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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:10.613)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I am your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Samuel W. Franklin, lecturer at the Delft University of Technology, where he teaches history and humanistic thought to industrial design students. And we're here today to talk about his book, The Cult of Creativity. And really excited about it today. Dr. Franklin, wonderful to have you on. Thank you for being here.
Sam (00:35.15)
Thanks PJ, I'm excited to be here.
PJ (00:37.941)
So why did you feel the need to write this book? You give a little bit of a personal bio at the beginning. I love that. But also from a professional side of things, what led you to this project?
Sam (00:45.134)
Hmm.
Sam (00:50.254)
Yeah. Good question. It's a history of the concept of creativity, which was something that both kind of had never really been done, at least in the way that I did it. And I don't know if anyone had been really asking for it. But I felt it was important because when I undertook the project, particularly, but I think still today, creativity was all around. Like we were just awash in books on creativity, on how to be more creative.
on the science of creativity, the neuroscience of creativity, the philosophy of creativity, 10 steps to be more creative, unleash your creative mind. There were blog posts, there were creative mornings. I had just moved to Providence, Rhode Island for graduate school, which the year before I arrived there had just branded itself the creative capital. And I think it was one of...
actually many cities that were trying something similar, sort of defining their whole identity as well as economic development strategy around creativity, around the idea of fostering creativity and reaping whatever social and economic benefits could come from that. So it was a real creativity moment. And I was reading some of this, okay, so on one hand, this felt great. This was really fun, like,
creative city, that means more art, that means more fun tech, it means nightlife, it's young, it's vibrant, it's museums, it's all stuff that I like. And as someone who, as I did explain in the book, had always been told I was creative, this felt lovely. It felt like everyone was saying I was the most important kind of person in today's society. There was a lot of...
still a lot of kind of new economy talk. This was all in the context of this idea that in America and Europe and the West, that the old era of dirty industry, of like making things and manufacturing was disappearing. And with it, the old culture of the button down, gray flannel suit, follow the rules, sit in your desk, fall in line.
Sam (03:10.51)
And what we were entering was an information economy or a knowledge economy or, as some put it, a creative economy where creativity and creative people were going to be the kind of saviors and also the winners. And so for someone like me, who had all the kind of hallmarks of being a creative person, this felt really great. At the same time, it felt really bad, like it was hiding something bad.
it felt quite self-serving. Like I wasn't sure whether me as a creative person was actually going to contribute anything that worthwhile to the world or to the economy. A lot of these economic development strategies based on the idea of promoting economy were essentially just trying to attract highly educated knowledge workers who would produce cycles of gentrification that was not a particularly great.
or equitable strategy for economic development, even though it sounded really nice because it was creativity and And and I also sort of felt like there was some kind of Synergy, I guess between this Cult of creativity as I came to call it this kind of idea that This state of affairs where creativity is this thing that everybody kind of can agree upon. I felt like it had some synergy
with a larger culture of work, and particularly of overwork, and of these messages that you should do what you love and love what you do, and you should always be kind of working, and work should feel like play, and all this stuff that, again, sounds really great and was kind of an ideal that I had been brought up to pursue, but which I found was, let's say, it was kind of underwriting or hiding a lot of
PJ (04:44.309)
Hmm.
Sam (05:08.398)
exploitation and self-exploitation, and I felt like I became sympathetic to people like Richard Sennett, who was writing at the time about a need to return to a craftsman-like ethic. Okay, these things that feel kind of stodgy and were a little bit hard to get next to at first, but a kind of a respect for hard work, for a job well done, for work that might be kind of repetitive and rote but might be...
really, really satisfying in the end. And I also realized that a lot of what we consider creative work involves a lot of that kind of stuff. And that this idea that artists are really creative and are constantly sort of chasing the next new idea was also a bit overblown and didn't really describe what artists do. So to make a long story short, there were all these problems with this idea of creativity. And what I realized is they kind of came down to some
disagreements about what creativity even was, or not disagreements, but let's say fuzziness, about what the term even meant. Is it a cognitive ability that some people have and others don't? Is it a process that we all go through? Is it art? It seems like it's about art. It always seems to kind of invoke the idea of art at least. Or was it about something broader, technology?
PJ (06:09.877)
Hmm.
Sam (06:33.326)
business, all kinds of other things like that. And to finally get to your point, what I realized also at the same time was that the term itself and all of its fuzziness was really, really new. And I learned this by typing it into Google's Ngram Viewer, which was a brand new tool that they had released right at the time that I started this project. And I typed the word creativity in and I saw that it was really, really new. Like it didn't even enter our vocabulary.
until the 1950s, which for an idea, for a word that sounds like an ancient idea, sounds like something that the Greek philosophers would have been debating and that at least Kant would have been writing about and that, you know, at least Dewey or John Dewey or someone, none of them used that term itself. And so I started wondering, could it be that it's not the case that this term creativity is now being used?
kind of more broadly or in ways that it wasn't intended to be used, but that it appeared at a time, um, kind of recently to, to essentially to confuse us. And that's, that's, so I went about trying to figure out like, trying to get inside that curve, basically, that explosion of creativity talk, who, who was using that word? What were they using it to say? Why did they adopt that word and not other near synonyms like
imagination or genius or ingenuity or originality? What was it about this term creativity that was so kind of attractive to those people at the time? What were they about? What were they dealing with? What was their context? And how did it continue to be so resonant today?
PJ (08:19.541)
One, thank you. You have left me a lot to think about and a lot to ask about.
