he built the bomb, described it in great detail, true picture of it. it is absolutely compatible with what exploded. .. challenge the credibility if you want, but i offer it to you and you can take it for what it is. remind me, what was the other point? about them not building bombs in the army? i think there is jim only a

question of how mcveigh and nichols learned learn how to build the bomb. you talk to people in federal law enforcement they will say it's not that hard to build. but as i say they say the record shows that to the extent that we know of about mcveigh and orrin eccles building devices, we have evidence of pipe von's going off in arizona and evidence of fooling around with small bottle bombs on the nichols farm in michigan but nothing on the scale of the bomb that was detonated on that day. i think it is a row question of how they built it with the confidence to know that it was going to blow a's devastatingly as it did. it is one of the genuine unanswered questions. does anybody else have a question who has not asked yet? yes, go ahead. >> could you talk a little bit about stross my and your interview with him? >> sure. andrea stross meyer --

there are a number of really interesting troubling and fascinating things in the story and one of them is a german national by the name of stross meyer who was living in the city for about four years from 1991 until after the bombing. and it's a real mystery to figure out who he is. over the years there has been suggestions he was some kind of an intelligence agent either working for the germans to spy on the neo-nazi agents or directly for some u.s. intelligence or law-enforcement agency. they're also suggestion that he was a true believing nazi and his grandfather was one of the early members of the nazi party and maybe he wanted to wage war against the federal government and was a true believer. i talked to him for four days straight and it was absolutely fascinating. the reason he became involved in the investigation was right merrily because he had met mcveigh had a gun show in 1993. he had given mcveigh his

business card in two weeks before the bombing mcveigh made a phonecall to him and he was asking if he was going to be coming here shortly which raises the question did mcveigh go to the city in the day before the bombing and in the book i found no conclusive evidence suggesting that he might very well have gone in search of other help. again another leading investigation that was completely ignored. it raises the question of what could strausmeier no? just to give you the short version because some of it is supposition and some of it is guesswork but the impression i got of him from meeting him and talking to them at great length about all of these things is i don't think he would have spoken to me if he would have been involved in the bombing directly. having said that i think he knows a lot he didn't tell me what he knows. i think he and mcveigh were extremely good friends. he talked very fondly about mcveigh. he have this incredible memory of their every interaction which

suggest to me it wasn't just 10 minutes at the gun show in 1993 but a relationship that went on for quite longer than that. and the impression i got is harry was. his father was a prominent politician in germany. yet a fascinating background which i dug into which had not been previously known that he spent a lot of time in israel. he was put on patrolling duties near the goal line heights with the israeli army. he met general rafael who was the architect of the 1982 invasion of lebanon. he has remarkable access to all kinds of high-level people. he goes back to germany and you still in the german army at that stage doing intelligence work. just that itself concerns me. it seems he had some kind of you know, intelligence related connection going. he comes to the kent in the one of the first people he contacts is a cia operative by the name of vince petroski who according to strausmeier was interested in hiring him to be laptops

operation to do his drug trafficking on the u.s.-mexico border. he was hoping to get a job in the administration and george bush senior when he became president come he didn't get that job and strausmeier could not work for him because it all fell through. everything i found out of strausmeier fell apart at that point. he became listless and he didn't know what to do. he showed no interest in getting a job or no interest in leaving the united states. he fell in with a lawyer who represented members of their radical far right. he prayed, hospitality of sidekick dave halloway and eventually they got fed up set up with them and thinking he could marry one of the young woman there and get a green card and get a job and get a life and get out of their hair primarily. his response when he got that was start arming the place and buy up cheap weaponry and full rifles and talk about the showdown with the fbi that they

all expected would happen after waco. and he became associated with a lot of the criminals who pass through. i believe it is to say that he'd mcveigh had a relationship and it was unknown to us was involved in the bombing. he would not go there with me unfortunately and after the bombing when his name started circulating and the heads of the fbi and did this -- investigation wanted to go after him, he left the country in a great hurry. they want to grill him in berlin and find out what he knew. the new. he was overruled. an fbi agent got on the phone with him and asked them a lot of our questions and they managed to arrest outside of the investigation in a move swiftly on. the whole history of strausmeier was left hanging. the osama bin laden family after 9/11 when they should be the first people that the fbi went to talk to but instead because

they had connections because george bush was friendly with other members of the family they were put straight on the plane and flown out of the country. something similar happened to strausmeier. he was about to leave and that was the end of that and again another hughes bit -- huge missed opportunity in the investigation my opinion. let's do one more question and i've been going for quite a while. one more, keep it brief. thank you. >> operation patriot conspiracy and the failure of the fbi to investigate the f. -- right wing extremist before the bombing was partly because of reluctance with waco and ruby ridge and satisfactory resolve of those issues was partly responsible for the bombing but i have this -- i am expecting the investigation to be a conspiracy which is run by the fbi where the papers came out where they were in for trading a lot of the right-wing --

