The Creative Life

Josh Landy
Is creativity something you’re born with?

Ken Taylor
Or can it be cultivated?

Josh Landy
What can young people do to prepare themselves to live more creative lives?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
… except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Stuyvesant High School in New York, in front of an audience of New York City highschool students and their parents.

Josh Landy
And we’re continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner at Stanford University, where Ken teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Today, we’re thinking about the creative life,

Josh Landy
The creative life… That sounds fantastic, man, I wish I had one of those.

Ken Taylor
Come on. Don’t be so modest. You write about literature and philosophy—surely that’s got to be creative in and of itself.

Josh Landy
Look, writing novels—that would be creative or poetry and, and trust me, can you do not want to read my poetry?

Ken Taylor
Come on, it can’t be that bad.

Josh Landy
Oh, yeah. Remind me to show you my “Ode to a Toenail Clipping.”

Ken Taylor
If you really want to be a better poet, you want to be more creative, why don’t you do something about it? Go over to the English department and take a creative writing class or something, for example.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I just don’t think it’s that easy. I mean, okay, if someone’s already creative, then A class can help them they can sharpen their skills and so on. But if you’re like me, and you don’t have a creative bone in your body, then I’m afraid there’s not much hope for you.

Ken Taylor
Wow, I’m shocked, you got such a fixed mindset. No wonder you don’t consider yourself creative. You got to change it up. You got to switch from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, Josh.

Josh Landy
No, I see. I see what you’re doing. You’re channeling our good friend and colleague, Carol Dweck, the famous Stanford psychologist.

Ken Taylor
That’s exactly what I’m doing. And I’m right to do that, because Carol has shown that many qualities of mind that we might think are just fixed, like it actually be cultivated. And you know, Josh, it’s a really bad idea to go around thinking that your character is just given by I don’t know your DNA or your genes or something like that. Because if you think that way, he may just give up and you know, you won’t even work to do the work. You need to get better like at poetry, for instance.

Josh Landy
All right, so let me get you straight. You’re saying? My fixed belief I’m not creative. That’s the reason why poetry so bad. I mean, all I have to do is believe like Tinkerbell and Peter Pan.

Ken Taylor
Well, okay. I’m not quite saying that. I’m not saying all you have to do is believe like Tinkerbell or Pinocchio. But you know, Josh, changing to a growth mindset, that would be a start, at least, it might actually motivate you to try and become a better poet.

Josh Landy
Can we change the subject? My terrible poetry? Oh, you brought it up? All right. All right for that, okay. You seem to think that creativity is like self discipline, it’s something you can learn. Right? So so maybe you start off a bit lazy, but with the right training, you can become a more focused person?

Ken Taylor
Well, I do think that that’s obviously right. You can’t possibly disagree.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I do disagree. I think creativity is more like brilliance. I mean, you can’t train someone to be a genius— either they are or they aren’t.

Ken Taylor
Look, I’m not denying that some people are, maybe they start out more naturally creative than others, you know, a little bit more of this. This is some people are more naturally disciplined than others. But take any person, put them in the right training, the right education, and they’ll become better than they were when they started. That’s why a growth mindset is so important, Josh.

Josh Landy
So you think we could have something like a boot camp to make people more creative?

Ken Taylor
Put it that way, I do. And you know what? The university that’s exactly what it is. It’s a boot camp for creativity.

Josh Landy
Yes. That’s actually a pretty good slogan. And you know, that makes you and me drill sergeants to the mind.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, now you’re getting it. And that’s why we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to speak to some Stanford alums about how they continually foster creativity in their own lives. She files this report

Liza Veale
Timako Thiel is an artist and a computer graphics pioneer. I like her definition.

Timako Thiel
I see creativity is being the life force that enables you to look at the world around you and say what could be different and how could I make those changes.

Liza Veale
Thiel comes from the kind of parents who had diverse interests and pursued many of them to the point of professional mastery. She describes the way creativity for her father was a way of being in the world a more present and engaged and playful way. She remembers

Timako Thiel
going on walks with my father and pointing out because this texture, look at how the slats of the fence create a rhythm as you’re walking past them. And then you’d say, oh, let’s go down to the harbor and he would just go onto a ship it down into the engine room. And as a kid, I’m going like, “Dad, we’re not supposed to be here!”

Liza Veale
But not everyone has such a joyful, fanciful relationship with the creative process.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
The, like, survival mode, where you just like get abandoned in a strange land and are forced to fend for yourself.

Liza Veale
This is Jonathan Fetter-Vorn, a graphic novelist who makes historical comic books.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
I think that’s the kind of creativity that I subscribe to the sink or swim kind that brings out really fantastic results.

Liza Veale
He’s working on a book about the moon landing. And recently, he got taken on this long digression into all this research about astrology and navigation by the stars. And he told me this panic had set in because he couldn’t find a good way to use any of that research he’d spent all this time on in the book.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
And it was one of these kind of like, late night as I’m falling asleep modes that I kept going over the diaries that Kepler kept.

