This is the full transcript for Episode #315 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Dr. Steven Pritzker – Encyclopedia of Creativity, Creativity for Entrepreneurs. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 0:00
You’re more creative than you think.
Max Branstetter 0:16
Hi, welcome. I don’t know why my voice started off that high Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wiild ideas into Wild growth and high-pitched voice ideas. Sometimes I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is Episode 315 that’s three and 15. And today’s guest is Dr. Steven Pritzker. Steven, or Steve, is one of the most creative minds you’ll hear from that being. He’s taught creativity. He’s written for some of the most famous shows of all time, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He even conceived of and Co-edited the Encyclopedia of Creativity. So, as you guessed it, we don’t talk about creativity at all. It was a big disappointment. No, I’m just gonna now we dive into all things creativity, current creativity, future creativity. How to be more creative. It is Dr P Just kidding. It is Steven, enjoy the shoe.
Alrighty. We are here with Dr. Steven Pritzker, one of the most creative minds that you’ll ever come across. We joke about how certain people are just kind of really good at creativity, but not many can say that they wrote the book or conceived of the book. I’m creativity, the Encyclopedia of Creativity. Steven. Dr. Steven, however you prefer, Dr P, Doctor not Dr P, all right, anything but that one. Thank you so much for joining. How you doing today? Good. How are you? I’m doing great. I’m doing great. Let me make a note not to call you that one, but I
Dr. Steven Pritzker 2:16
think it’s self explanatory. We’re
Max Branstetter 2:20
gonna get to all things creativity and and beyond. And as soon as I came across you, I was just blown away by what you’ve done throughout your career, and now for decades now, giving back to the next generation in terms of creativity and all everything there. But there was one stop of your career from the Creative Writing standpoint that really jumped out at me. And that is unbreaking away. It was the show Breaking Away, correct?
Dr. Steven Pritzker 2:46
Yeah, yeah. I just wrote one episode of that. That’s interesting. It jumped at it,
Max Branstetter 2:51
yeah. Well, the reason it was because I saw the name breaking away. I went to IU, Indiana University. So breaking away is huge. Like everybody you know, people get fired up. Watch it around the time a little 500 my parents actually went to IU as well. They met at IU. So like growing up, they talked about that movie and watched it as a kid. So really, really cool. So anyway, so I was very familiar with the movie breaking away. I didn’t know until looking up your background about that show, and so maybe that’s why you only did one episode. Seems like it was cut
Dr. Steven Pritzker 3:23
short. It came into plan. It didn’t get picked up. But they we basically for the episode. I did reproduce the bicycle race as a racing in bathtubs, as I recall. So it was, it was basically not that creative, because it was the same dynamics that the movie had. But I liked the movie very much, and I was in Indiana for 10 years when I was young, and so I had that kind of connection to the culture there.
Max Branstetter 3:58
Oh yeah, that’s that’s special. Do you mean living in Indiana or with ties to IU? No,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 4:05
I lived in Indiana. I’ve never been to Bloomington. You
Max Branstetter 4:08
got to go. It will be the research for the next episode of Breaking Away. No, but it’s a special place. And that’s just a sneak peek at some of the awesome creative writing you’ve done. But I think if anybody looks at your background like you’re in a 75 episodes for TV, super impressive. I think the name that jumps out at anybody is The Mary Tyler Moore Show. How did you kind of get your foot in the door in terms of writing for what would be actually TV shows? It’s
Dr. Steven Pritzker 4:39
kind of a disorganized process. A lot of people moved to LA, which I was told to do by somebody, a friend of a family, who was producing Andy Griffith Show. I like the Dick Van Dyke Show, the original one, where he was a comedy writer. Later, I was disenchanted with my business experience. Even though I’d majored at business at in school, I just decided to just take a 360 degree turn at the age of 24 and move to LA with no credits no hadn’t even really written only half a script and quite a risky move. But I you know, when you’re 24 you you don’t necessarily think about risk in the same way as you do when you’re older. It was quite a struggle, but it didn’t last long. I mean, I got in within three or four years, which is really kind of amazing to me. And the first shows I worked on were room 222, which went in Emmy that year, is the best new comedy. And I was a story editor on that. And then Mary town of Moore, so a lot of that is luck. I mean, it’s random. I can’t say, Okay, I was this great writer, and everybody saw it and everything. It’s just, it’s getting into the room with people who are decision makers and somehow connecting with them, convincing them, and they read your materials. So it’s not it’s not a personality contest. It’s based on if you’re funny and if you can tell a story.
