How do you Build a Civilization from Scratch?

human beings were a funnier title. But it was this ridiculous quiz show and we were trying to figure out what the big challenge would be and we were stumped, and finally we thought, what if you took a smart person, gave them some materials like a lab or big textbook on optometry, and told them, why don't you just make a pair of glasses? Like could the smartest person in the world or smartest human being in the world just forged together some glasses in thirty minutes on this weird

reality show. And now that I say it out loud, it sounds like a terrible idea, or like a more ridiculous version of nailed It. But thinking about that show idea made us wonder, how hard is it to create a civilization from scratch, Like, if we had enough time, could we build a bicycle or figure out how to spin silk or make those pair of glasses we were talking about? And is there a funny instructional book that tells you how to do all of this? It turns

out there is. Let's dig in. Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm together, Tristan's in the booth wearing his I Miss Will t shirt, and Will is off officiating a wedding for a college friend of ours. Happy wedding day, Joyce. But as a side note, if you want Will to officiate your wedding and Tristan to DJ the after party, you can always hit us up at Part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com. Tristan, please don't edit that part out. So today we've got a very special

author on the show. He's the brains behind Dinosaur Comics. He's one awards for his comic book writing, including Penning Adventure Time, the New jug Head. But he's here to talk to us about his new book, How to Invent Everything. Welcome to the program, Ryan North, Thank you for having me so I really loved How to Invent Everything. It's this ridiculous and hilarious guide to rebuilding a civilization from scratch.

But the concept is way more interesting than that, and I was wondering if you'd mind telling our listeners a little bit about it. Yeah, sure, so. Um, the premise of the book, it's sort of a nonfiction core wrapped in a fictional candy coding. The premise of the book is that this is a it's a found document. It's a repair guide for a time machine. If you go back in time and your time machine breaks down, this

is how you fix it. But after the first couple of pages of the book admits that, like, look, time machines are the most complicated machines humans have ever built. There's no use servical parts, and so you're not gonna fix it in the year two. You're trapped where you are, but we're not gonna leave you stranded. Here's how you bring the future back to you by reinventing all the basically the low hanging fruit of citialization. Everything you miss

is in this book from from first principles. And we don't assume like what time period you're in or what tools you have. It's all like from basics here's how it works. So for the stranded time traveler it should be legitimately useful in those circumstances, but for the non stranded, for us who are just going through time at one second per second and only ever forward. It's also like an interesting book that makes you feel like a more competent person in the world. That I feel a lot

better having written it. I'd feel a lot more prepared to do lots of things, among which is be stranded in the past. Yeah, so I guess I was curious about that, Like how much were you interested in these things before you wrote this book? Like what was the motivation for writing this? Yeah? Like age six to sixteen. Basically this is all I thought about, cause I saw Back to the future and Martin mcflig goes back in time,

and like, that's amazing. What would I do if I was trapped in time and I kept coming back to this idea that you know, I'd be saying, oh, it's great. In the future have computers, and people would say, great, how do they work? Can I say, I don't know, but you're gonna love them. I have no proof. And I wanted to be that person to be like, oh, how does it mean to work? No problem. And by the way, here's an internal combustion engine, and here's like

everything else you need. So it was something that I sort of fantasized about, and I kept waiting for um this book to be written, and finally I wrote up myself, which I think is the origin story of a lot of books. We all write the books we'd like to read. Yeah, definitely, I mean you know that that was always our goal at Metal Fhiss two, was trying to make people interested in something they didn't think they could be interested in. You know, we used to have these conversations in our

dorm rooms. Will and I actually about like if we went back in time, what we could actually do, like how confident would be and really, other than telling people to like wash their hands a lot, like, we really didn't feel like we had much advice of them. But you know, I was there, you need soap, like but that that's the thing, like you write about how to make soap, like why horses can only use certain type

of caller. It was like you have this argument between like a water wheel enthusiasts and windmill enthusiasts, and like, honestly, I had never thought i'd have an opinion on on why windmills are better, but it really is terrific, Thank you. I mean, it's it's the way it normally works. As you may know, when writing a nonfiction book, He's right kind of a proposal. We say, here's the book I want to write, and here's a sample chapter, and here's the table of contents, and here's what I want to do,

and you try to get people than that. But for this book, I wasn't at all confident that what I was trying to do was possible collapsalization into four hundreds and odd pages, and I wasn't sure that would work, and I wasn't sure if I could do it, if it would be useful like I would. I was worried about contecting it so much. It would be at level of you know, you need food to live, find some food and need it, and you wouldn't learn anything. So

I actually wrote a fifty words for the proposal. I cut down into a smaller amount um and then sort of point from there. But I wasn't at all confident that this book woul actually come together, because it was just it seemed like, this is the craziest thing I've ever tried to do it is I mean I and the fact that like I walk away no ing, what's a better like way to harness the horse is amazing and it's it's told in like diagrams and just a few sentences, you know, and it is it is stunning.

