surprise brought by, you know, first Darwin and Freud, and now A.I., is that humans are far more malleable than we
thought.
And as we understand more about our past, we understand that actually we have invented ourselves. Humanity is our
first invention. And that humans are the first animals that we domesticated, okay? And that we are in this process, still,
of inventing ourselves. So we’re making up what humanity is. And the question is not so much who we’re going to be
as, like, who do we want to be? Which is a much more difficult question to answer.
DUBNER: I had imagined this conversation would be fun, but it was much more fun than even I had imagined, so
thanks.
KELLY: Well, you have a great imagination. Thank you, Stephen.

Does Hollywood Still Have a Princess Problem? (Ep. 394)

Geena DAVIS: In my opinion, the biggest problem we have in the world — of all the problems that we have — is gender
inequality. If we were able to fix that, so that women were no longer second-class citizens, I think it would impact every
other problem that we have — hunger and the environment and war. I don’t mean to say that it will cure the other
problems, but it would go a long way toward improving these other stubborn problems.
I mean, women in most sectors of society — well, in every single sector — there’s big gender inequality. But as far as
the leadership positions go, a lot of times, progress seems to stall out at about 20 percent. Congress is 20 percent
women, and so many other areas of society are similar. So we’re not using, by any means, all of the talent of women.
And the evidence has shown that if you correct that, and get all of the best minds working, things will improve. And
women and men just have a different view of the world. There’s all these studies that show that when a body is more
blended, where it’s not homogenous, it makes smarter and better decisions.
You may recognize that voice. But it’s not one of the academic researchers we usually speak with on this show. Nor
does she run a big institution like the World Bank or the Federal Reserve. That voice belongs to Geena Davis. The
Hollywood actor — not some random Geena Davis.
DAVIS: Yes. Yes. In fact, I put that in my email to you in the subject. It was from “Geena Davis, the actor, not some
random Geena Davis.”
Why did Geena Davis send us that e-mail? Well, it really goes back to the 1991 movie that made her super-
famous: Thelma and Louise.
DAVIS: Did you see how polite he is? He’s so sweet.
Susan SARANDON: Thelma.
DAVIS: What?
Davis played a timid housewife who goes road-tripping with her not-at-all timid friend, played by Susan Sarandon.
DAVIS: And they make horrible decisions along the way. But they live and die by them, and live and die by them.
As Hollywood films go, it was a huge outlier: two female leads, a female screenwriter, and the kind of raucous, thorny
story that didn’t usually involve female characters. Also, a wild gut-punch of an ending. Making Thelma and
Louise changed Geena Davis, from the very beginning.
DAVIS: It started happening within minutes of meeting Susan for the first time. We were having a meeting with  Ridley
Scott.
Ridley Scott was the director. Davis and Susan Sarandon were asked to give him some feedback on the screenplay.
DAVIS: And I had gone through it to see if I had any ideas. And there were some very little things, maybe a little line
change or something.
Keep in mind that by this point in her career, Davis had already won an Oscar for best supporting actress.
DAVIS: And I figured out the most girly possible way to present these. Maybe I could make him think it’s his idea
somehow, and maybe I’ll tell this one, I’ll make it sound like a joke. And this one, I could wait until on the set, because I
don’t want to bring up this many things.
DUBNER: So you’re treating yourself like a second-class citizen, essentially, yes?
DAVIS: Exactly. I was definitely one of those people who had a thousand qualifiers before they would say anything.
Like, “I don’t know if this is true,” and, “it’s probably wrong, but what do you think about—?” So anyway, so we get there,
and page one, Susan says, “Now, this first line of mine. I think we should just cut that line, or maybe put it on page two,
but it just doesn’t seem right.”
And I’m like, wait a minute. My mind was blown. Wait a minute. Women can be like this? I became her acolyte. I
couldn’t get enough of her. And just observing how she moved through the world. She just seemed like she thought her
opinion was valuable. And so she would say it. And it’s astounding to me that I never saw a woman behave like that.
Why had Geena Davis never seen a woman behave like that? Perhaps because she, like many people, had absorbed
so much media imagery of women and girls who behave nothing like that. And it starts early. For girls in America
particularly, it’s almost a rite of passage: the watching of, the obsessing over, and perhaps the imitating of the
princesses in Disney movies.
Sarah COYNE: Being highly engaged in the Disney princess culture at a young age tended to be related to more girly-
girl behavior.
Today on Freakonomics Radio: what messages do those princess movies send?
Anya DUBNER: This idea that you could make a wish and it’ll come true and that you don’t have to work hard for what
you want.
How does this princessism trickle up into the economics of the broader movie business?
Caroline HELDMAN: Hollywood is leaving money on the table.
What’s Geena Davis doing about it?
DAVIS: I’ve been there hundreds of times to talk to every possible division they have.
So is it working?
*      *      *
Stephen DUBNER: Let’s just play word association for a minute. When I say the word “princess,” you say what?
Anya DUBNER: Beauty.
Stephen DUBNER: When I say the word “Disney princess,” you say what?
Anya DUBNER: Strict guidelines.
Stephen DUBNER: So how do we go from “beauty” to “strict guidelines” just by adding “Disney”?
Anya DUBNER: Because of the easy access that we have to this media as five-year-old girls.
That’s my daughter, Anya.
Anya DUBNER: I’m a rising senior in high school.
Actually, we recorded this over the summer, so by now she’s fully risen. When she was little, Anya was heavily into the
Disney princesses.
Anya DUBNER: Snow White, Belle, Aurora. What little girl wouldn’t want to be a Disney princess? Wouldn’t want long,
flowy hair and, wouldn’t want to make a wish in a well and have the perfect life?
Stephen DUBNER: Do you remember going to Disney World?
Anya DUBNER: I do. It felt so magical. You meet all the princesses.
Stephen DUBNER: You would just—
Anya DUBNER: Jaw drop. It felt like I was meeting a celebrity. It felt like, oh my God, this is who I want to be. This is so
exciting.
Stephen DUBNER: Was there one princess in particular?
Anya DUBNER: It was always Belle.
Stephen DUBNER: Now, which one was Belle?
Anya DUBNER: Beauty and the Beast. And even though I had a mind that made everything and anything possible,
she was the most achievable to me because I looked like her. So I would wear that yellow dress and I instantly felt like
her. I would wear it everywhere. Do you remember?
Stephen DUBNER: Yeah, everywhere. To visit grandparents, to go to school.
Anya DUBNER: Yeah.
Stephen DUBNER: Doctor’s office. And what’s her story? What’s the plot?
Anya DUBNER: She gets trapped in a castle. She meets this big beast. He’s hideous. Everyone thinks he’s really
aggressive and terrible and a monster. And she gets to know him, and he becomes nice and gentle and he starts to
love her. And then somehow he becomes a handsome prince.
Stephen DUBNER: Right.
Anya DUBNER: This is actually one of the very few princesses I admire, because in the beginning of the movie, she
was always reading books, walking around town. And she turned down the handsome town man who everyone loved.
She had no interest in him. And then suddenly she meets the beast and she falls in love with someone for something
other than his looks. And I think that’s an important message, yes. But at the same time, there’s still this weird sense of
the man being obsessed with her, and it still revolves all around her being beautiful.
Anya’s been thinking a lot about Disney princesses lately because of a writing project she had in school, for ethics
class. The assignment was to explore any scenario that showed a marked imbalance of gender or power.
Now, you’ll have to take my word for this, but Anya is not an injustice collector; she doesn’t try to turn molehills into
mountains, and she’s not punitive. I mean, take it with a grain of salt — I’m obviously biased. But I think she’s a kind and
thoughtful person.
Anya DUBNER: I want to study psychology. I think it’s kind of like a superpower, you can know what’s going on in
someone’s mind. It’s just such an exciting thing.
And yet when she looked back at the Disney princesses she loved as a kid — she wasn’t crazy about the messages
they sent.
Anya DUBNER: There are such strict gender roles and guidelines that represent how women should act and how
women should perform in a household, and what they should want in life. I don’t blame them. Because all of these
movies are reflections of the time.
What I’m curious about is why people continue to watch these, and why parents continue to show their kids because,
hopefully, these societal norms have improved in some ways, and they’re not like they were in the 1930s, when  Snow
White came out. I think Disney makes possible this idea that you could make a wish and it’ll come true, and that you
don’t have to work hard for what you want.
And what you want is probably, because of Disney, this fantasy life that everything is so easy, and everything is perfect
and that, you know, find a prince. And having your ideal life be so easy to achieve is a really bad message to send to
anybody. But in my opinion, especially to girls. Because for me as a girl I always have to work really hard to prove
myself, because—I feel that subconsciously, people expect men to be smarter or just to be more successful and
because of that, I think women need to have an extra layer of armor.
Stephen DUBNER: It makes me proud of you to hear you think this through like that. But it also makes me feel bad.
Anya DUBNER: Sad. Yeah, right.
Stephen DUBNER: Yeah. As the father of a daughter, you know, that you feel that you’ve got that additional burden.
Anya DUBNER: I like it. If you think of it in a certain way, it adds a certain type of determination.
COYNE: There’s a debate right now, where a lot of critics say media has no impact on us at all.
That’s Sarah Coyne. She’s a psychology professor at Brigham Young University; she studies how children and families
are affected by the media they consume.
COYNE: We’ve been researching this for over two decades, and lots of things that have an impact on behavior. Lots of
things influence body image, or prosocial behavior, or aggression, or pick whatever you want, gender. But media is a
significant and an important one.
Just how significant, and in what directions? Coyne and some other researchers set up a study to find out.
COYNE: The major aim of the study was to find the longer-term impact of princess culture on a variety of different
outcomes, such as prosocial behavior, body image, and gender stereotypes.
The study included roughly 200 young children, girls and boys. The researchers factored in each kid’s viewing habits,
their play habits, and a lot of other factors; they also interviewed the kids’ parents and teachers. What’d they learn?
COYNE: So we found that girls in particular who were really into princess culture at age four tended to be more gender-
stereotyped the next year after controlling for how gender-stereotyped they were that previous year. So in other words,
being highly engaged in the Disney princess culture at a young age tended to be related to more girly-girl behavior the
next year.
“Girly-girl behavior” meaning what, exactly?
COYNE: Characteristics would be kind of submissive and passive but really friendly and sweet, whereas boys are more
assertive and aggressive.
Coyne and her colleagues published their findings in a paper called “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of
Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in
Children.” The reaction was not so great.
COYNE: I even got physical hate mail to my office. It was the only time that’s ever happened. I think when we tell
parents, “Just be thoughtful about this,” or “There could be a darker side to princesses,” they get really defensive about
their own choices as parents. I think that a lot of people thought, well, you’re saying girls can’t be feminine. Which is not
the case at all.
There’s a difference between being feminine and being stereotyped, right? What we find is that girls who are highly
gender-stereotyped tend to limit themselves in a number of key ways. So they don’t think that they can do well in math
or science. They’re less likely to want to go on to college when they get older. So it’s really about limiting yourself and
what you could become.
Hearing Sarah Coyne talk about the “lasting effects of princessism” of course made me think about my own daughter,
Anya.
Stephen DUBNER: So looking back on your, let’s say, five-year-old self now as a 17-year-old, what effect do you think
all that princessism had on you, as a person?
Anya DUBNER: Yeah, that’s something I was wondering. I mean, I like the way I turned out, and I think my values
adhere to the beliefs that I admire. But the values presented in these movies may have been instilled in me in ways that
I’ve not particularly noticed.
DAVIS: My 17-year-old daughter is exactly the same as yours. Princess-mania. And now, so self-possessed and
stubborn.
That, again, is Geena Davis. And this is exactly what she wanted to talk about when she sent us that e-mail a few
months back. Because she sees a connection between princessism and what she calls “the biggest problem in the
world”: gender inequality.
When Thelma and Louise came out, Davis says, she was convinced things were moving forward really fast.
DAVIS: The press had a field day with saying that Thelma and Louise would change everything. “Now everything is
going to change.” So many more movies starring women. And it didn’t happen at all.
It wasn’t only in Hollywood where it didn’t happen, but in finance and tech and many other areas.
DAVIS: All the evidence shows that if there is progress being made, it’s at an absolutely glacial pace.
And Geena Davis is starting to get impatient.
DAVIS: It should happen right away. I keep saying, this is the only direction it’s going, toward equality. So can we just
get there already?
Her real awakening came when she started having kids.
