Of it, the philosophy of it. We wanted to be accessible. [applause]the joining us here on our bookot tv set is over Steven Johnson. Before we get into the most recent book, you are listening pretty intently to what james glick had to say. Guest hes one of my favorite authors. His book, chaos, which i read in college was the first Popular Science book that i read in my entire life that really started me thinking that i could potentially be a Science Writer becausbecause ive not been intd in science at all. If he were still talking i would say we should go back and listen more to him. But you have to listen to me now. Host your most recent book is called wonderland. Recent what were you trying to explore . Guest if the history of what human beings have done for the fun of it. For the delight in it, for the feeling of play and amusement. And it came out of the book how we got to now, and the pbs series i did which was a history of innovation and things in the modern world that we take for granted and trying to tell the 500 or a thousand year history behind these things. So that was a great format tois work in. I love that kind of historical work. There were a lot of interesting stories. You could writ write up a thousd times over because there were so many things you could write about but i wanted with this book to have an actual argument about history, kind of a theory of how things happen in society into the argument of wonderland is the history of things we do for fun and delight actually ends up triggering much more serious and momentous changes in science and technology and politics. So, things that start out as frivolous amusements and of changing the world a more significant ways. Host where di does the concept of this come from . Guest its one of these books ive been researching for 20 years. It opens up with a chapter in the introduction of the history of fashion and shopping. H i heard when i was in grad school 20 years ago i studied at the 19th century metropolitan mobile. There is an incredible story where they come to paris, one of the great spectacular shopping. A this extraordinary thing happens where all these welltodo women dont do this for one reason orh another and become to the store and starts killing. Its a true story. There is a wave of kleptomania among the wealthy men of paris even these other grand apartment scores. No one can figure it out because they can pay for the good but for some reasons the environment is causing them to steal so ifse promoted panic and it becomes known as the Department Store disease. Eventually the whole theory in the minandthe mind develops outf studying this to say it appears new configurations of modern life in the new spaces and the new commercial environment is n actually messing with peoples brains. Its the beginning of the line of the way of thinking about the brain that we have today when we think about how our video games affecting the brain or so on. So, i had stories like that but ive been accumulating the last 20 years and so once i started the research i could put it all together. Host you call this theendles endless quest for the light. Guest if you think about what you learned when you were in school about the forces that drive history, you would think there is a quest for power and ththe tribalism and religiousef beliefs, survival, money those are the forces that drive history but theres this other side that is amused by things we like to play and have fun and be surprised and delighted by new experiences and so, that is kind painted a lovely sight of our history and it turns out to be filled with all of these courageous stories that are fun to read. Host if you have read Steven Johnson in the past, you know what kind of books he writes. The most recent is called wonderland how play made the modern world. We are going to put up the phone number so you can call and participate in the programall in today. 20,274,882,001 east and central time zones. 20,274,882,201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. Go ahead and buy only and we will get to the calls very quickly. Steven johnson is the bestselling author and heho referenced the book how we got to now six innovations that made the modern world and there is future perfect everything bad is good for you as well. T now in wonderland, to talk about how the federalist quest for delight has changed or led to exploration and stock markets and computers and probabilitybased insurance policy. Explain that one. Guest there are two ways into the modern insurance system. First is a crazy figure from about 500 years ago this mathematician and chronic gambler who had basically spent his whole life doing vice games and gambling that it was kind of a math genius on the side, near the end of his life he figured out a way to understand mathematically the likelihood of the various games of chance outcomes like in a game of dice. What is the likelihood that youll roll threyouwill roll thw or 12 versus seven. No one had done the math on th this. No one quite figured out how to explain it so he wrote this book was a cheat sheet and very advanced math this became the basis for probability theory. Th it got refined and modified over the years and that became theth basis for a whole host of the modern world of the Insurance Business its not without probability math the other side that connects is the first modern Insurance Firm took place in a coffeehouse and i have a whole other chapter about this piece is designed to be sure in hanging out sitting around Drinking Coffee or beer and so both dice games and coffeehouses came together to form the business. Host public spaces. Guest the tavern is the world of this. In a way it is fueled with just countless look around you and think how many spaces are engineered for you to have fun in some fashion all around the world from movie theaters to parks, bars and coffeehouses and shopping malls, most of which. Didnt exist 300 years ago even. One of the first places to do that was the bar, tavern. It wasnt work, it was and how come it was the