I do want to talk about some of the specifics if you're up for it. You know, fairly early in the book you talk about written language and the importance of creating a language, and you discuss pictograms, which I hadn't really thought about, like those don't really work as a language when read, you know, and and and could you explain that a little bit because I really found

that fascinating. Yeah, that's what came out. I was at the XO EXO conference last weekend and we're talking about emojis a lot there, and it's sort of a similar idea where people you can say, oh, emojis are language, and I went to school for linguistics from the guy being like, I'm actually there's different seeing there's a difference between communication and language, right, So, like you can communicate with the dog and you know what your dogs feelings

are communicating with you, and you're exchanging feelings if not legitimate commands, right, And there's difference. So you can really communicate with animals but you can't really have a language with them in the same way we have language right now. And one of the main differences between pictograms and words is that words have a specific meaning. So I think in the Book of example of a picture of a woman tossing your hair in the emoji style and a

peach and sunglasses. I think, and if you know the story those emodia you're trying to tell, you can reconstruct it from those pictograms. And a cool woman ate a peach. That's what this is trying to say. But if you don't know, the story could also be like, oh, cool peach was around a woman, or a woman got transformed into a cool peach by aliens, And there's all this stuff that you are reading into it. Because it doesn't have one specific meaning, it's more like a reminder than

an actual narrative. With words, the whole point of language is to communicate clearly, and so words tending. You can still have miscommunications, but we try to minimize those in language that we can communicate quickly and acturally and not

you know, be passing pictures back and forth. Yeah, I mean I thought you have this like long sentence there about like I forget what it was, exactly like aliens being in the glasses or something, you know, in the shadow at the glasses of never in reflection, and and it was just so perfectly illustrative of the fact that these aren't you know, one to one is pretty amazing.

And and also the fact that I didn't realize this, but Eastern Island had a script that's never been deciphered, Like, oh god, yeah, that's that's I mean, I'm trying to communicate in the book. It's terrifying, Aby, the whole thing terrifying because um, it's this written script and basically Europeans show up and wreck everything in an unprecedented event. It will never happen again, and so they bring disease, and they bring like slavery raids and all this horrible stuff.

When they first show up, it's understood that this is writing, but only the elites can understand it. And then when they come back onto years later in the the island

is in a horrible condition. There's only a few people left, and that knowledge of the script is lost, and so you know what had been words is now just squiggles that nobody understands, and it it really drove home the idea to me that, like, you know, language is a technology, it's something we invented and we don't get it for and writing downwards something we had to think of and then do, and just like any technology, we can lose it.

An the idea of like losing the written word, it feels like you're just cutting the heart out of any civilization, Like it's it's such a devastating blow that would be so hard to recover from. So I thought it was a great example of just like things are more precious than we tend to think they are, and pullly, as you bick of this, as writing can can still be forgotten. Speaking of that, like you do this great section on farming.

I mean you go through everything from like why you leave a field, follow for a while, and like all sorts of things. But it's a lot of work. Yeah, I mean, but it's a small chapter. That's what's amazing about it. But you know, you talk about ancient corn and peaches and watermelon being completely different, and would you tell us a little bit about what those were like

and how they tasted. So we have this idea of selective breeding where we basically the right thing about like to breeding is this is one of the technologies you kind of get without trying because it's just human nature. If you have a plant that has you know, larger fruit, you plant those seeds next year because it's a better plant to be planting. And so you tend to add this evolutionary pressure to get the kind of plants you want.

