Kevin ashton, he is the coiner of the term internet of things, and hes also the author of this book, how to fly a horse. Mr. Ashton, whats the, whats the background story on the title of that book . Guest it comes from a quotation from Wilbur Wright of the Wright Brothers who was explaining how the Wright Brothers were first to fly. And he dropped a piece of paper to his floor and said to his audience notice how the paper darts back and forth, this is the kind of horse we have to learn to ride if we are going to fly. Host and how does it tie into the theme and themes of your book . Guest well, yeah. The interesting thing is why did the Wright Brothers fly first, and what was the process they used, because they werent the first people to have the idea of building a flying machine, and they werent the first people to try. So why did they succeed where everybody else failed . And the answer is they understood the problem they were trying to solve much better than anybody else. And at the end of the day, being creative is not about having ideas in the shower or aha moments or lightning bolts of inspiration, its about solving problems one step at a time. So understanding the problem of the piece of paper which is a problem of balance was the key for the Wright Brothers starting on their course that ultimately led to them flying. Host in your introduction you talk about the development of the internet of things, and is you say there was no magic, and there had been a few flashes of inspiration, but tens of thousands of hours of work. Guest yeah. By me and thousands of other people as well. And i think that was an experience for me that really led directly to the book. The book is a book i wish i had read 25 years ago when i started my career in creating. And the lesson i learned from developing the internet of things was most of the books i had read as a young man were wrong. There are no geniuses, there are no aha moments. You dont solve problems by not thinking about them and waiting for the answer to suddenly appear. You take lots and lots of steps, many of which lead you to dead ends, and then you back up and start again. So that experience i had at mit building the internet of things directly informs everything in how to fly a horse. Host kevin ashton, when did you first coin that term, and in what context . Guest that was in early 1999. I was a young brand manager at the Procter Gamble company from cincinnati, ohio. Procter gamble makes soap and paper and many household brands, and id had an idea that i could keep my products on the shelves at the stores if i could put tiny little radio microchips into everything and connect those to the internet. But i had to explain it to the ceo of Procter Gamble and lots of other Senior Executives who werent as familiar with Information Technology as i was, but they did know the internet was important. So one day i decided to change the title of my Powerpoint Presentation to the internet of things as a way to help them understand what i was talking about and get them to show up at my presentations, and it worked pretty good. That led me to mit, and i spent four or five years giving that same presentation all over the world to all sorts of companies. And eventually the name caught on. Host you also write in your book how to fly a horse that you never got really very good performance reviews and were in danger of being fired. Guest yes. I had horrible performance reviews nearly all the time because i was always trying to create something which meant i was working on something unexpected or something that people didnt understand. A lot of the things i tried didnt work or misunderstood. The other thing i found is when things did work, everybody else seemed to get the credit. So its a notuncommon thing for creative people or people who are working hard to create whether its kids in schools or junior employees in companies, its not uncommon for them to be undervalued because theyre always doing something unexpected. Host this is one reason the creativity myth is so terribly wrong, you write, creating is not rare, we are all born to do it. Guest yes. Creating is what makes the human race the human race. Birds fly and fish swim and human beings create. The reason we have become this dominant species on the planet is that about 50,000 years ago which is only 2,000 generations, its really not that long one human being looked at a tool and said i can make this better. And up until that point, and the tool was, like, it was called a hand axe. Its a pointy piece of stone that various species of humans have been using for millions of years. And be it never changed. Just like birds nests stay exactly the same over thousands and thousands of years, theyre a product of instinct. And what led to us was that that first human being saying, you know what . I can make this thing better. I can improve it. Were all descended from that first human being. So so we all have this innate instinct to try to improve things, and thats what makes us different from every other species on the planet. So the idea that only a few human beings have the ability to create which is embodied in this 19th century myth that there are geniuses which are always white men, by the way, this idea is completely wrong. Everybody, every human being has the innate potential to create new things. That doesnt mean were all the same. Were not all equally good at creating, but everybody can do it. Host in a subchapter called ordinary acts, you write the case against genius is clear, too many creators, too many creations and too little predetermination. So how does creation happen . And whats the answer to that question . Guest creation is an accumulation of many tiny improvements to things that many, many people propose and execute. So even when we have some great inventer, an einstein or an edison or somebody that people build statues of and canonize, when you look closely, you