Liza Veale
The astronomer Johannes Kepler kept these really intense diaries where he detailed why he was so inadequate and why he was never going to amount to anything.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
In my own panic. I kept going over the words that Kepler was using to describe his own internal anxieties. And that was when I realized that I was fixating so much on this anxiety that Kepler is the perfect person to hinge this whole story on.

Liza Veale
In other words, it was actually his own insecurity that led him to a compelling human narrative and character around which he could structure this astronomy lesson that he really wanted to give. Obstacles generate creativity, discomfort, dissonance, and the synthesis of disparate things to make oteil the technologists and artists, she grew up in a time when being biracial was seen as a deficit. But from our parents,

Timako Thiel
we were told constantly, you’re so lucky to have two entirely different cultures and roles that you’re intimate with that you’re a part of that you can draw from.

Liza Veale
Thiel’s professional work also synthesizes disparate ways of being early in her career, she pursued degrees in computer engineering and developed as a visual artist. At the time, these two fields were very distinct, even adversarial, but she questioned the idea that technology could be separate from questions of the human heart. And she also disagreed that so called media arts were less than so called Fine Arts. She brought together tools from both disciplines.

Timako Thiel
If you look at people who are considered to be creative, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re putting together things that other people weren’t putting together before.

Liza Veale
For Jonathan Fetter-Vorn., the graphic novelist, part of creativity is empathic. It’s about not being locked in your own experience but being open enough to discern other people’s, even the people you think you know, best. He tells me earlier that day, he and his 15 month old son were walking on a hillside covered in fire weed, this dandelion-like flower

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
And the cotton was getting caught up in the winds and swirling around in cyclones around us. It first he was scared, and then he was gleeful. And then he was just silent.

Liza Veale
It takes a little creativity to share that experience with a baby. But if you can, then you’ve got

Jonathan Fetter-Vorn
this mundane thing that I know and understand, transforming into just a wonder of the universe.

Liza Veale
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that tour of the halls of creativity among our Stanford alums, Liza. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from Stuyvesant High School and in New York City.

Josh Landy
Our guest today is a man of many creative talents. I mean, he invented the iPhone and iPad and he was a senior vice president at Apple. And he’s now a Broadway producer best known for xo-producing the Tony Award-winning shows “Fun Home” and “Eclipsed. Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage… Scott Forstall.

Scott Forstall
Thanks.

Ken Taylor
Scott, you’re clearly a very creative guy. I mean, you’ve had multiple creative careers. Now on the surface tech, and the art and theater, they seem like really different things. Is there a some common thread that unites them other than you?

Scott Forstall
I would say the disciplines the fields are very, very different. But creating a Broadway show this was surprised to me creating a Broadway show is incredibly similar to creating a tech startup. I mean, in many ways—

Ken Taylor
Come on, give me one way. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Scott Forstall
both of them start with very creative individuals who start with whole cloth, they’re looking to create a new product. And in the case of tech, it’s it’s maybe an application or a device, and Broadway, it’s creating a script. And so they start with this. They throw their, their heart and soul into it, they pull the people in to help run the show to, to invest money to invest again, time and effort. And then at the end of the day, you present your product, be it a show or a tech product to the world, and the people get to decide whether or not they’re surprised and delighted by it.

Josh Landy
Okay, but I mean, it sounds like you figured that out along the way. Was that your thought going in you thought, hey, I know how to program computers, I guess I can produce a Broadway play. Why not? I mean, was it was that your mindset? Or did this kind of sense of the correction evolve over time?

Scott Forstall
No, it was a total surprise. And I knew that I loved theater. I did not know that I had any capacity to be successful there.

Josh Landy
So you took a risk?

Scott Forstall
A huge risk. Yeah, I had no idea.

Ken Taylor
Were you scared? I mean, when did you first decide? You said, Okay, I’m leaving Apple, it’s time for a new career. I think I’ll produce a Broadway play. How did that happen?

Scott Forstall
When Steve passed away, and I decided I needed something else, I needed to go in a very different direction, or something that would feel to me as a very different direction. I met a person who had produced Broadway shows. And then we got along well, famously, and she started sending me scripts. And so I started reading scripts. And when I came across Fun Home, I thought, this is an important show. This is a show that deserves to be seen. It’ll affect people and ways that only theater can. And so I dove into that.

Ken Taylor
So you dove into it. You took a risk. I mean, did you have were you like, utterly confident? Were you afraid? I mean, what was your internal state? Because one of the things we heard about and I mean, risk have downsides. You know, and they have upsides. I mean, were you worried at all and where you’re just like, confident you can do this?

Scott Forstall
I think you always are taking risks. And if you’re not taking risks, then you’re not going to do anything interesting. I mean, literally, at Apple one time we had, Apple had been close to bankruptcy, and we come out with the iPod, the iPod finally is selling, okay, and we had the best selling unit wise product in the history of the company. And then we came out with a nano when we knew we were going to develop it. And we cancelled the entire iPod Mini line before we even shipped the new product. And it could have devastated the company. But we did it. Because we believed in it. And so we took risks. So it’s about taking risks. That’s the way you get to the next level.