Sam (08:27.406)
That was probably the longest single recital of that answer that I've ever given. So I hope you're serious about listening.
PJ (08:32.501)
That's a great answer. Yes, no, I am. I am. So, a couple things. One is, I myself have said it, but I've heard over and over, love what you do and you'll never work a day in your life. That immediately popped in my head. Two...
Personal notes, one is that I work my day job, my wife and I run a digital marketing agency and we work with keynote speakers. So when you talk about, like not all of them, but probably a third of them, it's like, when you, we work with the people who do the, how to be creative in 10 steps in your workplace, how to like bring out the best, like that.
Sam (09:01.838)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (09:16.942)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (09:21.141)
I'm not gonna lie, I had a little bit of like a PTSD flashback. I was like, oh no, I'm in another marketing meeting talking about this. And then you mentioned yourself and this actually shows up, you know, I don't know, this actually has a lot of personal touches for me, one from the marketing side, which is what I do as a day job. And you mentioned as a kid, you know, you were labeled the, like, you were the creative one and you talk about like that in the chapter in the book.
Um, and I was in fifth grade and at the end of the year, they had like a little ceremony with the parents and they would give each kid a character trait. And this was a Christian school. So they did like the fruits of the spirit. So they had like love, joy, you know, like kindness, faithful, generous, and everyone got like very biblical terms. And I got creative, which probably tells you, tells you a lot about the kind of kid I was in the classroom.
Sam (10:14.958)
Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, well, what... Yeah. No, what do you think it meant? What do you think that was based on?
PJ (10:20.629)
But, yeah, go ahead.
Oh, uh, um, uh, some of it is seeing my own kids in action now. Uh, it's probably that, you know, just getting lost in their own story, right? Like it's this like, uh, responding with way more than was asked for, like on numerous occasions, but, uh, just anyways, I like what I was reading about this stuff with the kids and I was like, Oh, I.
I know exactly what it's like to be, you know, you mentioned your own experience. I was like, I know exactly what that feels like. Um, very publicly, right? Um, it wasn't, it wasn't a bad thing. I was like, I'm creative. That's cool. You know, cause like that you're not a genius, but if you get creative at fifth grade, you're like, maybe, maybe someday I can be a genius. You know, you mentioned that democratization of genius. Um,
Sam (10:56.59)
Yeah.
Sam (11:09.038)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
PJ (11:13.877)
So, and then you mentioned that the way you put it, I love the way you put it in the book, that the slipperiness of the word is a feature, not a bug. And so, I talked to, we live in a multi-generational house, so my mom and dad live with us. And so I talked to my mom and I talked to my wife. And I told them that creativity, the first time it was put in a dictionary is 1966.
Sam (11:23.726)
Hmm.
Sam (11:33.838)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (11:43.029)
I'm sure you know, like I was shocked because you mentioned in the book, first question they both asked is like, well, what did they call it before? And which is exactly what you say in the book. And I found myself and I think this is what when you talk about the slipperiness of it, the way that it was used more for an agenda, because when people start, as soon as you start actually like nearing down, like it does cover things that have been talked about by philosophers, right?
Sam (11:50.446)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
PJ (12:12.821)
Like you talk about Kant and productive imagination, but when you look more carefully, the productive imagination in Kant does not cover this massive territory. It's what you talked about, that very singular faculty in the brain. And so there's a lot that you talk about here that's interesting and I think is just
Sam (12:13.006)
Mm-hmm, absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
Sam (12:25.422)
Hmm
Sam (12:31.63)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (12:42.741)
I love these moments when someone can open up something that we just take for granted and you just find this like The words kind of bottomless chasm at the you know, you're just like wait, I'm like this whole time I thought this was like here forever So Can you talk a little bit about like one of the things that you draw is it really starts with the psychologist? And sorry, I know I'd like there was just like there's so many personal connections so I apologize take us along but
Sam (12:52.558)
Hehehe
Hmm.
Sam (13:06.222)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (13:12.885)
You know, you go from the way it goes into the workplace and also into education. Can you talk a little bit about how this started really as it seems like a psychological concept?
Sam (13:23.438)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And by the way, all that stuff you said, I hope we can return to some of it, because yeah, it's all super interesting. The, yeah, and I hope that by the end of this, the listeners will understand what I meant when I said it's a feature, not a bug. And I think the best way to get to that is through the story, so the history. And so as you mentioned, the main players in the story, as I found it,
um, by going back to seeing like who, who was really writing about creativity and producing the knowledge about it. And it was, um, a lot of psychologists. It was them kind of in conversation with, and I, and the, the, the book goes in chapters kind of back and forth between psychology, history of psychology and the story of, of business management, people, consultants.
And I really hope that I show that these are really interwoven. Like, the same people kind of pop up in both sides of the story, because they're kind of talking to one another, even though they would see themselves potentially as different and in some cases see themselves as somewhat adversarial. And some of those people are educational psychologists as well. So one interesting factoid that I don't know if I put in the book is that the term create...
The first time we see creativity in, the first time the Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers have been able to find it is 1875, which is really late for almost any word. As I mentioned, we don't really actually use it in a regular way until several decades later. But the term creativeness was also quite rare, but more common than creativity for a long time. And I think,
This is my hypothesis, is that creativeness is a little bit easier to grab. It's like this soup tastes like carrot. It's got a real carrot-ness. The N-E-S-S suffix is quite comfortable to us. It's a Germanic suffix. I-T-Y is Latin, and that's what we use when we coin scientific terms. And creativity surpassed creativeness.
