Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert glam and um Julie Douglas, and
Speaker 1: we have a treat for you here this week because
Speaker 1: we are talking to an expert. We're talking to a
Speaker 1: man who definitely knows it was way around innovation, around
Speaker 1: the history of innovation and and how we work as
Speaker 1: an innovative species. This man, he goes by the name
Speaker 1: of Steven Johnson. He has a book out called How
Speaker 1: We Got to Now Six Innovations that made the Modern World.
Speaker 1: He has a corresponding PBS series which airs on Wednesdays
Speaker 1: from October through November twelve at ten nine Central. So
Speaker 1: we've talked about him before. Stephen Johnson has written a
Speaker 1: bunch of books, and you may be familiar with him
Speaker 1: already with his Ted talk, which is called Where Good
Speaker 1: Ideas Come From, And it is a musty if you
Speaker 1: haven't already. This is the coffee house talk for those
Speaker 1: of you who just have kind of a an in
Speaker 1: and out familiarity with the various Ted Talks of the past.
Speaker 1: This is the one that was like people stopped drinking beer.
Speaker 1: They started drinking coffee and hanging out in coffee houses,
Speaker 1: and they started getting all these crazy ideas. Their ideas
Speaker 1: started breading with one another and producing hybrid ideas. And
Speaker 1: that this is kind of the soup of innovation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that which kind of took us out of the dark
Speaker 1: ages and into the Enlightenment. And yeah, he weaves together
Speaker 1: all of he's uh sort of what you would think
Speaker 1: are disparate topics or areas, and he creates this cohesive
Speaker 1: narrative of how things came to be. And and he
Speaker 1: is an excellent storyteller and an excellent science journalist. Yes,
Speaker 1: now this book how we got to now six innovations
Speaker 1: that made the modern world. Uh, six six innovations. The
Speaker 1: chapter titles are glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, and Light.
Speaker 1: And Uh, what I love about this book is that
Speaker 1: it makes me think of those uh, you know, those
Speaker 1: transparencies you would find in in biology and anatomy textbooks.
Speaker 1: You know where you would be One transparency would be, uh,
Speaker 1: the circulatory system of an organism, and then you have
Speaker 1: another transparency that's the digestive system, uh, etcetera. All these
Speaker 1: different layers and your lawyer them on top and on
Speaker 1: top and altogether they give you this kind of complex
Speaker 1: view of the organism itself. Well, I find that books
Speaker 1: like this and and this book in particular, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like like each chapter, like the glass chapter, is
Speaker 1: kind of one transparency over the body of history, particularly
Speaker 1: the body of of history when seen, uh, in terms
Speaker 1: of technological innovation. And each one of those transparencies on
Speaker 1: its own is fascinating. You know, you look at the
Speaker 1: circulatory system, you say, well, the human circulatory system is
Speaker 1: in and of itself a very fascinating system and well
Speaker 1: worthy of study. And so in this book, Johnson is
Speaker 1: is basically taking different transparencies from the history of innovation
Speaker 1: and saying, well, just just look at the story. Just
Speaker 1: look at the history of say um, the lightbuhold in
Speaker 1: our quest for Light, and look at how this story
Speaker 1: of innovation colors the the overall history of human innovation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I love that about his ability to reframe our
Speaker 1: understanding of these really big meadia topics like light, right
Speaker 1: or even time. In one aspect of it, he talks
Speaker 1: about how time was just all over the place. You know,
Speaker 1: you could go from one city to another and you'd
Speaker 1: be five minutes ahead or ten minutes behind, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. And that's how we largely sort
Speaker 1: of went along until the eighteen seventies when William Allen
Speaker 1: created standardized time zones, and all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: could sync up not just trains, but all sorts of
Speaker 1: innovation sprung from that to the point where we really
Speaker 1: could not disseminate information or share our knowledge um or
Speaker 1: you know, air things without um creating this sort of
Speaker 1: cohesive understanding or all of us being on the same
Speaker 1: page of time. And that's just one tiny little aspect
Speaker 1: that he talks about when considering the entire history of
Speaker 1: time and how we've tried to bottle it. Indeed, that's
Speaker 1: a great chapter and and and this is overall this
Speaker 1: book is a just a great volume, well worth picking up,
Speaker 1: very readable, very much a book for the you know,
Speaker 1: the everyday person who's just interested in how these different
Speaker 1: inventions and how these great ideas have have changed the world,
Speaker 1: and you know, and how sometimes they spring off in
Speaker 1: just unforeseen directions. Yeah, and uh, Stephen Johnson will talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about this in the interview that
Speaker 1: we're about to play. We thought you guys would really
Speaker 1: like to get a little bit more information about his work,
Speaker 1: his process, and dive into a little bit more of
Speaker 1: the book. So, without any further ado, here's our interview
Speaker 1: with Steven Johnson. And remember that his PBS series How
Speaker 1: We Got to Now airs on PBS on Wednesdays, and
Speaker 1: that's ten eastern lineis in your book, you write about
Speaker 1: how Manuel de Landa's book were in the age of
Speaker 1: intelligent machine form your perspective bending approach to history. Can
Speaker 1: you touch on that a little bit? Yeah, Well, we
Speaker 1: tend to tell historical stories in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: kind of great leaders, political leaders, spiritual leaders, military leaders.