>> i know the question. pat conroy is in operation for the fda but one of the view that the fbi managed to get through. it started in 1991 and it started because an informant told the fbi that he had heard among the group of texas militia people that they were plotting to assassinate fbi agents. the informant had health problems. he wanted money. everything he said turned out to be pretty unreliable. the story about attempting to assassinate if ei agents turned out to be mostly true and just as they were about to close it down he kept coming up with new stories but he knew how to play the fbi. he came out of the story about somebody who he said was trying to sell missiles on the black market and they looked into that too. that turned out not to be true and my investigation of what happened was the people who started it, it was a total wash

that this informant was not reliable and gave him nothing of any substance. there are people out there who believe that somehow pat, was this all-encompassing investigation by the fbi to the far right and points to some kind of secret knowledge that they had of the bombing before it occurred. i found no evidence to suggest that whatsoever. okay, if there are no more questions thank you very much. i will be signing books here. appreciate you listening, and all of that. [applause] thank you. nice to meet you. >> thank you for coming today. i don't want to one up you anything but i'm not trying to upstage andrew at all, but i was somewhat associated with this. speier read was very helpful and he knew some information and he was a the source of the book.

>> i do the warren show on kaytee and pay. we never look like we sounds off i don't look like i sound -- then that's okay. number two, i have an offer for you because i know you came here, you would like me and you are seeking the truth, right? this is not going to make it in the edit on the video, because i'm going to offer you and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the tour of the of this building, which in 1995 how is the fbi offices, four floors in this building. but, you have to do two flights of stairs of 10 steps apiece so if you will do that, waive any liability against -- okay? and no photography. and three, i was never here. [laughter] that is why it does not make the

edit. i would be happy to take you on this. is anybody wanting to do that? this is the place that they took tim mcveigh. he was on a helicopter to tinker base and he came here and i will show you where they took him if you are interested. spews this after we get our books signed? >> absolutely. we are going in at midnight. [laughter] please, get your books signed. see you enter. i want to acknowledge one other person and that is major stanley brown who is sitting here who was with the bomb squad. he was a major in the national guard. he wrote a journal on the day of the bombing that he very graciously shared with me and hadn't shown it to anybody before. a tremendous asset to the book and i want to recognize him and thank him very much indeed. [applause]

okay, okay, where do you live? oh you do. okay. [inaudible] my name is susan. address it to me. >> okay. thank you. >> it just never, ever came out. >> this event was hosted by full circle bookstore in oak lummis city. to find out more visit full circle books.com. jonah lehrer looks at the science behind creative thinking. and shows how it can be applied to solve societal problems. this is just under an hour.

>> thank you so much to the museum for having me. thank you thank you all for coming. is a tremendous honor and pleasure to be here to talk about creativity. i would like to begin tonight with a story about bob dylan. it takes place and really the summer of 1965, when dylan is finishing up his tour of england. it's been a grueling few months as dylan has been struggling to maintain an nonstop performance schedule. he first drove across the northeast on a bus playing in a small college towns in big-city theaters and then he crossed over to the west coast and crammed in the hat few weeks of concerts and promotions. he had been paraded in front of the press and asked endless questions from what is the truth, to why is there a cat on the cover of your last album? when dylan was not surly he was often sarcastic. telling journalists he collected monkey wrenches, was born in mexico, that his songs were inspired by chaos, watermelon

and clocks. that last line almost made him smile. by the time dylan arrived in london, it was clear that the tour was taking a toll. the singer was skinny from insomnia and pills and his nails were yellow from nicotine, and his skin had a ghostly pale pallor. joan baez said he looked like an underfed angel. for the first time his solo shows felt a little formulaic as if he were singing the lines of someone else. he rarely acknowledge the audience or pause between songs. he seemed to be in a hurry to get off stage. before long, it all became too much. while touring in england dylan decided he was leading an impossible life. the only talent he cared about was being ruined by fame. the breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in portugal where dylan came down with an ambitious case of food poisoning. the illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving them a

rare chance to reflect. i realize i was very trained dylan would later confess. i was playing a lot of songs i didn't want to play and singing words i really didn't want to sing. it's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you. the last lashes were in london. it was here that dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. he was finished with singing and songwriting and was going to move to a tiny cabin in woodstock new york. although dylan had become a pop icon, he was ready to renounce at all. he just wanted to be left alone. dylan was not bluffing. as promised he returned from his british tour and wrote his triumph motorcycle straight out of new york city. at dylan didn't even bring his guitar. of course, our story doesn't end there. bob dylan did not retire in 1955. after a few relaxing days in woodstock, just when dylan was most determined to stop creating

