Start. You can watch this and other programs on line at booktv. Org. Spent up next, author and lecturer Steven Johnson, best selling Science Writer talks about the cyberworld, Popular Culture and computer networking as a political tool. Mr. Johnson is the author of eight nonfiction books including everything bad is good for you, where good ideas come from, and his 2012 release future perfect. Host Steven Johnson, in your newest book, future futura perfect the case of progress in a networked age use the tere pure progressive. What iss that . Guest is my attempt to come up with a term for this new political philosophy that i seeo emerging all around me. E. The book is really kind of a series of stories about these people are trying to change ther world and trying to advance the cause of progress. Ban but they dont completely fithei the existing models that we have between the left and the right or the democrats and right republicans. Democrats and repub. They believe in many ways that the way the internet was built, the way the web was built, the way things that wikipedia were built, using these collaborative. The works, where people come together from different points of view and openly collaborating, building ideas, that that mechanism is a tremendous engine for progress and growth. But it doesnt necessarily involve a government and doesnt necessarily involve capitalism or big corporation. So when you believe in a system come you dont necessarily believe in the traditional anchors that the left are traditional anchors at the right. So i felt that it is time that we had a category to describe these people come as a pure progressives is what i came up with. Host post central authority, post decentralized authority . Guest yes, the best example is the way the internet was built and the way that the web was built. The internet was partially a result of visionary government unnamed, which weve heard a lot about in the early days there is some important funding for the government. For the most part from the internet was built by louis Collaborative Networks come with that in leaders, without any bureaucrat that people who arent actually trying to patent their inventions, want working for private corporation a more freely building on each others ideas that were fighting those ideas sharing them. Now, this is one of things where if we had this conversation 40 years ago, you said that the lovely utopian idea and im sure that will work well in your commies to mourn for the california when you are making baskets. Always in the long run out perform a top down consensually planned system. This isnt inside from an austrian economist, a very important one, which is because the world is so complicated, because the economy is so competent, because the city is so complicated that is trying to understand it is too hard for a small group of chinas centrally located planners to ever fully be able to do. And so the way the markets work as they say look, no individual person has to understand the whole thing. The market works because every individual in the market understands just a little bit of it. You can focus on your part buying and selling, creating, sharing. In your part of the world, and over all the totality of all these agents will end up coming up with new solutions to problems, meeting peoples needs and so when. So markets are a kind of pure network in that sense. Where the pure progressives differ from traditional libertarians is that we dont think that markets solve every problem in society. Elf there are many facets of human they experience that are not necessarily solved by mark is, in fact, markets create their own problems sometimes. They approach of bubbles and i things like that. In the internet, there are a lo anies that were trying to build a global network, that would unite computers all around the world and they all failed. Compared to this open source peer produced solution of theikd internet and the web and nowing. Canipedia and many other things. So there are places where you dt can use that kind of decentralized structure without involving traditional markethat relations and thats what pure progressives are trying to do. Host what is the chicken gun . Guest okay, so the book starts with this kind of opening preface about progress, society and inability to, understand, you know, extent to which progress is happening all around us and misinterpret it, misinterpret where that progress comes from. The example. Astonishingly safe to fly in a commercial airplane now. Just this extraordinary thing. We dont hear that much about it, because there is kind of bias in the media and bias really in our own minds, against, stories of steady incremental progress where something in society gets better, 1 or 2 a year which over time stacks up to the amazing kind of break throughs, but, the headline of, this thing is 1 better than it was last year, is most boring news item in the world so people dont write about this, same with airplane crashes, when the plain goes down, there is nothing to go down so it doesnt report. So in the book i talk about it has gotten so safe to fly in a commercial airplane youre more likely to be elected president of the United States than you are to die in a commercial airplane crash. The example i give kind of the set piece in the book is story of the miracle on the hudson. Reminding my way to the, so they have right context. When the us air flight landed in the hudson and everyone survived i thought it was very telling how the media chose to cover this event. There are really two different ways they covered it. First was superhero pilot, captain sully who indeed was an amazing pilot and amazing job. There was this kind of language of the miracle on the hudson. Almost like supernatural event that happened. When people didnt focus on nearly enough was the plane, the plane had, performed admirably during this, during this event and, it did so on a couple of levels. One when the geese collided with the jet engines they didnt explode, they didnt shatter, they didnt send of shard. Is of titanium in