The art of invention with Nathan Myhrvold (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Nathan Myhrvold: I love intellectual arbitrage where you find solutions someone has over here that could apply to a different area. 

[00:00:08] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Nathan Myhrvold. He's something of a modern Renaissance man. He earned a PhD in Applied Math, did a postdoc with Stephen Hawking and became Microsoft's first Chief Technology Officer. He's the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, a company that develops and acquires patents, and he loves to invent solutions to problems. 

[00:00:48] Nathan Myhrvold: When we recruit other scientists, I always like to say, I need to find someone who's crazy enough to think it's possible, but not so crazy as to think they already did it. 

[00:00:56] Adam Grant: Nathan has also moonlighted as a dinosaur hunter. Yep. His team has discovered a record number of T-Rex skeletons. He's published peer-reviewed research in fields ranging from paleobiology to astronomy to climate science, and in his spare time, he's an award-winning nature photographer and chef.

He's won a James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award and been a guest judge on Top Chef. Today he's gonna challenge you to rethink some of your creative process. I, uh, I'd love to kick off by asking you, when did you know that you wanted to become an inventor? 

[00:01:29] Nathan Myhrvold: Oh, probably my whole life. My mom says that when I was two I told her I was gonna be a scientist.

[00:01:35] Adam Grant: What were you tinkering with in childhood? 

[00:01:37] Nathan Myhrvold: Oh, I took lots of things apart and put them back together again. The dreaded thing is when you had spare parts at the end and you think, Hmm, were those really necessary or not? When I was a kid, an old TV meant it had tubes in it, and the tubes are really cool because they would glow when they were running.

And of course it was also super high voltage in there. And so I kind of knew that if I screwed up, it could end badly, but fortunately it didn't. But later I took my mom's car apart and put it back together again. Rebuilt the engine. Uh, of course these days you don't need to take something apart to know how it works, 'cause the internet will tell you.

Um, and if I was a kid today, that's probably what I would do. In fact, I do do that a lot today. 

[00:02:22] Adam Grant: Given that you can, you can look up the answer so quickly now, is it a little bit like a magic trick that's been ruined when somebody tells you the secret as opposed to figuring it out for yourself? 

[00:02:32] Nathan Myhrvold: On one hand, I would tend to say yes, that it's cooler and maybe more instructive to do it yourself.

But at the same time, I know that that is a, a, a sort of a meme that has run through human culture forever, which is, yeah, those newfangled kids don't have it as good as I did. Back in my day, Sonny, let me tell you, we had to take our tube TVs apart with our bare hands! And the fact is that each generation winds up overcoming the supposed things that aren't as good.

The most interesting inventions are those that haven't worked yet, but of course that's also part of the deal is that inventing something that is obvious that it can work is different than trying to make something work that's never, ever worked before. And, and both are important. In fact, the incremental inventions that improve things a little bit and a little bit and a little bit, those incremental ones are way more numerous, but collectively they're hugely important.

But then every now and then you have a really big breakthrough and, and you love those too. 

[00:03:38] Adam Grant: I wanna talk about how you get to those breakthroughs. Your invention sessions are legendary. Talk to me about how those work. Uh, I've a whole host of questions about them, but the, the place to start for me as an organizational psychologist is how do you decide who's in the room in the first place?

[00:03:54] Nathan Myhrvold: You want to get people who have, who know something about the problem at hand. So, ideally, someone who has some experience with it. But too much experience of the problem isn't helpful. Those people tend to be Debbie Downer when it comes to new ideas. Not always, not always, but you, you have to watch out that you don't fall into the, "well, we tried all that and it's impossible" mode of thinking.

Then it, it helps to have some people who have a lot of deep experience in other parts of technology that might be useful. So there's a ton of different inventions in our modern life that are some combination of physical things and software things, and it's hard to invent such a thing if you don't have a good understanding of both in the room.

But mostly what you want are people who are inventive, people who are willing to think outside the box, people who are willing to say stuff that might seem crazy at first. Then you have to be careful that you don't let other people censure them too much. Now, I say too much because of course, an idea that completely fails, you don't wanna spend lots of time trying to beat a dead horse. But at the same time, if you are too negative, too early, then just as a social construct, it helps prevent people from coming up with a new idea. People can invent things that they don't know that much about. That that, that sounds counterintuitive. 

