Derek Thompson

Thank you.

I think it's a lovely cover as well.

So I, and I had nothing to do with that.

That was all the people at Penguin.

Here's how I wrote this book, which is not to say how everyone should write their book.

I think that, you know, creativity is,

is the ability to come up with surprising answers to familiar problems.

If you come up with surprising answers to problems that people don't think about all the time, no one calls that creative.

When you come up with familiar answers to familiar problems, nobody calls that creative.

And this marriage of surprise and familiarity that is so necessary for creativity and is

one of the theses of my book, which is that that is the dance at the heart of every great pop culture product, is that it is both familiar and a surprise.

So as I was going around and writing my book, I kind of just like gathered a lot of awesome stories and ideas.

I would talk to one person in TV, I'd try to distill their idea to its very most sort of fascinating nugget.

I talked to somebody in music, in movies, in publishing, distill that idea.

Writing the book itself was kind of like playing jigsaw puzzle.

It was fitting all these ideas together in such a way that made sense if you step back 10 feet.

But the way that I wrote it really was to allow myself to be curious about anything that was interesting and think I can make this work if I just collect all the most interesting stuff.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So I had all sorts of terrible ideas for books a long time ago.

And then I got an agent down in D.C., Gail Ross, and she was sort of like my proposal doctor.