music, he was overcome with a familiar feeling. it's a hard thing to describe he would later remember. dylan did the only thing he knew how to do. he grabbed a pencil, started to scribble. once dylan began his hand did not stop moving for the next several hours. i found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of, 20 pages long dylan said. i never had written anything like that before and as sadly came to me that this is what i should do. is the essential word here. dylan is described as a characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of the creative insight, the flow of words that cannot be held back or going out nowhere my songs come from, it's like a ghost is writing a song. he gives you the song and then it goes away. once the ghosts arrive all dylan wanted to do was get out of the way. in retrospect this frantic composition allowed dylan to

fully express for the very first time the full diversity of his influences. in these lyrics lyrics begin here is mental blunder at work as he mixes together scraps of selenium, brecht, woody guthrie and robert johnson. the song is modernist and avant-garde, country western. would dylan did, and this is why he is bob dylan, he spun the strange thread connecting different voices. in this frantic first minutes of writing he found a way to make something new out of this diverse list of influences drawing them together into a catchy song. when dylan gets to the courts any know it's the courts as soon as he commits it to paper, the visual power of the song becomes obvious. how does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a "rolling stone"? the following week on june 15, 1965 dylan brings his sheet of paper into the cramped space of studio a at columbia records.

musicians are only beginning to learn their parts. like a "rolling stone" is cut on acetate. those six minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock 'n roll. bruce springsteen the later described him on the radio is one of the most important moments of his life. the story of like a "rolling stone" and the reason i am telling you about all dylan tonight is because it's a great story of inside, captures a moment of insight. at times such stories can feel like romantic clichés, sort of make believe breakthrough that to archimedes under the apple tree and yet insights to happen. they are a genuine and mental event. they really are responsible for the theory of gravity and like a "rolling stone." in recent years, psychologists in narrow scientists have tried to understand the mystery of these moments, why these epiphanies come to us, when they do and it turns out there to defining features of such moments of insight. the first defining feature is

that the answer comes out of nowhere, comes when you least expect it that way writer best songs when we have given up songwriting. the second defining feature is as soon as the answer arrives it feels like the answers of the solution comes attached with a sense of certainty. you don't have to doublecheck the math or reread the lyrics. we know this is what we have been waiting for. it is not quite clear how one could study such moments canned -- because you can put to bring under brain scanner and say have an epiphany, we are ready for you. that would be an inefficient way to collect data so scientists had to come up with a way to generate lots of moments of insight on the fly and i'm talking primarily about john cuneo said drexel. what they came up with is a set of word problems called compound remote associate problems. the acronym is a bit unfortunate crap. i am going to give you three

words and you have to find a fourth word that can form a compound word. we will do the first one together. the three words are pine,, sauce and in this case the answer is apple. pineapple, crabapple and applesauce. here is one for you guys. the three words are age, mild and sand. so if it happened that quick it is certainly an insight popped into consciousness and you guys were not shy about shouting out probably because you know was the answer, and you didn't have to doublecheck the words. you knew this was it. right there we just had a collective moment of insight. the same thing they discovered when they would give students these compound problems was that they saw a sharp spike in activity in the part of the brain called the interior

superior temp oral gyrus. is the cortex in the back of the right hemisphere just behind the ear and it's part of the brain nobody knows too much about. has been's been associated with things like jokes and lights up when people hear punchlines. the interpretation of metaphors. this makes a little bit of sense. when watching romeo and juliet and romeo declares that juliet is the sun, we know he is not saying that juliet is a big flaming ball of gas. instead we understand he is trafficking in metaphor and saying that juliet lights up his world the way that the sun lights up hours. the way we make sense of the metaphor is not by making a list of all the things juliette and the sun has in common because they have nothing in common. instead we make sense of the metaphor by looking past the similarities and instead looking for the underlying theme, those remote associations they actually share. that is what it takes to understand the metaphor. a similar mental processes required whenever we try to

solve a compound associate problem. we probably never use pine, crab and sauce in a sentence before. with this one brain areas seems to be good at is finding the one other word which is apple which connects these three words. has been fragile thread of connection between these seemingly unrelated nouns, ideas and associations. when you need a breakthrough and struggling with a very very hard problem, you probably are going to need some remote associations. you'll probably need to bind together ideas that seem completely unrelated, seem completely disconnected and that is where the interior superior temp oral gyrus comes in handy. they discover the importance of this bit of cortex in the back of the right hemisphere. the second thing they discoverep people to an eeg machine to measure the waves of electricity pouring out of your head.