see theyre always building on the work of not just one or two people, but thousands of others and adding their own tiny improvements as well. And eventually someone puts the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle together, and something is complete. Sometimes that person accumulates all the credit. Really everything we do is a series of fairly ordinary steps that eventually can lead to extraordinary results. Host what led you to believe that everybody is creative, not just geniuses . Guest well, a little bit was my experience of building things at mit and seeing just how many people were involved and how we were always acting as a community of creative people trying to solve pieces of a problem to create something new. But then as i started working on the book which began as a series of lectures, the more research i did, the more i found these Amazing Stories that id never heard before of people everywhere creating things. One of them, which i start the book with, is of how the vanilla industry was created. Vanilla is the most popular spice in the world, and the second most expensive spice in the world. And for hundreds and hundreds of years, it could only be grown in a tiny part of mexico. And the rest of the world was trying to figure out how to grow vanilla and failing. Until a 12yearold slave, a boy called edmund didnt even have a last name on a tiny island called reunion which is off the east coast of africa figured out how to manually pollinate the vanilla orchid which leads us to the vanilla root which leads us to the vanilla bean which is the spice. And nobody else had figured out how i to solve this problem. So how to solve this problem. As you rook 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 are the result of thousands and thousands of years of selection through agriculture to things like televisions and cars and shoes. Everything is created by somebody, and theres so much of it that it becomes fairly clear fairly quickly that everybody is creating. Host well, what are some of the steps we can take as individuals to create . Guest well, so the first thing maybe the only thing is to begin. And how do you begin . Well, theres probably something youre itching to improve, and it may be a tiny problem. But you try and solve that problem. And each time you come up with a solution, you evaluate your solution, and the first thing youll find is your first idea isnt that good, either it doesnt work at all, or it causes a whole set of other problems. And then you try and solve those problems. And each time you evaluate the solution and improve upon it, youre taking a step. And after thousands of steps, it could take years, you will end up with something amazing. So the trick is find a small problem, come up with a solution, evaluate that solution, expect it not to work. Dont be deterred by the fact that the first things you try fail. Keep going, keep learning from every failure, and eventually you create something amazing. Host kevin ashton, another one of the stories you tell in your book is about Kelly Johnson at the skunk works. Who was he . Guest so Kelly Johnson is a remarkable figure in the history of aviation, first of all, and thats what hes best known for. The skunk works is the nickname of lockheed martins advanced research group. And during the second world war, the allies particularly the United States and Great Britain realized they had a major problem. Second world war was really the first air war. And at the beginning of the war, all the plane, the bombers and the fighters, used propellers. And during the war it was, first of all, it was discovered that a propellerbased plane absolutely cannot go faster than about 500 miles an hour. There are some aerodynamic principles that prevent that. And then british spies found that the germans had solved this problem by developing something called a jet engine. And they were going to bring a jet fighter into mass production in the mid 1940s, and if that was allowed to happen and it was unopposed by allied fighter plains planes, then germany was going to win the war. And Kelly Johnson and his team were given 150 days to build a jet fighter from scratch, the firstever jet fighter the United States had built, in about 125. And that was a major accomplishment and divide unexpected. And quite unexpected. But in doing that, and this is the story i tell in the book, johnson did Something Else. He really demonstrated what the ideal Creative Organization looks like. And its very focused, it doesnt have a lot of administration, it doesnt waste a lot of time on meetings or planning. It really does concentrate on the work of solving problems and evaluating solutions. And when you do that, you can accomplish Amazing Things. Lockheed skunk works then went on the to develop stealth went on to develop Stealth Technology and traveling six times faster than the speed of sound, so they continue that tradition today. Host Kelly Johnson discovered that a small, isolated, highly motivated group is the best kind of team for creation. Whats the importance of isolation in that creation process . Guest well, the way you create is by doing the work of creation, and anything else you do is distracting you from creating. So, you know, the isolation is an isolation from distraction and interference, first of all. But secondly, it can be an isolation from skepticism and criticism. Youve already got enough problems to soft if youre to solve if youre trying to build a jet fighter in 150 days. You dont need wellintentioned outsiders telling you it cant be done. You have to spend your time believing you can do it and doing it. So its a lesson that good, Creative Organizations apply all over the world today. You really want to keep everybody whos not engaged in the actual hard work of creating away from the Creative Space because you can really distract and diminish the people who are doing the work if you dont keep