In 1943, Edwin Land was on a family trip in New Mexico when his three-year-old daughter Jennifer asked why she couldn't see the photographs he had been taking. Not in a frustrated way. In the way that only small children ask questions, with complete sincerity and no assumption that the current reality is the only possible reality.

Land couldn't stop thinking about it. Three years later, he unveiled the instant camera. At its peak, Polaroid was enabling people to make about a billion photographs a year. Steve Jobs called him a national treasure.

It started because a father took a simple question seriously enough, actually to answer it.

This episode is about what happens when you stop accepting that's just how it works as a sufficient answer. Land's story runs from dropping out of Harvard to sneaking into Columbia labs at night, building Polaroid into one of the most recognized brands in the world, getting pushed out by his own board after 43 years, and spending his remaining years still working, still building, still answering questions that hadn't been answered yet. He held 535 patents when he died in 1991.

Andrew uses Land's story to ask a harder question about the problems sitting right in front of us that we have stopped seeing because we have been inside them long enough that they started to feel like the floor. The friction at work we have explained away. The tension in a relationship we have normalized. The gap between how things are and how they could be that we have stopped noticing.

You don't have to invent the instant camera. You just have to stop walking past the questions that everyone around you has already accepted.

What question have you stopped asking because you accepted the answer too easily?

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