the fuselage causing the plain to break down. That is because every single jet engine, every single model of a jet engine on aircraft is tested with a chicken gun. They fire frozen chicken carcasses to a spinning jet engine to make sure this thing can handle it without exploding and shattering. That is your taxpayer dollars at work, right . This is Government Initiative here, and everyone on that plane was very glad that those chickens had been flown to test to make sure the engines could survive. But the other thing going on in that plane the engine survived and kept enough power to power the electronic system. And, that enabled, what we call the fly by wire system of the airbus 320 to give sullenberger all the assistance landing the plane properly which was the key to his success and the fly by wire system was originally developed by nasa. It was refined over the years. Airbus kind of mod deled it in the 320, it was a huge part of success of that landing. Because there wasnt a single hero to point to, we didnt, you cant put 1,000 engears own the cover of time magazine, right . So you put one person on the cover of time magazine. So often it is that tinkering and improving and modifying with thousands of minds working on a problem, how do you make an airplane safe really responsible for the progress we have in our society. One of the things ive tried to do in a way i try to do with a lot of my books is to tell story of Group Collaboration where people come together from different backgrounds and work to make the world a better place. Host you write, i suspect in the long run the media bias against stories of incremental progress may be more damaging than any bias the media display toward the political left and right. Guest around that point in the book i have a kind of a social studies quiz of other, kind of key indices of social health over the last 20 ore 30 years. And question to the reader. How were faring as a society in the United States on everything from Violent Crime to divorce rates, to automobile fatalities, to air pollution and so on. It is 10 or 15 of these things. Every single one them over the last 20 years there has been dramatic positive change, many case, 20, 30, 40 over that period. We just dont hear about that side of our society very often because, for whatever reason it is just not newsworthy. In fact youre much more likely to get attention by telling a story of slow, and steady decline than you are a slow and steady progress. It may be in fact that theres a bias in our own minds which the news media just kind of reflecting, because one of the things i came across today in this book, when i was researching this really shocked me with crime, the story of crime in the United States over the last 20 years may be the most extraordinary sort of social development in that period, is incredibly optimistic story. It is amazing how safe. New york has about 1 10 the number of murders it had at its peak in 1990. This is generally a national trend. Weve seen incredible improvement really in all sorts of crime around the country. That actually is something the media has reported a little bit. It was within malcolm godwells book, the tippingpoint. You see stories about the new york Success Story and l. A. Success story. For the last five years gallup is asking americans is crime Getting Better or worse, for the last five years despite that coverage and despite the incredibly positive news, more americans think crime is getting worse year after year, even though that is empirically not true. People assume things have gotten worse even when evidence staring them straight in the face. Host you alluded to this, Steven Johnson, a little earlier but you have the running theme in almost all of your books. This points it out. This is from future perfect. Most new movements start this way. Hundreds of thousands of individual groups working in different fields and different locations start thinking about change using a common language without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by the people in your immediate vicinity and then one day you look up and realize all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave. A dense, network of human intelligence, is what you call it. Guest you know, i feel that it is a theme of all the books but, with future perfect, it is the most pronounced because the fun thing about future perfect it is a book about something that hasnt fully happened yet. It is a book a emerging movement im seeing around me, doesnt really have a name, trying to figure a way to kind of describe it. But you do hit that point as an observer of society where you can look around and start to say, hey, im seeing all these interesting people, working on projects in the case of future per Perfect People working in cities and things like patent reform and new ways to fund prescription drugs. New ways to collaborate on the internet and fund the arts which is quick starter, i read about. A lot of different fields and made up of different stories about different fields, but it is still very early in the game with all these developments. And so, you know, future per fwek is designed kind of a short book, i wrote it, not to be fully comprehensive, in a way amplify those voices to celebrate what they were doing and inspire other people to come along and build on the new tradition. Host from your book, where good ideas come from, Natural History of innovation, published in 2010, the history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it. A much longer history of being spectacularly wrong again and again and not just wrong but messy. Error often creates a path that leads you to keep error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces to you explore. Guest you know, there is an interesting study a number of years ago about scientific papers by scientists who had made significant break throughs at some point in their career. And, what theyre kind of publishing pattern was over the course of their career. They compare that to scientists to ended up not having real break throughs but