Melissa: How do you decide what kinds of things your putty can do and where do you get your inspiration?

Crazy Aaron: So I like to work on those impossible ideas. That is like when you’re just waking up and you’re sort of going to remember that last dream that you had for the rest of your day. It’s sort of those impossible connections. I had an idea that putty should be magnetic, not because I wanted magnet putty but because I wanted putty that would move on its own, that would seem like it was alive. That seemed really cool to me. And of course, magnets turned out to be the way to make that happen. And then of course, figuring out how to make that happen was very complicated and took a lot of sort of … Two things, hard work to figure it out and also that persistence, that sort of a Steve Jobs or [inaudible 00:00:50] had where they just wouldn’t take no for an answer when everyone told them this will never work. It’ll never work.

I just try to get my ideas from free association or also, I like to look outside the box. I’ve learned that the sort of secret of invention isn’t that you’re going to wake up one morning with an amazing idea that’s going to change the whole world, it’s that you notice two unconnected things in the universe and you can see the line that connects them. So for example, the research that was being done, developing magnets for wind turbines and then me saying oh, I could connect that back to putty in a way that would make a magnetic putty that would crawl on its own. It’s a simpler connection, but it’s harder to see it until suddenly you see it and then it’s very obvious and simple. And if you look at all the inventions, you guys are all sitting in your rooms, right? Every single thing in your room was once just a dream in somebody’s head and they made it into reality.

Melissa: That’s amazing.