what they discovered in conjunction when they became scientists at the university of london is they could predict on 28 seconds in advance whether not someone would have a moment of insight. thing for a second house for fetuses. they could look at your bgg waves and say sorry buddy you are wasting your time. [laughter] you should just go home. you consider flailing all day and it's not going to have an insight. they could say, pressure self. 7.5 seconds there is a pretty good chance you may have an epiphany. the crucial question of course is what the predicted signal is. it turned out to be something called alpha waves. they are closely associated with states of relaxation. reliably induced an outpouring of algal waves are things like taking a warm shower, going for walk on the beach, taking a nap on the couch in the sun, drinking a beer in a chair and watching television. whatever it is you do to push

your mind at ease that get you to stop thinking about work, chances are it involves the production of algal waves. the reason the states of relaxation are so important is when we are not relaxed and we are really focused, when we are really vigilant our attention is out here. consumed by the noise of the world. we are obsessed with the problem. the problem itself is running like a broken record and it's often a wrong answer which is a big block sitting right at the front of consciousness, common wrong answer for it is tree. as result the problem seems impossible. it was not until we are relaxed and taking a shower, shampooing our hair that those alpha waves are going and we finally turned the spotlight of attention inward and that is when at long last we hear that quiet voice coming from the back of our head from the interior superior

temporal gyrus whispering the answer, apple, apple, apple. me the answer has been there for hours, days or weeks but wiki didn't give our chance of self -- to list them. listen. most people assume when they face a difficult problem which they should do is drink a triple espresso, chug some red bull, do whatever it is they need to do to stay focused or chained themselves to their desk and continue staring ahead at the computer screen. this research access that is the wrong thing to do. instead when we hit that block, when the problem seems impossible, that is when you should take a break and go on vacation. that is when they should drink a beer, go for a long walk. the own serb -- the answer were only arrive once we stop looking for. reminds me of my favorite quote, creativity is the residue of time. we all have to get a little bit better at wasting time. i wish i could stand up here and

tell you that the way to solve every creative problem is to take a long shower. that relaxation was the universal cure and that alpha waves were always the right approach. but that would be very bad advice. as was famously observed creators have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration shining down from heaven as a way of grace, but this is often a lie. in reality, all great artists and thinkers are great workers. to prove his point, he described beethoven's musical -- musical notebooks which documented the composers kean process of inventing a melody. wasn't uncommon for beethoven to go through 70 versions of a single musical phrase before settling on the final one. i make any changes and reject and try again until i'm satisfied the composer remarked to a friend. the lesson here is that even

beethoven, the cliché of artistic genius date to constantly refine his ideas, struggling with his music until the beauty shone through. let's not sugarcoat. this rejecting process is not fun. is the red pen on the page in a discarded sketch, the trashed prototype in the field for stress. nevertheless such a merciless process is often are only way forward. keep on thinking and paying attention because the next thought might be the answer. so, what defines the creativity? it turns out to be largely defined by psychological trait called grits. when you look at people on the far right side of the l curve these creators like rob dylan, probably cost of, steve jobs, at first glance is not clear what makes them so special. you can give them an iq test and they all look pretty normal. they are often not smarter than the rest of us and you can give

them a battery personality test myers-briggs and so on and it's not quite clear what makes them unique to coast they are pretty standard personalities. maybe a little bit more open to experience but that's about it. i would argue what really defines these productive creators is these people -- they are grittier and more persistent and more stubborn. they simply refuse to quit. i'm reminded here of j.k. rowling who suffered through 12 rejections from publishers but kept on writing about this wizard in coffee shops while her little baby daughter napped. that toomey defines grid. the best way to explain the importance of grids is to tell you a story about a supermarket cashier. in the early 1980s in a college named -- paul decided to find out which cashiers in the supermarket in a variety of chains, which cashiers where the bat -- fast as so we came up with a simple test that took 10

minutes to complete and he gave people a basket full of items and check out as many items as possible in the next 10 minutes. you assume these people are motivated to go fast and they want to perform well so the whole motivation is content. they wanted to be more capable of what they're cashier talented consists of, their hand-eye coordination. that is what he did, gave this simple ten-minute test to hundreds of cashiers at these different supermarket chain censor enough he got the bell curve of human performance where some cashiers were mud faster than others. some cashiers could check out a lot more items in those 10 minutes. so he said okay i figured out which cashiers are the fastest. i found a way to measure the supermarket cashiers. then he kept thinking about this problem and realized about this time electronic scanners were being introduced to supermarkets across the country and he realized if i got access to a

scanner data, you know i wouldn't need to give them this maximal test. i would need to take up their time. a good look at this candidate and see which cashiers check out the most people over the course of a few hours or a day or week so we got access to data and sure enough there was a bell curve of human performance were some cashiers check out a lot more people and a lot more items over the course of a typical working day. then he had the bright idea to see if there was a correlation between these two bell curves. what he discovered through his shock was that the correlation was essentially zero. it was statistically indistinguishable from nothing. ..

