But what do i get . Induce a sense of the supreme so sacrifice in a very precarious position. We really could have won in 22 countries that that momentum was more than blind devotion it was adjusted quest for heroism or mythology but there was a belief it was complected some thought they were fighting for the union some thought they were fighting to free of the slaves some thought both but there was that kind current belief that it was different from many different perspectives it was this supreme selflessness for a cause greater than themselves that really struck me in almost all the research i did host the book is imperfect union. Thank you for being here guest thank you. Book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com. book tv or post comments on our facebook page, facebook. Com. book tv. This is book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Hears primetime lineup. Tonight starting at 7 00 p. M. Eastern pulitzer prizewinning journalist confronts her Family History in in the darkroom. 7 45 p. M. , Candace Villard discusses Winston Churchills exploits in south africa 8 30 p. M. , 300 years of immigration through new york city. On book tv afterward program at 10 00 p. M. Eastern the wall street journal joe and loveland profiles women who left successfully climbed the corporate ladder and we wrap up our saturday primetime lineup at 11 00 p. M. With cnn political contributors looking back at the 2016 president ial race tonight on cspan2 book tv. Host joining us here on our book tv set is author Steven Johnson. Before we get into your most recent book, you are listing pretty intently to a james glick had to say. Guest james is one of my favorite authors. I read his book, chaos, in college and it really started me thinking that i could potentially be a Science Writer because i had not been interested in science at all, so is one of my idols. If he was still talking i would say lets go back and listen to him. Host your most recent book isto called wonderland. What were you trying to explore in this book . Guest wonderland is a history that thinks human beings have done for the fun of it, but the light in it, so for the feeling of play or amusement. It came out of, the book how we got to now in the pbs series i did a couple years ago which was a history of innovation and things in the modern world we take for granted and trying to tell the 500 year or thousand year history behind these things andeh so that was a really great format to work in. I love that kind of historical work with a lot of interesting stories in them and you could write that book a thousand times over because there are so many things you could write about, but i wanted this book to have an actual arguments about history, kind of a theory of how change happens in society and the argument of wonderland is that that history of things we do for fun, for delights actually ends up triggering much more s serious and momentous changes in science and technology or politics, so things that start as kind of frivolous amusements ami incidence changes the world. Host where did the concept come from . Guest its one of these books where i have been ricci researching for 20 years in some way and it opens up after the introduction about the history of fashion and shopping and i had heard when i was in grad school more than 20 years ago, well more than 20 years ago that i studied the 19th century metropolitan novel and as i was reading dickens and there is incredible story about the first apartment source and may come to paris, really the first great immense spectacular shopping wonderland, really. This extraordinary thing happens where all of these well to do women who dont need to do this for economic reasons come to the d store and start stealing from the store. Its a true story. Its a way valve kleptomania among the wealthy women of paris in these new grand apartment stores and no one can figure it out because these women can pay for the goods, but for some reason the store environment is causing them to steal and so this provokes a huge moral panic andean discussion and becomes known as the Department Store disease and eventually a whole series of the mind develops studying these women which is its appears that new configurations of modern life, new spaces, new commercial environments is actually messing with peoples brain and beginning of a line of walkie talking about the brain when we think how video graves affect the brain and so on. I had stories like that that have been accumulating for thechch last 20 years and that once i started the research i could put it all together. You called it our endless quest for delights. Guest yacht. Guest if you think about what you learned in school about the forces that drive history, you would think there is a quest for power and this tribalism or nationalism, religious belief, survival, money, those are the big forces that drive history, that there is this other side of being human, which is we like to play and have fun. We like to be surprised and delighted by new experiences and so i think its kind of a lovely side of ourof history at it too turns out to be also fun stories that is fun to read. Host if you have read Steven Johnson in the past you know what kind of books he writes. s most recent out is wonderland how play made the modern worldnumbers so we will put up the phone number so you canda participate today. Dialing and we will get to your calls quickly. Steven johnson is a bestselling author and he referenced his book, how we got to now. Theres also the ghost map everything that is good for you as well. You talked about our endless quest for delights as it changed or led to exploration in stock markets and computers and probability based insurance policies. [laughter] host explained that one. Guest i mean, actually there are two ways in which the modern Insurance Business end of the first there was a crazy figure from about 500 years ago, this italian mathematician and chronic gambler who had basically spent his whole life doing dice