[00:05:31] Adam Grant: Very much so. Tell me more. 

[00:05:33] Nathan Myhrvold: But a, a phenomenon that happens quite often is someone will say, oh, why don't we think about it like this? And that may not be right, but it's different enough that somebody else says, oh, well that's cool, but how about like that? And then somebody else says, oh, but that's very much like this problem over here that people already know how to solve.

And so you get, it's sort of like a puzzle. You don't have all the puzzle pieces in, in any one person's hand. If they start, if you start showing your puzzle pieces, they can say, oh look, I've got a piece that fits with that. I've got a piece with fits with this, and you put 'em together and you've got something that's pretty cool.

[00:06:15] Adam Grant: I think it sounds like you're trying to, to solve a few problems. The first one is you're avoiding cognitive entrenchment. 

[00:06:20] Nathan Myhrvold: Yes. 

[00:06:20] Adam Grant: Where people start to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned because they're, they've just been too steeped in the old way of doing things. And then I'm thinking about some evidence in the brainstorming literature suggesting that in a competitive environment, criticism hinders creativity.

But in a collaborative environment, a little bit of criticism can actually stimulate creativity because it raises the bar. 

[00:06:41] Nathan Myhrvold: Yes. 

[00:06:42] Adam Grant: And people don't feel like they're being attacked personally. They actually feel like somebody is trying to help them rule out bad ideas so they can get to the good ones. 

[00:06:49] Nathan Myhrvold: If you ran a track team by having a bear chase the, the runners, it might be effective, but it also might be scary and off-putting and people would quit the track team. If you have some competition between the runners, that's a much more mild form of stimulus than the bear chasing them. 

[00:07:07] Adam Grant: I, I think there's often a trade off on the strong tie, weak tie dimension. We know that people who know each other well let their ideas fly much more freely, but they also tend to carry a lot of redundant knowledge.

And weaker ties are kind of the opposite. They open up fresh perspectives, but it's hard for people to be candid and take risks in those environments. So how do you deal with those dynamics? 

[00:07:28] Nathan Myhrvold: If you have a couple people that can riff off of each other, then the new person is more likely to be able to chime in and say, oh, why don't we try this?

Because they see it's okay. They see it's okay to not be successful in everything. They get encouraged, like someone mumbles something. You say, what was that? And you kinda draw 'em out of, of it. And so it, it's one of these things where, well, much like being an interviewer, what's the right way to be an interviewer?

Well, there's lots of rules you can put down, but ultimately it's a case by case situation. And if you're doing a, an interview with multiple people simultaneously, it's even more case by case because the interpersonal dynamics comes up. On one hand, you can't schedule success. You can't say, Adam, we're gonna get together this afternoon for two and a half hours and solve this problem, or we will make at least a stage three milestone towards that problem.

Doesn't work that way. On the other hand, if you do push at something enough, you have a reasonable chance of finding something. Now, it isn't always the thing you set out to do. You have to decide what is your goal? Is your goal to create new inventions? Even if they're somewhat coloring outside the lines and not the problem you were talking about, or is it you have to solve this one problem?

There's a difference between an invention and research. Research can involve invention and and often does, but it's also very common that a researcher will work on one problem for 20 years and they're beating their head against the wall, and maybe they get it in the 21st year, or maybe they don't. Well, that's about a problem centric view.

They have so much commitment to the problem that they will continue beating their head against the wall because it's so important to solve that problem. Whereas in an invention session, we'd say, look, it, don't keep beating your head against the wall. Yeah, give the wall a couple good hard cracks with your head and then move to a softer spot of the wall because it, our experience is there's always a softer spot of the wall.

[00:09:41] Adam Grant: That's such a great way to frame it. There's always a softer spot on the wall. I'm reminded of some evidence that roughly half of all patents come from spontaneous discoveries. 

[00:09:50] Nathan Myhrvold: Yeah. 

[00:09:51] Adam Grant: So as, as much as you might want to find the solution by just staring at the problem and applying a structure, sometimes it's, it's the unexpected moment that leads to a, a leap of, of discovery or invention.

And I think it's tricky to stay open to those though when you've got a problem that you're really committed to solving. 