you often find that these tests failed to predict what really matters which is performance in the real world, performance when it counts. an example of how maximum tests bail of become the combine, this carnival of maximal tests that every player in the nfl draft has to go to. the 40-yard, vertical leaps, but presses, the short version of the wonder lift him. in these function of nfl teams, very reasonable assumption is that players to do very well that the combined will do better in the pros because they have more innate physical talent. they're better athletes. last year to economists here at the university of utah decide to see if this was true, to see if it predicted anything about performance. what they discovered is that the

nfl, was a gigantic waste of time and money. that nearly every tested, and failed to predict anything at all about performance in the pros if. the sole exception was the 40-yard-for running backs. every other test will do nothing but a typical performance. now, the reason why small tests so often fail to predict what matters is that -- because of what they can't measure, character traits like great. a new character trait first identified by a psychologist at penn. it really represents two separate things. the first is how committed you are to a gold. in the always wanted to read that novel, to become an actor, to solve this scientific problem you know, is that something that is long of zesty? the second thing it just a measure is, when working toward that goal how stubborn are you? when he suffered through the inevitable failure and frustration, are those trying to

suck trying something new or doubling down and working even harder? those are the two things great attempts to measure. actually first by year at west point. west point have this problem to see that every year during the first six weeks of west point, really tough if, go on long runs, wake up early, get your hair shaved, turning a squishy citizen into a hard soldier, but 5 percent of first-year cadets dropped out, and west once had been trying to predict retention, of these tests, nothing predicted. she identifies, gives everyone the survey. you can take it on their website. the first test that allows was born to predict retention when they have been using it since he. since gone on to show that in so many different fields, so many different domains, from 12 year-old to the national spelling behalf, teachers to teach for america, the grid is just about the most productive variable you can look at. if you're trying to predict with trouble in the spelling bee, the supple with the highest i.q. score the best grades, it's the prettiest one.

at the grid is particularly important when it comes to creativity. creativity is never easy here. if it were easy that idea would already exist. that would have already been invented in the book would have already been written. creativity always involve lots of failures, dress, iterations. it is never easy. woody allen has this great ," creative success, 80 percent of creative success is simply showing. pri is what allows you to show up again and again. so far i have been attempting to describe these two distinct forms of creativity which depend on very distinct mental processes in the brain. the more practical lesson is that different kinds of creative problems benefit different kinds of creative thinking. the big question is up to evolve our thought process to the task at hand. he daydream and take long showers and when should we drink another cup of coffee.

what we cry's relaxation and we will require script. the good news is that the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose a problem, says the kind of creativity that we need. these assessments have an eloquent name. they are called feelings of knowing. they occur whenever we suspect that we can find the answer if only we keeping new of the question. my favorite example, the word is on the tip of your time. a very frustrating mental moment. walking down the street. you see someone, an acquaintance from high-school are a remote friend don facebook. you know that you know their name, but you just can't quite place it. and it always tells me he. i hated. and yet it is also kind of profound because how do you know that you know something if you don't actually know attack you know, wire you so convinced that memories are in here, your overstuff file cabinet if he cannot remember it? this return resisted these very mysterious feelings of knowing

the tip of the taxes they should come as annoying as it is, it is the hunts reminding you, if you just keep on searching for that name for the next ten minutes eventually you will find it. really somewhere inside your head. now, when it comes to creative problem-solving i think the feelings of knowing are really important advantages. numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to problems that don't require insight, the doe require one of these big associations, the epiphanies, the mind is remarkably accurate at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. we can glance at a question and now that the answer is within our reach if only we put in the work. we are motivated to stay focused on the challenge. what makes these even more useful, come attached to the sense of progress. this was first illustrated by jenny metcalf at the university. people working on various creative problems, whether or not they felt like we're getting closer or warmer to the solution.

