Show Notes
“Every imagination is distinct,” says Dan Hunter. “It is a conglomeration of what you’ve experienced, what you want to achieve, and what you remember.” Can imagination be measured, and what does it have to do with creativity and invention? How do teachers develop imagination in their students, and how is it elicited in the workplace? Host Richard Miles talks to Dan Hunter, the inventor of the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, known as H-IQ, the first assessment of individual imagination and ideation. Dan is also an accomplished playwright, author, songwriter, teacher, and comedian.
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: 0:00
Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Richard Miles: 0:00
Imagination. What does it really mean? Can it be measured? And what does it have to do with creativity and invention? I’m your host, Richard Miles, and my guest today via the miracle of Zoom is Dan Hunter, the inventor of the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire known as H-IQ, the first assessment of individual imagination and ideation. He’s also accomplished playwright, songwriter, and teacher. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Dan Hunter: 0:00
Thank you, Richard
Richard Miles: 1:04
So, Dan. This show is produced in Florida. I live in DC, You live in Massachusetts and we’re conducting the interview via a technology created in San Jose, California. Imagine that.
Dan Hunter: 1:04
Yes, exactly.
Richard Miles: 1:17
So I neglected to mention in introducing you that you are probably the world’s foremost authority on what makes Iowa funny.
Dan Hunter: 1:25
I’ll claim that honor. Yeah, I am a native of Iowa and lived there until about 20 years ago.
Richard Miles: 1:32
And you’ve written a couple of books on it as well. Sort of specifically humor and Iowa, right?
Dan Hunter: 1:36
Yeah, Three books. “Let’s Keep Des Moines a Private Joke,” “The Search for Iowa” and “We Don’t Grow Potatoes,” and, the last one is, “Iowa. It’s a State of Mind.”
Richard Miles: 1:47
Is this taken well by native Iowans that they like the ribbing? Or do you get some push back?
Dan Hunter: 1:52
No. I made my living for about 17 years, performing throughout the Midwest and primarily Iowa. I think Midwesterners, they appreciate humor about themselves, and they recognize that they have a calm humility about them, for the most part. Occasionally you get a crackpot, I mean one person once sent me back one of my books stapled 100 times.
Richard Miles: 2:14
Like I said, that’s an interesting side hustle. But I guess it wasn’t a side hustle a while.
Dan Hunter: 2:20
No, it was my main work at the time.
Richard Miles: 2:22
So, this is not a show dedicated to Iowa humor, as much as we, we could talk about that, but to showcase the stories of inventors and entrepreneurs, and at the root of most of those narratives are seeds of imagination and creativity. But the problem is imagination, sort of one of those amorphous words that a lot of people use and a lot of them use it differently, I thought. Let’s start by defining imagination itself, How would you give a fairly precise definition of imagination? And then we’ll go on after that to talk about the questionnaire you develop.
Dan Hunter: 2:54
I think it’s very important to distinguish between imagination, creativity, and innovation. Imagination is what happens inside a person’s mind and imagination is something that we all have. It’s part of being Homosapiens. It’s part of our evolution, and people use their imagination every day, often unaware that they are using their imagination. So the concise definition of imagination is, it is the ability to predict outcomes, visualized scenarios, and to engage in counterfactual thinking. So those three aspects are part of our daily life. I mean, you might be thinking, What am I gonna have for lunch? Should I go to downtown tomorrow? Where should we go on vacation? All of those involved predicting an outcome and visualizing this scenario, and it’s universal. Everybody does it now, you might ask yourself then, Well, what’s the difference between, say, me and Albert Einstein? Now, if you are trying to visualize where you left your car keys and you might visualize, Gee, do I see them in my mind on the kitchen counter? How do I see them by the back door? You’re using the same channels of visualization that Albert Einstein used because there’s no special channel for visualizing the universe. And the difference between most of us and Albert Einstein is that Albert Einstein practiced this his whole life, and he channeled his imagination to achieve his goals. He was able to visualize how light moved through the universe and how it might be bent by an orb or a solid body. He could actually visualize that in his mind, and that was the key to his success. So what about creativity? Creativity is defined as something that’s original, novel, of value, either aesthetic or utilitarian. And so it is actually a designation, and not of what goes on inside your mind, where you generate ideas, your imagination. It’s a designation that applies to your idea. Bringing your idea forward. Creativity is a designation given by others. It could be in your domain, it could be in your family. But the designation of creativity is not from you, can I use a metaphor?