Speaker 1: It's it's you know, it tends to be very kind
Speaker 1: of human centered view of the world. And even when
Speaker 1: we talk about the history of invention, we often talk
Speaker 1: about the great inventors and and the geniuses that they
Speaker 1: were and how they're great ideas changed the world. And
Speaker 1: what the Landa was suggesting in that book that I
Speaker 1: read many many years ago as a grad student in
Speaker 1: my early twenties. Um, it's taken me twenty three years
Speaker 1: to fully digest what he was saying is that there's
Speaker 1: another way of looking at at the history of human society,
Speaker 1: which is in a sense the kind of machines eye
Speaker 1: view of it all UM, and to look not at
Speaker 1: how people change the world, but how these technologies, these machines,
Speaker 1: these objects, UM changed us. And he imagined, if you know,
Speaker 1: if you somehow in the future and you had a
Speaker 1: robot historian, you know, we got to a level of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence and a robot set out to tell the
Speaker 1: history of the last thousand years, that robot would tell
Speaker 1: a very different story, would be all the different strains
Speaker 1: in kind of historical progress that we're leading towards, you know,
Speaker 1: intelligent computers, UM, and that certain elements in human history
Speaker 1: would loom large and that telling UM that might not
Speaker 1: loom quite as large in in our traditional accounts. So
Speaker 1: that's what how we got to now is in a
Speaker 1: sense trying to do it's trying to talk about how
Speaker 1: all these breakthroughs and and objects and technologies changed the
Speaker 1: way we live. What do you see as humanity's biggest
Speaker 1: misunderstanding when it comes to the nature of innovation and
Speaker 1: does and this understanding threat I think part of the
Speaker 1: issue that we have when we think about innovation is
Speaker 1: that we tend to look at it a very kind
Speaker 1: of local way. So you see somebody trying to solve
Speaker 1: the specific problem in coming up with some new new solutions,
Speaker 1: some new technology, and and oftentimes you know, people are
Speaker 1: very good at doing this. You know, they set out
Speaker 1: to figure it a way to um, you know, cool
Speaker 1: down and dehumidify a room in the invention of air conditioning,
Speaker 1: for instance, and they do an excellent job of that. Um.
Speaker 1: They successfully managed to create these like nice interior temperatures
Speaker 1: that are very livable. But what we don't see and
Speaker 1: we don't anticipate are all the crazy, um kind of
Speaker 1: peripheral consequences of that invention that gets set in motion
Speaker 1: because this new thing is in the world. And so
Speaker 1: with the invention of air conditioning, what that ends up
Speaker 1: triggering is this huge migration of people, uh to you
Speaker 1: know kind of very hot places like desert states or
Speaker 1: very you know tropical um junglie places that would normally
Speaker 1: not sustain big population bases. And you know, like the
Speaker 1: entire sun Belt, for instance, is basically a creation of
Speaker 1: air conditioning technology UM. And that itself then creates other
Speaker 1: you know, kind of strange consequences where like, for instance,
Speaker 1: people living in the desert have you know, need for water.