Max Branstetter 6:32
Well, what was the team behind The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Like, what were they looking for in writers? Well,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 6:38
the team was Jim Brooks and Alan burns. Jim Brooks is, of course, went on to do movies, and Alan had a very successful career. They were at room 222, when I went, Jim created that. So I had known them from there, and they said, We’re going to do marytown More, and we’re going to do a show with an audience, which nobody had done for a bit, since Dick Van Dyke, I think, went off the air. So it was new for all of us to say, you’re going to bring in a couple 100 people and they’re going to laugh, or they’re going to not laugh. That was challenging and exciting and very nerve wracking, because the audience comes in and you don’t know how they’re going to respond. So that was a big leap, but I loved it. I
Max Branstetter 7:37
feel like it’s more unique these days, like there are shows, and obviously there’s SNL, and there are shows in front of a live audience, but that’s That does sound like really intimidating. Of like, Hey, we’re gonna get live feedback for for this stuff as part of this. What were writers rooms like back then?
Dr. Steven Pritzker 7:54
And the beginning of that show, there were just, there were two guys. There, was Jim and Allen, and they did all the stories, you work with them, and then you could be a story editor. But I didn’t want to be a story editor because of my experience on room 222, being thrown in because I became a story editor on my first script, I was crazy. The pressure and the stress of having to do that I felt was wrong. Looking back, I probably would have done it because I would have gotten a sense of how they ran the show much more, but I didn’t so
Max Branstetter 8:34
and Story Editor, for anybody who’s not familiar, including myself, is that what it sounds like someone who edits the story
Dr. Steven Pritzker 8:39
arc absolutely and it’s you sit in the story meetings, and you work with the writers, and then you go as far with the writers as you can, and then you eventually go into a room and rewrite it. And it’s a lot of meetings, a lot of stories. It’s the most essential part of a TV comedy show. Drama is more isn’t rewritten in the same way that comedy is. So it’s a whole different animal writing comedy is a matter of sitting there and trying to be funny every few lines, in addition to keeping the story going. So that’s why it’s so rare to have really good comedy shows you could name in the history of television. Is probably 10. Maybe I’ve never sat down and figured it out 1015, it’s very challenging a medium, and they kept shortening the amount of time, the amount of commercial time kept increasing in the amount of show time is less. So it’s kind of an art. To capture. You have a number of characters, so you have to kick take care. Each one has something to do, and you have a couple story lines going, and you’ve got to be funny, and you got to do that all in 2324 minutes at that point, 24 when it started. It’s probably 222 now, so it’s not much time to do all that.
Max Branstetter 10:24
Did you ever see it coming that like, I feel like all the shows these days, because comedy is super popular, but as you mentioned, it’s a tough nut to crack like it’s tough to actually be really funny consistently. I feel like there’s all these shows now and over the past decade that are like that, dramedy, like comma and drama, comedy and drama not common. And like, for example, White Lotus is really popular now. And, you know, the past decade, shameless was really popular. And like, there’s a lot of shows like that that have serious undertones, but have a lot of comedy worked in. How do you balance that? Like you were saying, of making sure that the story keeps going and it’s compelling, while making sure that there’s still comedy spliced into that?
