. . and now joining us is kevin -- and the cleaner of the term internet of faith and is also the author of this book "how to fly a horse."

what is the background story on the title of this book lacks >> guest: it comes from a clarification of the right brothers explaining how the were the first to fly and he said his audience noticed how the paper went backward and forth and this is the kind of force we have to learn to ride. >> host: how does it tie into the theme of your book? >> guest: the interesting thing is why did they fly through stand what was the process they used because they were the first to have the idea and the first people to try so why did they succeed where everybody goes field into the answer is they understood the problem they were trying to score much better than anybody else but at the end of the day it was and about having ideas in

the shallow end of the lightning bolt of inspiration, it's about solving problems one step at a time time so understanding the piece of paper which is a problem of balance was the key for starting on the course that led to their flying. >> host: in the introduction you talk about the development of the internet of things and you say there was no magic. there have been inspiration for the tens of thousands of hours of work. >> guest: by me and thousands of other people as well and i think that was an experience that could directly to the book. it's a book i wish i read 25 years ago when i started my career and the lesson i learned

from developing the internet of things was most of the books that i read as a young man were wrong. there are no geniuses were moments. he don't solve problems by waiting for the answer to suddenly appear. you take lots and lots of steps many of which lead you to do and send you back up and start again. but asserted by building the internet of things directly it informs everything. >> host: when did you first claim that term and in what context text >> guest: that was in early 99 i was a young manager at the company from cincinnati ohio and proctor and gamble makes any household brands and i had an idea that i could keep my products on the shelves of

stores if i could tiny little microchips into everything and connect those to the internet but i have to explain it to the ceo and lots of other executives who are not as familiar with information technology as i was but they didn't know the internet was important to. it works pretty good. that led me to mit and i said given the same presentation all over the world individually. >> host: you also write and how to fly a horse you never got very good performance reviews and you were in danger of being fired. >> guest: i had horrible performance reviews over time because i was always trying to

create something that meant i was perhaps working on something unexpected or something people didn't understand. a lot of the things i tried people didn't understand what if it did work everyone else seemed to get the credit. so it is not uncommon for people working hard to create. it's not uncommon for them to be undervalued because they are always doing something unexpected. >> host: this is one reason the creativity myth is so terribly wrong. creating is not rare. we are all born to do it. >> guest: it's what makes the human race the human race. both fly, fish slam and human beings create. they've become the dominant species on the planet.

it's about 50,000 years ago which was only the 2,000 generations. it's really not that long. one human beings had i can make this better but up until that point it was like a point he piece of stone that humans have been using for millions of years and it never changed just like birds nests stay the same over thousands of years. it's a product of instinct and what led to us is the first human being saying you know what i can make this thing better. it ascended from the first human being so we all have this innate instinct to try to improve things and that is what makes us different from every other species on the planet. the idea that only a few have the ability to create which is embodied in this 19th century myth that are geniuses, this

idea is completely wrong. every human being has the innate potential to create new things. it doesn't mean that we are not the same but everybody can do it >> host: in a subchapter called ordinary acts you might case is clear to many creators into too many creations and too little predetermination. so how does creation happened and what is the answer to that question quite >> guest: it's an accumulation of many improvements to things that many people propose and executed. so even when we have some great inventor in the einstein or edison or somebody people build the statues of the new look closely you see they always building on the work is not just one or two people but thousands of others and adding their own tiny improvements as well but

eventually someone puts the last piece of the jigsaw in the puzzle as something complete and some things that doesn't think accumulate all of the credit it is a fairly ordinary stuff that eventually can lead to extraordinary results. >> host: but like you to believe that everybody is creative and not just you ask >> guest: building things at mit and seeing how many people were involved in how we were always acting as a community of creative people trying to solve pieces of the problem to create something new but then as i started working on the book. but the more i did i share these stories that i'd never heard before of people everywhere creating things. starting the book bonilla is the

most popular spice in the world and the second most expensive spice in the world into the hundreds and hundreds of years they can only be grown in a tiny part of mexico into the rest of the world was trying to figure out how to grow vanilla until a 12-year-old who didn't even have a last name on the island off the east coast of africa figured out how to pollinate the vanilla orchid which leads us to the vanilla fruit which leads to the vanilla bean. so as as you look around, you find apparently ordinary people doing amazing things because we have this creative potential. the other thing is everything around us has been created.