But um, the results of that are things like peaches where these we have these giants sucking with peaches in the past, where these like hard sour things no one really want to eat, but they're nothing. Corn is it comes from this ancient grain that's just like basically grass. And the crazy thing about corn is we haven't been able to figure out exactly how you get corn out of out of this ancient ancestor. It feels like it must have been this one in a million, either random

cross breeding or mutation. But something changed to produce the larger heads of corn with these giant kernels. We can eat that. Um, it's just we don't know how to do it yet. Yeah, I mean, it's not like in in your book like you'd only get something like four or five kernels of edible corn off a cob, which is just crazy to think about. But I mean, if that's if that's the state of the art, that's what you go with. You don't you don't imagine our modern corn.

It's ridiculously convenient packaging. We're just throwing the barbecue and then peel it off and you've got this de wicious corn ready to go, Like it's it's it's the thing where you know, you think of the natural world as being permanent and unchanging, when we're surrounded by evidence of human influence on this natural world, like we've been changing it since we've been humane to make it easier first. So I was like, it is remarkable. Um So another

thing that I hadn't really thought about. You feel like this whole book is things I hadn't thought about. But one of the things I hadn't thought about was, um that that you have to test foods for edibility, right, like if if you're coming from the future and you don't know what you're looking at, that you need water and salt water on hand, Like could you talk to us through the process and why it might take something like seventeen hours to determine whether food is edible or not. Yeah,

it's it's called the universal edibility test. And if you're not trapped in the past, it's also useful. If you're, say, trapped in the woods, no survivable situation, you know what to eat. And so basically you're you're taking a tiny bit of this candidate food and you just touch it to your skin and then wait fifteen minutes or something horrible to happen, for your skin to erupt or bog, your crawl out of it, or something that's not gonna happen.

But then you're looking for a reaction, and then if that works, you press it to your lips, then the inside of your lips, and then your gum, and then you chwold and spit it out. Then you chew it and hold in your mouth, and then you chew it and s While I'm taking fifteen minutes between each of these steps, it takes I think it is it's sixteen hours. Remember I forget how Yeah, I want to say it was seventeen hours to do this. Yeah, but at the end of this, you know it's probably safe to eat.

But that is pretty remarkable. It was It was fun um research in the book because I was reading a lot of survival books for the present right, because they're not unrelated scenarios. And when thay I discovered is that there are some survival books out there they're just completely bonkers. I was talking about food spoiling and say, you know, when the apocalypse happens, not if, but when you want to be eating food that's in tin cans and stuff or in fridges. And by the way, don't worry about

food going bad. That's a that's a myth. Food doesn't go bad. You can still eat it just doesn't taste good, but it still has nutrition in it. And I'm like, I don't that's not That was like a stick to the second edition Excellent Fishing, and that's fish can go bad. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. You know. There was a time when we used to look for funny prizes for UM a trivia show. We used to go around doing and and I found a survivalist site that produced um peanut butter

and jelly in a can. And it was just meant to be on shelves waiting for you, so that in the future you could pull out like a fresh peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is just amazing to me. But the word fresh is a very generous used the word fresh. I've never made a B and J sandwich. So you know what this will. I'll let this cure for a couple of weeks before I eat, and then it's going to beat the way. So um. You know.

You also have a great section on plants that are useful and and uh, and there's a whole list of them, from apples to white mulberries where silkworms can grow, to rubber, to sugarcane. But you also include tobacco on this list, and I was curious why you chose to do that. Was that just for humor or for historical purposes or what was it? I mean, it's not a very glowing review of tobacco. You should do is smoke this stuff.

But it's one of the plants that has had this huge impact on human history, right, Like, it turns out that when humans find tobacco, they eventually try smoking it, and so knowing not to do that can save your civil your potential future civilization, like millions and millions in medical costs and lives cut down too soon. So I felt like that was more of a be careful with

this one than by the way. Yeah. Actually, you know, for the listeners, I I will note that I'll read the quote you've put in the notes section under tobacco avoid introducing tobacco to your civilization. You will save billions of dollars, millions of lives and prevent the invention of vaping, which I found really funny. Oh man, I just laughed at my own joke. How embarrassing. But books you write, it takes a year or two and then you forget the jokes you put in until you have them played

back to. That's pretty good past me. So do you have any plans that you are particularly partial to on on this list of yours. There's a footnote for I believe orange plants talking about scurvy and citrus, and it's one of the most ridiculous footnotes in the book. So it's talking about, you know, citrus prevents scurvy, and scurvy is a horrible disease that kills you eventually after making