DAVIS: So when my daughter was a toddler, I decided to start showing her preschool shows and G-rated videos and
things like that. And the very first thing I sat down to watch with her was a kid’s TV show. And within five minutes I was
saying, “Wait a minute, how many female characters are in this show?”
DUBNER: Was this  Sesame Street?
DAVIS: I never bust anybody publicly.
DUBNER: So do you want to cough if, uh—
DAVIS: I’ll tell you what, I’ll blink. Yeah.
DUBNER: Okay.
DAVIS: And I started counting on my hands. And then I looked online to see what it said about this show. And it had 19
male characters before they added one female character.
Davis started to notice this pattern everywhere. If a show didn’t happen to have a princess in it, there probably weren’t
many females. Like in the hugely popular animated movie whose title Davis, again, won’t say, but I’m pretty sure
rhymes with “Shminding Shmemo.”
DAVIS: That had only one female character in the entire movie — an important character, but nonetheless — and I was
horrified and absolutely stunned to learn this. And I asked my friends — my best friends, mothers of daughters, had
they noticed, and none of them had noticed, so—
DUBNER: They’d literally not noticed the disparity, you’re saying?
DAVIS: Yes. They had no clue about the disparity.
She seemed to have stumbled across an invisible problem.
DAVIS: So, because I have meetings all the time in my industry with producers or directors, whoever, I started bringing
it up in every meeting I took. I would say, “Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in movies made
for kids?” And every single person — I’m talking about dozens and dozens of people — said, “Oh, that’s not true
anymore. That’s been fixed.” And it wasn’t that they were like, “Oh no, that’s not important” they were passionate about
it, they were telling me how much they care about it at the studio, at this company.
That’s what made me realize, I need the data, because I can’t believe that I’m the only person to notice this, but the
people making this stuff don’t even see what they’re doing.
In 2004, Davis started the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. First step: collect data to see if her observation
about the on-screen gender imbalance was true.
DAVIS: So that’s what I did. I raised funds and helped sponsor the largest study ever done on kids’ TV and movies
made for kids.
This study, released in 2008, looked at hundreds of top-grossing movies released between 1990 and 2005, along with a
sample of TV shows. It found that in G-rated films, only 28 percent of the speaking characters were female; and an
even smaller percent when you looked across all ratings.
This gave credence to what’s known as the Bechdel Test, which was inspired by a comic strip drawn by graphic
novelist Alison Bechdel. It’s a gauge of whether a movie includes at least two women talking to each other about
something other than a man.
The study Davis commissioned also found a disproportionately high share of white characters in movies and TV shows.
So: an overwhelming representation of white maleness — which, perhaps not coincidentally, could also describe the
personnel in many Hollywood studios at the time.
DAVIS: And my plan was, I’ll go back to them in a private way, not bust anybody publicly, and see if that has any
impact. So that’s what I did.
And what happened?
DAVIS: What happened was all these people who couldn’t see the problem whatsoever and literally thought that things
were 50/50 were horrified. And I think because people who make kids entertainment do it because they love kids, they
were completely nonplussed that they hadn’t realized this.
But maybe — just maybe — there was good reason why so many characters in films and TV were male. Maybe it had
to do with economic theory — or at least what passed for an economic theory. It went like this: the way to make money
in Hollywood was to make movies geared toward a male audience.
DAVIS: That’s something that Hollywood has sort of lived by and made every decision about, that men don’t want to
watch women so we must make everything about men. And we’ll stick one in or something who’s pretty or hot.
Sean BAILEY: In the ’90s, I think the belief was that teen males and 20-something males were the ones that will show
up and knock down your doors on a Friday night at a movie theater.
That is Sean Bailey. He is president of production at Walt Disney Studios.
BAILEY: And that was the way you could get a huge opening weekend. And that’s what a lot of places played primarily
to. And by the way, it’s not altogether untrue, either.
But just how true is it — or was it, at least, back in the ’90s? And even if very true back then, how much has it changed?
And if it hasn’t changed much, why not? One reason, of course, could be discrimination. Let’s first talk about what
economists mean when they talk about discrimination.
Aislinn BOHREN: Discrimination is typically defined as differences in observable outcomes such as wages, or such as
performance evaluations, that cannot be attributed directly to underlying differences in performance.
That’s Aislinn Bohren. She’s an economist at the University of Pennsylvania.
BOHREN: So for example, if you’re looking at gender discrimination, economists would define discrimination as
occurring if a male and a female generated similar performance, but they were treated differently in terms of how they
were paid, or in how they were evaluated, based on differences that are not attributable to any performance differences.
There are, however, different flavors, or sources, of discrimination.
BOHREN: The first would be a preference- or a taste-based source, which would say that the discrimination occurred
because the evaluator, who’s determining the wage or the performance evaluation, has some sort of preference or
dislike for the group that they’re discriminating against.
Geena Davis does not think that’s what causes gender disparity in Hollywood. Her belief is based on how the studios
responded to the gender data she showed them.
DAVIS: This was a few years ago, but we did a survey of top executives to see what they thought about what they
learned. And something like 90 percent said it was definitely having an impact on them, and that they thought it was
very important to show gender parity.
Okay, so let’s accept, at least for the sake of argument, that Hollywood doesn’t exercise taste-based discrimination
against female characters.
BOHREN: A second source would be a belief-based source. And this would be when there’s no preference or dislike for
a particular group, but because the underlying quality is not perfectly observable, the evaluator is going to form a belief
about performance that’s based not only on any signal of performance from that individual, but also from some
underlying belief about whether different groups have different average performance differences.
Belief-based is also known as statistical discrimination. And historically, when economists use the words “statistical
discrimination,” they’re referring to belief-based differences that are actually based on correct beliefs.
This gets to what Geena Davis said earlier, regarding Hollywood’s belief about male moviegoers.
DAVIS: That men just don’t want to watch women.
And was this belief-based difference based on a correct belief?
HELDMAN: It is true that a decade ago, films led by men made a lot more money  on average than films led by
women.
That’s Caroline Heldman, a political scientist at Occidental College — and the research director at the Geena Davis
Institute.
HELDMAN: So in terms of box-office revenues, what we found is that in the past decade, the gap in terms of films led
by men and films led by women has closed.
DAVIS: And in fact, we studied 2015, ‘16, and ’17 and found that in all those years, movies starring a female character
made  more  at the box office.
Indeed, the three top-grossing domestic films of 2017 were Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which had male and female
leads; a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, interestingly, with Emma Watson playing Belle; and Wonder
Woman, starring the Israeli actress Gal Gadot.
And yet males continue to be cast much more often in leading roles. They’re also paid a lot more: one analysis found
that, even after controlling for an actor’s past performance, including awards, female stars were paid 56 percent
less than male stars, or around $2.2 million less per film. Caroline Heldman again.
HELDMAN: Hollywood is leaving money on the table if they continue to cast men at twice the rate that they cast women
to lead major films.
DUBNER: So you’re saying the Hollywood idea is that boys and men need to star in films because audiences prefer
them. But if the data show that films with female leads generate more money, and since it’s an industry, why on earth is
that gap still existing?
DAVIS: Ah ha. You ask a very good question. And I will say that the evidence has been clear for a while now that if a
company has more women on the board, it will make more money. And yet the percentage of women on boards, the
progress is absolutely glacial. Nobody seems to be saying, “Oh my God, this is a great idea. Let’s just do this.”
And there’s other examples of that, where people know that including women is going to make them more money, and
they don’t do it. So as far as the film industry, it’s the same. They know that, and yet they can’t seem to overcome their
own conscious or unconscious bias.
BOHREN: So there’s a third source of discrimination, and that is inaccurate statistical discrimination.
The economist Aislinn Bohren again.
BOHREN: And as I mentioned previously, there’s two main sources of discrimination that economists have historically
looked at. One is this taste- or preference-based discrimination. The second is belief-based discrimination, with the
implicit assumption that beliefs are correct. The third category is still belief-based discrimination, in the sense that the
employer or the evaluator believes that there are performance differences at the group level between two different
groups — for example men and women — but now their beliefs may be inaccurate or incorrect.
You can imagine why it’s important to identify the difference between accurate and inaccurate statistical discrimination.
BOHREN: From a policy perspective, it’s important because the policies to try and reduce discrimination are going to be
different if you’re trying to correct for employers or people who have a preference against a certain group, versus
people who have correct or accurate beliefs about performance differences across groups, versus people who have
inaccurate beliefs about these performance differences.
Bohren did an experiment to look into this, with fellow economists Kareem Haggag, Alex Imas, and Devin Pope.
BOHREN: We wanted to see whether a simple informational intervention, such as presenting employers with the actual
performances of workers from the different groups would have any effect on their beliefs and therefore the
discrimination stemming from inaccurate beliefs.
To run their experiment, they recruited people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Some would act as employers,
and some employees. First came a group of roughly 600 “employees.” Two-thirds of these research subjects were
American; the rest were from India. In the first phase of the experiment, the researchers had all these “employees”
answer 50 math questions, and they were paid according to how well they did.
BOHREN: We found that workers from the U.S. perform slightly better. It was about 37 questions on average correctly
for workers from the U.S., and about 36.3 for workers from India.
Then the researchers turned to the employer group. They would have a chance to hire potential employees from this
pool of 600 people. But they were only given basic demographic information — including country of origin; they were not
given the results of the math test. The employers were then asked how much they’d be willing to pay each employee.
BOHREN: So if there was accurate statistical discrimination, the employer would say, “Look, on average, American
workers are outperforming these Indian workers and therefore, because I don’t know the performance of a particular
individual worker from the U.S. or an individual worker from India when I’m choosing to hire them, I’m going to use
these group averages to form my beliefs about the performance of the individual.”
And is that what happened?
BOHREN: So we actually observe the opposite. The wages offered to workers from India were about $2 higher on
average than the wages offered to the workers from the United States.
So the offers weren’t consistent with performance — but they did seem consistent with the employers’ beliefs about
performance, which was that Indians would score better than Americans on math.
BOHREN: We find that the employers believe that Indian workers outperform American workers by about 2.8 or so
questions on average. So when we look at this, we find that the wages offered by the employers are consistent with
their beliefs. That’s suggestive of belief-based discrimination rather than any sort of preference favoring Indian workers.
Okay, so that sounds like inaccurate statistical discrimination in action. What would happen if the employers were given
accurate information? That’s exactly what Bohren and her team now did: they divulged the actual math scores for each
group and asked the employers to do a second round of hiring. So what happened now?
BOHREN: We found that once we provided information on the performance differences, the gap in the wage paid to
these two groups shrunk. So this is suggestive that one potential intervention to try and correct for inaccurate beliefs is
just provide employers or provide evaluators with the actual performance of different groups.
Say, “Look, here’s the average performance of workers from this group. Maybe you should rethink how you’re
evaluating them or how you’re choosing to pay them, because the performance differences are not as large as you
thought.”
And that, it turns out, is exactly what Geena Davis has been trying to do in Hollywood: tell all those studio executives
and producers and directors that women are the target of inaccurate statistical discrimination. At least one studio has
taken the message to heart.
*      *      *
We’ve been talking today about Disney princessism — how the main female characters in a lot of traditional kids’
movies were prized mostly for their beauty, but they weren’t really protagonists: things happened to them, but they didn’t
have much agency.
We’ve also been talking about how, in the earlier days of kids’ TV, there weren’t many female characters at all. Here’s
what the actor Geena Davis — by the way, she prefers “actor” to “actress” — here’s what she told us about the beloved
educational series with a cast of puppet characters.
DAVIS: It had 19 male characters before they added one female character.
For the past 15 years, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has been updating its numbers on gender
representation in kids’ entertainment.
HELDMAN: It’s kind of like Super Bowl Sunday when I get the data and I open it up, because then I get to see whether
or not we’ve made significant strides.
That, again, is Caroline Heldman, the institute’s director of research.
HELDMAN: And I’ll tell you, the last couple of years, the story has been so positive. It’s small, but it’s been in the right
direction.
DAVIS: We have a brand-new research study that we’re profoundly psyched about. Because we just relooked at TV
shows made for little kids. So we’re talking 11 and under. And for the first time—
HELDMAN: Female characters accounted for 55.3 percent of screen time and 50 percent of speaking time. And—
DAVIS: The percentage of female lead characters has gone up to 46.8 percent, which is pretty much parity. And we’re
over the moon about that.
DUBNER: What was that number maybe 10 or 20 years ago?
DAVIS: The ratio was two- or three-to-one, male to female lead characters. I’m pretty sure that this is the only sector of
gross gender inequality in the entire business, in front of and behind the camera, that has changed dramatically.