Josh Landy
I guess if you’re not taking risks, you’re taking a different kind of risk of wasting your life.

Scott Forstall
Yeah, exactly.

Ken Taylor
So is creativity born of repeated failure and then success? Or is there like, you know, I take a risk because I’m so good at this. There’s not really a risk. I mean, you know what I mean? How much is creativity born? Have? I tried out this? I tried that I tried out that.

Scott Forstall
I don’t think that creativity requires failure. But I think it requires the possibility of failure.

Josh Landy
Right, you have to be psychologically ready for that as a possibility.

Scott Forstall
Absolutely. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk coming to you from Stuyvesant High School in New York. Our guest is creator of the iPhone and Broadway producer, Scott Forstall.

Josh Landy
So what exactly is creativity? Is it something you’re born with? Or can it be developed? And it’s the kind of creativity you need in tech, the same as the con you need in the arts?

Ken Taylor
Creativity, technology, and the arts—along with questions from our very creative audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much to our musical guests, Jazz at Stuy. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Broadway producer and inventor of the iPhone, Scott Forstall, and we’re thinking about the creative life.

Josh Landy
Do you consider yourself to be a creative person? Are you hoping to have a creative career of invention and discovery? How are you preparing yourself for life lived outside the box? Join the conversation by stepping up to one of the microphones in front of the stage.

Ken Taylor
So Scott, in the opening, Josh and I disagreed a bit about how much creativity can be cultivated And how much is just a fixed trait? You know, you’re born to us with a certain degree of creativity. You either got it or you don’t. So what do you think? Is creativity, that kind of thing that can be cultivated and increased in a person?

Scott Forstall
Oh, absolutely. I believe it can be cultivated. I don’t believe it’s just an innate, you’re born with a certain level of creativity, I think you can grow that overtime.

Ken Taylor
So we could take Josh and make him a better poet.

Scott Forstall
I think for any given discipline for any given area, there are certain skills you need, and it may be harder for some versus others. But I think in general, I think of creativity as a mindset.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So let’s talk more about what goes into that mindset. I mean, as an educator, I agree with you, I think creativity is the kind of thing that can be cultivated, I’m not sure our entire educational system is founded on the idea that we should cultivate, I mean, take take science, a colleague once said to me, you guys in philosophy, you’re always teaching things you don’t believe you’re always teaching your failures, and you’re arguing with him. He said, in science, we don’t have time to teach our failures. I said, Wait a minute, if you don’t have time to teach your failures, then you don’t have time to teach the process of science, if you don’t teach the process of science, how are you teaching about creating new science? What a possibility.

Josh Landy
A lot of what people do in the humanistic disciplines is mean they’re, you know, from a very early stage, they’re, they’re invited and required to come up with their own solutions problems. So that sounds like a way in which I mean, does that go along with what you’re saying, Scott? I mean, that creativity can be cultivated. Is it a matter of habit and getting into a habit?

Scott Forstall
I think it is. I think certainly to your point, like creativity can be squashed. I mean, when you have a new idea, a new idea is like a very fragile life form. And a harsh word, an insult, can both crush that idea and the person who came up with it their tendency to create creative ideas or vocalized creative ideas in the future. So I think you can definitely you can hurt creativity. But for 20 years, at least, I’ve been saying that creativity is is encouraged by questioning everything and I guess—

Ken Taylor
That’s our slogan here. I don’t know if we stole it from you or you stole it from us!

Scott Forstall
So I begin by questioning everything and here I was actually inspired by my freshman year at Stanford, I took a class a psychology class from Philip Zimbardo. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Zimbardo is you know, one of the most famous psychologists who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, where he took some students and made them prisoners and some guards and immediately the guards became sadistic. Zimbardo is, you know, a great professor, but don’t enrol in one of his experiments.

Ken Taylor
The why we have human subject committees now.

Scott Forstall
Yeah. But I was taking this class with him. And he was talking about lucid dreaming. Now, lucid dreaming is the ability to wake up in your dream, you’re still dreaming. I mean, you’re still physically in REM. We can medically tell that but you’re aware and can control the dream. And it’s something that I’ve done since I was a pretty young kid for high school was really useful because when I was taking like French in like my junior year of high school, I couldn’t remember vocabulary words. I’d look at him right before I went to bed, I go to bed. When I got into a dream. I’d wake up and I go to the chalkboard in the dream and I practice these vocabulary all night long. I wake up and I knew it’s just for me. And so what happened in the psychology class, Zimbardo said you can actually learn to lucid dream is something I didn’t think we learned to do this thing other than sort of randomly the way it happened to me. And he said, the way you do it, is you constantly question whether or not you’re awake or asleep. So you’re questioning your reality as you go around all day long. Every half hour, am I awake or am I sleeping? Am I awake or am I sleeping? You know, you’re awake.

