Russ: This is the BusinessMakers show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time on the show and I have a very special repeat guest because with me now I have Dr. John Lienhard, the originator, author, and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity. John, welcome back to the BusinessMakers show.

John: Thank you, Russ. I appreciate being here. Thank you.

Russ: You bet. So let's assume that somebody lives in part of the world where they don't pick up your great pieces and why don't you describe The Engines of Our Ingenuity?

John: The Engines of Our Ingenuity is a 3.5-minute featurette where we talk about creativity and invention and how it works and what it does. The engines that we talk about are really the engines of our ingenuity in a sense that we're not talking about gears and nuts and bolts, although we do talk about gears and nuts and bolts, but we're talking about the way in which ingenuity takes us forward and the fun we can have with ingenuity whether it's writing poetry or music or building airplanes or whatever. Anyway, the program airs on a number of public radio stations and you can also get it on the web if you go to www.uh.edu/engines. That will get you every episode we've ever done. It will get you audio and it will get you a lot of extra stuff as well.

Russ: Okay. As you know I told you before when I interviewed you, I believe it was in September of '08 and I am a huge fan of your work and think it is really, really cool, and just like we do on almost all guests here on the show I'm always interested in what triggered the idea to start the company, to start the mission, in your case to start The Engines of Our Ingenuity. What stimulated that?

John: Okay. I started writing programs in 1987. Now 17 years before that I had taken a summer workshop at the Smithsonian where I got kind of a grounding in how to do research in history and that had led to teaching courses in the history of technology, and I was primed and ready. I wanted to do something more with the history that I was playing with, and so one summer evening on a Friday the dean of the College of Engineering mentioned that he and his publicist were talking about creating some sort of a spot for public radio and so I got the bit in my teeth at that point. I went home, I wrote three episodes, and I got a commitment from John Prophet, who is the CEO of our station, and I got my son who's a jazz keyboardist to do the music for the program. I showed up the next Monday with a done deal.

Russ: All right, and now here we are several thousands of episodes later. How many about are we in?

John: Well right now I'm working on episode number 2,729.

Russ: My goodness. That's incredible. Now when you talk about the history of technology, what a fascinating story. I mean it's technology -

John: Or the history of creativity. Let me expand that a little bit.

Russ: Okay. I want to go back even to technology too because man, it has raced forward. You're bound to agree that technology and creativity and innovation and inventiveness all happen at a much faster rate today than they did in the past.

John: You want some chapter and verse on that one?

Russ: Absolutely.

John: If you plot the rate of improvement of technologies, and by improvement I mean things like efficiency or accuracy of clocks or whatever, the resolution of telescopes, you find some measure of quality in a technology, and you'll find that this measure of quality doubled roughly every 30 years from - well I haven't gotten numbers to antiquity, but if you go back to Medieval times you'll find that it doubled every 30 years up until about 1840 and then something strange happened. The doubling switched from just the quality but rather to the rate at which qualities started improving. So from 1840 until about 1950 these rates went rocketing upward until you started seeing a doubling about every year in the 19 -

Russ: From 30 years all the way down to a year.

John: Yeah. Then we reached a point where you couldn't double anymore because you were simply outrunning the ability to retool, and retool doesn't just mean in the factory. Retool also means retooling psychologically. So since 1950 the rate of improvement has been essentially that one year.

Russ: Okay, and you don't think with the digitization, the Internet, the microcomputer, it's happening?

John: These might be speeding the retooling a little bit, but I don't have numbers to verify or deny that, but I don't think it's changing the retooling that much, but if a doubling every year is one awfully fast change.

Russ: Oh absolutely.

John: And so I think that's the situation we're in right now and of course new technologies keep popping up. The other thing that I think we need to ask is how many new technologies pop up? And I might suggest that more new technologies were popping up in 1900 than are popping up today.

Russ: Oh really? Whoa.

John: Look at the things that came about. The airplane, FM radio, the telephone. Right around the turn of the century.

Russ: The automobile I guess.

John: The automobile. Be still my heart.

Russ: Well that's real interesting too because I find even when you sort of talk about history and history of creativity, innovation, that the younger generation today, the millennial generation to me seems to think that a lot of what happened previously in history in these categories is almost non-applicable now, and the reason is with social media and the ability for groups to gather and decide with research, with the digitization, Wikipedia, with Google, that my goodness, those are cool things that happened in the past but we don't have to learn them in detail anymore. Number one, is that unusual that a generation might think that way and number two, do you think that perhaps there's some credence in how they feel?

John: Albert North Whitehead once said "The scientist who hesitates to forget his founders is lost." Now think about that. I shudder, being interested in history, I shudder when I hear that, don't you? And yet I think back to when I was starting college in 1947. Did I give a fig for the past? No! I read Popular Mechanics and I was looking for 200-mph automobiles on the highway. I was looking for a helicopter in every garage. That was the future that popular science, Popular Mechanics was telling me about. That was where my interests lay.

Russ: Absolutely. So you think this is just business as usual for us.

