Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

If you're like us, you would love to be more creative.

But how can you do that?

And what is creativity anyway? And why are some of us more creative than others?

Those are the questions we'll be exploring with our guests on this episode.

Joining us is best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter Matt Ricktle,

whose latest book is called Inspired, Understanding Creativity, a journey through art, science, and the soul.

Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

I'm really grateful.

What prompted you to write this book, and who did you write it for?

That's such a good question.

I've never been asked that question before. You must be

creative. I just think of the same thing, Mom. It's a good one. I'm trying to figure out if I wrote it

to skewer my parents. So I wrote this because somewhere in my 20s, the person that I had been growing up evaporated,

and a person who started writing a lot of books and a syndicated comic strip and music emerged and I became

overcome often with these impulses to create. So if I'm being really honest with you,

I wanted to understand this experience that I would frequently have to create and that as I began to

get older and be blessed with really remarkable friendships with world-class creators,

they would describe to me too. And I was like, what is this thing? And that's what happened.

...