Ken Taylor
Sounds like he’s been reading Descartes.

Scott Forstall
Exactly. And eventually, you ask yourself, Am I awake or asleep when you’re asleep? And you recognize you’re asleep? So let me recognize this thing about you.

Ken Taylor
Let me ask you something. Okay. So you said a harsh word can squash, squash creativity? I don’t know, maybe this is not true. But you know, your former boss, Steve Jobs had the reputation out in the world of being a brutally honest man. Yet Apple was surely one of the most innovative tech companies ever. I mean, the iPhones The Thing of beauty they, you know. So, I mean, how did that work at Apple? How did all that happen?

Scott Forstall
I think that when we were working on a given project on new features, we protected that bud of a new idea. And we were very careful about that. Certainly, if we got to a point where we decided an idea was not good. We would we would cut it, but at the moment that we considered whether or not this was worth doing. We 100% Would would support that and you can actually create an invoice To support creativity. So one thing I would do actually, when we are working on Mac OS 10, right before the iPhone, whenever a release was finished, I would actually give every single person in the department an entire month to do anything they wanted for a month, which is kind of insane, because you’re talking 1000s of people, so millions of dollars of salary spent for a month for people to do whatever they wanted. And they would work so hard that month coming up with incredible ideas. In fact, one at the end of it, they’d present these, and some will get presented to me. And what I saw was this idea of a 10 foot user interface. And I loved it, and we turned it into Apple TV, Apple TV was invented, because someone was encouraged to do whatever they wanted for a month, and we turned it into a product so you can have that kind of environment to support creativity.

Josh Landy
Right. So I come back something you were saying earlier about questioning everything. I mean, you know, we heard in the robin philosophical report about the experience of being around a small child, and it made me think also Butler’s line. geniuses, childhood, we discovered at will, right, so but how do you do that? I mean, so you know, once those occurred to me to make a bridge almost between this in the theater is starting to sound a little bit like what Brecht was trying to do, you know, Brexit, this idea that if you, if you have the kind of theater that keeps waking people up, right, with the breaking of the kind of jarring breaking of the fourth wall, you can kind of get people on a little bit like your lucid dreaming, training, right? Get people in the habit of saying, Oh, I might be dreaming, I might be wrong about my experience. Does that seem plausible?

Scott Forstall
Right, yeah, and what Brecht would do in the theater and make you question what was happening on stage and realize it’s actually being staged? If you question all the time, what’s around me? What are the limitations? What’s the conventional wisdom, right? Then you’ll start to step outside of that conventional wisdom, because you questioned it. I mean, Heidegger talks about this Heideggerian breakdown, right? And it’s where, when you don’t even realize something’s happening, and until it stops working, and then you realize that, I think, by questioning everything, you’re, you’re looking for those boundaries, and then you can go beyond it. And to one more point on yours. You know, your child doesn’t know what they don’t know. And so they come up with unique ideas. The very first text message I ever sent, was on a prototype of the iPhone, because phones were so horrible about designing for sending text messages, I couldn’t figure him out. And so when we were designing for text messaging, it was done with ignorance, but we just designed it for what is the best possible solution not affected by things—

Josh Landy
So you got into the head of a child—why is it like this?

Scott Forstall
Yeah, absolutely.

Ken Taylor
So let’s—you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re talking about the creative life in front of the audience at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. We’ve got questions from that audience, and they start over here. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir.

Chapin
Thank you. My name is Chapin and I’m a sophomore in high school. And going back to the ability and innate ability to be creative. Do you believe that there’s a sort of hybrid between what one is able to be brought up with and what one is able to cultivate and cannot be applied to risk where there’s one point where one person is able to take a mailing list where another, it may be too much or too little? So is there a point at which there’s a meeting between these two thoughts that someone’s brought up with this idea? And is there a point where there’s too much and there’s just the possibility is just not there?

Ken Taylor
Good question, what do you think? Is it like a disposition to risk taking? Can you cultivate a disposition to risk taking?

Scott Forstall
So I agree with your premise that I think there is a certain level that you’re born with on risk taking and sort of creativity, I think there’s a nurturing piece. And I think there’s a risk taking piece there. I think that if you take too much risk, too early in your environment that doesn’t support it at all, it can 100% hurt your creativity later. And I think that’s a terrible thing. And it happens all the time. So I think the right way to do it is take the small calculated risks all the time you get used to and you get used to be right and wrong. But then you’re no longer afraid to take bigger and bigger risks.

Ken Taylor
So I think you’re onto something really important. I mean, one of the things when I was younger, I really loved philosophy. But I started out as an engineer, and I was interested in science. One of the things that bugged me a lot about science, when I was young, was that my science education was all about acquiring tools. The reason I love the philosophy class is because they were throwing threw you in there and you were arguing you could be wrong, and this that the other thing it was the process? Well, I think taking risks without the tools is a recipe for disaster, right if you don’t have like the basic fundamentals, but one of the things I do think we need to do is inculcate early earlier as we’re inculcating these tools, the creative use of these tools, right, and I just don’t think our education system does nearly enough of that. What do think?