place you could go and it was kind of semi private, semipublic and was designed to pass a few hours and have a good time. Thats kind of nice because thats where these things came from. But they have played a really momentous role in the history of politics in the history of the country you cannot tell the history of the American Revolution. They are every step of the way the kind of Key Information node in the network of the antienglish sentiment during the period. Its possible we would have had an American Revolution had it not been invented that it would have required a different path. It would have required a different set of meeting places to happen so it is a big part of our history. Host what do we do with the information that you sharede in wonderland stuff . Guest when we are being beig amused and delighted by something it seems to bleed to more and more innovation. People think thats fun, thats interesting what if we added this work changed this. Would change this. There is something that is thoughtful. Theres a whole chapter about the history of games. Think about this in the context of history. When you watch kid play games whether they are video games or board games are educational games they concentrate the mind. I play these kind of simulation games with my kids that say they play them when they were seven a or eight and they would be building an entire geopolitical empire learning about taxation when they are seven. Its the nature of the game to try to teach them about tax reform and Industrial Development when they were seven they would never pay attentionon but the game structure pulls you in and makes you want to learn in spite of yourself. Host appear from theth rai callers, Steven Johnson. You are on with all her Steven Johnson. Go ahead. Caller i wonder if mr. Johnson has read [inaudiblet the only translation that ive been assigned what he thinks about the irony of the preposition so carry away, please. Guest it is a fascinatingast book. It was written right at the beginning of world war ii. In fact he died during world war ii so you have this kind of extraordinary thing writing about the centrality of the play to the human species as the nazis are marching across europe its a kind of tragedy in the middle of a powerful book so i closed iquoted at the beginninge final chapter. The basic idea is that we share that. He is referred to little more abstract and philosophical where if you get the chance to see wonderland it is filled with examples of how this instinct or appetite for play actually camea to pass in all of the kind of crazy stories that people tried to amuse themselves in ever more inventive ways comes with the approach is that the books philosophically are in line. Host david in rochester, new york. Youvyoure on the air. Caller how are you doing, yes. Rochester, new york and i wonder if you know here in rochester have a Strong Museum of play and its a history of all three items throughout history, all different kinds of things and if you were ever been rochester new york you can come to visit so i wonder if youve heard of it. Guest i need to make a pilgrimage there. I am on book tour. I need to go there. This is the thing. How do we think about this as a role of the objects in play where do they go to movie that we think about history and we think of them as just kind of something if well history happens on the battlefield or in parliament, or do we recognize that the play space and the objects that we have made have been part of the march of progress and i think it is the latter so its good that we have some museums out of celebrating this and everyone should go to rochester new york. Host was chess technological innovation . Guest it then led to the Technological Innovations because it was central to the early days of computing. If you look back to the first in the idea of Artificial Intelligence, and now indias essays we are all kind of in urging this question could you teach a computer to play chess . Host he said you could do but it would be possible. Guest he was a little pessimistic about it because of how computers are better than humans, but thats a long time and so it is a good example of the power of play in the history of Artificial Intelligence gamet have been the way that we would measure and train these new machines so they started with checkers. There was no way to get the computer to play chess and now we brought in backgammon and go is the next hurdle but it was arguably one of the most intelligent forms of artificial computation out there. How did they train us, by having it play jeopardy and then eventually when so they were likely need to figure out a way to play this machine. I think a game show would be the perfect way to do it. So the connection between gaming and Digital Technology is a very rich one. Host we were looking at the iphones a little bit. I dtalking to somebody the other day and they said someone0 should remake 2001 a spacethere. Odyssey where siri is like im sorry, dave. [laughter] a host she is kind of a play toy in a sense. Guest theres a chapter in the book on evolution about how much time they spent trickingw our eyes into perceiving things that are out there starting with the perspective of going through the Magic Lantern shows and one of the arguments i made in the chapter is there is something about just as with an optical illusion, you cant you know that it is a to be image that you see the three d. Square and cant tell your brain otherwise. Thats just the way that our brains are. Once you get to more than 12 frames per second and a human being talking with audio you feel like you know that person didnt like there is some kind of an emotional connection to that person. What we are going to experience pretty soon is a similar kind oi emotional illusion where we have these Virtual Systems like siri only they actually know us a little bit and engage in real conversation and change over time. There would be this personality to develop intense emotional connections to these devices like the movie her, spike jones movie. It