[00:10:10] Nathan Myhrvold: That's why in invention sessions, we only have a, a weak commitment to our initial idea. There's a variety of things you can do with problems you haven't solved yet, but if you only focus on the things that are insoluble, it, it's gonna be really tough. Engineering is also different than research that way. If you're at an airplane company making a new airplane, that's what you wanna do is make a new airplane. Now it, it happens. People trying to make a new airplane came up with all kinds of really cool things. So an example is in computer graphics, there's a type of curve that's used to model surfaces and it's widely used, and it's called a B-spline.

By engineers and scientists at Boeing that were looking for curves to model airplane shapes and this really cool set of curves. And it turns out it's not just airplane shapes. You can model all kinds of things that way. And every 3D modeling program that does realistic looking surfaces uses B- splines.

Um, so that was a happy accident of trying to make jets. 

[00:11:22] Adam Grant: It reminds me also of a case where some, some digital imaging technology that was invented for the the Hubble Space Telescope ended up revolutionizing breast cancer. 

[00:11:32] Nathan Myhrvold: That's a good example of something I call idea arbitrage. In financial markets, arbitrage is where you discover, oh, the price of wool is this amount in New Zealand, and it's a different amount in New York. So, let's buy wool one place, sell it the other place, and, and help bridge this gap. Well, in technology and intellectual pursuits, there's almost always arbitrage opportunities. The, the problem with the Hubble Space Telescope was that the mirror was made badly.

And there's a whole story about why that happened, but then people said, well, is there a way we can salvage the images? And so they came up with all these very clever algorithms using something called Deconvolution to correct for the shitty mirror on the original Hubble. Well then of course someone, it percolates through the system and someone is saying, gee, I wanna sharpen these X-ray images.

They're not as good as they could be. Hey, let's try this thing. And it's this huge, uh, benefit. NASA, by the way, has had tremendous amounts of that in its history. The Apollo Space Program and other programs invented lots of stuff that was hugely useful elsewhere. Uh, so you could argue that the societal benefit, for example, sending men to the moon, it wasn't just getting people on the moon.

It was this incredible amount of technology that was invented that then was very material in the United States and other parts of the Western world becoming leaders in electronics and various kinds of software and other things. So it was hugely useful for an accidental reason. 

[00:13:12] Adam Grant: I encounter a lot of people who live in fear that someone else is gonna steal their idea.

And my reaction to that is — 

[00:13:18] Nathan Myhrvold: Exactly. 

[00:13:19] Adam Grant: You, you don't realize that creativity is abundant. It's actually execution that's scarce. And I, I'd love to hear you riff on that theme a little bit. 

[00:13:27] Nathan Myhrvold: Oh, it is totally the case. So when, when we would recruit new inventors, they'd always say, well, who's going to take my idea?

You're gonna take my ideas. I said, well, if you're only gonna have one good idea, you're right. You should keep it. And if that next idea is going to give you the next trillion dollar company, oh yeah, you should all just keep that one. Just go for it. I, I'll be able to say, I knew you when. Um, but if you are the kind of person, we really want in an invention session, you have tons of ideas every day,

and you have more than you could possibly do anything with. Execution is perhaps the, the narrowest part of the funnel down at the bottom. But there's a whole funnel of how do you develop these ideas? How do you carry them forward and hone them, and that all is part of getting this stuff to work.

[00:14:20] Adam Grant: Lemme see if we can run to a lightning round. Uh, you ready for some rapid fire questions? 

[00:14:24] Nathan Myhrvold: I'll try. 

[00:14:26] Adam Grant: All right. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten?

[00:14:32] Nathan Myhrvold: Life rewards you for specializing in something. And I've never been able to, to stop being interested in many things. So it's actually good advice. I've just never been able to handle it. 

[00:14:44] Adam Grant: What is an unpopular opinion you're happy to defend? 

[00:14:48] Nathan Myhrvold: When we made the world closer together by flying around a lot, we were just waiting for there to be some germ to take advantage of it. And I wrote these long memos and reports about that and say, oh, there's gonna be a real problem.

There'll be a natural pandemic, there'll be a bio-terrorism, there'll be something else. It'll be horrible. It was completely predictable, but the world did nothing about it. 

[00:15:14] Adam Grant: Let's go to a more optimistic prediction then, which is, if you could take a time machine 50 years to the future, what do you think is is going to be the biggest surprise or most exciting breakthrough?