Dr. Steven Pritzker 11:11
Well, that comes down to a couple things. One, the characters have to be funny, and then they need to have a real underpinning of reality, so that even Mary Tyler Moore was exceptional in terms of the definition of the characters. Each character on that was very, very well defined. And so you could go dramatic with them, if you wanted to. It wasn’t. There were a few dramatic shows that they did. I wrote one of them on anti semitism, and I really wasn’t crazy about going into something that dramatic, but they wanted me to write it, and so I did the show because the characters were so well developed, the actors were exceptional, and the producers knew what they were doing. You need all of that to make it exceptional. You know, that’s a good overview for what you need to have creativity in any business you need a combination of leadership, clear values and clear objectives and a freedom to experiment and try different ways of doing things. I never thought of that parallel exactly like that. So
Max Branstetter 12:42
I Well, let’s dive more into that. I think, you know, the show, we interview so many entrepreneurs, and so often creativity comes up, and it’s an area that’s of great interest to me. I would argue that you’re someone interested in creativity as well, just just a little bit, but it’s been one of the foundation, foundational pillars of this show since episode one, and so I always love diving into it. But through the lens of entrepreneurship, like creating your own business, what makes creativity so crucial in the world of new ventures like that?
Dr. Steven Pritzker 13:18
Well, if you view business as a competition, then you need to differentiate yourself in order to win. And so it’s as simple as as that, what value do you add to the product you’re offering that sets you apart from your competition. And I still think business schools don’t fully understand and are suspicious of creativity. It sounds to them like it’s a you know, I said, you know,
Max Branstetter 14:05
well, we might have to keep that one in only because you called it out.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 14:10
It’s ethereal. It’s something we don’t do. We’re a businessman. We’re serious people. We aren’t fluffy. There’s still a way to go to get some businessmen. Now, there’s a lot of areas that inherently call for creativity, but still aren’t creative like you were mentioning show business. There’s a reason for that, and that is the structure of corporate business requires you to meet certain objectives. And creativity is inherently risky because it means doing things that. That you haven’t done before. So let’s look at, for example, the entertainment business and why you see so few shows that are different because the people who do the programming want to keep their job, and if they can say this worked before, didn’t work this time, but it worked before, then they have a safety net. They feel there’s very few attempts to really do something extraordinary. And let’s face it, if there’s only a few shows in the history of television that are really creative, to get that level of creativity requires an extraordinary amount of both skill, luck, chemistry, all kinds of things, timing, it’s safer to just do what’s been done before. So that’s what people do.
Max Branstetter 16:02
I love that. That’s a real catch 22 of that. The natural default is, if something’s working, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Like, keep it going. You’re seeing great results, whether it’s a TV show or a business or a podcast or whatever it’s like. Obviously, if people are liking it, you would think that they would like more of it, but that’s also a huge trap of Well, that’s a great way to become stale over time, like, if you never try anything risky, or never try anything outside of the box, at some point you’re going to lose people. So that’s a really interesting point there. And I think when you look at creativity over the years, I’m sure it’s changed hugely in terms of how it’s taught, how it’s thought, about how it’s accepted, since your early days in the writers room, what’s the biggest way that creativity has changed through your eyes,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 16:55
in terms of the field itself, or in terms of the world.
