 Yeah, Monday morning, the 10 o'clock block, the middle way, and today we're going to talk about creativity with Chang Wang, and he's our, I guess our co-host today, and Jonathan Feinberg in the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Very important we have this discussion because there's a big question out there about whether our society would be better off with more creativity. Chang, why don't you give a full and proper introduction of Jonathan? All right, thank you, Jay, and good morning, Professor. The Professor Feinberg is the latest book called Morden Art at the Border of Mind and Brain. I haven't read the whole book, and I'm very eager to read it. As a student of Professor Feinberg for 20 years, I'm always constantly, you know, amazed at Professor's scholarship because as an art historian, he's very unique, he's very creative, and Professor Feinberg's wife, Maryam, is a wonderful, very talented novelist, and both Professor and his wife are very creative people. It's not the typical, you know, bookworm you expect from art historians, and they are, they talk about the psychology, they talk about sociology, and they feel very comfortable around other creative people, the artist. So, and for the 21st century, as professors and teachers, we face a challenge. The challenge is how to teach our students, because everything we teach in school, in classroom, will probably become irrelevant even obsolete when they graduate, when they leave school, because everything changes so rapidly. So, the educators believe that at this time we need to teach four Cs. Four Cs stands for creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. So, that is what we want to hear from Professor. They talk about his scholarship and his teaching, about creativity. Back to you, Jay. Yeah, welcome to the show, Jonathan. Nice to have you here yet again. So, I only have one question based on that introduction. You know, Chang said he studied with you for 20 years. Did it take him that long to pass the course? There's a gradual transition where the teacher becomes the student. So, you know, we talked before the show about creativity, and in fact, we have another show called Creative Life on alternate Tuesdays. But, you know, the question I put to you is why these days now? I mean, you will agree with me that people are more focused on creativity, perhaps, than they were 20 years ago. What are we missing that we need to focus on that? Why are we focusing on it all the more these days? Yeah, you know, it's basic to our survival. And we're beginning to understand that in a way that we never understood it before. You know, if you're an animal in nature and you can't figure out what's happening around you, you get eaten. So, it's important not to get eaten. And I think that this is one of the things we've learned about the modern world. It's so complex and things are changing all the time. And we need to be able to assess things and creatively put the pieces together in new ways all the time. And I think everybody in every field is realizing how important that is. So, you know, I supervised a PhD dissertation for 45 years, mostly at University of Illinois, and for a while at Yale. And I realized that we were never really doing it right. We take the students, we teach them all the literature in their whatever the field is that they're interested in that precedes them. We teach the methods that preceded them. And by the time they're done with that, it's very hard to break out of that training. So, for them to then deal with what's current and what's now. And I think that we did them a disservice to some extent. Anybody who's done a PhD in a very rigorous program, you know, like many of us did, finds it takes a while before you can really do creative thinking in your own field. It's hard to get away from that training. So, I created, I wrote this book about an art at the border of mind and brain, which was the kind of tracked my career, which began in, I'm really an art historian, but it began in psychoanalysis and started to look then at how objects and creative thinking, but particular images affected our society and how we use them in our society. And that was influenced very much by two of my undergraduate teachers. One was Eric Erickson, who was a psychoanalyst who wrote about his basic idea was he wrote a book about Gandhi, one about young about the young man Luther. And his idea was that these charismatic individuals solve their own problems in public in such a way that other people could identify with them. And it becomes ideology, which I thought was a very interesting idea was a very creative use of psychoanalysis. And I started to think about how works of our interface with the times and the social situation in which they exist. So, that, you know, that book then went to that problem. And then I started thinking about, well, if we can really talk about how creativity or how, you know, how images shape our thinking, then we need to know something about what's actually happening in the brain. And it ultimately led me to neuroscience. And I began to study neuroscience because I felt I had to understand better what we know about the brain. And I'm not a neuroscientist. Well, some people say I'm a neuroscientist, but, you know, I'm not, I'm not a medically trained person. So I had to really teach myself this as I went along. And what I realized at the end of that book, the last chapter gets into some, what I would call speculative neuroscience. And I realized that I was at the point where I thought I knew how to create a moment for a student, no matter what field they're in, where they would take that leap into creative problem solving in their field. And