HELDMAN: A lot of folks don’t know that Hollywood actually, in its very early years, the silent years, was more gender-
equitable than it is today. But as soon as it became big business, it became a male-dominated sector. About 20 percent
of the key decision-making roles in film are held by women, and in television that number hovers around 30 percent.
“Key decision-making roles,” meaning executive jobs as well as producers, directors, cinematographers, and so on.
HELDMAN: It’s especially the case for women of color. And while there have been small gains in recent years, we have
seen very little traction for the last couple of decades that we’ve studied this.
DUBNER: What’s your — not evidence, necessarily — but what’s your reckoning as to how much that is a supply issue
and how much it’s a demand issue?
DAVIS: Right. So I definitely think that the interest, and in many cases the supply, is there. For example, only four
percent of films are directed by women. And people have said exactly what you said, that, “Well, they’re not as
interested.” But  50 percent of film schools are now women. They want to be directors, they graduate with the same
abilities.
But there is one major studio that has substantially changed the status quo.
DAVIS: Yes. Yes, they just announced that  40 percent of their directors coming up are women. And I mean, that’s like
10 times better than anybody else is doing. So that’s really incredible. They also make more movies starring a female
character than not. 
Which studio might that be? I’ll give you a hint. We heard from someone there earlier, talking about why so many films
have male leads.
BAILEY: Teen males and 20-something males were the ones that will show up and knock down your doors on a Friday
night.
And who is that?
BAILEY: My name is Sean Bailey and my title is president of production at Walt Disney Studios.
The Walt Disney Company is so massive, it’s split into a few different studios. Disney Animation and Pixar Animation
oversee the animated features. There’s also Marvel and 20th Century Fox, which Disney bought earlier this year. As
head of Walt Disney Studios, Sean Bailey oversees the live-action divisions. In recent years, this has included live-
action remakes of Disney’s own classics.
BAILEY: Many of those had been animated in terms of what we’ll call the broadened definition of a Disney fairy tale.
And we sort of thought that those were largely for a family audience. And then we started to realize, wait a second.
There’s a hugely underserved portion of the audience here that is not only family but clearly — women are more than
half of the population. Everybody’s sort of caught up in making movies for the teen and 20-something male. We may
have a tremendous opportunity here.
When Bailey joined Disney in 2010, he inherited a live-action remake of Alice in Wonderland. Tim Burton directed; it
starred Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter. It was a huge hit, grossing
a billion dollars worldwide.
BAILEY: And we really spent some time thinking about it. And there was a quote from Walt that I won’t get precisely
right, but I’ll paraphrase it here, which is someone once said to him, “You make these animated movies for children.”
And he responded fairly forcefully, and he said, “No I don’t. I make movies for all of us, whether we’re six or 60. It’s just
that many of us have forgotten what it feels like to be a kid.”
I think what the breakthrough was, was sort of this audience we felt was underserved, tied to this idea that we aren’t
making movies for just families and just for kids. We’re trying to make movies for everybody. And once we do that, the
female audience in particular is huge, and these can become really, really significant films from a global box-office
perspective. And I think there is, by the way, not just the commercial returns but there are great stories to tell that we
don’t think any of our competitors are really focused on currently.
Stories like Maleficent, for instance, based on the evil godmother from Sleeping Beauty. And, as we noted earlier, live-
action remakes of old princess movies, including:
BAILEY:  Beauty and the Beast.
That’s the one with Belle. And, if you’ve forgotten, here’s the plot summary, as told by Anya Dubner.
Anya DUBNER: She gets trapped in a castle. She meets this big beast and he becomes nice and gentle. And then
somehow he becomes a handsome prince.
If you’ve seen the 2017 remake, with Emma Watson, you probably noticed some tweaks.
BAILEY: We did recognize that from a gender perspective, it’s a complicated story. We really worked to sort of bolster
and ballast parts of the story, such as, why does Belle live in the provincial town? And we gave a back story that the
mother had fallen ill with the plague in Paris and they’d moved away and that the father Maurice was incredibly
overprotective and why he didn’t want her to leave. We really worked on the idea that — why doesn’t Belle just leave?
So we worked hard on the scene where, for example, the Beast saves her from the wolf attack. And he’s in mortal peril.
And so she stays with him because she’s such a good soul that her conscience couldn’t allow her to leave him to die,
which gave them a little time to bond. And we also thought it was really important to, have her try to escape, have her
not engage with him, and at a certain point in the movie — and I’m not going to get the dialogue exactly right — but he
says, “Could you ever be happy here?” And she says:
Emma WATSON: Could anyone be happy if they aren’t free?
This neo-princessism model seems to be paying off: Beauty and the Beast became one of the highest-grossing films in
modern history. Which, along with the other high-grossing films with female leads, you might think would naturally lead
to even more starring roles for more women in more films. But that’s not quite the case. Why not? Sean Bailey from
Disney has a theory.
BAILEY: One thing we’ve seen that I think is interesting and relevant is directors tend to be very visual, and I’m talking
from both a gender and sort of inclusion and diversity perspective. If you send a script to a director, they’re going to
read the script and envision things in their mind. And once a director has painted a picture in his or her head, it’s more
difficult to sort of disavow them of that vision. We’ve started trying in our screenplays to more specifically call out
gender, ethnicity, so that they can have a different opinion, but they aren’t starting from whatever their baseline bias and
assumption may be.
The other thing we often find is — let’s talk in these fairy-tale movies as example — the filmmaker says, “I’m being true
to the period of the film. I’m being true to the historical period.” To which we say, “Well, what on earth are you talking
about? Because we have spells and magic mirrors and candelabras that used to be people. So there is no period. We
can make the history as we would like it to be.”
There’s also the delicate issue — well, you wouldn’t think it would be delicate, but it is — of casting an African-American
actress to play Ariel in a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.
BAILEY: With Halle Bailey, that’s just sort of a case of, for us, we looked for the very best Ariel.
Halle Bailey — no relation to Sean Bailey — is a 19-year-old R&B singer.
BAILEY: I remember specifically all of us sat in the room and heard her sing and saw her perform and we thought,
that’s her. And we heard some criticism.
Criticism especially from the Twitterverse. The cartoon Ariel had white skin and red hair — how could Halley Bailey
replace her?
BAILEY: And I heard things like, when the announcement went out, some friends of mine who were at the Essence
event in Atlanta described it — they didn’t know why, a cheer went up through the hall. I heard all sides of it. And for us
it was just as simple as I say, talent wins.
The original Little Mermaid was also considered problematic on the gender front. Because Ariel, in order to get her man,
has to give up her voice, her most magical and distinctive quality. You can see why this might fly in 19 th-century
Denmark, when Hans Christian Andersen wrote the Little Mermaid fairy tale. But in 21st-century, anywhere: the idea of a
woman literally silencing herself in the pursuit of romance feels—well, pretty 19 th-century. The new Little Mermaid  is
scheduled to come out next year, and we asked Sean Bailey about that.
BAILEY: Well, I don’t want to say too much about it because they do involve some, sort of, plot changes. It’s something
we’ve talked a lot about. And we are definitely working to still sort of deliver the beautiful foundations of that story while
being cognizant of the times we find ourselves in.
I will say, on a more personal front, I have a daughter. I took this job around 10 years ago. She was around seven-
years-old. And I watched, as I was preparing to take the job, a lot of the old animated pictures. And while they’re
wonderful in many, many ways, I was watching them with my daughter and thought if—if we’re going to tell them now,
there’s a lot of things we should probably do for little girls who are going to watch these versions. And for young men,
by the way, as well. So what’s the world that we want to reflect, while respecting what is clearly timeless about the
stories?
*      *      *
Stephen DUBNER: Think those are pigeons or doves?
Anya DUBNER: I hope not pigeons. She looks a little like a Dubner.
Stephen DUBNER: So this is what you’re talking about, of the—?
Anya DUBNER: Right.
Stephen DUBNER: Yeah.
Anya DUBNER: I think this is like the first time we really hear her speak and we don’t know anything about her except
she wants to find a prince. And then here he comes.
My daughter Anya and I wrapped up our princessism conversation by watching Snow White. That was the movie that
led her, as a teenager, to start rethinking how she used to think about princesses. I asked her what, specifically, had
bothered her.
Anya DUBNER: Mainly what she wanted. She wished to meet a man, that was her one wish. She adhered to the
stereotypical woman-of-the-house role. I watched this as a kid and was unfazed by how objectively suggestive this
movie was. The feeling that took over me most was confusion. Why did my parents let me watch this? What were they
thinking? No — I mean, what were you thinking? Did you realize it was problematic in any way or —?
Stephen DUBNER: Honestly, I think the opposite. So you were born in 2002? So, and Snow White was made in the
1930s, I believe.
Anya DUBNER: Yes.
Stephen DUBNER: So I think most parents in my generation probably thought that going back to then was not only
normal, but, like, it was the right kind of traditional.
Anya DUBNER: Right.
Stephen DUBNER: Because it’s not full of weird, modern, terrible things.
Anya DUBNER: Right.
Stephen DUBNER: And it’s kind of sweet and lovely.
Anya DUBNER: Right.
Stephen DUBNER: And did you think that back when you were a kid too? I mean, did you like that stuff?
Anya DUBNER: Yeah! I mean it’s fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to show their kids that? I think it’s just the underlying
factors that make you take a step back and be like, “Wow, that can be really impactful.”
Stephen DUBNER: What do you mean when you say underlying factors?
Anya DUBNER: The ideals of princesses wanting to be beautiful. Finding a prince and having your wishes come true is
fun, of course. And I don’t think that they should completely be frowned on. The only thing is that they shouldn’t be
exclusive of being a badass woman and being really, really determined and having your life go well and working hard
for what you want.
Stephen DUBNER: So let me ask you this. If you were running, let’s say a Hollywood studio right now, or a TV network,
what do you think are good solutions? Should it be like a quota system? Should you ban men from certain production
facilities?
Anya DUBNER: That would be the worst thing to do.
Stephen DUBNER: Because why?
Anya DUBNER: Because that would send out a big middle finger to all men, and then more people would be angry. We
need men. We just need women too. And I think that that’s probably the biggest misconception in feminism. And if that’s
what feminism were, I’d be the opposite of a feminist.
But I think the only people that really are able to have the biggest impact on movies and how they affect children are the
people in the industry themselves. Emma Watson, she’s somebody that I admire greatly. She was Princess Belle in the
most recent movie, and she refused to wear a corset. And it was this big deal. Why would you wear a corset in 2019?
She refused to perpetuate the body that little girls are supposed to look up to, she said, “No, this is going to be my real
body.” And I think that’s a small, really small action, but I think it speaks volumes. My initial reaction would be that
society has to change first. But I think it has. So why haven’t the movies?

People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard. (Ep. 340 Rebroadcast)

The holiday season is here, which gives us the opportunity — the need, really — to open up the archives and play for
you a few of the best episodes from our checkered past. Before we get to that: if you still need to buy someone a gift, I
have a few suggestions. First: how about a couple tickets to an upcoming show of Freakonomics Radio Live? We’re in
New York on March 8th and 9th; in San Francisco on May 16th, and Los Angeles on May 18th. For tickets, click here.
Or, for a more tangible gift, click here, where we’ve got some Freakonomics Radio stuff for sale.
Now, today’s show: one of my very favorites — and, according to our top-secret download data, yours, too: nearly 2
million listens. It’s our conversation with Richard Thaler, who helped create the field we now know as behavioral
economics. Which brought him, among other things, a Nobel Prize. So let’s begin … right now:
Stephen J. DUBNER: So let’s begin. If you would, say your name and title.
Richard THALER: I’m Richard Thaler. I’m a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
DUBNER: I see, technically, you’re called the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral
Sciences, blah, blah, blah. Is that accurate?
THALER: Yeah, that’s accurate, but I didn’t want to take up the whole podcast with my title.
DUBNER: I understand. I was curious, however, I guess it’s an endowed chair, is that what that is?
THALER: Yeah. In fact, it’s a chair that has only been held by three people, all of whom have won a certain prize.
DUBNER: Interesting. More important, though, I want to know, as it’s bestowed by the Walgreen family, does the
position come with a discount at Walgreens drugstores?
THALER: There is no discount that I’ve been informed of.
DUBNER: That said, you — and I guess the other two holders of said chair — you are about a million-plus dollars richer
since you were last on the show, because I understand that you went out and won a Nobel Prize, and that they give you
some money with that.