when the subjects were working on problems that were typically solved in moments of insight, they reported no increase in want until the answer suddenly appeared. from freezing cold to burning hot. if there was no feeling of knowing. , typically answered only after people reported a gradual increase in wants which reflected their own since progress. what is impressive and kind of amazing is that people were able to assess their closeness to a solution without knowing what the solution was. this ability to calculate progress is a very important part of the creative process. one we don't feel that we are getting closer to the answer we have hit the wall, so to speak, we probably needed insight. these instances, we should rely on the right hemisphere which excels at revealing this remote associations, focusing on the problem will be a waste of mental resources. we will simply stare at our computer scene and repeat our

failures. instead we should find a way to relax. the most productive thing that we can do is forget about work. however, when those feelings of knowing how telling is that we are getting closer than we need to keep the struggling. we should continue to pay attention until it hurts too reliant on those muscles of credit. before long that feeling of knowing what will become actual knowledge. so far i have been talking about individual creativity, how we invent and how we should inventing and we are alone. i would like to spend my remaining time but dissing agreed of collaborations. interesting evidence to suggest that these kinds of collaborations are becoming more important to. best demonstrated by the work of bin jones. more than 20 million peer review science papers over the course of the 20th-century. what he finds, go back, 1950, decades after world war ii, the most important papers in the

field here, home run papers, most highly vetted, almost always the product of a single author, and the ingenious to all by themselves saw farther than the rest of us, shifted the paradigm all but themselves. think of hindsight, darwin, people like that. 1990's and that is no longer the case. would jones found is that king's , co-authors, big big academic collaborations heine almost always responsible for the summer of papers be read back, this trend seems to be exhilarating by about 20% and predicted he. now, the reason this trend exists is pretty simple. our problems are getting harder. although lohan need for is done. many of the problems that remain exceed the capabilities of the individual imagination. so we either learn how to work together or we fail alone. now, this raises the obvious question. how should we work together? what is the best template for group creativity?

there is lots of saying and the subject. i can tell you, do not print storm. whatever you do, it is a very bad idea. seeking of the input of outsiders. there are people who are able to see more because they know a little bit less. but today i would like to focus on a single theme and successful group collaboration which is the importance of spaces that bring a diverse mixture of people together. physical space is the premise together. one of my favorite examples of this is the pixar studios. designed by steve jobs when he was the head of the animation studio. and the original plan for the pixar studios called for three separate buildings. this pitiful parcel of land outside. three separate buildings. one would be the animator and one for the computer scientists. one would be for everyone else to more writers, directors, editors, so what. steve jobs took one look and said this is a terrible idea. instead, he insisted there be

only one big building. they actually had to keep the old belmonte canning factory, the show of it on sight. he wrote, it is not enough to put people in the same building, you have to force them to interact, for sentimental. he carved up this pitiful atrium and started putting everything important in the atrium. the mailbox, the coffee shop, the cafe, the gift store. he realized, even that is enough. you build people the beautiful cafe and services food and it's quite delicious in the pixar cafeteria. you know, computer scientists, this talk with computer scientists. there still are forced to share knowledge and the success of a company like pixar, consist of all these different cultures depends entirely on whether or not these different cultures interact, whether or not the animators are seeking to learn every day from the computer scientists and vice versa. then jobs at his big idea. only two bedrooms.

the entire studio. this is a big studio. he put those bathrooms in the atrium. and at first everyone thought this was the worst idea. i mean, you know, it takes five minutes as you walk from end to end. people thought this is so inefficient. i'm spending in our everyday walking to the bathroom. there has to be a more efficient way. but now you hear, the bathroom epiphany stories over and over again. a great conversation they had while washing their hands are the unexpected encounter that led to this new idea that it is pumped into the stranger in the hallway walking to the bathroom. it is the human friction that makes this park. the genius of steve jobs interior design, all about maximizing the human friction. now, there is some less empirical support for this. it comes from a study led by isaac kohen year at harvard. he says 35,000 peer review

papers by other harvard researchers. the location of every single co-author. and what he discovered is that physical location matters. when co-authors were located closer together their papers tended to be at higher quality. at least a measure by the number of subsequent citations. in fact, the best research was consistently produced from scientists working within meters of each other. the worst were collaborations more than a kilometer apart. in other words, our most important new ideas don't arrive on a screen. rather, they emerge from idle conversation, from too many people sharing too small a space . i think it is surprising. i mean, go back 15 years and people constantly declare geography, thanks to all these wonderful new tools, e-mail, skype, video chat, that we no longer need to live in cities. we no longer need to commute to

office buildings. we could all live in the excerpts and just telecommute. it would be so much easier. that hasn't happened. the opposite has happened. more people are moving to cities and have moved to cities and ever before. scape, attending business conferences. nearly doubled. even in the day and age we interact and share information, we still have the intuition. we have to me in the flesh. we have to have those incidents of conversations, those random encounters. and all these on-line tools, not against them. i think they're wonderful. i use them all the time, but we are about maximize efficiency. creativity, however, is not about efficiency. creativity is about serendipity, and that is still requiring these accidental encounters in the flesh. the last idea i would like to end with is a provocative one,