we are completely dependent on conscious human intervention for everything we do from apples which is the result of thousands of years of selection to television and cars and shoes. everything is created by somebody and there's so much that it becomes fairly clear fairly quickly that everybody has created. >> host: what are some of the steps we can take as individuals to create? >> guest: the first thing or maybe the only thing is to begin. how do you begin? it's probably something that you are itching to improve and it may be any problem. each time you come up with a solution you evaluate and the first thing you'll find is the first ikea idea isn't that good or it doesn't work or causes a whole set of other problems and then you try to solve those problems and each time you

evaluate and improve upon it you are taking a step and it could take years and you'll end up with something amazing so the trick is to come up with a solution, evaluate the solution, expect it not to work, the first things you try fail. keep going and keep learning from every failure and eventually you will forget some amazing. >> host: and other one of the stories you tell in the book is about kelly johnson. who was he? >> guest: a remarkable figure in the history hole of aviation. that's what he is best known for. that was the nickname of lockheed martin's advanced research group. during the second world war, the

allies particularly the united states and great britain realized he had a major problem. it was the first interwar and over the beginning of the portals of the planes used propellers and during the war it was discovered that he absolutely cannot go fast at 500 miles per hour and then british spies found that they solved the problem by developing something for the engine and they were going to bring a jetfighter into mass production in the mid-1940s and if that was allowed to happen and was unopposed by the allies then germany was going to win the war. kelly johnson and his team were given 150 days to build a jetfighter from scratch, the first ever jetfighter the united

states adult and that was a major accomplishment and quite unexpected but in doing that this is the story that i tell in the book johnson did something else come he demonstrated the ideal creative organization and its very focused and it doesn't have a lot of administration and it doesn't waste a lot of time on meetings are planning. it concentrates on the work of solving a problem in evaluating solutions. when you do that you can accomplish amazing things. they then went on to develop technology and planes have traveled six times faster than the speed of sound so they continued that tradition today. >> host: with regards to kelly johnson he discovered a small isolated motivated group is the best kind of team for creation.

what is the importance of isolation in that creation process? >> guest: the way that you create is by doing the work of creation and anything else you do so the isolation is from distraction and interference. second, it can be an isolation from the skepticism and criticism. you've already got enough problems to solve you don't need the outsiders telling you that it can't be done you have to spend your time believing you can do it and do it so it's the lesson that the organizations applied all over the world today you want to keep everybody that isn't in gauging the actual hard work of creating a way for the creative context because you can

distract and diminish the people doing the work if you don't keep them isolated. >> host: something else you talk about in the book. >> guest: they are a little bit misunderstood. they are a group of workers from the northeast of england who about 200 years ago rose up in rebellion in the automated loop. about 200 years ago it became possible to create a a living that didn't need weaving. he used a sort of punch card that contains the pattern and automatically load the piece of work and they felt threatened by

this and believed that it would be the end of their livelihood the end of the livelihood of their children and grandchildren what they did and though and could now many of them died fighting this, caught and executed or killed trying to destroy women's. but they couldn't know is that was the beginning of the information revolution. what actually happened as a result of the automated build and the industrial era that it held was the need for more educated workers than there have ever been before so as a result of those apparently very descriptive and potentially socially damaging technological changes, two things happened through the 18th century everybody in the industrialized world learned to read. nobody could read in 1800 nearly

everybody could read in 1899 and then following on from that in order to create the workers that could do the jobs in the management around 1900 coast of the .-full-stop the industrialized countries started public education so it is a result of the automated loom ironically the grandchildren got to learn to read and go to school so the unexpected consequence of the technological revolution was the much more educated population. >> host: we often refer to people who may not adopt technology that we know today. is that fair? >> guest: no. they were not opposed to the technology. they were opposed to technology that was going to destroy their livelihoods. they were fighting for their jobs and one of the the ironies they were aware of is the sledgehammers they used to destroy the automated looms were

invented by the same man that invented the automated looms at about the same time so in using the sledgehammers they were demonstrating the willingness to replace technology. it was the consequence of technology that they feared. and the other thing to say is it is a misunderstanding about the words technology. there isn't a human being alive that doesn't use, need and depend on technology. a lot of people use the word technology to be in high technology. they think about iphone for televisions or something. but books are technologies and wouldn't look like they do today without agriculture also technology. everything that we depend on this technology. in fact you could show conclusively that human beings couldn't survive more than a few days without technology because as we started adopting technology millions of years ago our teeth and jaws changed in the way that we really can't