THALER: Now that you mention that, I won that prize in spite of your best efforts to prevent it. I think the show owes me
an apology. Like, on the air.
DUBNER: This is sore winner-dom we’re seeing. You win the Nobel Prize, having been on our show previously, talking
about potentially winning the Nobel Prize, and yet somehow you’re sour about our theoretically negative influence,
when in fact the outcome was positive? What kind of logic is that?
THALER: Well no, but it’s not the interview with me. It was the interview with  Per Stromberg, where you outed me. I’m
sure you guys can find the tape.
Yeah. We found the tape:
Per STROMBERG: So I’m actually not allowed to talk so much about what happens.
The episode was called “How to Win a Nobel Prize.” Per Stromberg is on the committee that awards the economics
prize. As he pointed out, he couldn’t say too much about the secret process. But, he said, his committee was very
reliant on the reports they commissioned on potential winners.
STROMBERG: Our goal is to keep on scanning the field of economic sciences, broadly speaking, and to keep this up to
date, we continuously send out these reports, basically scanning the field. So these are super-helpful, and they’re sent
to really top people in these fields who put a lot of work into these reports. So this is probably our most important input.
DUBNER: And those reports remain confidential for 50 years, correct?
STROMBERG: Exactly.
DUBNER: So Richard Thaler tells me that he was asked many years ago to write a report — he was commissioned to
write a report on the work of  Daniel Kahneman and  Amos Tversky, who—
THALER: You described me, revealing I had written a long report on my friends Kahneman and Tversky back in the
1980’s. And you told Per I had told you that, and I think his words were, “Oh, he shouldn’t have done that.”
STROMBERG: I’m not sure he was allowed to say that, but fine.
DUBNER: Okay, well, that’s his problem, not mine.
THALER: The show owes me an apology for trying to block my slim chances and drive them to zero.
DUBNER: Well, let me ask you just to entertain the counterfactual. Maybe it made that Nobel committee think, “Oh, that
Thaler, he’s his own man. He identifies what he thinks are important ideas and he feels it’s important to disseminate
them even at personal risk to himself,” and because —
THALER: You know, it would be a line you could have used. I was holding off on the lawsuit until it was clear I hadn’t
won, but I think you’re safe now, Steve, so we can move beyond this.
And move beyond this we shall.
*      *      *
Years ago, Richard Thaler became enthralled with a new line of research about decision-making by the psychologists
Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. Thaler went on to collaborate with them, thereby helping to create the field now
known as behavioral economics.
To mainstream economists, Thaler’s research was often an irritant. He insisted that the elegant models they used to
describe human economic activity were in fact grotesquely inelegant — because they failed to factor in how real
humans actually think and decide and behave. Over time, however, Thaler’s work came to be tolerated, if not outright
accepted. Along the way, he wrote a few books, including Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral
Economics and Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Today, governments around the world are running so-called Nudge units, hoping to harness the simple power of
Thaler’s ideas in the pursuit of better outcomes in health, education, personal finance, and crime reduction. Many other
institutions and firms are practicing what Thaler has been preaching, often to quite substantial success. If Kahneman
and Tversky were the architects of this behavior revolution, Richard Thaler was the man who turned their sketches into
something we could actually inhabit.
DUBNER: I have a lot of questions for you today. And we also solicited listener and reader questions. So we’ll toss
them in as we go. Here’s one from Jose Albino Sanchez. He’s an economics major who graduated from Notre Dame in
2016. So: congratulations. He wants to know, “How did you, Richard Thaler, use your behavioral-economics research to
not run away with the $1 million-plus prize money of the Nobel Prize and go buy a Ferrari?” And I should say, that’s
assuming you didn’t do that. But I, like Jose, am curious how you used your behavioral knowledge to spend or not
spend your money.
THALER: Well, every Nobel winner, I think, is asked this question: “What are you going to do with the money?!” And
they asked me this at 4:45 in the morning. The routine is, you get this call at 4:00 a.m. Chicago time, and once they’ve
convinced you this is not a prank, they say, “Okay, get ready. There’s a press conference in 45 minutes.” And I hopped
in the shower, and then I’m on a press conference and the first question is, “What are you going to do with the money?”
And all I could think of was, “Well, to an economist this is a silly question, an impossible question.”
DUBNER: To most economists perhaps.
THALER: Well, certainly to a non-behavioral economist, it’s a silly question.
DUBNER: Because the answer would be, “It just goes into the pool with the other money. It’s no different than any
other.” Is that why?
THALER: Right. The proceeds of that money, half of which will end up in the U.S. Treasury, are sitting in some account
at Vanguard. And if I go out for a fancy dinner, there’s no way for me to label that “Nobel money.” Though that might be
a fun thing to do. I’ve thought that maybe the hedonically optimal way to spend the money would be to get a special
credit card, the Nobel credit card. And then when I decide to buy a ridiculously expensive set of golf clubs, hoping that
that will turn me into a competent golfer, then I just whip out the Nobel card — that might be a good idea.
DUBNER: Now, I’m curious. You do believe — and in fact helped identify — the notion that we think of as mental
accounting, which I know that the smart people tell you you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t set aside money for vacation or
for a certain project, because money is fungible. That’s one of the beauties of money. And yet, as you discovered, many
people do it. And, you also argued, it’s not such a bad idea. Or, at least, since so many people do it, we should figure
out how to deal with it. But is there a cookie jar on the counter where you’ve got the half a million that you can dip into
whenever you want to do something fun?
THALER: Yeah. That would be a really good idea, especially—
DUBNER: And what’s your address, by the way?
THALER: Especially if we announce it on the radio!
DUBNER: But why just stick it in Vanguard, where it just becomes more dollars mixed in with the others?
THALER: Well, I’ve been busy, Steve, you’re getting me to think about labeling it. And, of course, maybe we should
figure out what percentage, maybe all, should go to some cause. That would make me feel good, too.
DUBNER: If there were a cause, can you tell us just the general outlines of the cause? Would it be poverty alleviation?
THALER: You know, I greatly admire Doctors Without Borders. And they are one of the causes that we support. But I
haven’t really figured out what my personal cause is.
DUBNER: Now, let me ask you this. Your wife, France, you’ve been married quite a while. I don’t know how much credit
you give her for being part of the familial team that produced this Nobel Prize. If you were to divide the prize, how do
you think about divvying that up?
THALER: First you try to prevent me from winning the Nobel Prize. Now you try to break up my marriage, Steve. You
know, I used to think of you as a friend. I would say that France should get 120 percent of the after-tax money.
DUBNER: Good answer.
THALER: And you should get -20 percent. And I think that would be a great solution.
DUBNER: Early in your academic career — and I hope you don’t mind me saying this — it didn’t appear as if you were
destined for huge distinction in your field.
THALER: I think that’s fair.
DUBNER: The undergraduate and graduate schools you went to aren’t quite elite. Your place in the economic
firmament was hardly guaranteed. So what happened? How’d that guy get to here?
THALER: So, you’re right. I don’t think I was — well, I certainly wasn’t a great student. And I don’t think I was a great
economist, in the way economists are usually judged, in the sense that I wasn’t a great mathematician and my
econometrics skills were not superb. Suppose there was an economics combine, like the N.F.L. combine, and they did
all the stats on Thaler. No one would have drafted him. And so what I really ended up having to do to survive — and
this sounds premeditated, and of course it wasn’t — was to figure out a kind of way of doing economics that would be
something I was good at. And had I not done that, I might well have not gotten tenure and gone off and maybe I would
be competing with you in book writing.
DUBNER: You’ve summed up  behavioral economics as a collection of “supposedly irrelevant factors that, when it
comes to how people actually live their lives, are in fact not irrelevant.” Can you give an example?
THALER: Sure. One of the first things that I noticed back when I was a graduate student puzzling through the behavior I
saw, was that people don’t follow the economists’ advice to ignore sunk costs. If you paid for some expensive, rich
dessert and after one bite you were already full, and your waistline doesn’t really need it, but you remember how much
you paid for it, and so you think you need to eat it, following all kinds of mothers’ bad advice to finish what’s on your
plate – then you are failing to follow the economist’s advice of ignoring that money, because eating it doesn’t get the
money back.
So, sunk costs are something that economists predict will have no effect on behavior. And there are a class of these
supposedly irrelevant factors. In fact, it’s almost the only set of things about which economists have precise predictions.
Consider supply and demand. If the price goes up, people will demand less. Well, how much less? “Oh sorry, the theory
doesn’t specify that.” All it says is: less. Whereas here, sunk costs will matter precisely zero.
DUBNER: So says the theory, at least.
THALER: Says the theory, right.
DUBNER: In reality, you’re saying they matter a great deal.
THALER: Right. That’s why I call them supposedly irrelevant factors. Another example is default options, which box is
ticked on a form. Again, according to economic theory, the cost of clicking the other box is infinitesimal. And yet we
know that making enrollment in a retirement plan the default option increases enrollment rates to over 90 percent. And
so again, economists would predict confidently that that would have a zero effect, and it has a massive effect.
In an earlier episode of this podcast, called “How to Launch a Behavior-Change Revolution,” we heard Danny
Kahneman — who won his own Nobel Prize in 2002 — describe the history of behavioral economics. He pointed out
something that distinguished Richard Thaler from many other economists.
Daniel KAHNEMAN: Now, Richard, he hates my saying the next two things I’ll say about him. One of them I think he
would tolerate. I think he’s a genius. That one he accepts. I think he’s lazy. I’ve made him famous for being lazy.
DUBNER: You’ve been accused — or really, praised — by your collaborator and mentor and friend Danny Kahneman
as being extremely lazy, and furthermore he argues that laziness has in fact been a big part of your success. What
does he mean by that, and should we all try to be a little bit lazier?
THALER: Well, I don’t know whether I can recommend laziness. Danny insists in great earnestness that this was
intended as a compliment. He described it as my best feature. And I object to that. I concede some laziness, but that
being my best feature? Really, Danny?
So I think what he means is that — at least I’m going to interpret it this way — that I have little patience for working on
things that aren’t, at least to me, both interesting and somewhat important. And so compared to too many economists or
academics, I haven’t written a super large number of papers, and I don’t follow the habit of writing 20 versions of the
same paper, or on the same topic, because I get bored. And the fourth paper on some topic is not nearly as interesting
as the first one. So Danny claims that it’s my laziness that forces me to work on things that are important rather than
unimportant. And that’s his story, anyway.
DUBNER: And the mechanism of that benefit is what? Because you’re lazy, you just don’t want to waste time on things
that aren’t going to be potentially important and/or interesting?
THALER: Yeah, that’s the idea.
DUBNER: So, I hate to inject our personal history in this, but it does bring up a memory. I remember coming to visit you
in Chicago. I think it was the first time we met. And it was probably 15, 16 years ago, and I had really fallen hard for this
whole behavioral idea, the Kahneman/Tversky, and Thaler, and I liked the economics. I especially liked the psychology.
And I came to you and I said, “Herr Professor Thaler, I — a young and ambitious journalist at The New York Times —
would be most interested in writing a book that incorporates your research and incorporates your own view of the world,
and I’d love to include you in it as some kind of collaborator, subject,” so on.
And if I recall correctly — I’m just curious to know what your recollection is — you basically said, “That sounds like a lot
of work. And I’ve got other stuff going on, so I’ll buy you lunch but then, scram.” That was my recollection. And I’ve
always been disappointed that we never worked on a book together. I’m curious if that squares with your recollection.
THALER: Yeah, it really is too bad for you, because when you got done with me, you said, “I’m going over to the
Economics Department to talk to this young guy  Levitt.” And then I think you abandoned the idea of writing a book with
me, because sumo wrestlers are more important than mental accounting. But my recollection of the story was that I
thought maybe I had a book in me. And eventually I did.
DUBNER: Obviously, you did. You had two more, and maybe more beyond.
THALER: So, this is the tallest-midget theory, but by economists’ standards, I write well. And so yeah, I thought that
maybe I should write a book. And that it should probably be in my voice. And it worked out well for all three of us.
DUBNER: I do agree you write well — not even for an economist. You’re a good writer, but in economics it especially
stands out. I read a piece of yours recently that I would recommend to everybody. It was published in, I believe, J.P.E.
— Journal of Political Economy — and it was  an essay about the history of behavioral economics. And this was so
interesting to me: you write that it nearly got fully underway at the University of Chicago about 100 years ago, but didn’t
catch on. Can you talk a little bit about that?