published a lot, but didnt change, didnt have a truly disruptive idea and what they found was that by looking at it you can judge this looking at citations with newspaper, how many times each newspaper was cited by other papers, things like that. You do the big statistical analyses because all the stuff is online now and kind of archived and what they found was innovators, the ones who had really, you know, profound new ideas on science, had this interesting pattern where they, actually had a lot more kind of failed papers. And they published, they had far more volume to their work, and a huge number of those papers never went anywhere. It was every now and then, there would be one that would be incredible breakout hit and would change science forever, then most of the time they were starting out hitting like baseball a short little ground out whereas the none in noninnovative thinkers, who hadnt had disruptive idea, they were just hitting kind of singles and were much more consistent, had higher batting average but werent swinging for the fences. So the argument is that to really be kind of successful in a new way and open up a new door or possibility in your field or science or some other field you have to have tolerance for failure and error. That is one of the things we see in Silicon Valley. Is that that is if youre an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and you havent had at least one failed startup people look at you strangely. Youre supposed to try and miss that means youre taking risks. Investment capital model is found on the idea that 90 will be failures. It is 10 will be huge failures. It is one of the thing that governments have to be at. I talk a little bit about it in future perfect. You have to have a sense of experimentation and when you experiment, you get things wrong. And you go backwards or end up going down kind of, kind of false leads. And so you have to build up that kind of acceptance of failure as part of the process. Host in where good ideas come from, the Natural History of innovation you have seven ways of innovating very quickly. You call them, adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, accept taigs and platforms. If we look at last two. A what is except taitiony. Guest thanks for not making me remember all of them. I think i would have passed that test. It is a very profound concept with a very awkward word. It is not my word. A word coined by the late brilliant evolutionary theorist. Steven gould many years ago. And, gould and verba were talking about in the context of evolution but i think a word brilliantly applicable to innovation in technology and science and many other fields. The idea is this. In evolution there are many cases where a feature or a trait that evolved for one particular purpose turns out surprisingly kind of serendipitily when the organism in the environment changes. An example of this is feathers. We think feathers evolved to keep their owners warm basically. Over time some creatures evolved feathers decided to adopt crazy new lifestyle of flying and ones had new feathers were better at it than ones that didnt have feathers. At one point evolution starts to skult the feathers to make them aerodynamic. So theyre still just keeping them warm. Flying birds have slightly asymmetrical feathers which gives them better aerodynamics essentially. You can see the shaping of after the change. The idea in accepttationy trait designed for one thing gets designed for something else. In the technology in it history of creative arts, in any field where people try to feel inventive and imaginative, that practice of taking an idea from one place and moving it over and kind of applying it in a new context is incredibly powerful. Theres a great story actually not in where good ideas come from that kind of came to me after words, from apple, the most inno site tiff company in the world right now. When apple was trying to figure out what to do with its stores in the early days when they were starting to plan their retail stores, they, this was a very controversial thing, this is the hilarious, people look back, apple will not be able to do retail. This will be a total disaster. Apple being apple didnt want to just kind of study its direct competitors. All right . Normal way you do it i will open up a Consumer Electronics store and study other Consumer Electronics stores out there. So i will look at radioshack and best buy or whatever. Apple didnt want to do that. They wanted to reinvent when it meant to be a Consumer Electronics store. What is a space where consumers just feel like theyre having an amazing experience where they just love it . And so they went and studied fivestar hotels, four seasons and ritzcarlton. They made their employees go through the Training Program at ritzcarlton. What they came out with was, what do people love about a fivestar hotel. They love the concierge. They love going to the concierge whatever the issue is the concierge will figure it out. I want to take a hotair ballon over the city. Right i can make that happen. Here is the what would a highend Hotel Concierge be in the Consumer Electronics store . Genius bar. Hotel concierge xap over and put. Apple are the most profitable retile environments by square foot on the planet. It is that kind, the cliche is thinking outside of the box. I dont want to say that. It is not just outside the box. Go to some other field, go to some other field and discipline and see how you can trigger a new association in your head that makes you approach the problem youre working on in a new way. Host platforms. Guest one great thing, this is a kind of perfect connector to future perfect. This is the way in which the books are deeply connected to each other. One thing that we have seen with technology platforms, the internet, the web, things like facebook and twitter, they have this extraordinary ability when theyre done right to allow for all sorts of inno vigs on top of that platform that the creators never dreamed of. So you create your platform. You say i will set up a social Networki