them isolated. Host kevin ashton, Something Else you talk about in your book are the luddites. Who are the luddites . Guest so the luddites are, i think, a little bit misunderstood. Theyre a group of workers from the northeast of england who are about 200 years ago rose up in rebellion against something called the automated loop. They were basically weavers, and about 200 years ago it became possible to create a loom that didnt need a weaver. It used sort of punchcards that contained the weaving pattern and automatically, you know, wove a rug or a piece of fabric. And the millers felt very threatened by this automation. They believed it would be the end of their livelihood, the end of the livelihood of their, you know, of their children and grandchildren. What they didnt know or couldnt know and many of them died fighting the automated loom. They were caught and executed or killed while they were trying to destroy looms. What they couldnt know was that was the beginning of the information revolution. What actual happened as a result of actually happened as a result of the automated loom and the industrial era that it heralded was there was a need for more educated workers than there had ever been before. So as a result of those, apparently, very disruptive and potentially socially damaging technological changes, two things happened. Through the 18th century, everybody in the industrialized world learned to read. Practically nobody could read in 1800, and nearly everybody could read in 1899. And following on there that in order to create a class of workers who could do the jobs we today think of as management, around 1900 most of the industrialized countries started public education. So really as a result of the automated loom, ironically the grandchildren of the luddites got to learn to read and got to go to school. So the unexpected consequence of that technological revolution was much more educated, more literate population. Host we often refer to people who may not adopt technology that we know today as luddites. Is that fair . Guest no. And the luddites werent opposed to technology, they were opposed to technology that potentially was going to destroy their livelihoods. They were fighting for their jobs. One of the ironies which they were well aware was the sledgehammers they used to destroy the automated looms were invented by the same man who invented the automated looms and at about the same time. So in using those sledgehammers, they were demonstrating their willingness to embrace new technology. It was the consequences of technology that they feared. And the other thing to say is theres a misunderstanding about the words technology. Theres not a human being alive that doesnt use, need and depend on technology. A lot of people use the word technology to mean high technology. They think about iphones or televisions or something when hay talk about technology. When they talk about technology. But books are technology. Bananas, which would not look like they do today without agriculture, are also technology. Everything we depend on is technology. In fact, you can show very conclusively that human beings couldnt survive for more than a few days without technology because as we started adopting Technology Millions of years ago, our teeth and our jaws changed in a way that means we really cant chew food unless its cultivated food or unless we have tools to cook it and cut it. So were all highly dependent on Technology Even if some of the Newer Technology doesnt appeal to us. Host kevin ashton, how did you get to mit, and what was your role there . Guest so i was not a professor at america it, i was at mit, i was not even a student at hit. I was working in Brand Management for Procter Gamble and trying to develop a technology that Procter Gamble could use to manage its business more efficiently. And i started collaborating with some academics at mit and eventually we decided that proctor should fund their research, and mit inviolated me to go invited me to go and manage that program. So i was executive director of a lab called the Autoid Center at mit. My status was visiting engineer which is kind of funny, because i have a liberal arts degree. My degree is in scandinavian studies. I spent four years studying 19th century norwegians, so im really not qualified to go to mit at all. But my job there was to manage the research, make sure the research got funded, make sure it stayed focus on the applications we needed it to deliver, and it was a very successful program. My cofounders at mit, who i should mention, professor santo sharker and dr. David brock, and eventually we had labs at five other universities as well. Host did you have a small, isolated, focused team . Guest absolutely. Absolutely. We had probably a couple of dozen ph. D. And graduatelevel researchers doing most of the work at m irk t. Similar mit. Similar teams at the other universities around the world that i mentioned, and everybody had an incredible sense of mission. They knew exactly what they were trying to do, exactly what their role was. They completely understood that if they were successful, they were helping to write the history of computing. So, yeah, we were very focused, very motivated. We really spent as much time as we could doing the work and as little time as possible on, in a potential outside distraction. Host kevin ashton, did your study of 18th century or 19th century norwegians ever pay off for you . [laughter] guest absolutely. I think everything is interconnected. Its really interesting. You know, i majored in the work of a norwegian playwright, and one of the things that struck me about him, he left his parents behind, never went back. Actually went to copenhagen, spent all his time observing people and writing his plays. He was a perfect example 069 kind of isolation and creative focus you often need to have if you want to be successful. And the other thing about ibsen whi