Richard Miles: 5:04
Sure, of course, I love metaphors.
Dan Hunter: 5:06
This is a baseball metaphor, but then again, we are in America.
Richard Miles: 5:10
This is as close, as we’ll come baseball, probably in 2020. So go ahead.
Dan Hunter: 5:14
So imagination, creativity, and innovation. Imagination is when the batter is on deck in that little batter circle and warming up. Now, he or she could be thinking about anything, but we hope that she’s planning on a strategy, an idea to implement at the plate. She might be thinking ill bunt it down the third baseline, or I’ll try to hit it over the right field. Or maybe I’ll try to hit a home run. However, this is internal thinking imagination. She could be thinking about anything. She could be thinking about chicken pot pie, Cadillac Eldorado. It’s all internal at that point. Now, we hope that she is applying her imagination towards the goals of the game. Now, when she comes to bat, that is the chance to implement her idea. Now they’re too arbitrary white lines in baseball that extend into infinity, in theory. Those are the foul lines, and if you hit the ball outside of the foul line, no matter how powerful you hit it, it doesn’t count. Now it’s the same way with creativity. Your idea has to fall within the expectations of your domain within the expectations of society, be within the rules of the game. And so creativity, then, is when your idea works, and it’s recognized by people that it works and that it adds value within the game. Innovation is then when you have a tangible result the success like reaching first base air coming around the home plate. Now what I started to say is, the DaVinci is a very good example of this Leonardo DaVinci because we know from his notebooks that he had extraordinary ideas for somebody who lived in the late 15th early 16th century. Among them were human propelled helicopter, a set of flying wings. Now those ideas were only in his notebooks. They never were produced. The Duke of Milan could see no value in them, and so they were not useful. They weren’t deemed creative. They weren’t in the expectations of the Duke of Milan. Now skip to the second half of the 19th century, when a lot of his notebooks were found after being lost and during the end of the 19th century the question was not, can human beings fly? The question was when, because from about 1850 on, there was a great race to become the first self-propelled flying machine, and we know who finished first, which was the Wright Brothers. But so the time when they found these notebooks it was great excitement because the expectation was we will be able to fly and DaVinci’s ideas are considered creative. And in retrospect, in the last 20 years of the 21st century, museums have built replicas, particularly of the helicopter, and it doesn’t fly. But nonetheless, it’s what’s interesting about that. So all ideas begin in imagination, they can’t begin anywhere else. And therefore, if you channel your imagination, if you use your imagination, you will have ideas that maybe recognizes creative or they may not depending on the audience and the time of society.
Richard Miles: 8:19
You talked about, Einstein talked about DaVinci so clearly there are people who develop this skill better than others. but It’s not something that someone is totally lacking imagination. Just give an example from the other end of the spectrum. We have, ah, a brand new eight-month granddaughter, and what’s fascinating is to see her develop. And you can kind of see her understanding the world increase, including imagination. One example, where in the last month to six weeks she now understands that if somebody disappears from the room, they don’t disappear from the world. When she hears, noises or footsteps coming from outside the world, she looks expectantly so clearly she knows that somebody is gonna pop around the corner based on the steps. So that’s the prototype of beginning to imagine yourself right in different spatial areas or different time periods and so on. So you and others have developed a questionnaire that can really get at the fine tuning assessment of somebody’s. Is it their potential to imagine? Or is it just a snapshot of where they are on that spectrum of, say, being an eight-month-old baby who figures out that people exist outside of the room? And Einstein or DaVinci?