Sam (15:49.998)
only in the 19, around 1950. And that's when this group of psychologists first took up the term. And it happened quite suddenly. The president of the American Psychological Association, his name was J. Paul Guilford. He used his speech that year, I don't know if it was actually in 1949 or 1950, but anyway, it was the 1950 issue of the journal that it appeared in, it was called Creativity.
PJ (15:53.973)
Mmm.
Sam (16:17.582)
And he said that creativity is an area that psychologists have feared to tread. We've been focusing on little things. He was referring to behaviorism, which was the kind of reigning mode of psychology at that moment, which was a lot of that research was done on rats. It was very much about kind of these little neural kind of networks and behavioral responses to things.
it had sort of distanced itself from big questions of metaphysics, of genius, of the kind of higher things. And so Guilford wanted a psychologist to get back to this. But he himself was actually a psychometrician. So he was actually a very empirical kind of psychologist who was involved with test, mental testing. And so what he was actually trying to do is to reorient the science of mental testing, which had been obsessed with
intelligence and reorient it toward creativity, what he called creativity, which for him was kind of a broader scope, which would involve big questions of genius and of the higher sort of aspects of humanity, but which would also include more pedestrian moments of cleverness or of problem solving. And I can get into why that kind of that was important that it encompassed both of those things. But so following his lead.
Many psychologists through the 50s and early 60s gravitated toward creativity research. And they did it in many different ways, using many different methods. It attracted a lot of funding. Most of that early funding was from the military. The Office of Naval Research was, which was kind of the first big military funding apparatus for basic scientific research. The National Science Foundation, which was also founded in 1950, the same year.
PJ (18:08.725)
Cough, cough.
Sam (18:12.654)
as Guilford's speech, and there were lots of different conferences about creativity research, people sort of gathering around it. And the word actually matters, right, because some of those people may have been doing research on what they called problem-solving. They might have been doing research on what they called creative intelligence. They might have been doing research on art, on art in children, art education.
Some of them may have been doing research on genius scientists, right? But they all kind of were able to come together around this vague concept of creativity, which kind of encompassed all of those things. And I think it's important that it encompassed all of those things. From the beginning, it had a quite practical use. As I mentioned, like the National Science Foundation, they went to this guy, Calvin Taylor.
And they said, hey, we need to find a testing regime to identify the best scientists for some kind of graduate student fellowship that we're doing. And he, having just heard Guilford's speech said, well, we actually, we really need to identify creative scientists. That's who we're gonna need to stay ahead of the Soviets. And to...
develop new products for the consumer economy. These are kind of the two sides of the American dominance after World War II. And so you're going to need to give us more money to research this new topic, this new frontier. And so the National Science Foundation funded these conferences that happened every couple of years in Utah, where all these people gather and talk about kind of all these various aspects of this.
concept that's starting to kind of concretize around creativity. And I can say a lot more about that, but the one thing that I'll add is that from the beginning, a lot of the people who were attending and who were involved in the committees and those conferences were research directors at corporations in various military branches. They were the people who were responsible for creating real technological and consumer innovation. So.
Sam (20:36.206)
The center of this creativity conversation was not artists, it was not people in literature, it was not at first people in childhood education. This really had a very practical business in tech and engineering focus from the beginning, and I think that set the tone for a lot of what followed after.
PJ (20:58.261)
There's a cynic in me that says it was businessmen pretending to be artists, kind of like, and this is why we see the locusts a lot of this in Silicon Valley today with that. Or is that too sharp? Too, yeah. Very Steve Jobs, very Steve Jobish, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Sam (21:08.718)
Yeah. No, no, no, absolutely. No, absolutely.
Sam (21:16.942)
Yeah, so I think what you're seeing during this time is a crisis of faith in science writ large. And that doesn't just mean that people didn't trust science, but it means that the ideal of science, which is to say, extremely rational, self-negating. So in other words, your own kind of soul or identity or personality should have nothing to do with
your work, you should try as hard as possible to kind of take yourself out of it. As well as I think it's connected to a social ethic, an idea that science is a communal pursuit or a pursuit that happens not just with a bunch of individual geniuses but stepwise and iteratively with a lot of people contributing. And I think this mirrored a larger social ethic.
that was really dominant between World War I and World War II. And so the figure of the expert, of the scientist, of the technocrat, that was the heyday of that figure. Now for a variety of reasons, but mostly we can just think about World War II, the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, things that were seen by many critics, left, right, center, as being essentially products of the enlightenment attitude.
uh, towards science, products of a kind of rationality run amok. They, this opened up some space for a neo-romantic vibe. So, um, a new respect for, um, what we would now call creativity. That's kind of what comes out of it, but like a respect for, you know, individual difference, a respect for individual, individual moral compass, um.
PJ (23:01.141)
Right, right, yeah.
Sam (23:11.146)
a various kinds of countercultural movements that are, you know, seem countercultural but are actually really beloved in a way by the mainstream for being an antidote to this overly rationalized society which everybody sees as the enemy and whose major manifestation is the dreaded conformity, which is this kind of social disease that is both what makes communism bad and what makes consumer capitalism potentially really bad.
because it turns everybody into sheeple. And we can't have that because we're Americans, gosh darn it, and if we are any different from the Russians, it's because we were individualistic. And so there's all these kind of things, land of the free. So all these things kind of conspire to make the figure of the overly rational engineer or scientist seem boring.
PJ (23:54.197)
Land of the Free. Yes.