Scott Forstall
I agree 100%. I mean, if I were to step over here and try to jam with your jazz band from here, it’d be horrible and embarrassing, I’d probably never play again. But if I started learning an instrument, up to a point and got better and better, there’d be a time in which I could get up in front. So that’s like wiring the tool. It’s the tools, you have to have a skill set. And that skill set enables you to take more risks in that field.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Stephanie
Hello, my name is Stephanie and I’m from Rockville Center. And so my question surrounds the original idea. So you created the Broadway play, or did you see a script and you perfected it for Broadway?

Scott Forstall
Right, I produced coproduced it. I was not the writer—Lisa crone and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music and the lyrics based a book by Alison Bechdel, that’s autobiography.

Stephanie
So the original idea was one thing, and then it was evolved and evolved. So is that actually creativity, taking something and then evolving it? Or is there an original idea?

Scott Forstall
So I think that’s a great question. And I would say 100%. I mean, it started based on an actual life of Alison Bechdel. She wrote it into a graphic novel. I think that was a creative process. I think her drawings are creative. Then Lisa and Janine took it and turned it into this this play on the same question we said was West Side Story, creative. West Side Story was based on Romeo and Juliet. And so everyone says Romeo and Juliet, super creative and amazing work of art that was based on a poem from Italian literature. So each one of these steps I think, is definitely creative in a different way. And I believe that creativity is a scalar. It’s not a yes or no. So it’s question of how creative and in what way, but I think all of those are examples of creation.

Ken Taylor
I want to look there, you could think it would be wrong to think you could think that there is nothing new under the sun. Well, first, that’s not true. So there, there are original acts of like, creativity, XD Hello. But that’s not mostly how creativity works. Right. Mostly, it’s combining and recombining new to think of what just got said earlier about the texting on the iPhone, right? Somebody had that had the idea that this device, which is a phone can be a camera. I mean, cameras existed before phones, phones exist. But the brilliance of the smartphone is like, I’m going to put all these things in one box. And somebody had the brilliance to see that, although nobody was like demanding that you guys must have known or somebody must have figured out that once you put it in the hands of the consumer, it would blow their mind that do was an act of creativity, wouldn’t you agree?

Scott Forstall
Absolutely. And I part of the way we did that was to figure out what we could build for ourselves that we would love. But sometimes it is the combination. If you look at I don’t know Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an amazing symphony, every note in that Symphony had been played before, and had been played by those same instruments before, just not exactly in that same timing. That combination is still creative. And so yeah, we took together a capacitive touch screen and certain applications and insert, you know, a certain form factor. That itself I mean, that combination was unique and new and creative.

Ken Taylor
And here’s something else I want to stress before we get into some more questions, that when we talk about sort of original ideas, like nobody has had that idea, that’s one thing. And that’s really powerful, especially if it’s an impactful, powerful idea, if you’re the first one to have it. But one of the things we need to cultivate in the young, I believe, is just a capacity to have thoughts that are new to them. So that if some kid was toying around with a synthesizer or something, and had never heard Beethoven before, and thought of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, I wouldn’t say Oh, kid, you’re just copy. No, I wouldn’t be amazed. Right? Because that’s one of the things you want to inculcate in the young, the capacity to go beyond what they’ve seen and then take it. So welcome to Philosophy Talk, what’s your comment or question?

Speaker 9
So I’m a Senior at Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey. So you guys keep on touching upon how kids in college education and education in general? Doesn’t kind of support creativity. So wasn’t good enough. Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t do it enough. So why do you think that is like, why isn’t that fundamentally built into our education system?

Ken Taylor
Oh, I have a thought. Do you have a thought? Here’s my thought. It’s a lots of reasons. One thing is that we have we mistakenly think that what the apples and IBM’s and General Motors and all that stuff, what they’re looking for, is merely people with tools, rather than this risk taking innovative thing. I don’t know I haven’t asked God this thing. But I bet you that when he was at Apple He was really looking for young people, middle middle aged people with a spark of creativity and not just a set of tools. Is that right or wrong?

Scott Forstall
I totally agree that some people think their job is to have a skill set that is employable. And teachers think their job is to beat that into you. And what I found was, there were people who had come out of incredible Ivy League universities. And they could write the best algorithm in their sleep. But they were not creative. And it’s because they had been so narrowly focused for so long, that they could do what they were told, but they couldn’t think different than we used to say they couldn’t think outside the box. And so I think there is a mismatch between what maybe some educators think, and what we actually want in industry.

Josh Landy
And it comes from good intentions, right? The road to hell, paved with good intentions.

Scott Forstall
They see these interesting tools, and they want to teach that but, you know, when you’re teaching someone to write, and you teach them that five paragraph essay, that is, you know, an anti for playing the game, you need to do that. But you shouldn’t then crush them when they write a seven paragraph unique essay.