Speaker 1: UM that maybe we shouldn't really be living, you know,
Speaker 1: in cities and five million people in the middle middle
Speaker 1: of the desert, that that might actually not be a
Speaker 1: sustainable way to live. But air conditioning kind of made
Speaker 1: that possible for the first time. So we need to
Speaker 1: have this ability to kind of look at these secondary effects, um,
Speaker 1: and not just look at the kind of direct problem
Speaker 1: being solved with each innovation. In your book, you uncover
Speaker 1: many of the unsung heroes of history, the people who
Speaker 1: aren't often touted or celebrated for contributing to humanity changing
Speaker 1: inventions or innovations. So which one of those heroes are
Speaker 1: you most taken with? You know, there's so many. Uh,
Speaker 1: we we really had a lot of fun uncovering these
Speaker 1: these folks. I mean, you know, I think the whole
Speaker 1: story about Frederick Tutor and kind of inventing the ice
Speaker 1: trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century is an
Speaker 1: amazing one. Tutor himself, it seems like he was a
Speaker 1: bit of a jerk, but but his whole process is amazing. So,
Speaker 1: you know, he kids fund this idea that um, he
Speaker 1: could take large blocks of frozen lake water from New
Speaker 1: England lakes um and ship them ship these big blocks
Speaker 1: of ice down to the American styles to the Caribbean
Speaker 1: and then eventually UH to South America and even to India. UM.
Speaker 1: And he and he has this idea like, look, you know,
Speaker 1: ice is basically free in New England. UM, it's completely
Speaker 1: abundant and has kind of no you can just go
Speaker 1: and take it. Um. But it's unbelievably rare. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was non existent in the Caribbean. If you grew
Speaker 1: up in the Caribbean, you know, in the middle of
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, you would have
Speaker 1: never seen ice your entire life. So he thought people
Speaker 1: were going to pay a fortune for this, and so
Speaker 1: he went to this whole laborate process of figuring out
Speaker 1: how to get the blocks of ice to the Caribbean
Speaker 1: without his melting, which was interesting in and of itself.
Speaker 1: But the funniest thing is then it got there and
Speaker 1: nobody wanted his ice. And people were like, why, why,
Speaker 1: why would we want ice? We have been living here
Speaker 1: for three hundred years about needing any ice, and we've
Speaker 1: been fine, and so what would we do with that?
Speaker 1: And so we had to kind of convince them of
Speaker 1: the need price and that it was a really nice
Speaker 1: resource to have to have things that were cold, and
Speaker 1: eventually became, you know, a multi veionaire and ice was
Speaker 1: briefly the second biggest export in the United States after
Speaker 1: cop um. So he was ultimately a success. But it's
Speaker 1: just a kind of a crazy story. What was the
Speaker 1: starting point at about that point in which you realize
Speaker 1: that you could create cohesive collection of jaw dropping moments
Speaker 1: to help reframe our understanding of human innovation. Well, I
Speaker 1: had written Where Good Ideas Come From UM, which you know,
Speaker 1: is all about, in a way, the history of innovation,
Speaker 1: but not organized in terms of individual kind of objects. Uh.
Speaker 1: So it was about the kind of patterns and kind
Speaker 1: of lessons from innovative people and environments and communities. And
Speaker 1: uh and so I knew and that book had done well,
Speaker 1: and I knew that you know that you could you
Speaker 1: could tell these stories from history and they could be
Speaker 1: kind of captivating, um if you figured out the right
Speaker 1: stories to tell on the white way to frame them.
Speaker 1: And then because of that book, uh, I got approached
Speaker 1: basically with this idea of turning it into a television show. Um,
Speaker 1: a television series and uh and so really was a
Speaker 1: TV series first for PBS and and BBC. And it
Speaker 1: was during the early conversation is about the show that
Speaker 1: we came up with the idea of organizing it around
Speaker 1: six you know, objects, a clean glass of drinking water,
Speaker 1: a sound recording, you know, artificial light. Um. And then
Speaker 1: once you have that kind of clarity, it was clear
Speaker 1: that it was it was that's the that's the episodes,
Speaker 1: and then the chapters as I wrote them in the book. Um,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be fun because it just kind of gave
Speaker 1: us this structure that I that I hadn't had and
Speaker 1: where good ideas come from. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, more questions
Speaker 1: with Stephen Johnson. All Right, we're back talking to Stephen Johnson.
Speaker 1: A lot of times on the podcast, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: habits or practices that we tried to do, especially in
Speaker 1: terms of creativity. Do you have any specific habits or
Speaker 1: practices when you approach your work? Yeah, I have accumulated.