I still couldn't and still can't tell you exactly what's happening on a cellular level. Nobody can. But I can tell you, I can tell you how to make it happen. And as I do that, I learned more about what's actually happening. And, you know, that's so I decided I needed to have a proof of concept. And I happened to be reading that from that book at the National Academies of Science and Engineering and Medicine in California one year and ran into a guy who I thought was a brilliant guy. And we started this conversation and I find out in the middle of a conversation that he's just been appointed the new president of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. And I was about to leave Illinois because there was no reason once I retired from Illinois, there was no reason for me to be there anymore. So we were thinking about moving in. My wife has a sister in Philadelphia. And so I said, you know, I told him this. And he said, Well, come come visit me when you come to his look at real estate. So I come to visit him. We sit down over dinner at the end of dinner. I'm creating a PhD program for him because because his whole institution is about trying to enable human creativity. And he thinks big and he understands that the arts are fundamental, especially because the arts have got a discipline that universities don't normally recognize. They don't see it as being as easily quantifiable as a lot of other things they do. But the disciplines of the arts are extremely valuable in trying to teach creativity to people and it doesn't matter what the field is. So I wanted to try it and I built a PhD program around that concept. We enrolled our first group of students, nine students who are in everything from, you know, we have a combat nurse anesthesiologist who's working on trauma or somebody who's an educator from college and also some an educator from the public schools. I've got a filmmaker in there, a psychoanalyst from London, this big range of people doing quite different things. Everybody's doing something different. And I put them all together, nine of them. And we we treated the problems that they encountered in their field like we would a painting critique where everybody is really looking at each other's issues and they all critique each other. But in order to do that, you can't use any jargon because nobody's in your field. So that right away gave us a leg up. And then I started to create bespoke dissertation committees for everybody because I'm at a university which doesn't have anybody in any field that's not in the arts and all my students are not in the arts. So I had to find people who were in law. I've got a provost of a law school, you know, in there. And I had to find her a really suitable committee for what she wanted to do. And I got the best people in the world to do these committees. Everybody was intrigued by the idea. And everybody's willing to do it. And I thought I should pay them, which I did, although many people refused to take the money. But because they were too interested in the idea. Anyway, so I created the bespoke committee for everybody. So these are things that normally in a PhD program, the institution is not focused on what it is the student needs. They're focused on a method that they've devised. And my program is focused on each individual student and creates a program around them. So what are the arts, the graphics, if you will, what effect do they have in general? I mean, I know that from a biochemical point of view, it's hard to answer that, but you know, what effect do they have? And what are these students connecting the arts and what everything? Well, they're not learning the arts. We're just using techniques that are drawn from the arts. So it isn't so hard to answer for a biochemist. The problem for a biochemist is they learn methods that are already working in biochemistry, but the great innovations come from putting pieces together that nobody's put together before. And how do you get to the mindset which breaks down the hierarchies of your thinking? And there's a variety of things that you want to do to do that. And that's what this program is all about. It's about taking that biochemist for, you know, my anesthesiologist or my, you know, I've got a wine critic in there. They're all and they're all very accomplished people. And they came back to do this dissertation because they had a project that they really wanted to do that didn't fit any dissertation for any PhD program anywhere, because it was too interdisciplinary and too, you know, out of the box. How about Chang? Chang, have you been through the program? Do you understand the program? Do you want to be in the program? What do you think the program can do for you as a lawyer? Of course I want to be in the program. I want to be the tenth, you know, candidate for PhD. You know, I only have a JD. So as my father said, JD is not a real doctor, which we need. But I respectfully disagree, but I have a PhD. It's always been my dream that, you know, I'm not, I started my training as an artist that didn't work out that, and so I went to law school instead. But I always joke about people ask me why you went to law school after art school. I said, my favorite thing to do is talk about art with lawyers and talk about law with artists. And so my audience was thinking I must have fit kidded, but that is definitely just, you know, a joke. But I think the Professor Fember's program sounds very, very attractive to me. Well, do you think it could help you practice law? Definitely. You know, the law, here is my favorite quote in Chinese history. One of the greatest poet, and he was considered the greatest poet in Tang Dynasty, and people ask him, how