Ken Taylor
Some of it comes from good attention. Some of it comes from fear, because people who question everything, their pains in the students who are trained to question everything. Wait a minute, why don’t you get that result from Teach? Right? Especially if they don’t really have the tools, but they have the tools and they question everything. They can be pains, but you know what, we’ll take this up at greater length. In our next segment, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about the creative life with Scott Forstall, inventor of the iPhone and a Tony Award winning Broadway producer.

Josh Landy
If you’re a high school student thinking about college, should you be trying to focus on one major right away? Or should you be trying to get the broadest education possible? Should you take things like philosophy classes, if you want skills that are going to help you live a creative life,

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Stuyvesant High School in New York City. We’ll take more questions from our audience of high school students and their parents, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Thanks again to our live musical guests, Jazz at Stuy. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about the creative life. We’ve got lots of questions from the audience. So why don’t we go this way, then that way, welcome to philosophy.

Justin
Hi, I’m Justin, I’m from Southside High School on Long Island. And as a like, I’d like to profess that I am creative. I don’t know, like what the definition of creative is, could span across many things. But I have trouble as a lot of people do, and all of the things that I do, because I’m interested in a lot of things and coming up with ideas. Because ideas are the spark of creativity is the new life form, as you put it, and coming up with them is extremely difficult. And I just want to know if you can practice that if you can practice coming up with good ideas. And if you can culminate the ability to create new ideas.

Ken Taylor
I want to I want to jump in here. Or you can practice coming up with ideas, practicing and coming up with good ideas. Well, that’s the that’s you probably couldn’t practice that. But the question is, how can you you can’t guarantee that an idea is good. But that is questioning everything. I think you have to become an expert, you have to study lots of different things. And you have to put your ideas to the test. How do you put your ideas to the test, we’ll try to build something, try to convince somebody try to get somebody else to come buy into the idea. I don’t think creativity is just a solitary thing you do all on your own you do it by engaging in a world that’s like gonna push back on your ideas. I don’t know, what do you think?

Scott Forstall
Yeah, I think you have to make it a habit. And so you’re saying you’re trying to come up with new ideas in the given field, I think constantly be thinking, okay, little ideas in that field bigger ideas and writing them down, bouncing them, you know, with other people. And I remember lots of late night talks in college in the hallway at 2am, where you’re throwing out, you know, these ideas that are different from what you’ve thought before other people, they help guide you to something that maybe is more interesting, more creative than what you had in the first place. And certainly what we did at work is we would get together and we brainstorm and there’s techniques, there’s ways of brainstorming where you throw out every single idea you have, but I think practice literally when you wake up in the morning, write down like two different ideas that you have As you wake up every single day and just make that a habit, I personally, some of my best thinking is done in the shower, which is terrible because I live in a drought stricken state of California. And as someone who cares about the environment is why I have to write checks for to offset my carbon emissions, because I know I take very long showers and, and a lot of things, when I have a challenge, I’ll get in the shower. And so when we were creating this new web browser, I needed a name for it, we need a name for it. So we couldn’t come up with one I went, I took a shower for like half an hour, and it’s hot. And I it’s the isolation, it’s the sound, it’s the comfort, it’s relaxing. And I can just name Safari. And so these things, I absolutely would go get in the shower to think and so you might find there’s a place that you think better. There’s a thing that you do that makes us more freedom.

Ken Taylor
So let’s that’s the like, you know, six habits of creative people. But I want to take you into our domain a little bit, though university, because Josh said, Oh, that that makes if you’re right. He and I are drill sergeants of the mind. And the university I said is a boot camp for creativity. Think about your own your university education. What in your university education helped you become a more creative person? And what would you recommend that Josh and I do as educators to like, encourage more creativity?

Scott Forstall
I think the most important thing for me in in directing my life toward toward creativity, was taking a wide set of classes in many different disciplines. When I got to college, I was certain I was going to be an electrical engineer, I was going to study double E, I set up my classes to be you know, the right level, high level math and physics and that whole path. And I wanted to be an inventor too. I like love the idea of inventing and anyone can be creative. I my grandfather, who was a farmer, used to go to the junkyard and come back with a massive random things, weld them together and build something which would help his job work easier. And he would then bring all the farmers from the neighboring county and beyond around to look at us, they could build the same thing. So there’s creativity in all fields. So I got to college and say I’m doing double E. My first quarter of freshman year, I took a class in philosophy from John Perry, who I think actually used to co host Philosophy Talk

Ken Taylor
Used to co-host Philosophy Talk—it was his creative idea!