THALER: Yeah, so the background is, the University of Chicago house journal, the Journal of Political Economy, one of
the top five journals in the world — they were celebrating their 125th anniversary, and they asked a bunch of Chicago
faculty members to write short essays on their field and how it’s been represented in the journal. And for behavioral
economics, there were pretty slim pickings. But there was this article written exactly 100 years ago in 1918 by a guy
called John Maurice Clark. He was the son of a more famous guy, John Bates Clark, for whom an award is named.
And he writes something like, “The economist can try to invent his own psychology, but it will be bad psychology, and if
they want to stick to economics, they should borrow their psychology from psychologists.”
DUBNER: Clark, you write, ends up leaving Chicago for Columbia. And you write, “it seems fair to say that the
subsequent editors of the J.P.E. did not take up his call to arms,” which was essentially to integrate psychology and
economics. Why did it take so long, do you think?
THALER: Well, I don’t know really what was going on in 1918, but it is the case that economics was behavioral.  Adam
Smith  was a behavioral economist, for sure. And Keynes was a behavioral economist. The single best chapter on
behavioral finance was written by John Maynard Keynes  in The General Theory, which was written in 1936. So I
think until World War II, there wasn’t something called “behavioral economics,” but economics was kind of behavioral.
And then what happened is, there was a mathematical revolution that took place right after World War II. And it was led
by people like Paul Samuelson  and Kenneth Arrow. And Samuelson in particular, he was a University of Chicago
undergraduate, and then went off to graduate school, and his thesis was called  Foundations of Economic Analysis.
So all he did was redo all of economics properly.
And so starting with that, economists got busy writing down Greek letters and formalizing economics. And it turns out
the easiest way to do that is to describe behavior as some kind of optimization problem. Because if you’ve taken a high-
school calculus class, then you know how to solve for the maximum: you take the first derivative and set it equal to
zero, and you’re done. So it was the bounded rationality of economists, ironically, that led them to make everything
rational.
DUBNER: It’s interesting, because a lot of the hallmark anomalies identified in recent decades by people like you and
Kahneman and Tversky — we talk about loss aversion and mental accounting, and the endowment effect; and all the
cognitive biases: recency bias and status-quo bias, and the availability bias — it strikes me that none of them actually
even seem remotely new.  Can’t you find most of them in Shakespeare? Can’t you find them in Roman and Greek and
earlier philosophy? Don’t you find them in the Bible and other ancient texts?
So if what you’re describing now is a kind of mid-century modern renaissance of a more holistic thinking about
economics that was there from Adam Smith onward, until World War II — I guess the real question is, is that really
worth a Nobel Prize, to have rediscovered this rich tradition of, “people say they want to do one thing, but often do
another?”
THALER: I think it’s the sort of thing that your mother might say, “Really? You make a living doing that?” Much less a
Nobel Prize? So I guess it’s fair to say that just pointing out that people aren’t all that smart would not get you a Nobel
Prize. You had to do something with it. And that turned out to be more work than I liked. But there was a long debate.
And by no means have I convinced everyone.
DUBNER: Well, you were once asked about the degree to which, quote, “mainstream economists” have embraced
behavioral economics. And you said, “I don’t think I’ve changed anyone’s mind in 40 years. You basically don’t change
minds. Given that, I’ve turned to the strategy of corrupting the youth.” And indeed, there are a lot of young economists
really interested in behavioral stuff.
Is that really true? Did you really change no minds? And, if so — or even if not, I guess — what have you learned about
the human capacity to change a mind? I mean, we don’t want to just write off anyone over the age of 25, do we, as
incapable of entertaining new thoughts?
THALER: Well, it’s hard. So, I think  Richard Posner, the great judge, I think he’s changed his mind a bit. But I think it is
hard to change people’s minds. But economists in graduate school now, they don’t have a big sunk cost in the
traditional methods. There was an economist once early in my career who said to me, “You know, if you’re right, what
am I supposed to do? What I know how to do is solve optimization problems.” And I said, “You know, really I don’t
know. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
DUBNER: It’s interesting though, because if you look at the world writ large, political systems and healthcare
institutions, and so on — isn’t that exactly the same core problem that we’re facing? Which is, people come along with
what could be really useful solutions but, institutions being what they are, the people with the power to change have
often the least incentive to change. Isn’t that a huge issue in the lack of progress?
THALER: Well, I get what you’re saying, which is, if I’m at the top of the heap, why do I need to change? But on the
other hand, it’s often the C.E.O. that is the most reluctant to change, and that guy — and he’s unfortunately still usually
a guy — potentially has a lot to gain from changing. If you think of companies that have come and gone, like Kodak,
which invented the digital camera, but they had an almost-monopoly in film, and didn’t really think this digital thing
would go anywhere. Blockbuster Video, which came along and put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop video stores out
of business, only to be put out of business by Netflix.
*      *      *
In December of 2017, Richard Thaler went to Stockholm for a multitude of Nobel festivities.
THALER: At the Nobel Prize banquet, one winner from each prize has to give a toast. It gives you a glimpse of the
grandeur.
ANNOUNCER (TRANSLATED FROM SWEDISH): It is a great honor to introduce the laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank
Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel: Professor Richard Thaler.
THALER: So my toast  began by saying that my fellow winners had discovered things like gravitational waves, and
circadian rhythms. And I discovered the existence of humans in the economy.
Then there were other events, including the Nobel lecture.
Magnus JOHANNESSON: Professor Thaler, please, the stage is yours.
THALER: Thanks to all the members of the committee. And thanks for that great introduction. So, I’ve been interested in
gravitational waves for a long time—oh no!
DUBNER: In an earlier episode about the Nobel Prize and how to win one, we did speak with your colleague and our
friend Steve Levitt, and he said:
Steve LEVITT: [From “How to Win a Nobel Prize”] The way I know it’s Nobel season is that around Chicago, a lot of
people tend to get haircuts in the few days leading up to the announcement of the prize. And so if I see all my
colleagues with really short and well-maintained hair, I know that the prize must be somewhere right about the corner.
DUBNER: So we have a question here from a listener named Aaron Wicks. He writes to say, “Dear Professor Thaler,
did you get a haircut in hopeful anticipation of receiving your Nobel Memorial Prize?”
THALER: No, I didn’t. And I will also say that I have heard of economists and other scientists who set their alarm.
DUBNER: And then do they practice sounding sleepy?
THALER: — like 3:45 — so that they’ll be alert, which I was the opposite of when the phone rang. And I’m a good
enough amateur psychologist to know that this is a horrible idea, a really dreadful idea. So, let’s suppose my chances of
winning were one in 20. Setting my alarm gives me a 95 percent chance of being awake to get the bad news. Whereas
my strategy had always been to sleep soundly and then hear on NPR in the morning or now, breaking news on your
phone, “Oh, isn’t that nice that Jean Tirole, a fabulous fellow, won the Nobel Prize?” And you can be happy about that.
So, no, I didn’t get a haircut, and my alarm was not set.
DUBNER: In the very near aftermath of having been informed that you won the Nobel, you said this:
THALER: [At University of Chicago post-Nobel conference]  And unlike Bob Dylan, I do plan to go to Stockholm.
DUBNER: And you did go to Stockholm. Tell us about that experience …
THALER: Well it’s a week-long marathon. The laureates are there for eight days of constant interviews and dinners and
talks and various things. And there’s a hierarchy in the Stockholm prizes. The Peace Prize is given by Norway, and is
done in Oslo. And the hierarchy is: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics. And so my line is that among
sciences, the Swedes consider economics just after literature. And that’s because, of course, the economics prize, as
we know, and as I’m sure some of your listeners will call in and inform, “You idiots, it’s not a real Nobel prize.”
DUBNER: Well, before you go on, let’s just get it straight. The Nobel Prize in economics is not what they call an original
Nobel. It was established in 1968. It’s officially called the Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel. But, as you point out, a small but vocal contingent always seeks to remind us of this fact
whenever the economic prize is referred to as a Nobel Prize. What do you say to that small, vocal contingent that says,
“Well, it’s not really a Nobel Prize?”
THALER: You know, it’s a pretty good substitute. And I will say, the Nobel Foundation makes exactly no distinction. So,
you’re all treated the same way. But, because of this order, I spent a lot of time standing in lines and sitting next
to Kazuo Ishiguro, the Literature winner, who was charming and wonderful.
But I will say that I found the whole thing to be pretty emotional, partly because of where I came from intellectually. So,
as we were saying, I’m not someone that you would have predicted would be a Nobel Prize winner. And when that
finally happened, it was an emotional experience.
DUBNER: Are either of your parents still alive?
THALER: No. They’re very slow.
DUBNER: They, the Nobel Committee, you’re talking about.
THALER: Yeah, the Nobel committee — they’re working their way through the 1980’s. So that means that people are
typically in their late 60’s and early 70’s when they win the Nobel Prize, which means there are very few parents that get
to see their children win.
DUBNER: Who do you think was most proud of you?
THALER: Danny Kahneman. Well, he was happiest. He kept telling me, “Come on, win this before I die!” And he’s 84,
and he’s a friend, so I had to do it. The bribes were finally well worth it.
DUBNER: So let’s move on to talking about how behavioral economics has been applied by various people in various
intensities in many different places around the world. You’ve said there are roughly 75 what are called “Nudge units”
named after your and  Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge, about using behavioral economics in policy, essentially. Policy-
making.
THALER: The latest number is 200.
DUBNER: Goodness gracious, that’s a tripling in what span of time, just a year or two?
THALER: I don’t know, and I’m not the one keeping track, but someone at the O.E.C.D. has a map with 200. Some of
these are in—
DUBNER: Municipal governments.
THALER: Cities — there’s one in Chicago, for example.
DUBNER: Alright, but what would you say to date has been the greatest kind of specific contribution of behavioral
economics? In other words, the greatest instance in which the research and the ideas have been applied to policy in
successful measures?
THALER: I guess you’d have to say retirement saving plans. Because 401(k) plans and their ilk — defined-contribution
plans — have really been transformed because of behavioral-economics research, on two dimensions. One is changing
the default, so what’s called automatic enrollment. So you’re in unless you actively take some step to opt out. That has
gotten enrollment rates to be north of 90 percent. And then what my colleague Shlomo Benartzi  and I called “Save
More Tomorrow,” which is a plan where you ask people if they want to increase their saving rates every year until they
hit some reasonable level. The generic version of that is now called automatic escalation.
DUBNER: So what that means is, you get a raise and you contribute a higher percentage, but because you’re getting a
raise, you still are bringing home a little bit more money and you don’t feel the pain, is that the idea?
THALER: Right. And you commit yourself to this off in the future, because we all have more self-control next month,
when we’re going to start going to the gym every morning at 6:00.
DUBNER: You’ve written that “the subfield of economics in which the behavioral approach has had the greatest impact
is finance.” I’d love you to talk about that for a minute. One thing I’ve never understood about behavioral finance is:
once the notion of behavioral anomalies is widely accepted — and they seemed to be, now, in finance and in investing
— aren’t they just subsequently priced out of the market?
THALER: Well, that’s an interesting question. And the answer is, to some extent, yes. But I’ve been involved with a
money-management firm, called Fuller and Thaler, that’s been around for 25 years or so. And the things we do don’t
seem to work any less well than they did 20 years ago.
DUBNER: I know Fuller and Thaler describes itself as having “pioneered the application of behavioral finance to
investment management.” In what ways is the firm’s strategy actually behavioral?
THALER: So we’re explicitly thinking about, what are a class of situations in which people are likely to make a mistake?
So it’s like, you go into some restaurant and somebody is leading you to your table, and there’s that one step down, and
they say, “watch your step.” And they say that because if they don’t, three people a night will fall down, and they’ll have
lawsuits. So, you can be a spectator watching that and say, “Oh, that guy’s about to make a mistake.” Now, you would
have made that mistake, too. So, what we try to do is find those steps that are not quite in sight that will throw a majority
of market participants off.
DUBNER: Let me ask you a related question. This is from Colm Ryan, who writes that he’s an accountant in Dublin,
Ireland. Related to what we’ve been speaking about, with very high stakes, I should say. So here’s his question: “Given
that you could apply behavioral principles to help understand what led to the 2007 crash, do you see any similarities, or,
indeed, differences in what’s going on in the world today?” And before we let you answer the question, we should say
that you, Richard Thaler, would seem particularly well-suited to answer this difficult question because in the film The
Big Short,  Selena Gomez  helps you explain synthetic C.D.O.’s — collateralized debt obligations.