Speaker 1: You know, this is my ninth book, so I've I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of little tricks. Actually I wrote
Speaker 1: you can you know, maybe link to it. I wrote
Speaker 1: a kind of serious little essays at at medium um
Speaker 1: called the Writer's Room about some of my little tricks
Speaker 1: that I'd accumulated over the years. But the biggest one
Speaker 1: is this and and it's a big theme of the books. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, I talked in the last two books, I've
Speaker 1: talked quite a bit about this idea of the slow hunch, right,
Speaker 1: that the anti Eureka moment, instead of moments of sudden clarity,
Speaker 1: sudden epiphany, breakthrough moments. Most good ideas come into the
Speaker 1: world very slowly, and they start as hunches, and then
Speaker 1: you know, they sometimes take two or three years or
Speaker 1: a decade to turn into something that you can actually
Speaker 1: use in a really actionable way. And so the trick
Speaker 1: is to like preserve all of those hunches and keep
Speaker 1: them alive for as long as you can, because you
Speaker 1: know that idea you had in two thousand eight might
Speaker 1: not really make sense in two thousand eight, but it
Speaker 1: makes total sense to do Thousen fourteen because something has changed,
Speaker 1: or you've met someone who has another either kind of
Speaker 1: completes it, or the technology has changed in the world
Speaker 1: and lets you kind of build on it, or you
Speaker 1: understand something differently that you didn't understand before. So I've
Speaker 1: I've been keeping this single document for the last uh
Speaker 1: it's almost ten years now actually. Um. It was originally
Speaker 1: like a word document and then it became a Google
Speaker 1: doc so that I could just get to it. But
Speaker 1: it's one one document, and I just in that document,
Speaker 1: I write down every single random idea I have for anything,
Speaker 1: whether it's like a talk or a startup or a
Speaker 1: episode or you know, just like or a entire book
Speaker 1: or a magazine article or even I don't know where
Speaker 1: it's supposed to go, but it's just an idea that
Speaker 1: popped into my head and I and I write it
Speaker 1: down that same place that don't organize it at all.
Speaker 1: It's that file is now about seventy thousand words long. UM.
Speaker 1: So it's longer than all of my books. Um. That
Speaker 1: file is longer like the longest book I've written. It's
Speaker 1: probably about seventy thousand words. Everything else's short than that. UM.
Speaker 1: And what I try and do is I go back
Speaker 1: and reread it every six months or so. It takes
Speaker 1: a while. It takes like a book flenks worth of
Speaker 1: time to reread all these things. But I try and
Speaker 1: go through and reread it because you know you're constantly
Speaker 1: finding things in your past. We're like, oh right, I
Speaker 1: forgot I had that idea. That's such a good one,
Speaker 1: and now would makes total sense to do it here,
Speaker 1: you know. So that's one of the key kind of
Speaker 1: techniques that I've had over the years, just to keep
Speaker 1: that one. I call it my spark file. Um. And uh,
Speaker 1: it's been incredibly helpful to me. So just looking back
Speaker 1: at that spread to give you any insights into how
Speaker 1: you work or your thought process, yeah, well it really
Speaker 1: doesn't mean. The cool thing is sometimes I go back
Speaker 1: and I'm rereading it and I'll come across one little
Speaker 1: passage and I'll be like, that was the night I
Speaker 1: came up with the idea for invention of air. My book,
Speaker 1: Like the whole book came out of that little nugget
Speaker 1: that I had, you know, like that that night, And
Speaker 1: here I am writing it down, you know, for the
Speaker 1: first time. So you can see the idea of starting
Speaker 1: to take shape, which is really great, and and it
Speaker 1: just you know, it encourages you. It makes you feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, if I keep doing this, I'm going to
Speaker 1: generate another book idea in here, you know, sooner or later. Um.
Speaker 1: And then sometimes I read, you know, notes that I've
Speaker 1: written that I'm like, how many glasses of wine that
Speaker 1: I had when I wrote that down? I don't even
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. So, you know, some are
Speaker 1: you see a lot of like dead ends and things
Speaker 1: that didn't work. But you know, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: big theme of of the show in the book too,
Speaker 1: that there's you know, productive failure. You know, you you
Speaker 1: you end up innovating more if you take a lot
Speaker 1: of risks and if you're constantly like experimenting with ideas,
Speaker 1: most most of which aren't going to work out. Um uh,
Speaker 1: But if you do that, eventually you'll start hitting you know,
Speaker 1: hitting some that that actually do work out. All right,
Speaker 1: So this one might be a bit of a doozy.