Sam (24:10.466)
but also kind of suspicious, morally suspicious, and potentially destructive to society. And so we needed people who are more individualistic, more free thinking, more exuberant, in touch with their irrational side, in touch with their playful side, even according to some people in touch with their feminine side. We're mostly talking about men here in the white-collar workplace. And so there's, so the, I guess,
You could say that the figure of the scientist and the engineer get a makeover during this period. And creativity and knowledge about creativity is one of the ways that happens. So for these people to sit in rooms and say, we need to encourage creative engineers, the ways that they characterize that ideal that they're looking for, it's not just highly inventive engineers, but they would sort of prove this by being a different kind of person, a different kind of personality, by acting differently, maybe even like dressing differently.
And so this whole notion of who is creative does, I think, involve taking some of the aspects of the stereotypical artist or bohemian and kind of placing them on the engineer and on the scientist as a way for them to signal that they're not like those other scientists and not like those other engineers. And Steve Jobs was really like,
a classic case of this or a pinnacle of this. I mean, he loved design famously. He saw himself as being quite humane and in touch with the artistic side of engineering. But he brought this together with the hardware and with the software to create this beautiful synthesis of science and art, which to us is kind of an end in itself. We see a kind of virtue.
PJ (26:04.213)
Hmm.
Sam (26:05.91)
and that sort of interdisciplinarity. And I think creativity is one of the ideas that allowed this to happen, because it allows you to say, well, I'm creative, that means, even if I'm in tech, it means that I'm a bit of an artist, too, or at least I act in ways that are like an artist, and that's why I'm so inventive, that's why the code I write is so novel and profitable.
PJ (26:13.141)
Hmm.
PJ (26:35.189)
One thing I appreciate even at the end is that you don't... you have the good and the bad, the pros and the cons of creativity, and so you have critiques, but you also have this what it has brought forth that's actually really good. One of the things that you kind of touched on it here, I've done a previous interview with Dr. Michael Clune on defensive judgment, and he talked about
how the logic of capitalism, like capitalism will try to infiltrate other spheres outside of the economic and turn them into economic spheres. And so for him, he's a professor of literature, he's talking about how this idea of the destruction of taste is basically, the only way that matters is we vote with dollars, right?
Sam (27:17.005)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (27:32.309)
um or with its political power right so it's either like you know he's critiquing uh current marxism in the uh universities as well actually for not being marxist enough which i thought was kind of funny but um but uh what i'm seeing is is a similar story played out here about how uh and this is where you mentioned you wanted to talk about this but this kind of democratization
this pull into economics of spheres that hadn't been there before. Do you mind expounding on that, the slipperiness and how, and the massive amount of ground that creativity covers between cleverness and genius?
Sam (28:06.435)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (28:16.482)
Yeah.
Yeah, right. Yes. Yes, I'll say that. That's great. And then I'll try to connect it to the logics of capitalism. Yeah, so one of the ways that creativity, the concept of creativity distinguishes, is it distinguishes itself or is distinguished by people who use it from the concept of genius is that it's essentially it's more democratic. It's something that we all potentially have. And
Sometimes the way they'll phrase that is to say that there's a myth about creativity, which is that only geniuses have it But actually I'm here to tell you that you too can be creative now Funnily enough no one ever said Yeah
PJ (29:05.749)
Sorry, I just, I'm so sorry. This is so funny. It's like, I hear this all the time. Go ahead.
Sam (29:11.102)
Yeah, you hear it all the time. It's like you open up any book and it's like, there's a myth about creativity, that only geniuses have it. Nobody ever actually said that about creativity. People said that about genius, right? People said that there are some people who really, you know, just are a lot brighter than the rest of us. But no one ever said that creativity is only for geniuses. In fact, as long as they've been using the word creativity, they've been saying that it's
the thing that Einstein and Picasso have in common with potentially a rank and file engineer have in common with potentially a third grader. That it's a kind of essential human attribute. Some people might have more of it than others. So that's debated. But fundamentally as a concept, it's something that is available to all of us. And what that means is that you could actually have, it then becomes possible
to claim that you can teach it. Like, nobody would ever set out to teach genius. We just acknowledge that genius by definition, the way that we conventionally mean it, is that's mutually exclusive, those are mutually exclusive things. Whereas with creativity, you can plausibly claim that creativity is something that everybody potentially has and that you could actually learn through certain methods or through certain daily habits, like morning pages or whatever. Now, this is, at the same time,
People differentiate it from the concept of imagination because imagination is kind of open-ended. It could just happen in your mind and then fizzle out. It could be utterly bizarre. Whereas creativity is something that's productive by definition, at least according to the people who define it and in the way that we normally use the term. It's something that results in something new and useful or appropriate or at least legible, like a piece of art.
PJ (30:56.245)
Right.
Sam (31:10.166)
that is not just totally bizarre, a product that works, something like that. In other words, it kind of can slip between, but at the same time, you can also talk about Shakespeare's genius or Picasso's genius, I mean, sorry, creativity. You can talk about the creativity of Bob Dylan.
And you can talk about the creativity of a student. Okay, why does this matter and what does this have to do with capitalism? Well, it's both ideologically and practically useful to have a concept that can slide between the every day and the genius. And the practical reason is because if you are a, someone who's basically in charge of innovation in advanced industrial capitalism, if you're a research director at a R&D lab,
if you're a CEO of a company that manufactures and has employees engineers for improvement and research and development, it's in your interest to be talking not about genius, but about something that all of your employees might be able to have, or that you might be able to encourage company-wide, or that you might be able to foster, that you might be able to hire consultants to come in and tell you about.