has to do with facial expressions, so we might have a very complicated in the next five years maybe these relationships with completed the artificial characters and devices. Host kimberly in new york you are on with Steven Johnson. Caller i was calling to see if his book touches on thelo philosophy of aesthetic realism because based on your description that i look forward to reading they are so focused with art rather than play but you seem to have some similar things going on. Things guest in the book of how i was going to handle art because there is a chapter on music and there is a chapter that gets into the cinema and animation and things like that, but other than that, i try to steer away from art that was representational. So the literary novel which i spent a lot of time readingel because i went to graduate school and its a great passion of mind and representation where you have work that is trying to speak to the higher faculties in big sweeping connections of what it means to be human or the realities and whatnot because the students seem playful enough. We already accepted the idea. Since others have already made it more eloquently than i could i tried to do is make the case for the lower forms. And i included music because we have no idea what its good for. If we have an idea of how much music moves us and its of no functional value at all floating in the air should produce theser strong feelings. I didnt cover the aesthetic realism and things like that but maybe in another one. Host albert in texas, go ahead. Caller with us host i think we lost albert. Lets move on to a ahmad in michigan. Caller hello, how are you guys . Host go ahead with your question or comment. Caller my question is on technology. I just want to know how can we make social media better for the next generation and just make it safe for children and kids. Host before we hear from Steven Johnson, what would you like to see changed . Caller i would like to see the social media working faster and blocking out some of the negative ads. Host what kind of technology do you use . Caller my ipad and cell phone. Guest its an important question and ive written about this class in wonderland but others like future perfect and if you go back to emergence into social media is in a system them where you have a bunch of gatekeepers, editors, folks controlling the flow of information deciding whats true and whats not, whats appropriate, whats not and we shifted and distributed the system where the whole network is how everybody is generating news and shipping ideas or creating a filter to show thisri is relevant or not. We have seen some significant cracks beginning to appear. My concern is with Something Like facebook as the medium. Its almost as big as the web itself and cant get is a huge impact over what we read and consume and what we feel about our children experience we dont have any control over how the media works the way that we door over the web it is a platform people can modify and expand and push in different directions. Facebook is a platform by a Different Company but its the size of the intranet for the web so when we want to change something that facebook from the topic thats been on the tip of everybodys time with the last week or two, we have to go and kind of ask them to change it. Its not an open standard we could change so that will be something that happens the next few years. Host we have a president elect that likes his twitter account. Guest i have been a longtime user of twitter and i think there is an argument thati without twitter, he wouldnt no have when the republican race because it gave him this kind of mouthpiece for 0 basically. Host so why does he need a filter to filter it today . Guest its going to be fascinating. As you know, people took his ths phone away from him so he couldnt anymore but they ended up giving it back to him and apparently hes just going to keep going from the oval office. He puts this in a whole new world. Host next call for Steven Johnson guest that is as the founders intended. Host do you think that he had any idea . Guest they were interested. One of the things in the invention of air that we talked about a few minutes ago in the adams and jefferson letters, the famous correspondence between the two had fallen out. They have been spoken for many years and been at the end they started to correspond and the way they begin the conversation for the first few letters is noting how fast the letters were giving to each other which is t. Say in the Communication Infrastructure at the time your letter only got here in six days for monticello. You have very high bandwidth. [laughter] said they would have been shocked if they would have figured it out. Host david, you are on weren with Steven Johnson in his new book, wonderland. My grhe caller good afternoon. A my grandfather started to a company in 1920 and he wrote atu loss of bringing reality into the land and if he were alive, i never knew him tha but i would e argued that we need to keep play and reality separate. So he believed that by getting children actual miniature things his work is in the smithsonian. He went to a lot of trouble to make his toys so real they would now be playing with a real w object and therefore become more realistic and go on to meet corporations and do practicalula things. I would have argued with hi himn the play hatthe plate should bed and not directed and make children more pragmatic. They should be openended. Host i think we got the point. Guest that is an interesting family history. The blurring of the linessele between reality and the play space is an interesting one. St there is a big divide betweenis the games that are strictly limited and the rules are defined. I remember when my kids were young and i would play candyland yo with them you know whats crazy about this game, there is no choice you literally cannot take a position. Thats the ultimate kind ofkindo constrained. They have no free will in this game and then you go to the others in there as dungeons dragons or Something L