Ryan GOSLING: Well, here is Dr. Richard Thaler, father of behavioral economics, and Selena Gomez to explain:
Selena GOMEZ: Okay, so here is how a synthetic C.D.O. works. Let’s say I bet $10 million on a blackjack hand.
THALER: $10 million because this hand is meant to represent a single mortgage bond.
DUBNER: So first of all, was she a pretty good teacher? You understood C.D.O.’s better after that filming?
THALER: Yeah, let me just say that Selena, unlike me, was very good at memorizing lines. And I think it’s fair to say —
she was a very charming young woman, and I’m deeply grateful to her because being in that movie is the only thing that
I’ve done that has impressed my granddaughters, who are big Selena Gomez fans — but I think it’s fair to say, Selena
knew nothing about collateralized debt obligations nor blackjack.
DUBNER: So she’s a great actress, then, because the impression is, she knows quite a bit about both.
THALER: Yeah, she’s a much better actor than me. And so a possibly funny story is that in the script, the first hand,
she’s dealt a 21, which of course in blackjack means you win. And she was dealt 21 and didn’t react. And so I had to
take over as blackjack coach and director — both of which are uncredited in the movie, I might add — and say, “Selena,
when you get dealt 21, that means you win.” And there’s a shot in there where we’re high five-ing, and that’s because
she had learned in subsequent takes that when she gets dealt 21, that she’s supposed to be happy.
DUBNER: Okay, so let’s get back to Colm Ryan’s question about the 2007 meltdown and now — similarities?
Differences? What do you see?
THALER: Well, I don’t think we will repeat that mistake. But that crisis followed pretty quickly after the tech crash in
2000. Right? And it started like in 2006. So we’re barely over the tech bubble, and we get this real-estate bubble. And
we seem to learn one lesson and then are not able to extrapolate it to the next one. I don’t know what the next bubble
will be, or whether we’re already in one. I do think that we have done some things to make banks less fragile, especially
big ones. But, there are things like Bitcoin around —
DUBNER: Of which you’re not a fan, we should say.
THALER: Of which I’m not a fan.
DUBNER: You’re not not a fan of blockchain itself, correct? But as a currency, not a fan. Is that about right?
THALER: Correct. I don’t know why anyone engaged in strictly legal activities would want to use a currency that is so
volatile. It’s just the opposite. Suppose you sell another book and the publisher offers you an advance in Bitcoin. Unless
you were trying to cheat the I.R.S., you would say, “No, tell me what it’s going to be in dollars. Because I could end up
getting half of what you’re offering me, and that’s not an attractive feature.”
DUBNER: So have you shorted Bitcoin?
THALER: No, because Warren Buffett says a lot of smart things, and one of the things he says is, don’t make
investments in things you don’t understand. And I have no clue. I don’t think that the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is worth
thousands of dollars. But I also think it’s entirely possible that it will go up rather than down. So “stay away” is the best
advice.
DUBNER: Some people, including some economists, argue that behavioral economics is really just another way to
suggest that individuals can’t be trusted to make good decisions. And so institutions, particularly the state, should take
more control. Indeed, your co-author on the book  Nudge, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, for several years ran a White
House unit called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which sounds about as Orwellian as you can. There
are “Nudge units” in dozens of federal governments around the world. You’ve described your work as libertarian
paternalism, and, furthermore, argued that that phrase is not an oxymoron. Why shouldn’t we dismiss your work as a
kind of new, softer form of statism?
THALER: Well, first of all, when we use this phrase  libertarian paternalism, we’re using libertarian  as an adjective. And
so we’re trying to say we’re going to design policies that don’t force anyone to do anything. So the claim that we’re
trying to tell people what to do, or force them to do things, is just completely wrong. We are also not trying to tell them to
do what we think is smart. We’re trying to help people do what they want to do.
I like to use G.P.S. as an analogy of what we’re trying to do. So, I have a terrible sense of direction. And Google Maps
is a lifesaver for me. Now, if I want to go visit you, I can plug in your address, and suppose I’m walking across the park,
and I see, “Oh, there’s a softball game over there. I think I’ll go watch that for a while,” Google Maps doesn’t scold me. It
will re-compute a new route if I’ve gone a bit out of my way. It doesn’t suggest addresses to me. It just suggests a route.
And if there’s a traffic jam, it suggests maybe you should alter your route.
So, we don’t think people are dumb. We think the world is hard. I mean, figuring out how much to save for retirement is
a really hard cognitive problem that very few economists have solved for themselves. And it’s not only cognitively hard,
it involves delay of gratification, which people find hard. It’s just like navigating in a strange city is hard. So, why not try
to help? When I first was working with the U.K. Behavioral Insight Team, the first “Nudge unit,” the phrase I kept saying
in every meeting with some minister was, “If you want to get people to do something, make it easy. Remove the
barriers.” That’s what we’re about.
DUBNER: Let me go back to you and the Nobel. So, what would you say have been the biggest changes in your life
since winning the prize? Both of the observable sort and unobservable?
THALER: Well, I think I spend more time talking to people like you. My inbox, my email, is completely out of control. And
there are some downsides. The university all of a sudden has a lot of things that they would like you to do.
DUBNER: Fundraisers.
THALER: Of that ilk. So, I was a pretty happy guy. You’ve known me for years. And we saw each other recently. Did I
seem demonstrably happier?
DUBNER: You looked a little taller and better-looking, but otherwise — I think that was my perception. I think you were
exactly the same, actually.
THALER: No, that was just your jealousy. But look, I absolutely don’t want to sound like a sore winner or an ungrateful
winner. I’m saying that most of the people who win were already pretty successful people with pretty good lives. And
there’s what psychologists call a ceiling effect. So I had a pretty happy life, as you know, I have a nice wife and I have
kids I love. And yes, this made me happy. And it was very gratifying. But you have this image that you’re going to be on
cloud nine. And then there is life. You still get flat tires even if you have a Nobel Prize. You still have leaks at home that
nobody seems to be able to fix. So they need to fix that and say that if you get a Nobel Prize, nothing can leak in your
house.
DUBNER: I’ll end with where I should have started. Congratulations.
THALER: Thank you, Stephen.
DUBNER: I know everybody who listens to you is happy for you, proud of you, and most of all, we’re pleased in a
selfish way to keep learning from you, because we learn a lot. And I thank you especially for that. And I look forward to
the next time we speak.
THALER: So do I.

How to Be Creative (Ep. 354)

What do you think when you hear the word “creativity”? Truth be told, creativity is having a bit of a moment. There are
thousands of books on the subject, many written in the past decade. It’s become a corporate buzzword, right up there
with “innovation” and “disruption.” It’s at the center of a whole lifestyle movement: online classes and Facebook groups
and real-life meetups. There are creativity coaches, of course, and gurus, offering to rearrange your life to add more
creative spice. So we here at Freakonomics Radio got to thinking: with so many people spending so much time and
money and energy in pursuit of this thing called “creativity” — well, we wondered if there’s anything systematic to be
learned about it? What if we started by simply defining the term. We asked a bunch of academics who study creativity,
as well as some artists, musicians, scientists, and inventors: how do you define creativity?
Charlan NEMETH: You know, it’s actually harder than one might think.
Pat BROWN: Well, people use that word in lots of different ways to mean lots of different things.
Saul PERLMUTTER: There’s a huge amount of what goes under the heading of “creativity” that just has to do with a
willingness to stick to a problem and a pleasure in it.
John HODGMAN: So, starting with nothing, having an idea, letting the idea pull you forward, getting it down, making it
right.
Pat BROWN: “Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.”
Teresa AMABILE: It can’t just be different for the sake of being different, because that’s the definition of madness, I
guess.
Teresa Amabile is a psychologist and a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. She’s spent her career
studying creativity, particularly in education and work settings. But I asked her: how is it even possible to empirically
study something as diffuse as creativity?
AMABILE: Many people have the sense that it should not be studied scientifically, that you should not try to apply
science and objective thinking to the magic of creativity, that it’s somehow in the spiritual realm. As you might guess, I
don’t take that approach. I think that it can be studied scientifically without destroying the excitement and the sense of
magic about creativity.
For economists, the concern hasn’t been about preserving the magic of creativity; they generally avoid the topic
because it seems so touchy-feely.
David GALENSON: There’s sort of two questions: why do economists care? And the answer is economists really
haven’t cared about creativity.
David Galenson is an economist at the University of Chicago. He does care: his central research interest is the life
cycles of human creativity.
GALENSON: Why should they care? The single-most important problem for the discipline of economics is economic
growth. Why are some countries rich and others poor? And virtually all economists agree that the single-most important
source of economic growth in the long run, what really makes a country rich, is technological change. Well,
technological change is just a lot of people making discoveries. So, it would seem to be a very big question, how do
people make innovations?
*      *      *
Among the scholars who study creativity, there is no real consensus on who has it or even exactly what it is.
Charlan NEMETH: I was just looking recently and reminded of that old fable that if you have people blindfolded, looking
at an elephant…
Charlan Nemeth is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies entrepreneurs and
creative scientists.
NEMETH: …and one of them is looking at the tail, he thinks it’s a snail he’s touching. And if you have someone
approaching it from the side, he thinks it’s a wall. And it’s just a reminder, in a way, that what you focus on, to some
extent, determines how you think creativity works. In many ways, it’s a very difficult, and still to some extent mysterious
phenomenon. So if you get somebody studying it in business innovation, for example, separate from studying Nobel
laureates, or separate from looking at it in experimental tasks, for example, in a lab. So it’s very hard to compare those
because they use different definitions of the end product as being creative or not.
But you’ve got to start somewhere. And that’s why Teresa Amabile starts with a basic definition that’s accepted within
the field of psychology.
AMABILE: We identify creativity as essentially novelty that works. It has to be somehow feasible, workable, valuable,
appropriate to a goal. And it gets a little a squidgy when we’re talking about the arts. What does “appropriate” or
“valuable” mean in the arts? But I think even there, pure novelty just for the sake of novelty isn’t really going to do it. It
has to be somehow expressive of something that the artist was trying to convey or evocative of a response that the
artist was trying to evoke.
“Novelty that works.” I think that’s a great starting point. What if we run that definition past a creative type — Michael
Bierut for instance. Bierut is a world-renowned, much-awarded graphic designer: you’ve seen his logos; his work is in
museums. How does he like defining creativity as “novelty that works”?
Michael BIERUT: Yeah. I mean there’s this famous formulation by the 20th century designer  Raymond Loewy  who
designed the Lucky Strike package and the livery of Air Force One among other things. He used — he had this four-
letter formulation: M.A.Y.A.: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. And it was based on his theory that everyone has these
two impulses. And one is the desire for regularity and comfort, and the other one is the quest for surprise and novelty,
right? If you have too much regularity and comfort, you get bored. If you get too much surprise and novelty, you get
overexcited wired and distracted and exhausted. It’s the idea that it’s novelty with a purpose — that purpose is the
element that actually is about expectation and expectations fulfilled. And the novelty part of it is the idea that those
expectations might be fulfilled in a way that you haven’t seen before.
It turns out that psychologists have come up with a way to test our ability to produce “novelty that works.” Charlan
Nemeth again:
NEMETH: It’s called the “Uses Test.” Basically if I ask you to give me all the uses you can for a brick, you could say that
you could build a house, you could build a factory, and you could build a road. And that’d be three ideas, but they’re all
basically building. A more creative answer would be that you could build a house, you could use it as a platform to hold
a cup of coffee, you could use it as a missile to throw through someone’s window as protest. And other tests of
creativity all have that element to it: they see if the mind tends to go wide and down different routes and that it can even
make connections through circuitous ways of getting there.
That’s one way to measure someone’s degree of creative thinking. But how about studying creativity the other way
around — starting with people that everyone agrees are wildly creative? That’s the route chosen by Dean Simonton.
He is a professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.
Dean SIMONTON: I wanted to study creativity and genius and leadership, but I wanted to do it in a way that was
different than what most psychologists did. Because most psychologists, they study, really, college undergraduates who
happen to be taking a Psych 1 class. And they have to volunteer to participate. And those are not the people I wanted
to study. And so I had to figure out a way of studying people like  Michelangelo  or Beethoven  or Einstein  when I
couldn’t get them to come to my laboratory — particularly since most of them were deceased, which made it kind of
awkward. So, I started developing various ways of studying genius at a distance, measuring their personality,
measuring their intelligence, looking at their childhood and adolescence, the nature of their career.
Stephen J. DUBNER: Did you have a pretty smooth path through academia then, to become a Ph.D.?