Genius makes no sense in kind of mass society. The narrative that people tell is that early capitalism was the land of the geniuses, the genius entrepreneur inventors, the Edison's, the Graham Bells, people who had these brilliant ideas and invented them and then made a bunch of money on them. Now, of course, that's not actually how Edison worked. He actually employed a lot of engineers to do trial and error. And...
wage aggressive copyright litigation, patent and litigation. But the idea is that, you know, the genius was a creature of an earlier phase of capitalism and we've moved past that. And now we have no use for geniuses. What we want is creative people. And so that concept is useful for that reason. It's also ideologically useful because we also ideologically...
PJ (33:07.029)
Ha!
Sam (33:31.99)
don't love the idea, well, many of us, of a society run by geniuses. Actually, quite a few of us do. I mean, I think the cult of Steve Jobs and of Elon Musk shows that there is quite an appetite for the genius narrative. But for those of us who are a little bit more egalitarian-minded, I think we would prefer the idea that all of us could contribute to the national effort of progress.
in our own little way. And so the idea that creativity is something that we could say teach in schools, as opposed to just waiting for the great genius to kind of rise up the ranks, something that we could actually affirmatively inculcate in our society is attractive. Okay, so relating this to the capitalism's tendency to turn everything into
some kind of product to try to extract capital from every, extract profit from everything. I actually in a way push back not against that narrative, but against the narrative that creativity, that creativity's ubiquity is a sign of that happening. So, what a lot of people think when they hear all these Ted Talks and marketing speak about creativity is they think that this concept that used to stand for something good and pure,
PJ (35:02.071)
Hehehehe
Sam (35:02.238)
used to stand for, you know, some sort of pure realm of art and self-expression has now been co-opted by capitalism and is being used, is being bastardized, like the idea is being bastardized, and now all these kind of dumb advertisements or whatever are considered creative and they really shouldn't be because we should only consider real art.
to be creative or something. This is where I don't quite get the logic because I don't really know where you draw the line between the two. It's not to say there isn't an important difference between production for profit and production for other reasons, but I just don't know where you can really draw the line between true creativity and dirty creativity. The other sort of narrative that you hear is that the fact that we're all now obsessed with
Increasing our creativity is a sign that capitalism has is now requiring us to sell our To sell this thing that was once pure like to sell This font of self-expression and that if it wasn't for capitalism, we would all just be doing art and now and now or we wouldn't be we would be doing other stuff and now we're all kind of required to be
PJ (36:16.41)
Right.
Sam (36:26.386)
And even in our leisure time, we have to be on TikTok producing, you know, videos for whatever, for TikTok. So and for free, we should say. And that the value that's extracted from that, from our attention and from the hours that we spend via advertising. So I agree that that's happening. But I think what's interesting is that
when you look back at the history of the idea of creativity, it never really stood for this pure realm of human imagination that was unsullied by the market. In fact, it came about in a context of marketization, of consumer market novelty and innovation. It didn't come out of the art schools, it didn't come out of philosophy of art.
It didn't come out of Bohemia even really. It came out of this place where people were concerned about the human ability to generate novelty for frankly market reasons. And I think that that's very telling that our very connection to this idea of a kind of purity in a way comes out of that world in which people were concerned with
our ability to create novelty, but we're also aware of our misgivings about that. And so they wanted to imbue, I think, things like new product development and advertising with the aura of individual imagination and kind of undirected and pre-market and pre-political human imagination. And that's...
That's where creativity comes out of, is out of the anxieties about all of those things. So it was never really bastardized or taken over by capitalism. It was, I guess, in the foot... It was capitalism all along, I guess, is the moral of the story.
PJ (38:38.398)
It was, yeah, yeah. And so it was creativity was the logic. It was not something that was taken over, right? Yeah. And forgive me, I'm just gonna repeat a few things back to you. I mean, rephrase them, but just to make sure I'm on the right track.
Sam (38:48.768)
Yes.
PJ (39:03.433)
So one thing is that it's also, it's way more inspiring, right? To say, you know, you could be the Shakespeare of advertising than just to be like, you could be really good at advertising, right? Like that's part of the genius. So there's the inspiring part. You get more from people when they're inspired. Um, even as you talk about, uh, the word, uh, yeah, I loved, you know, you talked about the
Sam (39:16.48)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (39:21.271)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (39:28.489)
juxtaposition between imagination and creativity. And literally, creativity has create in it, right? It's got the production built in. And one thing that I found as you talked about this is that, even as you talk about Steve Jobs, even as you talk about Elon Musk.
Sam (39:34.574)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
PJ (39:50.453)
And again, this might be cynicism on my part. As I talk to people who love those sorts of people, there's an educational component and there's this inspirational component where it's like, there's a lot of this is based in psychology, right? So there's a lot of different motivations at play. But one thing that seems to strike me is that people look at,
Sam (40:02.339)
Hmm.
PJ (40:17.209)
look at Steve Jobs and be like, you know, if I'd gone to a different school or if my parents hadn't held me back, or, you know, like, it's like, if I'd gotten my big break, I really, I could be Steve Jobs, right? Like, and it's, if you claim like I could have been a genius, that's too much for me, like, really, I'm a creative person, I just need my big break, right? And so I think that's part of it and the...
Sam (40:28.875)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (40:37.584)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
PJ (40:43.985)
I think it's because genius is so far out of reach, there's the educational component side too. If you tell people you can write like Shakespeare, they're going to be like, if you say you can write like a genius, that's too much. But if you say you can write, you can be creative like Shakespeare, then that's where you get this educational component. Is all that, like am I tracking with what you're saying?
