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Hey. It's Guy here. So as some of you may have heard, there will be a new host of TED Radio Hour, which is super exciting. Her name is Manoush Samorodi, and she'll be starting in March. In the mean time, I wanna share some of my favorite episodes of Ted Radio Hour over the years. And this one is called the source of creativity, and it's full of big ideas about where creativity comes from and how we can all tap into it. This episode features Sting, writer Elizabeth Gilbert, and sir Ken Robinson, who still holds the record for the most popular TED talk of all time. And one final note, it also features an interview with the great British choreographer, Dame Gillian Lynne.

Dame Gillian was 88 when I talked to her in 2014. And last year, she passed away. Her story of how she got to be a dancer and how she found her creative outlet in dance is so inspiring. You will love it. So here is one of my favorite episodes. It's called the source of creativity. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

Those talks, those ideas adapted for radio. From NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And today on the show, the source of creativity. Ideas about where it comes from, why we all have it, and how to find it.

Hello. Hello. Now, I just wanna make sure that you can hear me.

I can hear you.

And can you hear Guy?

I can hear Guy. Hello? Hi. It's Sting. How are you?

Yep. Sting. Hello. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming in.

It's a pleasure.

So I was in Vancouver and saw your talk. So Sting's TED talk was about finding inspiration by going back home and how he turned the stories of his childhood into an album and then a show on Broadway. And the stories are all based on the people he grew up around in Northern England in a town called Wallsend.

The town was was basically, dedicated to shipbuilding. At the end of my street was a shipyard. They built the biggest ships in the world right at the end of my street. The other end of the town was a coal mine, so it wasn't exactly like living living next to the, the Met. There were never any operas in our town or even any shows, but, I had a need for that kind of life. And so I I kind of invented it in my head.

Now the story of how he made the record about Wall's End and how he was able to mount this huge production is really a story about creativity. And in Sting's case, how he lost it. But we'll get there. When you think of the word creativity, like, how how would you define it?

How would I define creativity? I for me, it's the, it it's the the ability to take, a risk, to actually put yourself on the line and risk, ridicule, being pilloried, criticized, or whatever. But you have an idea that you you think you wanna, put out there, and you must take that risk.

Did you think of yourself as a as a creative person when you were when you were younger?

I was actually allowed to dream a lot as a child. I worked with my father every morning as a milkman, and he would get me up at 5 in the morning when, all of my school friends were in bed, and we'd we'd drive around the streets and deliver milk, and he wouldn't say very much to me apart from, you know, 22 points here and the 3 points there. We didn't talk. And so I was allowed in this very creative time in the day, you know, as as light was coming up, to dream. And I dreamt and dreamt and dreamt about futures I might possibly have fantasized, I suppose. So I was in the creative mode from the very beginning, just by being left alone.