games and gambling, but he was a math genius on the side and near the end of his life he figured out, he kind of figure out a way to understand mathematically the likelihood of the various games of chance outcomes like in the game of dice, but what is the likelihood you would roll 36 is in a role row or 12 and no one had actually done the math. So, he wrote to this book that was both kind of a cheat sheet for how to win at dice and also very advanced math that became the basis for Probability Theory and of that theory got defined and modified over the years and that became then the basis of a whole host of elements for the modern world. The insurance of business without Probability Theory cannot do anything. The other side of it that connects to the books seem to set the first modern insurancee firm, which was lloyds of london took place in a coffee house and i have a whole other chapter about coffeehouse culture and taverns gold culture these Spaces Designed for leisure, hanging out and Drinking Coffee or beer and lloyds of london was originally a coffeehouse, so both dice games and coffee houses came together to form the modern Insurance Business. Host public spaces, how did we get to public spaces . Guest in a way that tavern is the beginning of this. The world is now filled with just look around you and think how many spaces are engineered typically for you to have fun in some fashion, all around the world from movie theaters to parks to, you know, bars and coffee houses and shopping malls im in the world is filled with in o these, most of which did not exist 300 years ago much less a thousand years ago and one of the first spaces to do that was the tavern. A space that was not work, was not home and was not nature, but a space where you could go and it was kind of semi private, semi public and it was designed to pass a few hours and have a good time and that alone is kind of nice. Bars and taverns have placed a really momentous role in the history of politics and history of this country. You cannot tell the history of the American Revolution without taverns. Every step of the way they were this kind of Key Information nose in the network of kind ofth anti english sentiment during that period. Ti its possible we would have had a American Revolution had bars and taverns not been around, but it wouldve required a different path, a different set of meeting places, so its a big part of our history. Host what we do with the information you have shared with us and wonderland . Guest i think its a reminder of how creative the playful state of mind is. When we are being amused and delighted by something into seems to lead to more and more innovation. People get into that state they are like thats fun im a what if we added this or changed this and there is something about that thats helpful and i think as alluded to with it dice game story theres a chapter about the history of games and this seems like games and the concept of education and this is an interesting field. When you watch kids playing games whether their video games, board games or educational games they concentratehe the mind. I play these kind of simulation games with my kids who play them when they were seven or eight and they would be building an entire like geopolitical empire in the game and learning about Legal Systems and money and taxation rates when they are seven. Gi its not to say that they get it, its just the nature of the game and if i sat them down and tried to teach them about tax reform and Industrial Development when they are seven they would not pay attention, but the game structure pulls you in a makes you want to learn in spite of yourself. Host lets hear from our callers, Stephen Johnson. Lets begin with weighing in a san diego. Caller i wonder if mr. Johnson has read. [inaudible] caller the only translation i have been able to find and what he thinks about the irony of what the iron author insists the proposition that should be in the culture. Take it away, please. Guest yeah, its a fascinating book. Was written it was written right at the beginning of world war ii. In fact, he eventually died in world war ii. You have this kind of extraordinary thing kinds of anthropologist sociologist writing this ethic book about the to centrality of play, the human species as the nazis are marching across europe. Kind of tragedy in the middle of of a really powerful book. I quoted actually at thehe end of the big at the beginning of the final chapter and his approach is the basic idea that play essential to human culture is obviously we share that. They approac he approaches it a bit more abstract and kind of philosophical where if you get a chance to see wonderland its filled with very specific examples of how this appetite for play actually came to pass and all of the kind of crazy stories of people trying to amuse themselves and the approaches of the two book of philosophically are very much aligned in terms of practice are a bit different to. Host david in rochester, new york. Caller thank you. I am from rochester, new york, and i wonder if you know here in rochester we have it the Strong Museum of a play and its a history of all play items throughout history, all different kinds of things and if a book tv ever comes to rochester, new york, you could visit and i wonder if you ever heard of it. Guest i have heard of it, but i have not been. Look, im on book tour i need to do an event there and, i mean, this is the thing, how do we think about this role of these objects, physical objects of play . Where do they go in the way we think about history cracks do we think about them out just kind of something at the margins . Or do we recognize that play space in these objects that we have made have been, you know, for thousands of years an important part of the march of progress and the advance of civilization. Its good we have some museums out there celebrating this and everyone should go to rochester, new york. Host Stephen Johnson, was chess a technological innovation . Echnl guest