Dan Hunter: 9:26
First, let me address one of the differences between Einstein and DaVinci and most people. Everything that goes on in your brain is neural connections. Neural networks, where the synapses process an electrical charge inside the neuron converts it to a chemical at the synapse, and then it goes to the next one. What we know about the plasticity, the neural plasticity, the brain is that the brain strengthens how you use it. In other words, practice improves that network in your brain. There’s a classic study of 24 jugglers, and 12 of them had to learn how to juggle, and the other 12 had the great challenge of not learning how to juggle, what happened? Well, there’s actually an increase in the gray matter on the dorsal lateral side of those who learned how to juggle the brain structure itself changed by the learning. The non-jugglers had no change then. This is curious because, of course, the jugglers, the new jugglers, they did it for the month that they were required to do. And most of them stopped because they realized that being able to juggle was not going to increase their chance of passing on their DNA to anyone. So they stop juggling they came back six months later, and that growth in the brain in the gray matter had disappeared. The brain had rerouted that gray matter, those neurons for other tasks. So if you want imagination, you have to practice it, like Einstein did. Or like DaVinci, who walked the streets with his notebook constantly drawing constantly writing his ideas. Now HIQ, which I developed as a solo project. It does not compare your imagination to mine, and the reason for that is is that every imagination is distinct. Even identical twins who share the same genome will not have a similar imagination. It’s that imagination is that conglomeration of what you’ve experienced, what you want to achieve, what you remember. So it’s those three aspects and, you know, from literature and elsewhere that people remember events quite differently, so they have their own understanding of it that informs their own imagination. So the HIQ. The idea came to me when I was working to try to increase the importance of creative work in the schools, and my first thought was, well, we need to have some way of keeping score because Americans value what we can measure, particularly in the schools, and so those things that are immeasurable, such as creativity. They get overlooked or sidelined because they don’t fit into the equation. They don’t fit into the algorithm. So my thought was, if we could establish a measurement that would increase the importance of the creative work, I won’t go into my original idea, which was almost implemented in Oklahoma. But it was similar to something the CDC does. A CDC examines at-risk populations like postnatal, neonatal elderly, youth at risk. They actually measure behaviors to determine potential outcomes. And that’s what the original index was going to do. But as I thought about it, I realized couple of things one. The most important thing is how you use your imagination and getting students to channel their imagination towards their goals. And so the HIQ is based on four sessions, none longer than eight minutes. So it’s easiest schedule inside of a classroom, and you can do it shorter doesn’t have to go the full eight minutes and has very simple prompts. There’s no secret sauce just like that, no secret sauce between Einstein visualizing and you. It is the same skills, so that prompts ask, you know what are you doing with your imagination? What do you want to do? What do you hope to achieve? And then at the end of the first session, if you’re invited to write as many ideas as you can and it’s not an English test, you don’t need to be grammatically correct as long as you can remember your ideas from what you write at the end of the first session, the software seals your ideas up in a virtual envelope on stores it. Then you have an incubation period 3 to 7 days. Now, if you didn’t like your ideas in the first session, doesn’t matter because you’re gonna have three more sessions and the human brain being what it is. You will either consciously or subconsciously ask yourself, Why didn’t I have any ideas so it gets easier as you go along? Second session is visualization. The third session is on change and invention and discovering again every time your ideas air sealed and stored at the end of the fourth session, all your ideas come back to you. And you assess the idea is on a liquored scale, 1 to 10. That’s what gives you the score. It’s not a diagnostic test. It doesn’t say you’re creative and you’re not because we all have imagination. What it actually measures is how engaged you are with your ideas Now that is valuable to the individual. It’s also a former metacognition because you examine in that time period how you generate ideas where you get your ideas and you focus on the notion that, yeah, I can generate ideas. That’s my responsibility. For the schools they get a score in the aggregate, what that allows them to do. And here’s the measurement part that allows them to determine what changes occurring with these students in terms of their imagination. So you have on opening sessions, say, at the beginning of the year, and that’s a benchmark. You can take it again at the end of the semester or at the end of year. One school wants to start with the incoming freshman, and so it’s a very distinctive questionnaire and is very different from existing creativity tests. I’m sure you’ve seen some of those the nine-dot test and others, but the thing that puzzles me about the other creativity tests is that they are designed by an expert, administered on one day, and then evaluated by that same expert. So aren’t we really measuring whether or not you fit the experts’ idea of creativity? There’s no chance for you to find your own imagination, which is what HIQ does for you.
Richard Miles: 15:24
So, Dan, I think I understand how the test works. But let me just see if I do understand. If I were to sit and take the test and in session one, what exactly is the questions? Like what I wanted to believe Is that kind of
Dan Hunter: 15:35
what do you hope to do, create, or achieve in the next few months?
Richard Miles: 15:38
So let’s say I said, okay, I’ve got a great idea on a manned mission to Mars, right? Okay, and then in session two, I could say either that was a stupid idea. That’s not going anywhere, or I come back and say, Well, I’ve done some thinking about it, and we need to establish a base on the moon first, and then we need to build stuff on the moon. And would that be evidence that I was engaging with my idea as opposed to just tossing it out? Or where would I fall on the spectrum then of imagination?