Sam (41:10.026)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's all happening in the creativity literature. There's...
Sam (41:19.714)
The creativity literature is based on the idea, which is the idea of creativity, that there is a general kind of, there are general kind of rules or properties of the ability to come up with something new. Now, just to be clear, I'm not sure that's really born out, like in science and research. I think the more they study it, the more they realize that people who do really well, at one thing, people who are really good writers,
PJ (41:25.577)
Hehehe
Sam (41:49.534)
are a bit different than people who are really good painters, are a bit different from people who are successful entrepreneurs, are a bit different from kids who can't follow directions. Um, you know, and even if you line up like 10 artists, they have like 10 different ways of doing things, 10 different processes, 10 different brains, 10 different, you know, that, so, but there's something attractive about this idea that it's all kind of made of the same stuff. And so I think both of your,
PJ (41:59.561)
Heheheheheheh
Sam (42:18.77)
answers are good, that there is a kind of a dignity to saying, reading about, say, how Bob Dylan works. If I'm a, say I'm a ad copywriter. And say sometimes it's fun, because I like writing, and sometimes the products are cool, but sometimes I don't really care about the products. Sometimes it's not really stretching my...
you know, imagination that much. And say I flat out don't even really believe in a lot of the products that I'm using and I'm kind of like, yeah, okay. Now I could pick up a book that's like, how to write copy. That might actually be really useful to me, but it's not that exciting and it doesn't tell, give me any sort of inspiring messages about my life. Whereas if I pick up a book that's about how to be more creative and I'm reading chapters about Bob Dylan and Picasso and Einstein,
and I'm trying to extract little lessons from kind of how they lived their lives or how their processes or whatever, I might find something helpful, but really what I'm getting out of that is the idea that I am in some way like them. That what I'm doing as I'm writing ad copy is kind of like what Bob Dylan was doing when he was writing a song. Now, there are similarities for sure. Like writing is writing. I'm not trying to create a hierarchy here.
PJ (43:43.786)
Hehehe
Sam (43:46.386)
between Bob Dylan and a copywriter, but I'm saying that there are differences, and I think that there's some work that's being done when you're writing about Bob Dylan to learn how to be a better copywriter. It's funny, the writer Thomas Frank wrote a really funny piece about all this creativity, all these creativity books, maybe about 10, 15 years ago, and he said, it's funny, you'll read about creative geniuses to learn how to invent a better mop.
you never read about the invention of a mop to help a jazz trumpeter work out a better solo, right? And that's because we understand that playing a good trumpet solo is not actually really about something called creativity. It's about being really good at the trumpet. You know, it's about having a lot of licks under your fingers. It's about understanding the music theory. It's about practice, practice. But the idea that there's something called creativity that might actually kind of in a way like jump.
PJ (44:22.425)
Ha ha ha!
Sam (44:46.11)
leapfrog or jumpstart, all that really, really practical skills and know how is really attractive to us. And did I already then answer the second thing you were saying? It kind of gives a dignity to it. But then what was the second your second part of your explanation?
PJ (45:05.693)
Um, well, there's also that, uh, there's the, I think you, you kind of brought the two together because like I was talking about, like with Elon Musk and Steve jobs, like you have people who are working like literal. Yeah. You're like, you're like, it allows you to make excuses while still being like participating. You're like, I mean, I'm basically.
Sam (45:11.703)
Okay.
Sam (45:15.578)
Oh, right. You could be like them. Yes. Yeah.
Sam (45:25.418)
Right, well, so okay, no, so I'm glad you reminded me of that because that's the other thing it does. So the idea of a general creativity, it brackets and ignores kind of all the specific domain skills and know-how and knowledge. It also brackets all the economic and political and social constraints on people, right? And this is something that all self-help,
PJ (45:49.492)
Yeah
Sam (45:54.678)
does. So this is not just about creativity books. This is any, any book that's about, you know, rise and grind, hustle culture, you know, pay yourself first, like all that stuff. It pretends like we live in a fair world where there are no real, you know, material constraints to people's lives. And it focuses instead on kind of things that people can do. And that's totally understandable why, why there's a market for that, because we don't, we don't want to believe.
that we are prisoners of our circumstances. And we are maybe not all individually 100% absolutely prisoners of our circumstances, but on the whole we are. That's why there's not a lot of economic mobility, social economic mobility in especially American society, but in most societies. But this genre does kind of promise people that...
that there's something that they have in common with all these great creative geniuses from the past, even if they haven't quite achieved the same, yeah, same stature yet, but that they might yet if they unlock the secrets of their creativity.
PJ (47:09.845)
One thing you mentioned that's really tied, and I have seen this myself before I'd read your book, I was like, it's really odd that we think you have to make something new every time. And then when you really get down to like people who are creative, like best artists steal, those sorts of things, and it seems to be drawn from, but it makes more sense when you realize it came out of this kind of production space. And like you said, it's not the...
It's actually most of the time not so much the copywriters as their managers Right because if you get the if you get the artists together if you get painters together they talk about the price of paint It's about like how do you how do you identify and manage painters are that's those are managers And like this novelty and the way it's tied to marketing You see the birth of modern marketing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution And it's basically they had to come up with
Sam (47:40.453)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (47:44.972)
Yeah, right.
