You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

A few years ago, back in March of 2019, my co-host Adam Bristol interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel about his new book called An Elegant Defense.

It traced four different stories, illustrating how our immune systems function.

Well, Adam and Matt had such a good time in conversation with one another that it became a bit of a nightmare for our editors.

There was a lot of content that needed to be pulled in order to keep it to our usual episode length.

So when Matt's latest book, inspired, all about the science of creativity, came across my desk. I first handed it to

Adam, thinking, well, he would just love another chance to hang out with Matt. But Adam immediately

turned it back to me and said, look, you're the one that's really interested in creativity.

And of course, he was right. But I thought, you know, I've been hosting this podcast for a long time.

We're almost at 400 episodes. I know how to keep a conversation short and crisp. Well,

I was no match for Matt Richtle because by the end of the episode, we had had such a good conversation

that somehow he convinced me

to sing back up on a track, a song that he wrote. So that's in store for you if you listen

all the way to the end. But in the meantime, here's my conversation with Matt Richtel,

who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for a series he wrote in the New York Times

on distracted driving. He also writes fiction, and even his nonfiction books have a very

narrative component. So this is a person for whom creativity is a friend, or at least a tool that he

uses every day. And so it makes sense that he

...