Max Branstetter 17:01
Well, I’m interested in both of those. Okay,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 17:04
well, the field I started in about 1990 around there, starting to think about transitioning into creativity. And at that point it, it was a field that was pretty small and very segregated in different areas. So the encyclopedia came from in graduate school when I was getting my doctorate, going to the Engineering Library, the Law Library. Why am I on all these libraries when, when there’s no cohesion, there wasn’t a field of creativity. And so the idea of the encyclopedia was to make people realize that it it’s applicable across the board, and it is a field worth studying, and it still has a long way to go as far as growing into a discipline, but at least it’s on its way. So that’s as a field. There are enough books, enough research, that if anyone is interested in learning more about it, they can do so, and that was one of my objectives in going into it was to try to enhance creativity in the world, and help people understand that they can be creative even if they don’t think they are. That there’s a lot of myths that go into being a creative person and what creativity involves. As far as business goes, I believe there’s more awareness now than there was 50 years ago. You have such tremendous advancement in technology that it’s forcing people to be creative within certain ways. There were no podcasts like this 30 years ago, and you could name a lot of different fields where there have been incremental increases, but you have the the phone, and that’s just exploded a lot of different opportunities. So this is a very good time to be creative, and I’m very interested in AI and what that can do, and whether it is or is not creative. There can help you be more creative. There’s, there’s a lot of advancement, there’s a lot, there’s so much more work to be done. If you look, for example, if you look at television, not just the shows, look at advertising, which was where I wanted to start, because at the time, it seemed creative. You look at those drug commercials, one after the other, they all look like the same. They all have the the only thing creative are these ridiculous names they give the drugs. Yeah, Xyla, they have a lot of x’s and z’s and Y’s xylophone, yeah, yeah. They probably started with Xanax, and it’s gone from there. It’s just, does anyone behind this that spends all this money, they spend all these moneys developing the drug, then they show everyone has somebody smiling because they don’t have this whatever dysfunction anymore. Disease or skin rash or whatever the drunk cures. It’s just a parade of identical expensive things going on that you wonder. Does anyone have any idea? Do they think what they’re doing is created because they put a person of a different minority in the in the ad, or what’s going on there? I believe that’s just, let’s do it the way it’s always been done. Nobody’s nobody’s sitting there and saying, Well, we should do something different. So everything we see, and there’s a diet with all the streaming and all the different I subscribe to most of them, and there are nights when you go, I gotta watch there’s not the kind of original product with all the increase in product, you would think we would be in a golden age. We were for a little while, but it cycles in and out. It’s not something you can control, but you can at least go for something spend your life trying to achieve some modicum of originality, because you have it. You’re born with it, you’re not like anyone else. So why are you suppressing that? I believe creativity is a core ingredient in being alive and expressing yourself, and whether it works or not, the experience of it is who all of us as human beings, and God knows we need it these days.
Max Branstetter 22:56
It’s upsetting. It also inspiring. What you just said, because I totally agree. I’ve always thought that pharma commercials are so boring, you’re right. Like, the most exciting thing is the name, and there’s so much legal language in there that it takes up, you know, they’re, like, two minute long commercials where they’re just reading all the sides, you know, trying to cover this themselves, from a legal standpoint. And it’s just kind of basic, like B-roll in the background. And I feel like car commercials get very repetitive and boring as well. Ironically, the type of commercials that are the best and the funniest and have been for years, are insurance, which is, like, the least exciting thing in the world, yeah, in a whole year,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 23:39
right? Yeah, yeah, because of that, because they have nothing to say about the product, it’s all the same. So exactly who can be funnier, by the way, what’s your favorite side effect? Mine is death. That’s
Max Branstetter 23:56
a great one. Yeah, it’s definitely up there, right? A little, a little morbid, but the reason I was saying it’s as depressing as well and inspiring is it’s a reminder that, like, Hey, you, like, we have the ability as humans to shake things up and be original and be creative like that. But so often people are just focused on getting the next commercial out, or get in the next podcast out, or move into the next task with their business, and they’re not bringing that like they’re not giving themselves space to think or room to even be creative. From your standpoint, from your experience, how do you disrupt that? How do you say, Hey, we’re Let’s force ourselves to do something a little bit more outside the box. You
Dr. Steven Pritzker 24:40