PJ (48:04.093)
uh ways to sell things because they were making too much for the first time in human history right and so this idea of like you just create this engine of like just continually making things and it's like you can't sell someone something they already have but if you're creative then you can have like that so part of the logic of creativity does contain this kind of hidden not it's not hidden this
Sam (48:08.738)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (48:29.181)
this idea of novelty that like the truly original person who has something completely new and that idea is like you're creating a new product.
Sam (48:38.386)
Yes, that's right. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the ways that creativity kind of appeals to everybody, but really serves capitalism mostly, is that, you know, the new is pretty universally, like, valued. Like, we, as humans, we love new shiny things. That's like, that's born out in, you know,
psychology studies and stuff like that. So I don't deny that on some level, like we love new things, but as you said, the era of industrial consumer capitalism asks us to, it really, really pumps that impulse. And it gives us new stuff all the time. And it asks us to not just buy new stuff and not just invent new stuff, but see
newness as a value in itself. And it's funny because that really kind of dovetails with many anti-capitalist notions of revolution and a new world is possible. And kind of, yeah, so that's modernity, right? Like modernity is being in love with new stuff. It's also being really afraid of new stuff, and so that's why there's always kind of equal and opposite.
reactions within every one of us and within society that are backward looking and nostalgic and reactionary and anti-modern and all those things and that's also across the political spectrum, but Getting back to the yeah, so nonetheless like this economic system makes novelty Almost an end in itself. It's interesting though because like marketing does As you say play this really important role
in greasing the wheels of consumer society and getting us to want new stuff all the time. But it also, it's necessary because you're trying to sell two things that are exactly the same. And so you need to create the appearance of difference between them. So some people would say advertising's necessary because there's actually not enough newness in the world. So it kind of creates the illusion of newness. But of course, these things work together. There is a lot of marketing that...
PJ (50:52.405)
Thanks for watching!
Sam (51:00.262)
The term creative marketing used to mean marketing that creates a new market for things, that creates new needs. This is something that used to be seen as very suspicious, very morally wrong. We should not—no one should be in the business of making people think they need things that they don't really need. It's very unchristian. It's very, you know, it's very un-
PJ (51:06.131)
Mm.
Sam (51:29.934)
However, it's really necessary for consumer capitalism to keep going. And so we sort of see this shift where we become less and less suspicious of the idea that we might actually, that it might actually be good to create new needs that some people sort of end up saying, actually, that's the real sign of progress is when we, you know, after Adam Smith, like.
when we desire newer and newer and more and more things and our standard of living gets higher and higher and higher. And so then the business of marketing, of creative marketing, and again, in the old sense, not of like imaginative or clever marketing, but of marketing that creates, becomes seen as potentially a really good thing and something that can be done guilt-free. And then you get creative meaning imaginative, being that creativity being the thing
advertising people have that makes them not only good at advertising, and there's a whole chapter on the creative revolution, which if you've seen Mad Men, you're kind of generally familiar with, but it's this kind of whole era in which the creative individual becomes the new hero of the advertising industry, but also of like capitalism in general, because that's the person who's adding value, as we would now say, to the economy through the production of new wants.
or if they're a new product developer, an engineer or an inventor or a designer, actually new things. And so both of those sides work together to create this regime of novelty. And then we tell stories about artistic modernism that it's all about novelty, that kind of novelty is the thing that we all love. But of course, those modern artists, they weren't pursuing novelty for its own sake.
They might have had a sense of the avant-garde and the importance of formal innovation, but it was novelty for some kind of reason, some kind of transcendent purpose. Whereas the novelty of the marketplace is just kind of for its own good, for its own regeneration.
PJ (53:40.094)
Yeah.
PJ (53:44.629)
I want to be respectful of your time, but this conversation is super fascinating. One thing you mentioned about the dirty and the pure types of creativity, and you mentioned – you said you were struggling with the logic of it, but from what you were talking about, that they're fighting against this myth.
Right? The myth is that only certain people are creative, but everyone can be creative. And you're like, that myth wasn't there. But then you later on see people saying, we need to return to pure creativity. Do you think that's almost an attempt to, anachronistically, put the myth back in place that's missing? So there's this missing piece of logic. Is that kind of how that happened? It's like...
Sam (54:12.855)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (54:17.783)
Mm-hmm.
Sam (54:25.035)
Yeah.
Sam (54:29.886)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's totally understandable. Once you have this concept that's been kind of defined as a pure font of human invention, which as I show is like in itself an invention of people who are designing military industrial technology or whatever. But once you have that idea, and that of course is not a totally new idea. I mean, from the beginning of the modern, what is romanticism if not...
PJ (54:46.141)
Right.
Sam (54:57.526)
the assertion that humans have a kind of inner drive to express themselves and to produce art that is coming from a pure place that the market can only sully and can only co-opt. That's not a new idea. So in that sense, people who are saying we need to get back to the true spirit of creativity, are they're just gesturing to that. They're just kind of saying that again, which is a very, I mean, we can debate whether that's possible, whether there is...
whether it's possible to have any art outside of capitalism or whether we should even try. But I think that that's certainly an understandable thing to want to do to try to carve out some space for humanity outside of capitalism. But what I think is maybe unnecessary is that we don't necessarily need to carve out a particular faculty for newness that is outside of capitalism. I don't think we need to even have a concept for the thing that allows us to...
come up with new ideas. But I think that's just because I maybe have faith that people will come up with new ideas when they need to, and that we don't always need to come up with new ideas and that a lot of the work that we have to do is not actually coming up with new ideas, that that's actually a story that's told by people who don't want radical change. It's like the idea that actually, we have all these wicked social problems and.