Scott Forstall
So John Perry, I took this philosophy class from him. And I was blown away. I remember a few weeks into class sitting there and watching this epitome of a college professor with his you know, beard and and poly patches on his code standing there and deconstructing the Great’s of philosophy. And it changed the way I thought it changed what I wanted to think about. It changed my studies. And so I went back after after a few weeks of this class, and said, I’m not just I’m not doing web, I’m going to take a lot more philosophy classes, philosophy told me what to think. And then I took a psychology class, that’s what psychology tells me how people think. And I took a linguistics class that told me how you communicate what you think. And so I made this major, it was just created, right? As I got there, those plus computer science and computer science was the tool. It was the tool that took all these other disciplines together to create products on it.

Ken Taylor
You didn’t name that major.

Scott Forstall
The major is Symbolic Systems.

Ken Taylor
Which I direct

Scott Forstall
Which Ken now directs.

Josh Landy
This was not a plant.

Scott Forstall
And, and so literally, for me taking philosophy and then taking this wide range, completely change the way I thought what I took in college and beyond. And so when we were doing things like creating the keyboard for the iPhone, it required all this multidisciplinary thought it required AI, and I wouldn’t have had that had I gone down this other path.

Josh Landy
So that’s really interesting, Scott, because you know, there’s a there’s a kind of debate between people who think college should be vocational, and people who think college should be helping us to live fulfilling lives. You know, the kind of There’s that famous debate between Booker T. Washington and WB DuBois in reconstruction, how should we educate the college age African American folk and, and you know, WB Dubois, Washington vocational, and Dubois a no no, you know, the true college will have ever had but one goal not to earn meet, but to know the end and aim of that life which meet narcissists. But sounds like you’re saying, actually, there’s kind of a middle way here, right? It’s not just you should take a bunch of courses so that you will live a happy and fulfilling life. It’s so they’ll actually be you’ll be more creative and you even in your professional life. That’s about right?

Scott Forstall
Well—Yes, I 100% believe you should take this very wide range of classes and And I think there’s a number of reasons for it. Yeah, one is, when I got there, I thought I knew I want I wanted to study and I was wrong. So cheating, taking something outside of my realm, my field of interest at the time led to what my career became. So that’s one. Another is we’re talking about creativity here. And I think that a big aspect of creativity is tying together disparate ideas from disparate fields. And so unless you have equipped your, your tool box, with tools from all these different fields, you can’t make those connections, I want to say one more thing, which I think is really important. And that is, in today’s day and age, people are going to have multiple careers. So all of the high school students here are going to end up with multiple careers throughout your life. And so by taking all of these classes, in many different fields, you’ll be more adept at navigating this change in fields as you progress through your life. So it’s super valuable all the way. I think the great recession did a huge disservice. Because people ended up especially parents ended up telling their kids, they should turn universities into vocational schools. And so kids come in thinking, I need a vacation, I spent four years doing that, that is not what your make the biggest difference, if you’re going to go to a four year university, come out with a broad education be an expert in a field in there, but be ready to move between fields.

Ken Taylor
And I want to add a reason for that I agree with you. But I want to add a deep reason for that, that is, should be very alive to this generation. You know, you did your PhD, you were working in AI, masters in AI masters in ai, ai, ai is coming, right, I actually believe eventually computers will be able to do creative work, there’s still a lot that they won’t be able to do big picture thinking, making our decisions about how to organize our society for us, but they’re gonna take over many, many things. And a human being that is not flexible and creative and an innovative and, and and constantly kind of remaking themselves. That human being will be maybe left behind in the in the economy that’s coming. So you should prepare yourself to be a highly creative being. And that takes this D siloing. As you call it. If not, I wonder if you agree with that or not?

Scott Forstall
Yeah, I think AI is definitely coming while I was doing AI. Anytime we solve the problem. People said that wasn’t it. It was just engineering. It’s been solved. Now there’s actually AI doing work. And there’s great work out there discovering cures for diseases faster. There’s a lot of big data stuff. It’s really great. I’m not so out anthropocentric that I think I won’t be able to do even things like creativity at some point, although today it’s terrible. literature and poetry. Yeah, visible, awful. But the hardest things to do are things that require the most creativity on the broadest scope, right? And so the better prepared you are to pursue that sort of endeavor, the better you’ll be prepared to have a number of careers in your life

Ken Taylor
And you can’t I think your message is, you can’t be prepared for that. With just a set of like technical tools. I mean, I love STEM education, right? But STEM education can’t just be about learning new man. It’s got to be lots more than that. And that’s why I like the humanities—philosophy, psychology.

Scott Forstall
Exactly. As I was saying, like when I would hire people onto the iPhone project onto the Mac OS 10 project onto the iPad project. The people who were just stem were not often the superstars. The superstars were people who had a very broad, very creative bent and they’d studied literature, philosophy, psychology, all these other disciplines that made them exceptional even at building a tech product. And outside of tech, there are so many disciplines that require this broad education.

Ken Taylor
So Scott, on that note of stirring endorsement of what Josh and I do,thank you so much for joining us.

Scott Forstall
Absolutely.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Scott Forstall. He invented the iPhone and the iPad. He’s now a Broadway producer, best known for co-producing the Tony Award-winning shows “Fun Home” and “Eclipse.” So Josh, you got—are you feeling more creative?