do you write such a great poem? And his answer is, if you write a great poem, spend your energy and efforts outside poetry. So you need to study everything else in order to become a great author, a great writer, a great poet. The same who applied to law parties as well. If you want to become a great lawyer, you can't just read the Constitution, break the law, read the case law. You need to spend almost all of your efforts and energy somewhere else, communication, collaboration, time management, crisis management, and everything you cannot learn from law school. And everything you can learn, working with artists, talking with authors, you know, spend time with the gallery. It's a human experience. We found that in my law firm, that somebody had a good, robust human experience. Maybe somebody who didn't go to law school at first, you know, did something else. We, in fact, had a biochemist in our law firm, and she was a fabulous lawyer. She had studied so many things before she ever started studying the law. But I want to explore one thing with Jonathan, you know, what I take out of your description of this, and the fact that you are at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is that there's something graphic about the human condition. I mean, I know it's nice to read, but I enjoy graphics. I enjoyed, maybe it's out of my childhood, I enjoy pictures. I learn a lot from videos. For some reason, that connects with me. I connect with the graphics more, and I believe you can learn a lot from art. But furthermore, you know, and this goes back to the biochemical issue, you know, I'm reminded of, you know, that hypnotic design is kind of a spiral black-and-white design, and it can hypnotize you as it turns. You know, what is that? That's having an effect on your brain. That's having a biochemical effect on you. Well, if you extend that to, you know, any graphic, any art, the more complex, the better. That also has an effect on you. Sort of like the hypnotic spiral. And it helps you learn. It helps you appreciate. It goes to Chang's notion of, you know, the robust life experience makes you a better lawyer. Well, the robust graphic experience also. I don't know, maybe I'm going further than Chang wants to go, but the robust graphic experience makes you a better person. Maybe a more creative person. How far off-track am I, Jonathan? Well, I think by graphic you mean images. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. So, you know, I think that's a really good point, and it's very much on target for what we're talking about, because the thing about images is that you can't really put them into words. You can say a lot about images, but if I were to describe a painting to you, there's no way you could really visualize it without seeing it. It would be very hard. And I think, and I often do this with students, I will walk into a, I used to do this, maybe Chang remembers, you know, I used to teach a big course, which was 300 students of color. And I walked in there with a Magritte painting, a famous Magritte painting that was very, very disoriented. And I would walk in and I would hand the book to a student in this class and the microphone and say, describe this painting for everybody else in the room, and see if they can visualize it. And of course, nobody ever could. And it says so much about what you're talking about. That is to say, you know, there's many levels in which we've perceived something and ways in which our mind comes to terms with something. And what we see, you know, is only a very small part of what we see is actually coming from the eye. It's really about memory and the brain and the way the brain, the networks in the brain recompose the knowledge that we have and the new input that we have from our senses into something which makes sense in terms of what we're seeing. And if you couldn't do that and you couldn't do it fast, you couldn't survive in the world. So, you know, there's a basic drive to want to do that. And I think that images are really important. And one of the reasons, one of the things about the arts that's particularly relevant is that and so difficult for academics normally to assimilate into their disciplines is that they aren't easily verbalizable. You can't, it's hard to describe them. It's hard to quantify them. And that's precisely because they are disorganizing. And the real value of them is that you look at, you know, the spiral that makes you dizzy or puts you to sleep, you know, is a simpler way of talking about something that you look at that deeply moves you. You have no idea what it actually means. And you're trying to figure it out. And that's exactly what I do to my students is I put them in, I'd actually bring them to campuses, mostly a program that people can do without leaving their jobs and they do it, we do it on the Zoom calls pretty much. And they're all over the world. But I do bring them to campus at the very beginning for two intensive weeks. And every day, I throw them into one experience after another for which they have no tools. And they have to, and it's disorienting and they have to figure it out, have to figure out what it means and what's happening and how to navigate in that experience. And what that does in the end is it's like, you know, if you want to get really great abs, you do a lot of sit ups, if you want to get develop your creativity, you have to really exercise this ability to put pieces together in ways you never have before. And you get a kind of agility and flexibility. And there's a momentum for that kind of thinking that you start to develop with students. And then I throw them back into their dissertation proposals. And while we're doing all those