[00:15:26] Nathan Myhrvold: That's almost impossible by definition, of course, because if it, if I expect it, then it can't really be much of a surprise, can it?

[00:15:34] Adam Grant: Surprise to the rest of us, but clear to you, how about that? 

[00:15:39] Nathan Myhrvold: Oh, uh, evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence would be a super cool one. It might cause humans to stick together a little bit more to know that we're not alone.

Um, uh, 'cause that us, 'cause we're humans are so good at doing that us/ them thing. And it'd be great if it was us/ them, but they were too far away to actually worry about. At a more practical level. Everything except accidental death ought to be solved in 50 years. 

[00:16:09] Adam Grant: That would be exciting.

[00:16:10] Nathan Myhrvold: If we solved things other than accidental death, we'd still have a expected lifetime, about 300 years because there's enough accidents.

It's like, oh God, that kid, that Adam, it's such a shame. He was a kid. He was only 103 when he died in that, when a bus hit him, we gotta stop this bullshit. And of course if that's true, I don't need a time machine. If that happens, I will not need a time machine to know what happens 50 years from now. 

[00:16:42] Adam Grant: Fair enough.

All right, Nathan, you were talking about physics. I have to ask you, uh, how did working with Stephen Hawking change you? 

[00:16:51] Nathan Myhrvold: Well, uh, I think two things really stuck with me a lot. One was his tremendous support for the people that worked with him. There was a invitation only conference that, uh, Stephen was invited to, and it was only for the head of each research group.

It was a very small group, and Stephen wanted to send one of his students because that student's thesis was on exactly this. And, uh, the organizer said, no, no, I'm sorry. You can only send one person from your group. So Stephen sent the student with a note saying, I'm sorry you didn't have room for me.

Which of course the idea you would jump rank and send a, uh, this kid in your, your stead was shocking to everyone. But what could they do? But the other thing, and the main thing about Stephen is here's a guy with his insane amounts of physical challenges, and yet he had a great upbeat attitude. He loved to tell jokes.

And the jokes were frustrating to the point of being almost painful, but he still did it. And because in the era I was with him, he didn't have his speech synthesizer yet, so he would talk. And the talking really wouldn't sound like human speech. You had to listen extremely carefully. And then you also had to guess what the words were gonna be.

So he would repeat the punchline, you know, 3, 4, 5 times. And the tension is just getting to be unbearable. But he would just soldier on and then finally we'd get it. And of course we'd all burst out laughing. But if a guy can do that with that sort of a situation, what the hell right do I have to feel sorry for myself?

[00:18:36] Adam Grant: You're an endlessly curious person. What's a question you have for me as a psychologist? 

[00:18:41] Nathan Myhrvold: Hmm. Well, the rude question, but it's one I think about, uh, a lot is does the science of creativity actually help people to be more creative or is it more about a, a study into itself? Now, I don't mean it to sound quite as rude as it sounds.

[00:18:55] Adam Grant: I don't find it rude. 

[00:18:56] Nathan Myhrvold: Uh uh, comparative literature is a academic field and it's not obvious it has any impact on how people write books. You have people that are creating literature. And you have people that are studying it and they rarely intersect and it often doesn't go well when they do. You could fill a room with books on brainstorming and creative idea generation and so forth.

And I've tried to read some of those and some of them I may have taken on board in some implicit way. But anyway, respond. 

[00:19:31] Adam Grant: Yes. No, I, I don't think it's a rude question at all. I think it's, I mean, it's the kind of question that I care a lot about as a social scientist wanting to know, does the knowledge we're generating actually help anyone?

Um, and the answer may well be no. I think in this case it's a qualified yes. I think that I found the science of creativity useful in three ways. One is that it helps people rule out things that are counterproductive. So we know, for example, that large group brainstorming sessions produce fewer ideas and worse ideas than smaller groups that begin with independent thought.

That's an easy one. 

[00:20:00] Nathan Myhrvold: Yep.

[00:20:01] Adam Grant: Um, I think the second thing it does is it sometimes helps people avoid becoming their own worst enemies. So we know, for example, when people run out of ideas, they tend to stop. But if you give them a little nudge and say, actually your first ideas are rarely your best ideas, why don't you spend another 20 minutes on this?