exceptional innovation that then lead to Technological Innovations because this chess was central to the early days of computing. I mean, the first essays written about the rigorous way about the idea of Artificial Intelligence were all kind of anchored in this question of could you teach a computer to playut chess. O host you are saying you can teach it. Guest it would be possible. In a way he was a bit too pessimistic because now computers are better than humans that playing chess, but that took a long time. Great example of the power of the play. All along in the history of Artificial Intelligence games out than the way in which we both major and trade these new machines. Its initially started with checkers, a simpler gate. Then it turned out they got pretty good it checkers and then we brought in chess and backgammon, but look at watson, ibms supercomputer which is arguably one of the most intelligent forms of artificial computation out there. How did ey train watson . They trained it by having into play jeopardy and eventually when, so they were like we need to figure a way to train this machine and i think a game show would be the perfect way to do it to. The connection between gaming and Digital Technology is a rich one. Host we were looking at iphones of that earlier. Do you use siri . Guest i do a bit. I was talking to someone at the other day about someone should remake 2001 a 2001 a space odyssey with siri as how, so like open the doors siri and series like im sorry, dave, i did not understand what you said. Here are three sites. I found this on the web. S host how advanced is a siri . She is kind of a play toy and a sense a . Guest we are just at the beginning. There is a chapter in the book on illusions about how much time we have spent tricking our eyes into perceiving things that are not their starting with perspective in painting going through these kind of Magic Lantern shows and cinema and one of the arguments i made in that chapter is there is something about just as with optical illusions, you know its a snooty image, but you still seeee that 3d square and you cannot tell your brain otherwise. Wired. Your brain has to make that mistake because thats just the way our brains are wired. Something similar with moving pictures and sounds, once you get more than 12 frames peret second and they close off of a human being talking with audio you just feel like you know that person. Rs you feel like you have some kind of emotionalha connection to that person thats why we have celebrity culture at an age of tv and movies and stuff like that. I think what we will experience pretty soon is a similar kind of emotional illusion where we had these Virtual Systems like siri only that assistance actually know its a bit and canning kid engage engage in real conversation. They change over time and adapt to what we say and so after you have been with his assistant for a year they will have a unique personality similar to you and i guarantee you people will develop very intense emotional connections to these devices just like the movie, her, that spike jones is movie. It may start with voice because voice is easier to do than facial expressions, so we may have these very complicated in the next five years, maybe, relationships with completely artificial characters that live in our devices. Host kimberly in baldwin, new york. Hello, kimberly. Caller i was called to see if perhaps his book touches at alle on the philosophy of aesthetic realism in the work of eli siegel because just based onyoui your description of your work, which i look forward to reading, they are more so focused with our rather than play, but you seem to have some similar things going on. Guest no, it doesnt. Whats really interesting question actually in the book of how i was going to handle art. The because there is a chapter on the music and there is a chapter on illusions, which gets into cinema and animation in that history of that. Buds, other than that ir try to steer away from art that was particularly nov representational, for instance the literary novel which i spent a lot of time reading because i went to grad school and English Literature and integrate fashion of mine. Your fork that is trying to in a sense speak toat our higher faculties in a way that its trying to address the bigng sweeping questions about. What it means to be human or the nature of reality because those did t seem playful enough. I think we already accept the idea that serious r, serious narrative fiction is an important part of our cultural history, so i did not feel the need for that since others have already made it more eloquently than i could. I was trying to make a case for the lower form i and i included music because there is this mystery about music which is we have no idea what its good for. If you think about how much music moves as an our passion for music and yet it seems to have no functional value at all and its unclear why these waveforms flooding in the air through our ears should produce these strong feelings, so that was an opening to allow me to write about music in this book, but i didnt cover aesthetic realism and things like that in this one, but maybe in another one. Host alber in houston, texas. Hello, albert. Host albert, are you with us . I think we lost alberta, so lets move on to royal oak, michigan. You are on with author Stephen Johnson. Caller hello. How are you guys . Host we are good. Please go ahead with your question or comment. T. Caller okay. My question is on technology and i just want to know if like how can we make social media better for the next generation and just making it safer for like children and kids, you know, especially nowadays a. Host before we hear from Stephen Johnson, what would you like to see changed . Anged. Caller i would like to see like just social media just working faster, you know, for the use and like so blocking out some of the negative ads and things. Host what kind of technology do you use . Caller i use my ipad and my cell phone. Host thank you, s