Speaker 1: But but how does this understanding of innovation's history color
Speaker 1: our expectation for humanity's future, perhaps humanity's future beyond Earth? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, beyond Earth. That's that's probably kind of
Speaker 1: above my pay grades speculated on. But but but I
Speaker 1: think it should color our long view of human history
Speaker 1: in in a in a positive way, right, um. And
Speaker 1: then you know, one of the things that I tried
Speaker 1: to do in in this book. Um. And in a way,
Speaker 1: in my last book, Future Perfect, was to just remind
Speaker 1: people how much incredible progress we've made over the last
Speaker 1: particularly two hundred years. Um. You know, I have a
Speaker 1: whole risk in the book and the show about the
Speaker 1: introduction of chlorination into drinking water and the crazy story
Speaker 1: behind that. And and you know that one little step
Speaker 1: understanding that chlorine and small doses would be harmless to
Speaker 1: humans but could kill bacteria, that one little innovation, you know,
Speaker 1: ended up reducing inframortality and child mortality by more than
Speaker 1: and you know, just think about that. I mean to
Speaker 1: think about how common infident child more stality was high
Speaker 1: those numbers were in the developed world a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years ago. I mean, it's just it is the
Speaker 1: single worst thing that you can imagine happening to you
Speaker 1: as as a parent, the loss of a child. And
Speaker 1: through through all these kind of collaborative innovations over the
Speaker 1: last hundred fifty years, we've taken something that was very
Speaker 1: common in the middle of the nineteenth century, it made
Speaker 1: it very rare here at the beginning of the twenty one.
Speaker 1: And that's just extraordinary. And that is that is actually
Speaker 1: happening in the developing world even faster now than it
Speaker 1: happened in the developed world a hundred years ago. So yes,
Speaker 1: they're lagging behind us, but they're seeing even faster rates
Speaker 1: of progress on something like that. So I think, look,
Speaker 1: we have big challenges that we have to confront. We
Speaker 1: have energy challenges, we have climate challenges. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we have any quality challenges and things like that. But
Speaker 1: the track record as the last you know, two hundred
Speaker 1: to three hundred years is an extraordinary one and as
Speaker 1: extraordinary all around the world. Um, it's not just anymore
Speaker 1: or the story of you know, the West with an impoverished,
Speaker 1: um third world, that is not what's happening. We're seeing
Speaker 1: actually the developing world, you know, increase in its basic
Speaker 1: standards of living faster than any human settlement uh in history.
Speaker 1: So I think, while we do have these problems, hopefully
Speaker 1: you look at you look at it from this angle
Speaker 1: and you see, you know, you see a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons for optimism. You've written about how innovation tends to
Speaker 1: keep tabs on itself and not unleash anything too terrible
Speaker 1: or harmful upon the world. But in terms of today's technology,
Speaker 1: which moves at a far faster pace than the current
Speaker 1: legal system. Do you see a downside or a need
Speaker 1: to address the oversight system in place. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: really good question. I mean, this is the classic you know,
Speaker 1: concern about why why we haven't detected any radio signals
Speaker 1: in like the SETI projects and things like that. And
Speaker 1: one of the arguments is that it may well be
Speaker 1: that civil sizations that advance far enough to send out
Speaker 1: structured radio signals. It's some you know, other planet are
Speaker 1: almost immediately wiped out by some self destructive technology that
Speaker 1: follows the invention of radio UM, which is the the
Speaker 1: less optimistic view of what happens UM. And I think
Speaker 1: we do have you know, we live in a much
Speaker 1: more you know, kind of connected world. And so if
Speaker 1: there were some kind of you know, self replicating style
Speaker 1: biotechnology or nanotechnology, this is the kind of gray goo
Speaker 1: um nightmare scenarios that we would you know, we could
Speaker 1: unleash something that's that you know, was incredibly damaging to society,
Speaker 1: that that could be a risk. And you know, I
Speaker 1: suppose like genetics meddling people are concerned about UM. I
Speaker 1: think it would be really good you know too. We
Speaker 1: we certainly need to have better systems for thinking about risk,
Speaker 1: and particularly for thinking about these unintended unintended consequences in
Speaker 1: terms of risk. Um I'm not sure if our existant
Speaker 1: kind of regulatory bodies are the best set up for that.