Dan Hunter: 16:06
I would say that you are engaged with your imagination when you get to that point, when you’re starting to ask yourself what else? If you just say, go to Mars and those are the sorts of ideas that floats through your mind quite frequently. But it’s far better that, as you point out, that when you become engaged with the idea and you start exploring the ramifications, what are the nuances? What are the different angles? And you feel yourself gaining interest in momentum. That’s when you’re engaged with your imagination. Now let me share with you what high school students at Conquer Academy wrote when they first did the HIQ, one student wrote that she wanted to write an in-depth essay on the treatment of adolescence and state mental hospitals. She also wanted to develop an algorithm to imitate Stuxnet and to see if it will could be damaged by a computer virus. Now those were pretty ambitious. Then the next questions answer Right after that, I want to get pretty your glasses. I need new blue jeans. Now, the point of that is that that’s how imagination works. It’s not something you reserve for the glory ideas. It’s something that occurs every day, and the glory ideas come along, too. Not that often, but something you use every day
Richard Miles: 17:15
You used earlier the great analogy of hitting between the foul lines. You could power the ball over the left-field bleachers, but if it’s left of the foul line, people may be impressed. But it doesn’t go. How does imagination translate into the type of curriculum that we teach, if at all, or testing or improving imagination and then in the workplace? Because you can imagine no pun intended, you could be in that workplace, have all these great ideas. But if your employer says I want X, Y and Z from you 9 to 5 and you go hey no, no, I got a great idea for M. They don’t want to listen, that’s not what they’re paying you for. You have somebody like that would give up or they don’t do it.
Dan Hunter: 17:52
In that case, M, would be a foul ball.
Richard Miles: 17:55
Right, exactly, yeah. So let’s start with schools. Are there types of schools that do this better in terms of encouraging that imagination to develop into creativity to develop in the action or are they all getting a failing grade?
Dan Hunter: 18:07
I don’t think they get a failing grade. Really. It comes down to the individual teacher when I give workshops to teachers and I asked them or I suggest ways that they can increase student imagination. One of the touchstones I come back to is if you give an assignment to your students and you know ahead of time what it’s gonna look like when it comes back, then you’re not increasing their imagination. So I’ll tell you a story. That’s a good example of how you could teach for creativity. When I was in fifth grade, I had a science teacher, Miss Dixie Douglas, and she wanted to teach us the anatomy of the human body, and she could have had us memorized the bones. But instead, she said, make a skeleton. How do you do that? We can’t make a skeleton, she said. You can use anything you want on. She gave us a break, she said. The skull, which has 40 some bones in it. We could just have one piece for the whole skull and it’s extra bones, so people went out and I got a coat hanger and straight out, I put empty spools of thread for the vertebrae, little pieces of felt for the pad in between. I used the inside rollers of paper towels for the arms, the only in the femur, and everybody had a different approach. Now my head was the hardest one to do, and so I kind of tried to shape it out of Styrofoam. It didn’t look very good, but she didn’t say how to do it. She just said, come back with it. Well, at the end, one friend of mine came in and hit the skull ahead. That he had on his skeleton was a head of lettuce, and again, who could have predicted that? And again, it’s a head, so it works. So my reaction is that people who are teaching for creativity are allowing students to be responsible for their ideas and moving the responsibility for imagination off the teacher and onto the student. Another good example of that was a high school teacher in Oklahoma who got tired of high school students complaining about high school. Well, she said, that’s it, I’ve had it, plan your own high school. You got six weeks, everything from the ground up, and stopped, so they had to figure everything out. And so what you see in that process is taking in questions, recognizing where you need information, exchange, and collaboration with each other and it’s very much like a business should work. I’m going back to the business part about the guy who came up with M when they wanted X, Y and Z. The biggest short come in any group of humans is the failure to listen. And so, that person, maybe his idea may be completely whack-a-doo, but somebody at least has to listen to him.