choose food unless it is cultivated a we have the tools to cook and cut it so we are all highly dependent on technology even if some of the newer technology doesn't appeal. >> host: how did you get to mit and what was your role? >> guest: i was but a professor or even a student. i was working in brand management for procter and gamble to develop a technology they could use to manage the business more efficiently and they started collaborating with the academics and eventually we decided to procter and gamble should fund their research and in fact they invited me to go and manage the program programs alive is the executive director of the lab called the auto id center and my status was visiting engineer which is kind

of funny because i have a liberal arts degree. i spent four years studying the 19th century norwegian so i'm not qualified to go at all but my job there was to manage their research and make sure it stayed focused on the applications. we needed it to deliver and it was a very successful program. my cofounders who i should mention this led an amazing research program around the world. >> host: did you have a small isolated focused team lacks >> guest: absolutely we had a couple of dozen graduate-level researchers doing most of the work at mit and a similar teams around the world that i mentioned and everybody had an

incredible sense of mission and everybody knew what the world was and they completely understood if they were successful they were hoping to write history of computers and so yes we were very focused and very motivated and we spent as much time as we could leave the work in as little time as possible on outside distractions. >> host: did your study of 18th or 19th centuries ever pay off for you? >> guest: absolutely. everything is interconnected. it's interesting. i majored in the work of the norwegian playwright and a lot of things that struck me as when he decided he wanted to be a playwright, he had a tiny town just outside of oslo and he left his parents behind and never went back. actually moved to copenhagen and spent all of his time observing

people and writing his plays. he was a perfect example of the kind of isolation and creative focus that we need to have to be successful. by the way. in the small town just outside of oslo it's regarded as one of the five most important playwrights in history. they speak as a major accomplishment and really furthers the evidence that anybody can create and one step can ultimately lead to extraordinary results. >> host: you started to some other companies or other startups. describe the process and what they are today. >> guest: the first company that i joined was founded by

several of my colleagues and friends from mit and as soon as i finish the research program i joined and initially they didn't take any money and family would it do the work and we were providing both technology using some very advanced engineering not bite not by me but by my colleagues and gradually we built that company to the point you we riddled to raise tens of know it's - tens of millions in the big computer company and eventually the company was sold and could very well. i then joined the company in

boston because i wanted to see how we could apply the internet of things technology to the climate change and failing energy and clean technology. that was a company started by other people and that gave me a lot of experience. at that point i had the perfect work experiences and a bootstrap startup and a company that had just gone public so i adopted one of my own products with the professor from the university of washington and we found ourselves in a bit of a bidding war to help people save energy

and as we started at the beginning of 2009 which was supposed to be the worst time to start the company because it was a depth of the recession which was a wonderful result for the entrepreneur so i was very lucky and i had good experiences at mit. >> host: what is the downside to the internet of things? >> guest: i don't think that there is a downside. it means giving computers computers there instances in the 20th century they have keyboards and that's how they got their information and there's only so there is only so much information that we can gather

ourselves. it's trivial to gather lots of information about the world and what you want is the new information system to gather information for itself. so this is the world we live in today. our smartphones know where they are and use gps to figure out where they are and they can take their pictures and recognize their own spaces and so on and so on. so we are in the world that we are able to capture the information automatically which is more efficient and the next is getting to analyze the information so it can either give us useful information or make decisions for us, decisions like driving our cars for us. one of the big internet of things revolution that is coming very quickly right now is self

driving cars. that's possible because of the information in the system and that will free us up to get information to be more without wasting time or to have a meeting where do whatever we want to do so i really don't see a downside. all technology comes with a few new problems we need to solve. that's just the way things progress. but the ability to create new technology is a unique ability in what allows them to thrive in 60 or 70 years from now we have to support a population of 10 billion people so we need all of the technology to help us do that into the internet of things will be a big part of it.

>> have you been following the debate on net neutrality and if so do you have an opinion? >> guest: i have, and i do. it's a euphemism for the companies to monopolize television. we had a lot of discussion that they are really surprised. the big change in the television world is that producers of television content can give it directly over the internet either to the laptop. everybody is familiar with youtube for example but also some type of a set top box like a video council for playstation for or a device from amazon. as to so what's happening is cable companies are providing you with internet but they are being disinter mediated from providing you with television so we have the worldwide wrestling

will now send queue wrestling directly to your xbox or tivo or your computer. the nfl is looking at doing the same thing and i think the great fear for the cable company is there role will bowlby simply providing you with internet access so what they are trying to do is crippled those services so that you have to get the television from them. that is until the free markets are supposed to operate so we need to be honest about what is going on. it's in old monopoly and what is best for the consumer as competition. competition is the american way. >> host: kevin is the author of this book have to fly the secret of creation invention and discovery. he's joined us from austin texas