just said it, let’s do it. Let’s take the time. The crucial element is, first of all, committing to doing something, trying to make our product or what? Do our service better. So it’s about quality and it’s about differentiating. It’s as simple as, how can we do this better? How can we make our product better, or create a new product, or, how can we sell it better? How can we differentiate ourselves from our competition? Or how can we create something that is a new field? And people do that, that’s a very big leap, but it starts with questioning. It starts with commitment. It starts with the idea that I’m going to make a certain amount of time out of my day to focus on creativity. And that’s that’s not a new idea. Back in the 90s, 3m I believe, was a company that allotted 15% of people’s time for creativity, to allow them to work out new ideas. And that that worked out well, they came up with some really great products from allowing people to focus on that and not to get away from that, I’ve got to spend every minute doing what is basically routine work. And the pressure and stress of working a lot of hours can also disrupt any creative activity. I’m not sure it’ll be very interesting to see what the working at home versus working in the office. What will be the results on that in terms of creative thinking and whether it helps or hurts. Commitment, though, is the first thing you have to really decide you want that and it’s a priority, and you’re willing to understand that that requires time, money and a willingness to experiment,
Max Branstetter 27:26
creativity, experimenting, titles, thumbnails, all things that are the name of the game when it comes to YouTube. And did you know the Wild Business Growth podcast, which I can’t pronounce my podcast name correctly. Well, address that later is on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. Make sure to check out the videos and Subscribe for the latest Wild entrepreneurs in video form, not just audio form anymore. There’s the audio podcast as well as the video episodes as well. If you want to get a little bit more visual, that is on YouTube and the channel is @MaxBranstetter okay, back to creativity. On creativity, Well, speaking of experimenting and the agonizing but also inspiring process of testing and repeating and throwing out drafts and all that you, as you hinted before, conceived and CO editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of creativity. So first of all, thank you, because when you look this thing up, it’s several 100 pages. It’s, uh, probably people would call it the labor of love, a labor of love, but it’s
Dr. Steven Pritzker 28:42
two volumes.
Max Branstetter 28:46
It’s like one of those books that you see in cartoons. That’s like one foot tall, one foot wide.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 28:53
It’s about 1400 pages. I and my co editor on it, Mark Runco, are probably only people that have read the whole thing, although I had a student who came and said, I read the whole thing before I came. Oh, that’s
Max Branstetter 29:06
awesome. Well, that’s like, what is it that book everybody talks about Infinite Jest, like, or Prayer for Owen, meaning, like, there’s all those books that are over 1000 pages or super long. So, so, so anyway. So I guess the nice part of that is, if you by the end of it, if you know, but if you know, nobody’s paying attention by the end of it, you could just mess around and just doodle and totally go off script in the last few pages. But I think it’s awesome that you put this together. And it’s, it’s a little bit meta, but it’s inherently creative, putting together a work that’s so daunting and so new and nothing of its kind like that between you and your your co editor, what would you say was like the secret that made this all work and made you be able to produce such a prolific effort like this?
Dr. Steven Pritzker 29:49
Well, again, luck plays a big part in it. I went to Mark grotco. I was still in graduate school when I had this idea. And. I met Mark Runco, who was one of the leading researchers in the field and prolific writer editor, and told him I had this idea for the encyclopedia, and we tried to sell it as a popular work, which is still probably a possibility, but I moved on to other things. We didn’t sell it. We had an agent. We didn’t sell it for the first 10 people. And he said, Well, let’s try to sell it as an academic work. And bang, we had Academic Press, which was a leading publisher, and another leading publisher go for it. We’d already made the commitment to academia press, and that’s been since purchased by Elsevier, and they had a excellent editor, Nikki Levy, that was on it and worked on it, and they just were great support in doing this. And it took off in a way that we we couldn’t have anticipate. You never know. But the big thing that has happened with it is the individual articles get sold separately. Elsevier, which bought Academic Press has made a very good living out of selling the articles. And I don’t care whether it’s the articles go online or not, because nobody except one student is gonna when I read it from front to back, but it has a place in terms of being a source for serious academic publishing about creativity. So in a way, it stopped me from doing a lot of the other research that I would have liked to do, and another way, it made a contribution. So it’s, it’s always a compromise. Nothing always comes out the way exactly you want. But I’m, I’m delighted that I was able to do that, to come into a different field as a second career, and make a contribution, and to work with the other thing that I worked with the American Psychological Association, there’s a division on that includes creativity. I worked with that division, and I work with the educational coalition to do work on creativity in the classroom. And there were a number of people who served as deans of schools of education on this board, and they they instituted some classes, a few of them in education. And I did a video. I’m not thrilled with it, because it was very low budget, but it was on creativity in the classroom, and got to do some work on that area, because that’s been a particular interest of mine, because of being a student that was incredibly bored. I mean, maybe that out we’re in comedy, because I sat there doing my own jokes throughout my educational career and being a disrupter, and I just believe education should be open and fun, and that there’s a long way to go on that area too.