SIMONTON: Oh no, I had a lot of times where I had to struggle. For example, when I decided I wanted to study real
creators, and real geniuses, instead of college students, I had a hell of a time trying to put together a thesis committee.
Because not everybody thought that that was even a legitimate form of doing psychological research.
DUBNER: Because why?
SIMONTON: Because at that time, and it is still the case — in fact, in many ways it’s even more true — the laboratory is
considered to be the acme of science, having a lab in which you collect your data. And in the case of psychology, a lab
means a place where, for the most part, you bring in college students to study. Something about  86 percent of all
research in psychology is based on college undergraduates.
DUBNER: That’s a very very narrow cohort, not just age-wise but also background-wise and IQ-wise and all that, it’s
pretty homogenous. What about just the fact that even good lab experiments, forget about all the bad ones, that it
doesn’t really represent the real world well enough, especially in the realm of psychology, but also economics, I would
say. Was that a concern for you as well, or no?
SIMONTON: Oh yeah, it was definitely. To me, there’s a distinction that is made between what’s called internal validity
and external validity. And internal validity has to do with the power of making causal inferences from your research, and
laboratory experiments are really really great in internal validity. But external validity is — does it really tell you anything
about what’s happening in the real world? What often happens when you want to study something in the lab that is
actually in the real world, you do a simulation. But you have no way of knowing whether or not that simulation actually
represents what happens out there. For example, I wanted to find out what were the social, cultural circumstances that
were responsible for why, in some periods you have golden ages with lots of geniuses, and other times you have dark
ages, where it’s really hard to find anybody who even knows what they’re talking about. Right?
DUBNER: How do you do that in a lab?
SIMONTON: How do you do that? I wanted to look at the impact of war. I wanted to look at the impact of having role
models in your field when you’re growing up. I wanted to look at the impact of the political system, whether you had a lot
of independent states or whether it was a big one unified empire. And those are things you just can’t study in the
laboratory. You can’t say, “Hey, imagine you’re growing up in the Middle Ages, and how creative do you feel?”
So how did Simonton go about studying this incredible range of factors?
SIMONTON: Well actually the story goes back to elementary school, believe it or not. When I was in kindergarten, my
kindergarten teacher came to our house and told my parents — I came from a working-class background, in fact my
dad didn’t graduate from high school. And they said, if you want your son to do well in school, you need a set of
encyclopedias, World Book Encyclopedias, and that it would really help him. And these books are designed from K-12
and very useful for writing term papers, and all that kind of stuff.
DUBNER: Those were expensive. That was a big deal.
SIMONTON: Yeah. That was expensive. It was an amazing purchase for them to make. And I started browsing through
them. And one thing that is characteristic of the World Book, is they have lots of pictures. And I saw lots of pictures of
strange-looking people, people with beards, people with long hair, people of different ethnicities, periods, whatever. And
I wondered, how did they get in that? How did they get their entry?
DUBNER: Ooooh, yeah.
SIMONTON: Why were they so important? And particularly since I realized my parents didn’t have entries, my
elementary school teachers didn’t have entries, I was always curious about just how you become eminent enough to
end up in an encyclopedia, or just have someone write a biography of you.
DUBNER: Was it — envy is not the word I’m looking for. Did you want to belong to that tribe, and you were trying to
figure out how to get there? Or you were more curious about who were these people and where did they come from?
SIMONTON: Well, it was a combination. I wouldn’t say it was envy, but it was curiosity about how they got there, and
could I be in that group? Do I have what it takes?
DUBNER: And what do you have to do to get it there?
SIMONTON: Yeah. And what do you have to do? What’s the process? And is it something that you can develop as
well?
Simonton learned to pay attention to all the details in the biographies he was reading.
SIMONTON: And it would talk about where they came from. Sometimes it would mention their birth order. Sometimes it
would talk about their education and maybe some of the struggles they went through, and then their career. And then
histories also have a lot of information about what’s going on externally, whether or not there’s any wars going on,
whether or not there was a dictatorship or a democratic government. There’s also information having to do with
personality, like this person was introverted or this person was extroverted. We know, for example, that Newton had a
lot of characteristics that suggest that he was a high-functioning autistic. And he was very, very introverted. And we can
see that from his behavior, as well as having some paranoid psychosis attached.
DUBNER: So, let me ask you the really obvious question. When you study people like Michelangelo and Beethoven
and Einstein, who, I think most people would agree, were pretty good at what they did, and maybe all the way up to
creative genius. Obvious question, what did you discover about creativity and genius? I guess, what do they have in
common?
SIMONTON: Well first of all, I have to say that artists and scientists are not equivalent as geniuses. But they also have
things that they do share. They are all very intelligent in a general-intelligence way. Not necessarily in terms of taking an
IQ test, but they’re very sharp. They love what they’re doing. They’re absolutely committed to doing what they’re doing.
They want to spend their whole life discovering the nature of the universe, or creating incredible paintings on the ceiling,
or whatever it happens to be, and they are willing to overcome all sorts of obstacles and all sorts of struggles.
Like Michelangelo and the agony and the ecstasy scenario: even though he was recognized very early as a genius, he
had constant struggles. And he often had major projects terminated, like with Pope Julius II. And it’s not easy to be a
genius. All of them, whether they’re scientists or whether they’re artists, have that tremendous drive and commitment
and determination to keep on going, even when they’re failing and failing and failing.
At this point, you may be starting to think: well, what Simonton’s describing sounds an awful lot like what’s known as the
10,000-hour rule of excellence.
SIMONTON: In our research, we call it the 10-year rule. There’s a little arithmetic that makes them equivalent, 10,000
hours equals 10 years. But, in any case, that is absolutely unquestionable, that you have to establish an expertise and
— you have to know what you’re doing. You have to have the tools of the trade. Now, sometimes people enter fields
where there’s really not that much to learn because they’re brand-new fields. When Galileo, for example, invented his
telescope and pointed to the skies and saw all these things that are not supposed to be there — there weren’t
supposed to be mountains on the moon. There weren’t supposed to be moons circulating around Jupiter. There weren’t
supposed to be spots on the sun, and so forth and so on. He was creating a domain from scratch. So, he didn’t have to
spend ten years learning something that was already obsolete. He was inventing his own field.
DUBNER: So being first is always a good idea.
SIMONTON: Yeah, if you want to avoid all the hard work of studying, just be the first in a given domain.
*      *      *
This is the first episode in a new, recurring series about creativity — which, for empirically-minded people like us, is a
notoriously squishy topic. The psychologist Teresa Amabile again:
AMABILE: So there are a few myths about creativity that are very popular.
So let’s at least clear up a few myths, shall we? First off, when most of us think about creativity, we focus on the arts —
music and film, the visual arts, writing, and so on. Maybe you also think of a scientist or a researcher in the lab, thinking
up experiments to test a new hypothesis. That’s all understandable, since these are people who make a living through
their creativity. But Amabile thinks that view of creativity doesn’t go nearly far enough.
AMABILE: Creativity is possible in all realms of human activity. If we define creativity as doing something novel that
works, that is valuable in some way, it’s absolutely possible in everything that humans do.
One of my favorite examples of creative thinking outside the arts is the story of John Snow, the English doctor who’s
considered one of the pioneers of epidemiology. In mid-19th-century London, Snow was trying to identify the source of
cholera outbreaks. Many doctors thought it was spread by “miasma,” or “bad air.” Snow thought it maybe had to do with
germs in the water supply. Using maps, statistics, and common sense, Snow identified one pump whose contaminated
water had caused nearly 200 deaths in a single outbreak of cholera. Over the ensuing centuries, Snow’s breakthrough
would help save countless lives. And that strikes me as a deeply creative act.
Seth GORDON: Yeah, I think that’s right. That’s an example of profound creativity that isn’t artistic or artistic with a
capital A.
That’s the filmmaker Seth Gordon. He grew up with two social scientists as parents; now he directs big Hollywood films
and also makes lots of TV shows and smart documentaries.
GORDON: I think actually the most creative discipline I’ve ever witnessed in person is probably coding. Because you’re
creating the language that you then employ to make something happen. That is profoundly creative. And whether that’s
for making a game or whether that’s creating a program or whether that’s — I mean, in a way maybe the most creative
thing I’m aware of in the last 10 or 15 years is the Stuxnet virus.
He’s referring to the computer virus, generally thought to be created by American and Israeli programmers, which in
2010 attacked Iran’s nuclear program.
GORDON: That thing is unbelievable, like what it was, what it did, and how it accomplished it. But I don’t think anyone
would call that creative in any normal sense. It’s bad, right? But it’s making something that never existed before and
tricked everyone for a very long time. It’s amazing.
Creating computer code that can shut down your enemy’s nuclear centrifuges — yes, I can see how that’s creative.
Some people see a lot of creativity in sports. Here’s Dana Gioia, the poet laureate of California and former chairman of
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dana GIOIA: I don’t like sports, but you’ve got to admire the energy, creativity, innovation that goes into sports. And it’s
very similar to arts. It’s a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters, which have enormous
emotional resonance to audiences. So, I think it’s a mistake always to talk about the arts about being about artists. The
arts are also about audience. It’s about community, it’s about this conversation between the creator and the receiver.
Margaret GELLER: I mean, what I think what one of the things people don’t understand is that everyday people are
creative.
That’s the astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who in her everyday work pioneered the mapping of matter in the universe.
GELLER: You go in the kitchen to make dinner. You put a different spice in the dish. That’s creative. You’re planting
your garden, you make a new flower arrangement  — it doesn’t have to be a big thing to be creative.
Maybe not, but some practitioners of the creative arts — the humorist John Hodgman, for instance — do draw a line.
John HODGMAN: I would make a small distinction. It’s sort of the distinction between being a stand-up comic versus
being an actor. When you are cooking, you’re following a recipe. When you’re acting, you’re following a script and
direction. Those are arts, to be sure, but they’re interpretive arts, rather than purely creative arts, where you are solely,
or in collaboration, responsible for creating something out of nothing. Developing a recipe or inventing a new kind of
Afghan pattern or whatever it is. If you’re following a direction, right, that is an interpretive art, of which many people
become craftspeople and masters of, and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s just enjoyable in and of itself.
It may be enjoyable, but as Hodgman sees it, true creativity occupies a higher realm. Teresa Amabile takes a more
inclusive approach.
AMABILE: One of my favorite things to do when I’m talking to managers is say, “Okay everyone, what do you most want
creativity in your organizations?” They yell out, “R&D, marketing, advertising!” Great, great, great, great. “Okay, so is
there anywhere in your organization where you do not want creativity?” Somebody will yell out “accounting” and then
everybody laughs. And people say, “Well, you think of ‘creative accounting,’ you think of Enron, you think of all these
examples of cooking the books.” Yeah, yeah, right. That’s funny. And yes, we want to avoid that kind of creative
accounting. But then I ask them, “Is it true that you don’t want people in your accounting department to think about what
they do creatively ever?” Then I give the example of my colleague Robert Kaplan coming up with activity-based
costing many years ago and how that was a true creative breakthrough in accounting.
But in a time when everyone is encouraged to be creative — are there downsides to that? Especially if there’s not
attention to go around?
SIMONTON: Can I give you one example?
Dean Simonton again:
SIMONTON: This just happened recently, and it happened near where I live, so it’s even more prominent. We had
someone who walked into the YouTube headquarters and started shooting people up because she thought that they
were stifling her creativity, that she had some creativity via video uploads that was not reaching the largest possible
audience. I have never seen any of her videos, and you have to know Farsi to understand most of them. But the point is
that she thought it was worth killing people because her creativity was being stifled. I think she would have been better
off just becoming an accountant or something, rather than trying to be a creative.
And there’s the other issue here. We live in a society where we are inundated with creativity. It is so easy to put yourself
up there. You can start your own blog. You can upload your paintings. You can upload your music. You can do all that.
In earlier times, you had gatekeepers. You actually had to have a patron who was willing to pay for your marble for your
sculpture.
DUBNER: You sound like you’re, for the most part, not in favor of this total democratization of creativity.
SIMONTON: I don’t really care. But I mean if someone is happy being a Sunday afternoon painter, by all means do it.
Just don’t give it to your relatives and force them to find some spot in the living room to hang it up.
DUBNER: When I hear that phrase, “creative genius,” and we do hear it a lot, I sometimes wonder if it’s a little bit of an
unfortunate pairing. In that, people who are not geniuses don’t feel they have the permission therefore to be creative.