and it speaks directly, i think, to the difficulty of fostering innovation. in fact, it suggests that many of the things that we do with the best of intentions from brainstorming meetings to the hiring of cheap innovation offices, they actually get in the way. they and their our natural ability to innovate. that is demonstrated by the work of jeffrey west and a theoretical physicist at this institute. he studies. the data minds. these vast statistics on the census piro and the patent office and governments all across the world. crime is lower in some cities than others. the correlations that help you predict those differences. but one of my favorite points that he makes us to do with the difference between companies and cities. he enjoys pointing from a certain perspective companies and cities look very similar. both large conglomerates the people, but clusters of people

and a fixed physical space. yet he points out that companies and cities exhibit one very interesting difference which is that cities never die. cities are indestructible. you can do is city and it comes back. in a flood the city that comes back. terrible earthquake in the city will still be air. it is going to back -- bounce back. companies are incredibly fragile they dial the time. the average life span of a fortune 500 company, the average life span is 45 years. they die all the time. 20 percent of fortune 500 companies die every decade. what this place the difference to acquire cities immortal and companies fragile? [laughter] collective great. that is one explanation. west texas led a different tack. [laughter] what he has found is that as cities get bigger the exhibit this very interesting trend

called the super linear scale. as cities get bigger everyone in that city becomes more productive. and make more money, they invent more patterns, and more trademarks. every metric you can look at when people moved to bigger cities and the cities get bigger those people become more productive. this is one of the big trends driving urbanization. this is a lie in the 21st century a.d. percent of the world will live in big a metropolitan areas. when we are around other people we have these random conversations while waiting in line. of these frictions. the spillovers. every once in a while all of those add up. they lead to a good new idea here. now, companies exhibit the opposite trend. as companies get bigger if they sit sublet your scaling. so as they get bigger every one in that company he becomes less productive, less profit per capita, less profit per employee, of your patterns per employee, fewer trademarks for employ youth. over the long run this is a very dangerous trend because you keep

on getting bigger. wall street's as you always have to get bigger. go the bottom line. did you get bigger fixed cost, but you're coming up with your new ideas for every new employee eat, so you end up becoming more and more dependent on old ideas here. you have to engage expensive acquisitions for your new ones. eventually the old ideas don't work anymore. they don't work. so all of a sudden you are stuck with his extensive bureaucracy and no good ideas. that is when companies died. now, what explains this difference between cities and companies, why i city's super lynyrd, what did they make us smarter and more creative and companies do the opposite? well, he argues it is because companies get in the wake. the erect walls, they tell us to brain storm. they admit the celebre hierarchies and tell us to talk to and which promise to work on, try to micromanage the creative process. that is a bad idea. that interferes with all those random jostles kamal that random

conversations he that eventually leads to get ideas and blacks are serendipity. cities on the other hand are free-wheeling chaotic places. it a try to interfere. they let us do our thing. a pretty powerless person. he can't tell us where to live or who to talk to or what to work out. that is a good thing because then we talk to the people we want to talk to. we have those bonds. we have that friction. ceos get paid millions of dollars to manage this. and the thing about the creative process, it cannot be managed like that. so he advice is simple. when in doubt imitate the city. in closing of would like to point out that your imagination has really always seemed like a magic trick of matter which is probably why we have always blamed our best ideas on the muses. the good news is that by finally understanding where creativity comes from, new ideas, we can

hopefully have a few more of them. we can make ourselves a little bit more creative. but we must also be honest. the creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we know about now runs and cities. the fact that the imagination does not fit neatly on a power point slide it cannot be summarized as subtitle is creativity were that easy bob dylan would not be so famous. it all the clever studies and rigorous experiments are most essential. talent remains our most mysterious, and mystery is this, although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world, but its flaws and peace we are able to see beyond resources permit to imagine things that only exist in the mind. there is nothing. another is something. it is almost like magic. thank you so much for your time and attention. thank you for coming. we have some time for questions. thank you very much. thank you. thank you very much.

>> microphones for the question and answer. please raise your hand if you have a question and with a microphone to come to you. we will take our first one over here. >> hello. you make a very compelling arguments, and you're really funny. so thank you. brainstorming, and i have not read the part yet where you disprove it, but i heard you on npr. my experience in the corporate brainstorming is that it was the beginning of collaboration. if you just sit there and put things on the board and then, yeah, but if it is the beginning of a way of doing ambience are having an ambiance of creativity and openness, there is some collaboration. would you comment on that? >> and it's a really good point. so i think if one views brainstorming as a morale booster, as a way to foster a more communal ambiance, then i'm

all in favor of it. if it is a few good technique that is just about making us feel good, that's great. at think the problem is too many people use brainstorming as an idea generation draft which is how it is originally pitched and sold off. brainstorming was invented by an ad executive in aleksei osborn, don draper of his day. and in a series of best-selling business books from the late 1940's and early 1950's he outlined this amazing new creativity technique called brainstorming. two simple rules. first was whatever you do don't criticize. the imagination is very meek and shy. it will just clam up. it will be able to free associate at all. second rule is quantity over quality. according to osborn, these two simple rules were unleashing ideas. they were the best way to generate new ideas if any group. now, as i tried to point out in the book, the empirical evidence on brainstorming is pretty clear. brainstorming at least as an