Max Branstetter 33:42
Well. My only criticism of the Encyclopedia of creativity is it’s too short. I think you should have kept going. You’ve sold yourself short. No, just go.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 33:52
So the movie rights, you know,
Max Branstetter 33:55
couldn’t be too long. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It could be several sequels in there. But, for anybody who’s like working on a really long book like that, or any sort of creative output, whether it’s a show or a podcast or video series, where it is such a lengthy process of doing it, what advice do you have for actually completing the thing and making sure your creativity flourish just throughout it, establish
Dr. Steven Pritzker 34:24
clear objectives and break it down into pieces. This is what I would suggest for writing, and I think it would be true for any creative activity, allot the time and show up every day and spend the time regardless of what happens, just commit that time. Some days will be fantastic. Some days will be difficult. Break it into doable Bites. To be willing to tear it apart if it doesn’t work. There’s no simple formula for creativity, which is a good thing, because we see when there are simple formulas, what happens you get what you got before. So it’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be risky. I would say the most important thing is that you have a personal passion for what you’re doing, that you have a stake in it, that you see the value that it relates to who you are and who you want to be and what contribution you want to make to the world, if you’re willing to do that, and if you don’t have that, that would be the first thing to look at is what, what matters to you, and what do you want to do? What? What does your contribution mean to you and and to others.
Max Branstetter 36:06
When you look at the teaching side of things, let’s say, I think it’s really cool. I hinted at the start, but you know, for many years now, you’ve taught creativity, Creative Studies, stuff in that ballpark at Saybrook university, one I think it’s awesome. And as you mentioned, it’s come a long way that there’s classes like that, and that there’s that interest from students to to learn from that obviously. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take a class from you? Let’s sign me up in terms of, like, your teachings on creativity over the years, what’s a specific aspect of creativity, or like a lesson on creativity that students seem to be pretty consistently delighted and surprised by. It’s like you’ve unlocked something for them. Well,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 36:50
the first thing when we started was just the idea that they could study creativity. Early on when we were starting this program because we started a program that was pretty unique at that time. It wasn’t the only one, but it was definitely new. And so we were doing basically pitches to the students we had. And one student had a epiphany. She said, I had an epiphany, and she committed right away, and she did a great dissertation. And so the the idea itself, getting that to people, that it’s something they can study, they something they can enhance, that it’s not some deep mystery a lot of people, a lot of mystery has been built around creativity, Eureka, and it’s moments that comes from Space, and the idea that this is something we can we can learn about. We can’t harness it. We can’t make a formula for it. We don’t want to that would be anti creative. But we can understand as your questions you’re asking, What do I do? How do I go about it? We can base it on successful people, but we can also say everybody has their own individual style and background and ability and desire on what they want to do. Of one of the first, the first when this was masters, before we went to a doctorate, I kept it as a specialization, along with my, well, I was the director, co person that worked with it. We kept it Ruth Richards. We kept it as a specialization, even when the school wanted to make it a doctorate, because I felt that the market wouldn’t understand a doctorate in creativity. I don’t know if they would now or not. I just felt that understanding psychology was an important aspect of it, and understanding psychology, your psychology, and what are your personal needs, and what are your personal risk tolerance? What I found, and still find, is people say, I don’t have a creative bone in my body, and that drives me nuts, because it’s been inculcated in them that they aren’t created by probably either parents, teachers, friends, that they can’t do it. And so why? Why even try and we’re. Losing a lot of creative energy from that. I’m concerned about all the lack of education in different economic levels and minorities. We’re losing somebody. My fantasy is we’re losing somebody who could come up with an answer for global warming or for something that we need. We have so many crisis moments now that weren’t even there 30 years ago when I started studying this, and so I think the world needs all that creativity. We can get work. We’re we’ve got challenges now that are to the whole survival of mankind. Who would sound like we’re in a comic book, but it’s happening, and it’s happening faster than we could imagine. So I feel this is a very serious topic. We need to really figure out how to get what as a humanity needs to harvest whatever creativity we have as a species, first of all, to fight off artificial intelligence when it makes its move,
Max Branstetter 41:27
right? Well, that’s a whole series of TV shows and, yeah, movies in itself.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 41:31
That’s been a cliche forever. So yeah, I think it. I think it might be making coffee in the morning.