Richard Miles: 20:41
Then let’s talk about some of the variables in the aggregate that you think may influence the stock of imagination, creativity, and a given country or culture. Are there things that you see happening on a large scale that seem to point towards well, that is good in enhancing or missing more creative, imaginative responses, Whereas that is not, one example that I’m sure you’ve seen a lot as well is when my wife when I first started the Cade Museum, we talked to a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs, and we go to their offices and we asked him for over their origin story of the invention. And we noticed on their bookshelf the books that they had were all over the map. They weren’t just on their particular discipline. They had books on history and the arts and cooking and sports and everything. The other thing that we did notice and it wasn’t s significant relation, but an awful lot of particularly the physicians and engineers and we talked to were amateur musicians. And so it seemed to us on our very small sample side of several dozen, maybe up to 100 of these folks, that this ability to see outside of your particular training seemed to have an effect because again, we’ve got a lot of great researchers. But not very many of them actually become inventors. There was an additional variable of play in spurring them on to the next level of actually creating a new technology or product or idea whatever. And our thesis was that it was training in the arts of the ability to see outside of their own training, that supercharged the creativity you had. Do you see anything like that? In your experience, in your research playing out citywide or statewide, globally, in terms of the variables that go into this?
Dan Hunter: 22:16
That’s difficult, I don’t see anything that happens consistently in schools or government or business. I think that there’s a lot of lip service to wanting this so called innovative workforce. But I don’t see a concentrated effort to get there, which I believe would involve changing fundamental attitudes in the schools. I think that is essential mean that has to happen because we are teaching students preparing them for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented. So what should we teach them? We should teach them the ability to generate their own ideas, and as you point out, combine disparate items to see something freshly, to see something new. I think that when you talk about the inventors and engineers and doctors you talked about with the variety of books on their shelves playing music, I think it comes back to the word curiosity. That if you have a natural and innate curiosity, you’re gonna try things and find things that other people don’t, and you have to be able to look. In one of my creative workshops. I used to talk about how much the subconscious controls our moment to moment daily lives. And to exemplify that, I would ask everybody in the room to be quiet and still, this would usually be in a classroom or some kind of business room, and say, do you hear any sounds that you hadn’t heard before? Well, there’s usually a very strong buzz from the fluorescent tubes, and they all hear that now on. My point is that’s been there since you first walked in. And I once did that with a group of composers, and they had all already heard it because that’s their bent in life is listening to sounds. But yes, I think it’s very important to have a broad interest and the aspect of music to get back to that something very interesting about music. But I don’t think we fully understand why. But when you play music and sometimes when you listen to music, it engages almost all of your brain when you do that and they’re not many functions that do that, and we don’t really know why it does that. But it has a powerful effect on music is a great mystery. Another point I might make about the connection between musicians and ideas. When you play music, you have to focus and it takes you out of the current world, and your entire conscious mind is focused on playing the music. The next notes on ideas often come when we shift our focus away from the problem itself. And I think that’s something that music does. Or people say they get their ideas in the shower. I have a friend in New Mexico who gets his ideas mowing the lawn. It’s almost as if you shut down the conscious activity and your brain will generate ideas. However, I would point out Pastor who said ideas Air favored by the fertile mind. You have to have a prepared mind to get ideas. In other words, I’m not going to get an idea about how to do a Mars Rover. I don’t think about it, but I think about plays and so I’ll get an idea for that. Or I’ll think about how to talk about creativity, and I’ll get an idea for that.
Richard Miles: 25:20
So one of the things that I’ve been wanting to do, at the Cade Museum and this, this will warm your heart. Dan is I’ve always thought comedy was a fascinating example of creativity and invention. In that every joke, at least when it’s told the first time, by definition is a surprise, right that if you land a punch line, you’ve got to take people by surprise. And that’s what triggers that laughter and so on. And it’s why comics have to change their material right because if you never change your material, you’d be out of business after a couple of years or sooner.
Dan Hunter: 25:48
It’s very interesting, because how to understand comedy is also a mystery. We don’t really know why we laugh or why we laugh from an evolutionary point of view. There was a scholar in Alberta, Canada, who claimed that he found the 10 most funny words in English, and his view was that if you just be used those words, people will laugh. Well, I wrote a piece on In all 10 words are on there, and it’s not funny has to do with the lack of surprise right on the funny word. If it’s put in the right place and surprises you, it can. I think comedy is very close to that, because again, in comedy, you have disparate things, put together reversals or the unexpected twist. And I think it’s the same with inventions that to use a cliche that moment of what if we did this in this in this or what? If we didn’t do this, how would that surprise us? How would that change things? And I think again it goes back to curiosity. I used to work with farmers and carpenters and there was always this, let’s just try this, what the hell, see if that works, you get a kick out of it if it doesn’t.