idea generation jeff is a means of getting good ideas on the right board. it just doesn't work. people in study after study come up with better ideas. so in essence brainstorming turns us to less than the sum of our parts. the reason it's back to the very first rule which is the ashkhabad criticize. it turns out, constructive criticism is actually really good for us. it unleashes the imagination. one group engaged in brainstorming and the other in days in what she calls the debate in the sense those need said be the conditions. having these subjects to stuff like come up with ways to reduce traffic in the bay area, problems like that. as in debate and dissent conditions, but more ideas. they're better as well. a panel of judges. now, the reason debate and

dissent seems to be good, at least from the perspective the imagination is that you know, one we are just reassessing by ourselves and all ideas are good ideas and there is no criticism we tend to skim along the superficial surface of the imagination. and most of our free associations are pretty banal. if i ask people to free associate on the color blue, the first answer will probably be green followed by a russian and sky. if you're really creating unity to jeans. you know, a free association is bound by language and language is full of cliches. that is where criticism comes in. when people are in a group which is engaging in debate and dissent that big a little bit deeper. they are surprised. they're fully engaged listen to other people. they're actually wake. and that is a good thing. that is when we come up with better ideas and take advantage of the fact that we are not working by ourselves but in a group. so brainstorming as a morale booster, i'm all for it. as a means of getting people to spend time with each other,

that's great. as an idea generation tested needs to be replaced. >> do we have a second every? >> thank you. what is your opinion on the emergence of space as an incubator in the bay area, how did they foster creativity or mass? >> i think it's a great idea. and i think they build on a longstanding tradition faugh silicon valley in the bay area. listening here, one thing jeffrey west has found is that silicon valley has for decades of this is the end of world war ii been an unusually creative place. san jose region, mostly walnut and paper, farms, still inventing patterns that an upsurge clip and he does not know how to explain it. one explanation, san jose has always been great at fostering

horizontal. really good at picking together people from different companies, different domains to have beers at cafes. the home brew computing is a example. the club where steve jobs convinced lots of apple. but the early prototypes and solicited advice from all sorts of people. that is great for creativity. when it comes to the stance of incubators at the same thing, just at an accelerated pace. one of the lessons when you're trying to figure out why some of troubadours, their secret sauce, was separates them. one of my favorite subjects, the sociologist at princeton. he tracks 766 graduates who had gone on to start their own companies in silicon valley. and what he found is that those entrepreneurs with whom he calls

an tropics social network, so a diversity of friends. if they were a computer programmer, they hang out with other computer programmers. they make time to spend time with metro biologists somewhere else. people from all sorts of backgrounds and spoke different languages, use different acronyms. those with and tropicana diverse social networks were three times more innovative than those with predictable social networks. he measured innovation in terms of the number of patterns, how much money. so one thing those incubator's do is force us to mendel with people from all sorts of different places in a different things and expose us to lots of different ideas. jobs sizes, this great line about creativity is create -- disconnecting things. so many of those connections are coming from other people. that's why it's important is to get diversity, a genuine intellectual diversity. >> one up here.

thank you. i just wanted to maybe follow-up on the previous question about brainstorming. that is, if you could say maybe something more about the emotional environment. what i have heard is that if -- the do not criticize parts, about reducing the fear level. you can engage in dissent and debate, but if they're is a level of fear or intimidation or a party that that cuts off. >> you know, this is a real problem. i don't think there is any answer to this yet. i saw this at pixar. pixar is famous the critical. they are all about iterations. they begin most of their days at the shredding meeting. that is where they review footage from the days and weeks before. this large group can be five people, 60 people. they proceed to deconstructs, to find ways to make it better.

it is not a classic race from recession. it is all about criticism, but finding this loss and fixing them. and that is often a difficult process. sometimes you're going to get your feeling surged. sometimes it is going to involve being a little bit scared before you open your mouth, and i don't think there is any company that has mastered the approach yet. pixar tried to use an approach that they called blessing which is when you criticize an idea you can't just tear it down, you have to find a way to make it better. the bar this from improv. the yes, and technique. that does help. it is one way to reduce the fear level. and yet it is not a panacea. you're still going to have moments when you probably lose some ideas through that inevitable anxiety, you don't want to get criticized some of the natural reaction we all have. a lot of work that remains to be done in figuring out how to replace brainstorming, how to create a corporate culture that is not intimidating, that is not to caustic.