you be in pain for a long long time. And the British Empire discovered, or like humists in general, discovered that vitamin C is an orange juice and that prevents scurvy, and then forgot that fact so many times throughout history, and it would be funny if people weren't dying every time it happened. And the most, the most outbreaking was the British discover this not great, we solve scurvy. It's done. And then you know, fifty years go by, they invent steamships,

so people are traveling faster at sea. And also this very nutrition shorts people better vitamin C reserves, and so nobody notices that when the British Army shifts from fresh juice to this stored lime juice that they run through copper pipes, which kills a vitamin seeing it that they're scurvy cure no longer works because's being masked by the

fact that people are at sea for longer. And then you hit this great age of exploration in Antarctica and people start getting a scurvey again and they're well, our cure is clearly not working, so we're out of ideas. Be bad morale causes the scurvy, and you're like back at square one again. You're like, why how do we keep forgetting this information? It's a disease that you can cure by eating an orange. The medicine is the same

as the cure. It's it's heartbreaking but also hilarious, but also not funny at all because all these people are dying from just the stupidest reasons. Yeah, when we UH used to put out t shirts that Menophaus, one of the first jokes I'd written for that was shirt with a pirate on it and said, when life gives you scurvy, make lemonade. And it's very divisive because people didn't like the idea of a scurvy joke on a shirt, but it's legitimate advice though. Well, we're going to be back

with Ryan North right after a little break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. But we're talking with Ryan North, the author of How To Invent Everything. So we're just talking about plants. But I do want to get into animal husbandry because you have a section on that and uh it is really fun as well. I'm curious what animal did you like riding up the most. There's this

whole thing in medicine. I'm talking Western medicine, but it applies a lot of them where we are operating under the wrong idea of what medicine is for thousands of years, and in Western indsineces idea of the four humors that are in imbalance, and because of that, you might have too much blood, and that's the reason you know you have cancer, not for another medical reason. You have too

much blood, We'll suck it up with the leech. And so the leech was a way to talk about, you know, how bad ideas of what diseases can cause bad treatments, and how there is no medical use for a leech at any point in history. Then a footnote saying, okay, fine, there's a tiny medical use in the eighties we realize that leech has had this one drug that was useful in cosmetic surgery. Then we synthesize it five years later.

So in this narrow window, you can use leeches, but you shouldn't be used anywhere else in time like, it's just this idea that humans have, where I say humans like, I'm not one of them. This idea we have when we want onto this bad conception of what something is

and not examine it for literally thousands of years. It makes the point of view of a time traveler saying there's a lot of things you can fix here, like there's there's ways for humanity to improve our history simply by not treating diseases with leeches for a thousands of years, that'll that'll be a lot better. And you mentioned silkworms as well, what you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, silkworms, Um, they're there, I believe, the only domesticated insect we have.

And it has not worked out too well for silkworms because they used to, you know, just feed on these leaves of this white mulberry plant and then spin this cocoon of a single piece of silk and then emerges these new animals. And now since we've domesticated them, they spin this cocoon of silk and those that do emerge only live for a couple of days. They can't eat unless they're force fed, they can't fly, they're blind, and

they're just like these unhappy little beasts. And most of them we stick in boiling water to kill them and harvest their silk. So they're the only dovestigated insect, but hasn't been a real success story from the silkworm's point of view. That's definitely just knowing, you know, where silk comes from, could make you millions of dollars at certain point in history, cause it was it was this big secret, and they're all these ideas like where the silk come from?

You know, I heard it's when this is one insect that if you eat too much, the bloads in this explosion of silk. But yeah, sort of like it's a telephone in a game, like someone who came from an insect but didn't know how the silk happened, and you sort of get this result down the road, and that's pretty impressive. So one of the things I also really liked in the section was about goats. And I'm a fan of goats anyway, because they helped us discover coffee.

But you also write that they're a great way to get rid of poison ivy. Why is that so? Poison ivy is fascinating because, um, it has a horrible effect on humans, and it's probably an accident. There's no evolutionary reason for this to affect only humans and one other ape and that's it. So it seems to be an accident.

Poison ivy is even poisoned in the first place and doesn't affect goats, but goats love to eat it, and so if you have poison ivy, you can rent a goat and just put it on your land and then we'll eat up all the poison I belong with your other stuff. And I have to do is be careful not to pet the goat or drink the goat's milk by accident over the next couple of days, and your problem is solved. That's remarkable to the kind of person who sort of ends up accidentally drinking goat milk the time.