Max Branstetter 41:44
Well, it would be nice if it does a laundry for us and does the dishes. It does everything for it. Oh, I see, I see, I see what you’re saying. Well, you just went through is really, really well said. And actually, we’ve come full circle with this podcast was, you know, we’re on episode. We’re in the 310s now, in terms of episodes, the three teens, we’ll call it and amazing. Thank you. Way back in episode two, our guest was my mentor, former former co worker, a guy named Brendan O’Marra, and you know, he’s led digital marketing at, you know, like Bic and laundry companies and lots of really cool companies, and been in the agency world. Agency world. Anyway, his like, kind of quote word to live by is always, I believe everyone is creative. You just need to get it out. Like everyone’s got that creativity in him. It’s just to your point. The the flip side of that is, like for so many of us, it gets suppressed at a certain point, or you go in a different direction, and you start to doubt yourself whether you are creative. And so whatever we can do to keep that creativity flourishing, I’m totally with you. Can can be the answer? Can point to a lot of the answers that we’ll need. So I want to creative Creek. I creatively had a grammar mispronunciation there. I want to creatively switch it up. To wrap up with some rapid fire, Q and A. You ready for it, sure? All right, let’s get wild. Actually. You keep bringing up AI, and I want to know your thoughts on AI. What is? What do you think is a like a dream, awesome use case for AI that you love in terms of creativity, I
Dr. Steven Pritzker 43:27
love finding new answers to medical problems so we can have more drug ads
Max Branstetter 43:38
and more side effects.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 43:41
And I’ll say one other thing that I’m finding it’s very useful to interact for questions, not necessarily answers, but the questions that you it generates, the answers generate can be pretty good the questions you’re at asking so so far, I think it, it’s not original thinking, so it’s just a device right now, but as it grows, it’s going to be fascinating.
Max Branstetter 44:08
We work on some clips for Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Joe is known as the godfather of content marketing, and him and his buddy and co founder Robert always talk about in their show. Whenever they talk about AI, they say, keep in mind, got you know it’s like, because everybody’s blown away by the capabilities right now. Keep in mind, this stuff a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, is going to be so exponentially better at this stuff than what it is right now. It’s pretty mind blowing to look ahead and see what’s what’s possible but, but back to your answer. I think medical stuff boring commercials aside, medical solutions is a pretty awesome use case for it. All right, what is something about teaching college student or becoming a professor that caught you by surprise? There’s maybe a little bit more. More of a learning curve there than you anticipated.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 45:03
Well, I think any anybody who teaches will say the time that it requires is, you don’t know why or how, but the time required to work with students getting a dissertation is far more than I anticipated in preparing classes, in all of the administrative things. So it’s, it’s very, very time consuming job. I was hoping I would have more time to write and you don’t, conference presentations, faculty meetings, administration just goes on and on. So it takes way more time than I ever thought it would. If
Max Branstetter 45:51
we can get AI to distort time to give us just a little bit extra time in each day when we need it, that would be pretty cool. So I’m sure that’s coming on the flip side. The flip side of that, what’s been the most rewarding part about teaching students,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 46:03
helping students achieve life changing experience, getting a PhD changes your life because you’re forced to Ask questions about what what you can prove is real and what you think so, it’s a very that’s the most important thing about it. It’s not the topic, and it’s not the contribution of the literature, because most dissertations aren’t read, including mine, which really kind of IRRI because it was about comedy, right? I thought it would be sexy. Nobody cared.