Richard Miles: 26:54
right? Yeah, and the other interesting about comedy too is it’s context matters, right? You’re not gonna really land a joke unless people see a little bit of themselves or their neighbor, their family member in that joke, which is one generally doesn’t usually transfer across cultures or nations very well, because people have no idea what they’re making fun of.
Dan Hunter: 27:11
Well, I give you a very interesting example. I was once doing a show in northeastern Missouri for 800 farmers sitting on folding chairs, drinking coffee in a high school gymnasium. I was supposed to make them laugh, and I started it, and I have been doing it for a few years, so I had an idea what worked with farmers and what didn’t. So I started up my usual show and nothing, still throughout the room. I could feel cold sweat rolling down my back. What? They’re not laughing, so I didn’t know what to do. So suddenly I just stopped and I hit the guitar and I muffled the cord silence across the room and I looked out around everybody, and I said, I leaned on the microphone I said, You know, this stuff is funny and one woman, about 12 rows back started to giggle, and then it spread all over the room, and that was fine for the rest of the show, so they didn’t know it was supposed to be funny that they were supposed to laugh.
Richard Miles: 28:06
They were taking you seriously.
Dan Hunter: 28:07
Yes, yeah, and when you talk about context, every performance, even exchanging jokes on the street, everybody has to know their role. And we all know that we’ve laughed at jokes that weren’t that funny because we were in a social situation and trying to make people feel good. But that context is everything. Ah, lot of communication resides in the listener, and the listeners expectations.
Richard Miles: 28:31
So, Dan, my last question was going to tell me a joke. I can’t lift past the opportunity. We are recording this in April 2020. We’re in the midst of this Covid19 pandemic. I wanted to give you a chance to share your thoughts. If you have any on the role of creativity, for better or worse and time are going through, I’ll just give a couple of examples. I mean, obviously a lot of people are trying to work on things like vaccines or new types of treatments. But at the other end of the scale, you have entire ballet companies choreographing things online or symphony orchestra in the same thing. How is creativity playing a role in the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves right now.
Dan Hunter: 29:11
What is pretty consistent in this is that the creativity doesn’t disappear, doesn’t go underground and vanishes. It’s there one of the pieces I wrote in my newsletter or about the homemade masks and the way people use them to express their individuality. The act of being home alone is an active imagination. How are you going to deal with yourself? What you gonna think about? How do you pass the time. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for people to maintain their imagination and even increase it going to your library shelf, getting the variety of ideas out of there. There is one area I would like to speak out against, though, if I can. I think online education. We’ve been thrown into this national experiment completely unprepared as teachers, parents and students for online education, and I think that is a chilling prospect. First off, I know from the surveys the students don’t like it. Some teachers don’t really object to it. But the heart of the matter is that school is a place where you generate ideas and where you think about issues and where you learn. The home is a place where you play with your dog or yell at your brothers and sisters. I think that we can’t let whatever success or money can be saved by online education. We can’t let that disrupt regular classroom education when the virus passes by, because so much of what we do in school is not just learning skills or data or content. We also learn how to make friends how to get along with each other, how to resolve conflicts. We watch teachers as they model being an adult. So I think that the online education is merely a temporary parachute.
Richard Miles: 30:52
Well, we’re certainly gonna have lots of testimonials from parents, said Wow. This is a lot harder than we thought, trying to do that also with supplementing various online things. And so I think there may be a little thirst to get back to the very personal with others and in front of others.
Dan Hunter: 31:06
Yes, and I think for parents to realize how hard it is gives him a better appreciation for teachers. And we need to go back to the question of what’s wrong with our schools. It’s not the curriculum, it’s not the books. It’s. We need to pay teachers more to get good teachers. And if we care about education, then teachers should be well paid.
Richard Miles: 31:26
Well, I can’t think of a better note that ended on that. So Dan, thank you very much for joining me this morning and hopefully the next interview we could do in person and best of luck to you and look forward to talking to you in the future.
Dan Hunter: 31:30
Thanks, Richard. Take care.
Outro: 31:31
Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention, located in Gainesville, Florida, Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews. Podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade Theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Columns and features violinist Jacob Lawson.