Here we go again, So this is back to an earlier question, But like, I feel like you've written a bunch of these, um, really unusual books or the concepts for the books are really unusual. And you've also written these books that tackles Shakespeare but treat them almost like choose your own adventure books. What was your inspiration for writing this style of book? Like, were there models of these books or tones that you sort of were drawn to when you're growing up. No, Um, I'm I'm actually

hoping there's more books like this. I hadn't read a book before that had, um a fictional conceit around a nonfiction core, And I know my publishers were works are like, well, people think this is all fake information. We had this huge babilyogrey with all the sources I referenced, so you know that there this is all real, except for the time travel parts, which is not real. But it was.

It was less of books I read and more movies I saw to Time Travel Adventures, where usually pretty much every time travel movie I've seen, there's not a person who's like, I'm prepared for this scenario for I have research just the information I had to her in this book. So I just like the idea of someone who you know, wakes up in the year negative and says, great, I

know exactly what to do today. Well, I feel like that in in the beginning, Like I feel like one of the things about time travel movies as people are always disputing whether or not time travel can work, or like the laws of time traveler or whatever, and I

like that you address them right up front. Yeah, I sort of had to, because I the whole premise is it's a rental time machine, right, And I feel like if you can go back and step on a butterfly and destroy the universe, it's wildly irresponsible in the rental time machines, but it builds this model of time travel whenever you go back in time, you create a new parallel timeline where everything is the same except you're there, and so you can't mess up the world you're from,

which works for a time travel adventure, but it's also like has huge ethical implications of just creating at a parallel war world for tourism purposes. There's no consequences, but it's filled with living, breathing people. It's like a nightmare holidack, but works really good for this the purposes of this book.

I agree. So you have a section on medicine and how to invent it where you talking about things like germ theory and and baselines for normal humans, but you also have the sidebar on a rehydration drink, and I was curious why you included that. Yeah, so this rehydration drink is it's like everything else, it's a real drink, and um, like everything else in the book, I should say it's real, but um, the reason I included it is because there's tons of diseases that don't technically kill

you from the disease. They kill you from diarrhea, from just dehydration of pooping so much, and it's such an unfair way to die. Plus it can be treated. If you're just drinking this rehydration rink even though your vomity, drink it between the vomits, you'll be fine. And the trick is it's got some solvent so lets your body

absorbed water slightly faster. And it's just a it's a really easy and really easy to make medicine you can make out of water and salt at any time period that can literally save lives if someone is having a disease that makes them poper vomit too much as dehydrating them. Yeah. No, I mean it's incredible that dehydration is one of the biggest causes of depth through human history. I mean that is something I just had never thought about. Yeah, I was.

I was worried. There a lot of sections that worried me at the start. In medicine was one of them because I was thinking, you know, what can I tell you that's usable, it's practical, like if you're years ago, what can I tell you it's going to be valuable?

But even just that is insanely valuable, Like you can save so many lives without just knowing how to make it and went to administer it also had the benefit that you know, killers like heart disease and cancer aren't going to be a big concern if you're in the distant past because you have to live a long time usually for those who have an effect on you. Yeah, yeah,

that's true. So I do want to go back to one of the things I have referenced in the beginning, which was the discussion of water wheels versus windmills, And I was curious if you could talk about the benefits of both of those and why a windmill might be superior. Oh,

you're on team and mill interesting. So basically what you want with either a water mill or windmill is to turn a wheel, because a wheel can power machinery which can grind your grain and do all sorts of saw your would, all sorts of interesting things, hammer your iron. It's basically a machine doing the work for you. And water wheels are great because water carries more force when it moves, but you need water moving water to do that. Well. Windmills you just need the air and you can place

them anywhere. Um So the windmill you have the advantage of you can move it more easily to target the wind, and you can place some in areas where you can place a water wheel, but at the disadvantage that wind doesn't carry as much work, so you're you're limited sorts of things you can do. And this that the talent type of the book is that, um, the fun of it really was that some of the stuff you're like, oh, well, this sounds boring, like why do why do I care

about this? But if you present it in a fun sort of time traveling way, it becomes a you know what, team where you hunting water wheel or team windmill. It didn't even feel like there was an argument there. And then once I read from Chomsky you, I think with the partner debating you, I didn't think I'd think about the benefits between the two, but it was really engaging. Thank you. I mean, that's that's That's what I'm trying