Max Branstetter 46:44
Sounds sexy to me. It wasn’t, all right. Well, a couple sexy ones to wrap up. What is rather who is in actor or writer or just any person that you’ve met through your time in TV writing that was just knocked you off your socks, how funny they were. Oh, wow.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 47:10
Jim Brooks was the most brilliant mind, and he was funny, but he was more than funny. He was able to spit out whole lines of dialog that were wonderful. And when I would go in, I would write him down. He one time he said, who that was great. I said, you wrote that. Wrote it down, you know? So he was in a class by himself. As far as I feel the ability to do that job at a level that I never saw anyone else do. It blew
Max Branstetter 47:47
himself away. That’s hilarious. And then last one you mentioned that there’s only a handful really, of, like, really, really good comedy shows in the history of TV. What you know won’t let you answer one that you worked on. What’s one you didn’t work on that from any time frame, is just an iconic comedy show.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 48:06
I love the Dick Van Dyke Show because of the humanity of it, and I love Carl Reiners. There’s another guy I did get to meet and work with who was extraordinary, just an extraordinary comic mind and a wonderful human being, really a great guy. I would say the Dick Van Dyke Show had that personal effect on me. There were other shows like on the family that I didn’t get at first and I didn’t write for even though I could have a mash, to say just one. There’s a few I liked. I liked friends a lot, even though I I don’t think it had that kind of other quality. It was just kind of funny, nice show. There’s a relative handful that make that leap to be really something you remember and would watch. And I hope we get more of them. And I hope that we’re just in a kind of a period. It tends to go like that, waves. It goes in, waves, up and down. My
Max Branstetter 49:19
wife, Dana, is a friends-aholic. Friends is her favorite show of all time. So I can can hear and feel her smiling as you’re as you’re saying that. It’s classic. And then I’ve turned her into a science Seinfeld Die Hard as well. So
Dr. Steven Pritzker 49:34
how did I forget Seinfeld? There you go. Yeah. Frasier was a very good show, which I like because of the psychology angle. They did well. So there’s probably, you could probably come up with 10 good ones.
Max Branstetter 49:49
Everything else will feed them to the dogs. Sometimes
Dr. Steven Pritzker 49:52
people just want to watch. They don’t want to be challenged. Or Larry David’s show. Was his curb, curb, your enthusiasm. I had some wonderful aspects to it. And so there’s always somebody doing something good.
Max Branstetter 50:11
Yeah, absolutely legendary, Steven. Thank you so much. This has been awesome. This has been like a mental vacation and brainstorm in the realms of creativity. So thank you so much. And if people want to learn more about you, they could check out the encyclopedia creativity, which is super short. You can read it in one sitting, super easy,
Dr. Steven Pritzker 50:31
but for the movie, yeah,
Max Branstetter 50:35
yeah, exactly, which will be an epic. But Where’s, where’s the best place, like, if they want to get check that out, or if they want to connect with you in some form, like, where’s the best place to reach out to you if
Dr. Steven Pritzker 50:45
anybody, I’m ashamed to say I don’t have a website. I’ve just been busy doing I do have a website. I’m developing. I’m dancing with the Trickster about people’s extraordinary experiences. But for me, you can email me at S, Pritzker, s in my last name, P, R, i, t, z, k, e, , I think that’s how you found me. I do check that every day, and I should, I should get a website, but I
Max Branstetter 51:19
am in Yeah, for me. Well, who needs a website? Your work speaks for itself, but really, really appreciate it. And the last thing, final thoughts, it could be a quote, Words To Live By. It could be a one liner, whatever you want, just send us home here.
Dr. Steven Pritzker 51:34
You’re more creative than you think.
Max Branstetter 51:39
Dr. Pritzker, you are an absolute joy and somehow even more creative than you think. As well. Thank you, Steven, for coming on the Wild Business Growth podcast, sharing your Wild story, and thank you Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to Follow the Wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast app and hit Subscribe on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. You can also find us on Goodpods, where there’s some good, good pods, and for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That’s where podcasting meets entrepreneurship and creatively terribly bad puns. And you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter Until next time, let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!