things in that initial couple of weeks, I'm having them rewrite their dissertation proposal every day or every other day in lieu of the things that they've just seen. And it's living their living the dream. That's they're actually using this notion in writing their dissertation. But let me let me ask you some questions that occurred to me in listening to the discussion here today. Okay, so we're interested in creative thought. We believe that creative thought a it's a better life intellectually, we believe that we believe that creative thought is better for, you know, accomplishing things, either in a commercial or artistic sense or, in any sense, if you're more creative, you can go out of the box. And to take a piece of what you were saying is out of your comfort zone. If you're out of your comfort zone, then other things will occur to you and you will be more creative. But the question is, does this apply through all cultures? And I remember years and years ago, that people would talk, this is to you, Chang, that people would talk about Chinese education. And they would say, in fact, it wasn't only Chinese, it was Asian education in Asia. They would say, Oh, those guys are just memorizing facts, they're just memorizing rules. They are not taught to be creative. We here in Silicon Valley, we have the guys laughing. We have the creative people. And, you know, they simply cannot achieve that. Well, you know, fast forward to 2021, you know, the Asian experience is more creative than the American one. See how that flips over. And we wish the people in Silicon Valley could be as creative as some of the people in Asia. So query, is that what we're talking about? I mean, I'm talking about the connection of the ability to be more creative and to apply it to accomplishment and society in general, okay, and culture. Are you that question for me, Jay? Thank you. Whoever will take it. Well, I need a five to seven hour to answer that question. But let's put it long story short. We need a system to nurture creativity. That sounds of pretty, you know, anti counterintuitive, but we do need a system. We do need an environment to nurture creativity. So that's why first I want to apply for Professor Flamberg's PhD creativity program. And in a second, I want to spend a lot of time traveling, because travel will open my mind and open my eyes. So, and Professor Flamberg will go to Paris in September, but I'm very jealous of that. But Professor, Professor, would you mind tell us that are you going to the crystal show in September? Well, before you do, Jonathan, I would like you to take a stab at answering my question about the relationship of thinking out of the box, I suppose, getting out of your comfort zone and creativity and culture and various cultures in the world. Is it all a flat world? Or is it dependent on culture? How does culture interplay with what you are discussing? Well, I think we want to be really careful about stereotyping cultures, because there's all kinds of different people in every culture. And there's extraordinarily creative people, and there's some people that just follow bureaucratic rules, and it's true everywhere. Doesn't matter what the culture is. And it's certainly the case that every culture has certain ways of doing things that are characteristic of it. And I think, and they teach people that. So, somebody who may be very creative, if they're really inundated with an educational system that repetitively teaches them to think one way, it's hard to break out of that. And that's what I was saying about the PhD before, if you get really well trained, if you go to Harvard and do your PhD, and as I did in our history, you learn certain methods. It's very hard to step outside that and say to yourself, well, those methods don't necessarily work. Maybe there's another way. Maybe there's a method that you need to derive from the evidence that you have in front of you instead of coming to the evidence with the method. And so, that ability is really important. It's important in everything. You find it in every culture. I mean, look at the, you were making the assumption that Asians were less creative at a certain point, but you know. No, no, no, no. I'm only talking about the fact that they were profiled as such. And we've learned since then that that's not so at all. Right. Yeah. And if you look at Google or any of the Silicon Valley places that you were talking about, they're filled with people from Asia. They're filled with people from all over the world, you know, because there are creative people everywhere. So, you know, that's really the point, I think, is that we're all kind of individuals and we have in certain innate capabilities and drives. We want to try and understand what the reality in front of us is. And we have, and our capacity to do that is enhanced by our education, but also by our exercise of creative problem solving. And we're now beginning to understand that how important creative problem solving is. Yes. And well, would you say, this is an interesting side point. We kind of have come to the conclusion here with you today that it's better to lead a creative life. It's better to make education life long, life long learning. And, you know, and that if you have, you know, that if you have a life experience that will make you more creative, you will be a better contributor. But let's look at the dark side for a minute, Jonathan. Likewise, I could be creative in the most awful draconian atrocities and by creativity cuts both ways, doesn't it? Creativity does not necessarily build in ethics, does it? No, but that's part of what your education and background do. You know, depends on what your mother taught you. And it also