to do. And I think the fun of a book like this because normally, if you're running nonfiction, you're always worried, you know, is this boring? And how can I make it not boring? But doing it in this time travel way. Whenever I was like, oh, I wonder if this is boring, I could just go back to the time travel thing and put in the time travel joker have some some fun with the conceit. So it gave me an easy way to make it um an engaging book and not just here's the list of facts that are useful. Did

you know water boils at a hundred degrees? Now you do? Yeah? I mean, and you also like those little jokes are so funny, Like you have that section on famous songs that you can plagiarize, and it's got sheet music to like owe to joy and uh and talk about Cannona or whatever. Like, I just thought that was such a wonderful relief from from the rest of the tech. But I'm curious, like what ended up on the cutting room floor, Like, what what is stuff that you thought about tackling but

but found too hard to condense? Yeah, there was gonna be a section on weapons, and by the time I've written most of the book, I I started thinking, I don't want a section of how to kill people. Yeah, it just feels the whole book is about building civilizations and building like literally building a world around yourself. You know.

I'm actually I'm actually glad you didn't because I felt like one of the brightest things about this book was you were filled with news that's so distracting and irritating and upsetting. And this book really felt, even though it's kind of a survivalist book, just felt so optimistic. You know, it is a very optimistic book. I mean you have to be optimistic too to be you know, two years in the past and thinking I alone can rebuild civilization, do it. But yes, so I didn't want to put

any any weaponry stuff. And honestly, if you want to kill someone, like, there's probably fair in a way to do it with what's in the book already, you know, hurt their feelings with the written word. Uh. There was a section It's funny in the music section. So the gig of that section is you have like some classics, pack of bells, cannon and oh to Joy, and then

you've got the Tetris theme songs, folk tongue. I resually wanted to have Salt and Pepper's Shop there, but I could not, for the life of me, get the rights holders to understand what I was trying to do with this book. It's like, hey, can I want to see music and I know it doesn't exist, but I'll make it. And they're like, is this for a textbook? I'm like, no, it's not a textbook. It's like nonfiction but fiction and

it's general information, like it's not a textbook. And they're like, oh, so it's for school, it's a textbook, Like, no, one's not a textbook. They finally suffered funding to my emails, and I was like, fine, who would have thought the problem is that, like I don't, there's a lot of money in sheet music licensing, and so there's no motivation to put a square peg in a round hole there. They were like, this is already waste enough time emailing

this guy. Forget that is a great story, and and honestly, Shoop is such a great punchline there for for some reason, it's really wonderful. And the other thing I ended up cutting was at the end there was a kind of a victory lap chapter with a recipe and how to make apple pie and ice cream from scratch, and sort of riffed off it old Carl Sagan quote where he says, like, to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first

create the universe. And in my verse, like, well you've created a civilization, now here's how you make apple pie and all the all the ingredients you could build off what you've already learned in the book, but there's already a pretty long book, and I felt like this is just like a loop of things people already know. Well, I understand why you didn't put it in, but it would have been a great addition. I think we're gonna pause for a quick ad break, but we'll be back

with Ryan North in just a minute. Welcome back to part times where we're talking to their Ryan North. So I do want to read the last few sentences of the book, and I promise it is a spoiler, and I was curious if you'd let us do that on the program. Yeah, I really like those last few sentences, so go for it. So it goes. Reading this book is transferred knowledge of humanity's greatest achievements from the palm

of your hand to the interior of your mind. Earlier, we remarked that this text, once stranded in the past, was the single most powerful and dangerous thing on the planet. That is no longer true. You are go get him Tiger, which I just thought it was such a wonderful way to close this book. Thank you. No, I love it of drama that gave it. But also you know you're you're about to do something crazy. You're about to try to rebuild civilizations, so give you the pep talk at

the end. Go do it. You got every vantage in the world that we didn't have because we didn't know about it at the time, So you can do this. You know, there are really so many things we didn't get to, from how to invent a bicycle to how to understand all of modern philosophy and religion through high fives. That might be the most valuable two pages in here, but it's really been such a pleasure. Our guest is Ryan North. The book is how to Invent Everything, and

thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It was great. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland

does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army, including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us. We do. We forget Jason. Jason, who was the best po