John: I think it's sort of business as usual. At the same time Albert North Whitehead could make a statement like that and we do have to cut ourselves off from the past to free ourselves to create a new idea. At the same time if we're deaf to the lessons of the past, we're toast. So it's an age old combat to reconcile these competing forces.

Russ: Okay. Talking with Dr. John Lienhard, the founder, originator, author, and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, and we'll be back with more with John after this. This is the BusinessMakers show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com continuing on with John Lienhard, the author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity. John, before we went to the break you'd just mentioned about going to college in 1947 and it brought back the memory of our prior interview. I know that you struggled mightily. I think you had a real high IQ, but I think you maybe even struggled in high school, struggled in college but just kept successfully struggling, never making the Dean's list until you got your PhD.

John: I'm not going to say anything about IQ. I can't claim that, but I got into terrible trouble at about the third grade. I started tanking. By that time the school system had run me ahead because they hadn't run into the problem yet but the problem -

Russ: But they'd run you ahead because they could tell you were intelligent.

John: Well part of it was just readjusting the school system. They were running on half semesters and they didn't start people in half of the third grade anymore, so that gained me a semester. Then I started stammering and it turns out that I was absolutely incapable of doing Palmer method, which was the cursive writing instruction, and I couldn't read. My eyes would spin around the page and it didn't make any sense.

Russ: But you kept progressing too.

John: Well I barely got out of grade school on trial and I was bottom in my class in high school and I found a junior college, and at that point I said, wait a minute, perhaps just by dint of effort, which I'd given up on effort I high school I thought, oh, let me try effort. Let's see what effort will get me. So I did fairly well in junior college and then I went to the state school and was in trouble again, but I finally managed to get out.

Russ: Through effort.

John: Through effort. I went along like that and finished a master's degree and then I was drafted, and in the army I figured, well, I don't know how to read. I'd been doing one word at a time. I've got to figure out how to read. The army gives you a lot of free time and a fatigue jacket with a big pocket here that will accept a paperback.. SO I would stand in line practicing eye tracking, and I got to the point where I could track and read and I started reading books. Then I went for a PhD and again at first I was having trouble and then I did very well and managed to finish. It wasn't until 1972 that I ran into a young lady that was a babysitter.

Russ: How old were you in 1972?

John: 42. Who was babysitting and I asked her what she was studying. She said she was doing special education and she told me about dyslexia. The first time I'd ever heard the word. It's this new thing that she was studying. Oh, you mean this has a name? The only name that i had up to then was lazy and stupid.

Russ: It fit exactly what you were experiencing.

John: Yeah.

Russ: I mean I am so fascinated by that story and you yourself ‘cause with effort you pushed through it and you figured out -

John: Well no, just a minute. Before I start "poor me"-ing myself here, think what dyslexia did for me. It forced me to be very spatial. What I did when I saw that I was a hopeless student was to take up building and designing model airplanes and I got quite good at it and I was constantly developing my ability to visualize in three dimensions. The first place in high school where I finally got a leg up I took a drafting course and my god, this was perfect. I loved it and I zipped through three years of work in one, and I said wait a minute, maybe there's an ability here. So I had this funny thing up my sleeve that served me very well.

Russ: All right. Well I congratulate you though for persisting. I mean my goodness, the world has benefited as a result of that.

John: I think that everybody in this world has their strengths and weaknesses and if you don't learn to ride your strength and walk around your weakness you're toast, dyslexic or name any other kind of a problem whether it's a physical handicap or some psychological handicap. It's something we all do in one way or another.

Russ: Okay. Before I let you go, and I've saved I think enough time for this too, I also distinctly remember towards the end of my interview with you last time I asked what you thought was the biggest challenge for mankind and -

John: And I said to you -

Russ: It was overpopulation.

John: Overpopulation.

Russ: So here we are now three, three and a half years later. I'm a true believer. Have you adjusted your opinion? Is that still the challenge?

John: Well I think it is the challenge, but I think there's an underlying challenge that is maybe greater. Maybe that underlying challenge is failing to pursue our ignorance. Our ignorance is our greatest servant. The world is filled with people who are sure they are right on every side of the political spectrum, on every side of the social spectrum, filled with people who think they are right, and overpopulation is a huge problem. Energy is a huge problem. We're saturated in huge problems. In fact for population the demographic experts tell us that the overpopulation is a consequence of two factors. One is poverty and the other one is a lack of education for women. These are problems that we have to solve if we're gonna solve the population problem, poverty, education for women, overpopulation is a result. I think that we need to be more in problem solving mode than we are. Politically we're drowning in people who know the answer and what we need are people who are willing to pursue their ignorance because that is the only way you'll solve a problem and the problem is poverty, lack of education for women.

Russ: Right. Well I tell you, it's probably gonna be an interesting future, but I always like to tune in to what you're suggesting and do my little part. I don't think I've been able to slow down the population growth yet and don't know what you do with that one, but John, I really appreciate you being on the BusinessMakers show again.

John: Well I appreciate being here. It's an honor. You do good work.

Russ: Oh, thank you very much.

John: And I appreciate it.

Russ: You bet. That's Dr. John Lienhard, the author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, and this is the BusinessMakers show heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.