SIMONTON: Well, creativity and genius are separate topics, and there are many examples of geniuses who were not
particularly creative. And on the other side, there’s a lot of creative people out there, a lot of creativity. There are people
who are just phenomenally witty in conversations at parties. There are people who can put together an amazing recipe
from just random scraps of stuff available in the pantry. And that all counts as creativity.
DUBNER: If you personally had to pick that you could only be good at one, would you be very creative or a genius?
SIMONTON: I would probably pick being creative, because I think being creative is much more fun than just being a
mere genius. What do you do as a mere genius? You wallow in your genius-hood?
That’s not to say that genius doesn’t exist, or that certified geniuses haven’t come up with some pretty amazing things.
Walter ISAACSON: Well, I do think that there are certain geniuses that truly can make mental leaps the rest of us can’t.
That’s Walter Isaacson, who teaches history at Tulane and has written several best-selling biographies of big, big
thinkers.
ISAACSON: That could be the way Einstein understood, after a while, that time is relative depending on your state of
motion. This is something no physicist had ever even really thought of. But likewise, you can have a genius just in
ordinary things. When Steve Jobs  figured out the iPod and how to have it be a simple, sleek, personal product that
would put a thousand songs in your pocket — in its own small way, that was a leap of genius as well.
On the other hand, there are some people, widely considered to be creative geniuses …
Elvis COSTELLO: Hello, I’m Elvis Costello.
… a songwriter, for instance, whose melodies and lyrics are practically beyond belief …
Music: Elvis Costello, “Beyond Belief”
COSTELLO: That’s a pretty good compliment.
DUBNER: I think everyone who knows your music, including me, would consider you an extraordinarily creative person.
You’re the kind of person that people use the phrase “creative genius” on.
COSTELLO: That’s really crazy. I don’t really think in terms of definitions like a name tag, but if you actually asked me I
say I was a worker of a kind. I work at what I do. And then there might be moments of inspiration that visit you
unexpectedly.
DUBNER: Can you give, can you give an example.
COSTELLO: Any song arriving is a mysterious sort of thing. I mean, it can range from carrying around a phrase in a
notebook for four years before it joins up with some other thoughts, or a line of melody that seems to bring it to life and
allows you to represent something that you want to share with people. Or a song can just appear, the whole thing, the
words and music. Time stops and —
DUBNER: Really, that’s happened?
COSTELLO: Oh yeah.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Elvis Costello belongs on the creative-genius list. In any case: there’s one
characteristic that we almost universally associate with such people: they’re tortured. Either they burn so bright that they
flame out early and die young, or they spend long lives wracked by schizophrenia or depression or at least garden-
variety neurosis. Maybe the most famous, most defining example of this is Vincent van Gogh, with his nervous
breakdowns and self-mutilation, and eventual suicide. Dean Simonton has looked at the incidence of mental illness in
creative types through the ages. And there is a correlation between creativity and mental illness. But it depends on the
kind of creativity you’re talking about.
SIMONTON: There’s a relationship between how much constraint the creative genius has to operate under, and their
tendency towards mental illness. A scientist operates under a lot of constraints. A scientist has to come up with theories
that are consistent with the facts. It has to be logically coherent. It has to fit in with what previous scientists have been
doing, and so forth. And, in our culture, artists don’t operate that way. Particularly since the Romantic period — anything
goes. But there are times and places where the arts have extremely high constraints imposed on them. Japanese
haiku, for example, is a very constrained form. You have a certain number of syllables to work with. You also have a
certain number of themes that are considered to be more appropriate for haiku.
So what’s interesting is that as you get into domains that are very very constrained, mental illness tends to be very rare.
And then if you go into more and more unconstrained forms of expression, then you also do it at risk of having more
mental illness, as well as having all sorts of horrible experiences in childhood or adolescence. And there’s a study
published on this, where you can compare Nobel prizes in physics with Nobel Prizes in literature, and they’re not cut
from the same cloth at all.
DUBNER: I think if you look at American winners in literature — most of them were alcoholics, right?
SIMONTON: Yeah, alcoholics. They often dropped out of school. They had tremendous ups and downs in their
education, if they even finished formal education. Whereas the physicists came from perfect family backgrounds,
professional families. Nothing happened. Nobody died.
DUBNER: Excellence in physics is building within a domain that must be mastered first, and that requires a certain set
of resources and skills and an ability to color within the lines. Yes?
SIMONTON: And you’re expected to stay within the box. Because the box actually defines what is science.
DUBNER: So interesting.
SIMONTON: I mean, I published an article in  Nature a few years ago. But they wrote their own title, and they made it
deliberately provocative. They said, “After Einstein, Genius Is Extinct.” Woah! And immediately I got inundated with all
sorts of mail, e-mails mostly, from people, some of whom agreed with me.
DUBNER: And did you take credit for writing the headline in those cases where they agree?
SIMONTON: Yeah, right. But others wrote and said, “What about me?” And they said, “I’m a genius and I’m after
Einstein. In fact, I’ve actually disproven everything that Einstein got credit for and I’m still waiting to get my Nobel Prize.”
And they’ll publish this stuff on the web, usually their own personal website. And you look at it, and it violates all the
constraints of science. I mean, a basic thing is, you have to obey high school algebra, for example. I know that seems
really obsessive, but you have to obey high-school algebra.
DUBNER: Well I mean, we’re laughing about it, but on the other hand in language, let’s say, right? You can break
language, you can go way outside the bounds of formal English or any other language, and it can be considered poetry.
But I cede that science is a different ballpark.
SIMONTON: And in the case of poetry, it’s actually astonishing how far you can push the edge. Like Ezra Pound, for
example, really pushing the edge of intelligibility.
Simonton looked at the prevalence of mental illness in different types of creative people. Visual artists and writers were
on the high end of the scale, with poets the most pronounced: 87 percent of them experience some kind of mental
disorder. How does that compare to the general population? According to one widely accepted study, around 46
percent of Americans experience some sort of mental disorder during their lifetimes. So artists and writers are
considerably higher than average. But: Simonton found that scientists have a considerably lower tendency for a mental
disorder: only around 28 percent. And if you include all creative types in the tally, Simonton found that they have lower
rates of mental illness than non-creative people. Creative behavior is in fact often a marker for good mental health. So if
you’re looking for some magic formula for the relationship between creativity and mental illness …
ISAACSON: I don’t think there’s one formula for that.
Walter Isaacson again.
ISAACSON: Ben Franklin was a happy, well-adjusted kid — even though he was a runaway from his brother, who tried
to keep him as an apprentice. Leonardo da Vinci was pretty tortured, had all sorts of manic periods of his life where he
was both depressed and elated. Somebody like Einstein, deeply focused. Steve Jobs had both demons and angels
inside of his head. So I don’t think you can make one blanket pattern, to say creative people have some special mental
challenges or abilities.
Let’s go back to Vincent van Gogh, who’s arguably the model of the tortured artist. There have been many posthumous
attempts to diagnose Van Gogh; among the theories: manic depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Many people,
when they look at the fantastical swirls and the vibrant yellows and blues in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” see see a picture
of madness itself. But what if the arrow is moving in the opposite direction? Consider this: Van Gogh was in and out of
hospitals during the final years of his life. It’s very likely that his doctors treated his epilepsy with digitalis, an extract of
the foxglove plant. He even made a painting of one of his doctors posing with sprigs of foxglove. Well, one of the side-
effects of digitalis? The color yellow overwhelms other shades, and swirly halos can appear around objects. So it may
be that Van Gogh’s paintings were more influenced by the cure than the disease. Or maybe not. It’s impossible to know,
in part because our understanding of the mind has changed so much since then. Some recent research suggests that
highly creative people often have what’s called “cognitive disinhibition”— basically, they lack the filter that keeps you
from getting sensory overload just by walking down the street. Which means they’re constantly being pinged by random
stimuli; in theory, this could help you notice things that most people ignore. Cognitive disinhibition, not surprisingly, is
also associated with mental illnesses like schizophrenia So it would seem that the line between pathology and creativity,
at least in some cases, can be quite fine.
Jennifer EGAN: There are a lot of parallels between fiction writing and being schizophrenic.
That’s Jennifer Egan.
EGAN: And I’m a novelist and a journalist.
Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 2010 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad. Her brother Graham was an
artist who had schizophrenia and died by suicide in 2016.
EGAN: He heard voices all the time, but it wasn’t the way I hear voices — although he was very funny guy.
DUBNER: Joked with you that you got paid for it and he was tormented by it?
EGAN: Exactly. He heard voices intrusively, as if there were a radio on in his head. And it really kept him from being
able to concentrate. His voices would speak to him in very cruel ways, and that made it very hard for him to function. It
just boggles the mind to think about what that would really be day in and day out. He was in his own private war all the
time and you could really see it. I mean he looked like he’d just come back from a tour of Iraq. He was drawn, and he
would be exhausted. So in that way, I don’t have any of that to deal with. I feel so lucky that my brain mostly seems to
work as it should. Talk about a gift. I mean a lot of people don’t have that.
DUBNER: Do you feel that the cliché throughout history of the mentally tortured artist, do you think it’s overblown?
EGAN: I don’t know. I guess it’s probably not. I mean it’s easy to romanticize that vision but that that romantic picture
comes from somewhere and I am lucky enough to be on a fairly even keel, but I’ve also had a lot of therapy. I mean we
have advantages now in terms of mental health that people didn’t have 100 years ago or really even 50 years ago. I
mean even now honestly if my brother were a young man now becoming symptomatic for the first time he would have
options that he didn’t have then. Maybe artists don’t have to live that way now in the way that they did.
DUBNER: A lot of people worry that if they need treatment including medication, a lot of creative people worry that it will
kill their creativity, change their creativity, change the way they think about things.
EGAN: Well, I would tend to think that it’s the opposite, that that the craziness is actually getting in the way of the
creativity more than fueling it. I mean in my brother’s case, it was so stark. I mean he was stark raving mad without
medication. Absolutely out of his mind. And with medication, he still heard voices all the time, but he basically
understood that they weren’t real. So for him it was the choice between having some kind of a life and having absolutely
no life. So I guess I really resist the romanticization of mental illness. Virginia Woolf  on medication, if I had to guess
and of course I have no way of knowing, would have done all the wonderful things she did and not committed suicide
and been able to do more.
So one thing we can say about creativity is that the connection between it and mental illness is far more nuanced than
the stereotype. As is the case with most stereotypes. But what about the more general stereotype of the highly creative
person — essentially, the idea they are a select few? The idea that perhaps they’re simply born that way — and that we
muggles should content ourselves with admiring their output, perhaps envying it a bit — but that we should generally
just keep out of their way. Is that really the best way to think about creativity? Or should we all strive to be creative?
That’s a question we put to everyone we’ve been interviewing for this series. Here’s Teresa Amabile, who’s spent her
career studying the topic.
AMABILE: Should we all strive to be creative? Yes we should, because doing things differently in ways that work is the
only way that human progress happens.
All right then! Who’s not in favor of human progress? Which means that all of us — in our way, on some dimension —
have reason to sharpen our creative abilities. So how do we do this? That will be one of the preoccupations of this
series. But don’t expect easy answers.
SIMONTON: Too many people want a one-size-fits-all. “What do I need to do to be creative?” And I’m afraid there’s no
one-size-fits-all.
That’s Dean Simonton; and here’s Walter Isaacson:
ISAACSON: I do resist the type of books that say, “Seven easy lessons to being creative,” or, “The 14 secrets to
innovative leadership.” I don’t think you can distill everything into a list like that, which is why it’s useful to read the
biographies of different people.
Let’s put aside for the moment that Isaacson has written biographies of people like Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs
and Leonardo da Vinci; I don’t think he’s just trying to sell more books here.
ISAACSON: The leadership skills of a Benjamin Franklin came from bringing people together, finding common ground,
and being very civil in his discourse when he tried to create compromises necessary to make the Constitution. That was
very different from the leadership style of a Steve Jobs, who drove people crazy, but also drove them to do things they
didn’t know they’d be able to do. So I think it’s useful to look at different creative leaders and then, after you have done
so, look inside yourself and to say, “I’m better off being more like Ben Franklin, or I’m better off being more like
Leonardo da Vinci, trying to mix art and science. Or I’m better off being like Steve Jobs, driving a team crazy but driving
them to do things they didn’t know they could do.” And you can understand your own skills by comparing them to what
great innovators and creative people have done in the past.
All right, that makes sense. Given the vagaries of our topic, it also makes sense to address it both systematically and
individually, interviewing creativity scholars as well as lots of creatives themselves — sound good?