PJ (56:04.681)
Hahaha
Sam (56:24.69)
Oh, we don't know what to do. We're going to need creative thinking to solve them. I think in a lot of cases, we know exactly what we need to do. We just need the political will, the solidarity, the redistribution of resources, whatever, to actually get there. And so sometimes I think that this focus on like creative thinking or this need to identify some part of us that can come up with new ideas is just unnecessary for the kind of work that we need to do. And I'm not saying.
It's not real or that it doesn't exist, but I think it's an unnecessary concept, let's say.
PJ (57:01.233)
Yeah, we're sending people looking for something that we've already found because then they won't work on the thing itself. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Last question for you, because I did want, you know, I have five kids. It's at this point, like, this always kind of sticks out to me. How did this infiltrate and how does it affect education and pedagogy? How does creativity kind of become part of that world?
Sam (57:07.622)
Yeah, yeah, right.
Sam (57:26.132)
Yeah.
That's a good question. First of all, I should say I wasn't really able to, I kind of ran out of time to do the research that I would have really liked to do in that area. So that's a story that I think that still really has to be told. It's also something I wanna be careful with because I kind of come out of the gate swinging about creativity, but I think a lot of what's done in the name of creativity in the realm of education is good stuff. It's pedagogy that I think I...
tend to agree with for reasons that I might not necessarily be able to articulate, but don't necessarily have to do with the fact that it teaches kids to come up with new ideas. So there's this very famous TED Talk by the late Sir Ken Robinson, who is a major figure in the kind of creativity discourse. And it's the most watched TED Talk of all time, probably always will be, and it's called Do Schools Kill Creativity? And his answer, of course, is yes.
that schools were designed in an industrial era to turn out workers and factories, and that in today's effort-changing economy, we need people who can, he doesn't actually explain this, but who can think on their feet, who can adapt, who are flexible, who can learn new skills, all of which he kind of lumps under the idea of creativity, even though you could break out those things as their own attributes, but.
To him, that means creativity. And he tells the story of this girl who was very fidgety in class and she was always getting into trouble. And her teacher brought her parents in for a conference and they were talking about her and what's wrong with her and what's wrong with her. And I forget exactly how it goes. But it turns out in the end, she's just a dancer. She just wants to dance. That's why she's fidgety. And applause, applause. Everyone loves this idea that we should
Sam (59:26.906)
not stifle someone like that girl. We should allow her to dance because we should be encouraging creativity in our schools because of the new economy. Now, there's just so much there that doesn't make sense to me. Like, I'm fine with education that's like 90% dancing. I love dance. I think dance and movement and the human body is an under...
PJ (59:47.017)
Ha ha ha!
Sam (59:54.13)
acknowledged and underutilized source of embodied knowledge, whatever. You could convince me that we should have a dance-based education, but what I don't understand is how allowing that girl to dance is going to make her more successful in the new economy. Like, I don't see how that's going to turn—if anything, obviously, considering, like, the state of the arts, it's going to make her worse off. I certainly don't think it's going to make her better at, you know—
being an entrepreneur, maybe she could turn it into a TikTok channel where she dances or something. But you know, like none of that actually has to do with learning to dance. And so he's taking this idea that everyone that appeals to the kind of liberal sensibility that education should be for higher things in life or for its own sake or for self-expression and turning that into to an economic argument. So I think that to answer your question broadly, what's happened is that
PJ (01:00:24.834)
Oh gosh.
Sam (01:00:49.358)
Creativity has been a term that I think a lot of essentially progressive education people. So I'm talking about the progressive education movement from the early 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century, which kind of has gone through various changes, including ones that seem totally anti-progressive, but whatever. But essentially the idea that students should like be learning individual, individualistically.
and that they should be learning experientially and that art should be a big part of this. That those kind of pedagogies have been used, but not for the same rationale as they were originally developed, but rather for the rationale that they foster creativity, which people who are more interested in producing productive economic agents through our education system can agree with because they can be convinced that this kind of arts curriculum
will produce the innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow. And I think that to the extent that those arguments have worked, they've maybe allowed the progressive education to flourish, but they also have probably had to make certain kind of concessions along the way. And they also, as soon as that logic falls apart, the arts can so easily be the first thing to go. So I think it's had probably some kind of impact
both positive and negative on art in schools. But I think it's also, I think it's also like changed the way that we teach STEM in certain ways that again, I would probably agree with. So I'm gonna trail off a little bit there because I don't really know the whole story, but I do think it's an interesting one to see exactly how.
the concept of creativity mediates between various potentially conflicting imperatives of education because education is a battleground for what we believe in, what we believe society should be, what we believe not just education should be for but what people should be for. So I think that's a story that I'd love to tell someday.
PJ (01:03:08.657)
That would be, I would enjoy reading that book. So no pressure though. Again, thank you for your time. If you could leave our audience for our listener at home, as they listen to this and they go about their week, what's one thing that you would encourage them to think about or do after listening to this?
Sam (01:03:13.09)
Hehehe
Sam (01:03:32.162)
Hmm.
Sam (01:03:35.374)
Hmm. I would... I think what I would like people to do is see if they can go for a week without using the word creative or creativity. Not because I don't think we should use those words. Not because I want to banish them from our lexicon. But because doing so can help you
clarify what you're actually talking about. And I think that could be an interesting experiment for people to try.
PJ (01:04:08.265)
Hmm.
PJ (01:04:14.513)
That is one of the more practical applications we've had on this show. I really like that. Dr. Franklin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on today.
Sam (01:04:22.658)
Thanks, PJ, it's been fun.