depends, you know, that's the most important education. And then also, you know, it depends on, you know, what your, what the conditions of your cultural conditions that you're raised in. And we, we do have certain agreed upon ethics. And one of the things we're seeing so much right now, one of the things that's so disturbing about the politics of America right now is that we had a president who violated them all. And he also misinformed half of the public to think something other than the truth. And we're paying a severe price for that. So it's causing us to have to rethink how we accepted Chung's earlier point, you know, communication, creativity, what do you say, collaboration? Critical thinking, critical thinking. All those things are terribly important. And if we had done a better job of inculcating that in our population, we wouldn't be where we are today. Anyway, so I get what I don't want to do is close the show without talking about Paris. We need to know. Paris is a great example. So you know, right now in Paris, the artist, Christo, just passed away last year. And his, his wife, Jean-Claude, who was his partner in, you know, in thinking of all these creative things that they did, passed away in, in 2009. And they have always done these giant public projects. And they're right. And they're, and now his studio is going to finish the one that he had completely planned. All the work was done for it. Now it's just the construction phase. And so the studio decided they could really do that. And he wanted that to be done. So they're going to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And these projects always go for only about two weeks. And when you see them, they're just breathtaking because, number one, they're just beautiful. Something like you never saw before. There's a kind of Ripley's Believe It or Not aspect to this. You can't believe anybody could do that. And it raises all kinds of questions about how do they get paid for and, you know, how do they logistically do this and all of that. And right now, if you can actually go to christenjean-claude.net and look up Arc de Triomphe wrapped, and you can see a live stream of them doing the construction right now, it's just kind of fun to watch. I'll show you pictures of what they visualized it to be. So I'm going to go see this. And one of the things about this project, one, one things it will do is that there's going to be, there's going to be probably three million people that come to see this project. That's a lot of people. The last project he did, I mean, that's always the case with this project, with their projects, because they're really, you know, they're so spectacular and they're so beautiful. And when you see something that's really beautiful like that, and you can't explain it, it doesn't make any sense back to what you were saying about images. You can't really put it into words and yet it really touches you. It kind of disorganizes you. It changes the way in which you feel about yourself and the way in which you feel about the things around you. It's a, you know, it's like falling in love for the first time. And you let this out, another person into the world of your orders of things, and they disorganic a mess of it in one way. But you're willing to tolerate that because there's so many other gratifying aspects to the relationship, right? And in the process, you begin to learn how to reorganize yourself in relation to this other person. And that process is a continuing process. You're always having to learn from the world in that way. And these crystal projects give you a kind of very focused experience of that. Oh, that's very, very interesting. I'll be looking for it in the press, although I don't actually plan to get there as much as I love Paris. So, Kanga, you going there? And, you know, you can meet up with Jonathan in Paris. That would be something. That would definitely be something, but I will need to go to China. And if everything goes smoothly, I will be in China in October. In one of our program, I will be live joining you for my quarantine room in Shanghai. And I will keep you posted. And we will see whether or not we can do that. That will be something quite interesting. I think so. Can you take a moment and close the show, summarize, and say farewell to your 20-year teacher? Thank you, Jay. I'm not ready to say farewell to my professor because we keep in touch all the time. But for the past 20 years, I learned so much from Professor Frenberg, particularly in creativity. And he taught me how to be a creative people. And I'm not very creative people. That's why I settled with law parties. But I believe that it is utterly important for this war to have more artists. If only we have more artists, more writers, more academics around the government, we would never be in the situation we had, you know, a year ago. And I talk about the image and look at the image of the Trump White House. I'm speechless. I have no word to describe it. So that is something I don't want to share with you. That's such an interesting notion that what happened there in that administration, and in fact, with him, and since then, is an experience in this country with such a rich vocabulary, we have no words to describe. It's not true. Maybe we will invent some. We should invent some to describe what has happened. It's so nice to see you again. Thank you for joining us. I hope we can do this again. Let's go for 40 years, okay? Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. Jonathan Feinberg of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Chang Wang, my co-host and a lawyer who's going to go back to China and reconnect, okay? Thank you so much, post. Thank you.