Josh Landy
Yeahh, look, I love this idea that it’s all about habits and I think you get out of your own way. Right? Yeah, so much was about turning off the filter. You know, take an improv class, learn to get a little bit loose and stop, you know, quiet those voice in your head telling you it’s a bad idea.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you’re right, exactly. Improv Theater is a great analogy. I now teach my classes as as my small class, improvisational philosophy and I have students improv, and I think it does make them think, hey, I can produce this I can do something new. But you know what this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is Cogito ergo Blogo—I think, therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in that community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, either here or on the radio, we’d love to hear from you. Email it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog. And now, someone who’s living the creative life at warp 10—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… A few years back, a new job came about, called “a creative.” Mainly your job was to say, it looks a lot better if you do it this way. Does it work better? I dunno, but it looks better. Which is why the thing on your “desktop” where you “throw things away” looks like a “trash can.” Layout, editing, music, animation, power point presentations, Ted talks, email blasts, all became “creative.” Now, I’m a writer myself. When the digital revolution came along, I was hired by a video game company. But they didn’t quite know what a writer did, so I was called a content provider. That took the glamor right out of things. Writers, mainly guys, used to head for the big city to live in a hovel, have a painfully thin insane girlfriend, a drinking problem, maybe even a heroin addiction and get in fistfights with the sculptor down the hall about who was the true artist, Picasso, Bergman, Giacometti, or Hart Crane. Then you’d either starve to death, or get a job teaching art to freshmen at a junior college in Ohio. Those were your choices. So creativity was a mixed blessing. After your death, the room in which you wrote your masterpieces might be preserved. When the digital revolution came along, the garage replaced the room as a place of invention. This is the room where Charles Dickens wrote Little Dorritt. This is the garage where they made the graphic user interface that fueled the new economy. Jane Austen’s house and garden became so popular, her admirers were having their ashes scattered there when they died. It got so bad the museum placed a ban on the practice. Tourists were ankle deep in fan cremains. And there’s the plus and downside of art in a nutshell. Nowadays nobody writes novels unless you’re Stephen King or JK Rowling. Not worth it. Ask yourself, can this novel become a 3D blockbuster and theme park? If the answer is no, do not quit your day job. In that regard, a writer in Ireland was recently awarded a university prize for her writing, and it turned out she was employed by that same university as a janitor. Good thing too. The prize was only a bit over 11,000 dollars. Hang on to that day job, you artist you. In America, creativity is something you do as a child on a rainy day. Fingerpainting helps with hand eye coordination, but it’s not what you do in the conference room after the age, of say, thirty two. Some jobs required creativity, advertising, for example. And before all that, artists and writers used to be subsidized by dukes or queens. Now we have venture capitalists and hedge funds. Good news for whiz bang startups, bad news for Toys R Us. And good times for creatives these days, coming up with faster ways to get emojis out into the viral playground, devising new emojis every day, emojis that may interlock like virtual Legos, to create vast Twitter edifices that we can inhabit for Instagram selfies. Wow! Not only that, new algorithms guarantee that Amazon will ship before we even order. And while all that is happening, we’re finding the time to think about consciousness, mortality, the Rapture, stock options, and our Linked in resume. And we find the time and nerve to ask, “Daddy, what’s a career? “ What we have lost in the rise of the creative, is that idea that creativity requires a lot of inner pain. Great art once meant suffering. You used blood for ink. Well. Microsoft Word cares nothing for your art or your soul. And nobody suffers to make apps. It’s all just neat cool awesome ideas that never stop. Like a shark, if they stop moving, the entire digital edifice dies. So you can be an artist, that is an alcoholic selfish bastard who writes thick novels nobody reads, thick paintings everybody hates, thin plays only beloved by the French, and you’re dead before you’re thirty with only your drug dealer to mourn you, or you can be a creative. Think of what you do as not having value, but added value, like an emoji, or an animated gif. Or, oh look, a puppy! I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, and the Trustees of Leland Stanford, Junior, University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producers are David Demarest and Tina Pamintuan. Special thanks to Rick Shaw, Femi Ogundele, Mary Chung-Szilagyi, and the Stanford Office of Undergraduate Admissions, as well as Matt Polazzo, Allen Wang, Julia Amoroso, and Amanda Piaceki at Stuyvesant High School here in New York.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Sun Lee, Lisa Wang, Cathy Maguire, Anne Maguire, Marie Honan, Eduardo Torres, and our musical guests: Hyun Choi on Trumpet Derick Fang on Tenor Sax Jessica Park on Keyboard, Max Mah on Guitar, Box Wu on Bass, and Jeremy Panicker on Drums—Jazz at Stuy!

Josh Landy
The senior producer of Philosophy Talk is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. The technical director is Dan Brandon, and our marketing director is Cindy Prince Baum.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University. And the partners in our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis-expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders,

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk orgy where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for lstening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.