Then they start to go on more random walks and that's useful. And then I think the third thing is that I think that the science of creativity probably teaches us a little bit about what kinds of creative collisions are most likely to yield fruit. So we know, for example, that if people have a mix of shared and unshared experiences, if you have some people that you know really well and other people you don't know well, then you get that nice balance of creating a common language, but also, uh, bringing in some fresh ideas.

And so I think about those ideas as pretty useful, but they might be more helpful for kind of incremental innovation than major breakthroughs. 

[00:20:52] Nathan Myhrvold: But incremental innovation is super important. 

[00:20:55] Adam Grant: I think so too, but I'm biased. So let's, let's talk, no, before we wrap, I wanna ask you about your comment about breadth and depth, because I think on the one hand.

It sounded like self-criticism. On the other hand, you might be the closest thing we have to a modern day renaissance man. 

[00:21:14] Nathan Myhrvold: Yes. Uh, some people are born before your time. You're telling me I was born in 500 years too late. 

[00:21:20] Adam Grant: Too late. You missed your window, Nathan. You're stuck improving Windows and hunting for dinosaurs when you could have been painting the Mona Lisa.

[00:21:30] Nathan Myhrvold: Well, it, so, as I say, the, the world rewards specialization, the more specialized you become, the often the better you can become at, at an area and the more likely you are to get lots of societal rewards, income, all sorts of other things. It's true that it's hard for me to focus on just one thing. I'm not scatterbrained or, or have A DHD in the, the conventional sense.

I can go very deep in things. But I find lots of things interesting and I'm always very curious and that's actually one of the great things about the internet for me is when I was a kid, if I was curious about how does this work? It was a lot harder. The threshold of being curious enough to go find out was very high.

And now the, the threshold is, is much, much lower. This is what works for me, and I've found ways to make it actually a little bit of an advantage. I can even tell you, oh, that's the secret, Adam. That's the secret to all of this. Um, but to go back to Stephen. I once had a serious conversation with him about his disability and this condition he had, A LS and he said, oh, it's actually an advantage.

And I said, Stephen, look, it's a great thing to say. But like, we're alone here. And he said, no, no, no. It's like, look, obviously his life would've been different if he didn't have it, but given that he has it, he saw it as an advantage because he said, they don't make me go on committees. They don't make me do all this bullshit I'd have to do otherwise.

Uh, he said, when it came to an idea. He was forced to always simplify it because he couldn't, if he had a, um, a pencil and paper, he could keep 10 things in his mind at one time, but doing it all in his head and with people writing some stuff down and so forth, but still, he had to focus on a smaller number of things.

[00:23:40] Adam Grant: Well, who am I to edit Stephen Hawking? But I don't know if, if I entirely buy the case that's, that this disability was an advantage. But I think there's a profound point there that every disadvantage has advantages. 

[00:23:54] Nathan Myhrvold: Well, and you find that with people, for example, who are dyslexic, who they think in a different way than people who aren't dyslexic, particularly when it comes to text and linear thought.

So they have to think non-linearly, and yet they can be incredibly successful. Although the school system and lots of other aspects of ordinary life penalize them heavily, which is unfortunate, that's an example of the world missing a resource that could be great for all of us. Other people that are not neurotypical, people that are on the spectrum as they say, also have a tremendous amount to offer, or can have a tremendous amount to offer, but because they have unusual ways of interaction, it's hard to work with them. And so we tend to underutilize that intellectual resource. That's a tragedy. Now, it's a tragedy that has a hopeful element because over time we've also managed to stop being quite so prejudiced against a whole set of other folks that we also used to marginalize and not, uh, gain the full fruit of their intellectual efforts.

So hopefully that this will continue. 

[00:25:05] Adam Grant: I certainly hope it does. Well, Nathan, I think we are at time, so I'll wrap us here, but this was utterly delightful and I look forward to the next one. 

[00:25:15] Nathan Myhrvold: Okay, great. Thanks Adam.

[00:25:20] Adam Grant: Nathan underscores that people who live in fear of others stealing their ideas generally don't have that many good ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. The real barrier to innovation is people figuring out how to make their visions a reality. What prevails is rarely the best idea. It's usually the best implementation.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. 

[00:26:12]Nathan Myhrvold: You know, if someone is so shy about expressing their ideas that they can't be drawn out in front of other people unless they know them super well, well then they're not a great choice for an invention session unless they bring some friends with them and, and you can do that session.