Speaker 1: I don't think, you know, government agencies do a particularly
Speaker 1: good job of thinking about that kind of risk. But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure really what the alternative is. Um. It's
Speaker 1: one of the places where I think, and I'm not
Speaker 1: actually a big reader of this, but one of the
Speaker 1: places where I think science fiction is probably pretty healthy
Speaker 1: for the society because basically science fiction authors just sit
Speaker 1: around and like imagine pretty alternate future scenarios based on
Speaker 1: you know, projecting out from the present, and that that's
Speaker 1: a pretty healthy attitude because it sometimes helps us steer
Speaker 1: away from those things, right, you know, we we had
Speaker 1: fears about what would look like and we're able to
Speaker 1: kind of largely for the most part, some of it
Speaker 1: a true, but some of it didn't. I think partially
Speaker 1: because in my eighty four was such a powerful and
Speaker 1: evocative book. Um So, it made us worried about entering
Speaker 1: into that kind of state. Um So, I think in
Speaker 1: some ways the kind of divisionaries and the sci fi
Speaker 1: authors maybe as important to this kind of stuff as
Speaker 1: the traditional regulators. All Right, we're gonna take a quick
Speaker 1: break and we get back. We will have more from Stephen.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. More questions here. We'll author Stephen Johnson. Uh, Stephen,
Speaker 1: what's the next topic that's going to keep you up
Speaker 1: at night making connections to that wider world. We're talking
Speaker 1: about doing another series, another season of this show, which
Speaker 1: would have another book. Um and so the question is
Speaker 1: what would it you know, what would be the uh
Speaker 1: focus of it. I'd like to have it have a
Speaker 1: kind of a distinct focus, so it's not just like
Speaker 1: six more objects that changed the world, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And I'm really interested in in leisure and kind of recreation,
Speaker 1: because that's another measure of progress, is how much time
Speaker 1: we have to sit around, like playing video games, are
Speaker 1: going on vacations like our hunter gatherer ancestors didn't have
Speaker 1: as much of um And so it would be interesting
Speaker 1: to do kind of a history, a connected history of
Speaker 1: of the things that we do for fun, um and
Speaker 1: how those things came into being. I think that would
Speaker 1: be pretty cool. Okay, if you don't mind indulging us.
Speaker 1: We have a couple of standard questions we like to
Speaker 1: ask people. So Woolly Mammoth, bring it back or don't
Speaker 1: bring it back? Well, you know, Stewart brand is uh,
Speaker 1: my neighbor in California and old friends. So whatever Stewart
Speaker 1: is doing, I'm I'm in favor of. I think it'd
Speaker 1: be cool to bring it back. All right, This question
Speaker 1: is fairly serious and you don't have to answer it
Speaker 1: if you're uncomfortable. Um, but we're just wondering do you
Speaker 1: have a cost don't pick out for Halloween? Sadly, I'm
Speaker 1: going to be in London actually doing the UK uh
Speaker 1: publication tour of the book. Um, and they don't really
Speaker 1: do Halloween over there quite the way we do in
Speaker 1: the US, so I will be just sitting in my
Speaker 1: hotel room ordering in room service. Uh. But my kids
Speaker 1: went out and got some very disturbing costumes the other day,
Speaker 1: so uh, they'll be they'll be in style here in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: All right, Stephen, Well, thank you for talking with us
Speaker 1: before we go. Is there anything else you'd like listeners
Speaker 1: to know about the book and the series? Well, I
Speaker 1: you know, I think the one thing I say about
Speaker 1: the series, um, is it it's really it's a really
Speaker 1: fun show to watch with your kids, like to watch
Speaker 1: with like an eleven year old, um, or if you're
Speaker 1: a kid, to watch with your parents. Is it just
Speaker 1: it really like it's pitched at this level. The book
Speaker 1: is slightly you know, older. I think it would be
Speaker 1: hard for eleven year old to read the book. But um,
Speaker 1: the show is right in the sweet spot where I
Speaker 1: think most of the grown ups will have not heard.
Speaker 1: The stories are all we worked really hard to has,
Speaker 1: you know, stories that you will not know and that
Speaker 1: we'll kind of blow your mind a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, there's nothing in it that
Speaker 1: an eleven year old won't get. And I think it's
Speaker 1: it's told and kind of a playful, fun way. It's
Speaker 1: not like you're normal kind of history series. Um. I
Speaker 1: think it's I think it should be a good family show.
Speaker 1: All right. So there you have it. Our chat with
Speaker 1: Steven Johnson again the book How We Got to Now?
Speaker 1: The TV series also How We Got to Now. We
Speaker 1: highly recommend books. Yeah, airing on PBS Wednesdays, that's Tenny
Speaker 1: Stern and nine Central. And if you guys have any
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