Steven Johnson: How We Got to Now

of Steven Johnson. He has a book out called How We Got to Now Six Innovations that made the Modern World. He has a corresponding PBS series which airs on Wednesdays from October through November twelve at ten nine Central. So we've talked about him before. Stephen Johnson has written a bunch of books, and you may be familiar with him already with his Ted talk, which is called Where Good Ideas Come From, And it is a musty if you

haven't already. This is the coffee house talk for those of you who just have kind of a an in and out familiarity with the various Ted Talks of the past. This is the one that was like people stopped drinking beer. They started drinking coffee and hanging out in coffee houses, and they started getting all these crazy ideas. Their ideas started breading with one another and producing hybrid ideas. And that this is kind of the soup of innovation. Yeah, that which kind of took us out of the dark

ages and into the Enlightenment. And yeah, he weaves together all of he's uh sort of what you would think are disparate topics or areas, and he creates this cohesive narrative of how things came to be. And and he is an excellent storyteller and an excellent science journalist. Yes, now this book how we got to now six innovations that made the modern world. Uh, six six innovations. The chapter titles are glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, and Light.

And Uh, what I love about this book is that it makes me think of those uh, you know, those transparencies you would find in in biology and anatomy textbooks. You know where you would be One transparency would be, uh, the circulatory system of an organism, and then you have another transparency that's the digestive system, uh, etcetera. All these different layers and your lawyer them on top and on top and altogether they give you this kind of complex

view of the organism itself. Well, I find that books like this and and this book in particular, it's kind of like like each chapter, like the glass chapter, is kind of one transparency over the body of history, particularly the body of of history when seen, uh, in terms of technological innovation. And each one of those transparencies on

its own is fascinating. You know, you look at the circulatory system, you say, well, the human circulatory system is in and of itself a very fascinating system and well worthy of study. And so in this book, Johnson is is basically taking different transparencies from the history of innovation and saying, well, just just look at the story. Just look at the history of say um, the lightbuhold in our quest for Light, and look at how this story

of innovation colors the the overall history of human innovation. Yeah, And I love that about his ability to reframe our understanding of these really big meadia topics like light, right or even time. In one aspect of it, he talks about how time was just all over the place. You know, you could go from one city to another and you'd be five minutes ahead or ten minutes behind, and so

on and so forth. And that's how we largely sort of went along until the eighteen seventies when William Allen created standardized time zones, and all of a sudden you could sync up not just trains, but all sorts of innovation sprung from that to the point where we really could not disseminate information or share our knowledge um or you know, air things without um creating this sort of cohesive understanding or all of us being on the same

page of time. And that's just one tiny little aspect that he talks about when considering the entire history of time and how we've tried to bottle it. Indeed, that's a great chapter and and and this is overall this book is a just a great volume, well worth picking up, very readable, very much a book for the you know, the everyday person who's just interested in how these different inventions and how these great ideas have have changed the world, and you know, and how sometimes they spring off in

just unforeseen directions. Yeah, and uh, Stephen Johnson will talk a little bit more about this in the interview that we're about to play. We thought you guys would really like to get a little bit more information about his work, his process, and dive into a little bit more of the book. So, without any further ado, here's our interview

with Steven Johnson. And remember that his PBS series How We Got to Now airs on PBS on Wednesdays, and that's ten eastern lineis in your book, you write about how Manuel de Landa's book were in the age of intelligent machine form your perspective bending approach to history. Can you touch on that a little bit? Yeah, Well, we tend to tell historical stories in terms of you know, kind of great leaders, political leaders, spiritual leaders, military leaders.

It's it's you know, it tends to be very kind of human centered view of the world. And even when we talk about the history of invention, we often talk about the great inventors and and the geniuses that they were and how they're great ideas changed the world. And what the Landa was suggesting in that book that I read many many years ago as a grad student in

my early twenties. Um, it's taken me twenty three years to fully digest what he was saying is that there's another way of looking at at the history of human society, which is in a sense the kind of machines eye view of it all UM, and to look not at how people change the world, but how these technologies, these machines,

these objects, UM changed us. And he imagined, if you know, if you somehow in the future and you had a robot historian, you know, we got to a level of artificial intelligence and a robot set out to tell the history of the last thousand years, that robot would tell a very different story, would be all the different strains in kind of historical progress that we're leading towards, you know, intelligent computers, UM, and that certain elements in human history

would loom large and that telling UM that might not loom quite as large in in our traditional accounts. So that's what how we got to now is in a sense trying to do it's trying to talk about how all these breakthroughs and and objects and technologies changed the

way we live. What do you see as humanity's biggest misunderstanding when it comes to the nature of innovation and does and this understanding threat I think part of the issue that we have when we think about innovation is that we tend to look at it a very kind of local way. So you see somebody trying to solve the specific problem in coming up with some new new solutions, some new technology, and and oftentimes you know, people are

very good at doing this. You know, they set out to figure it a way to um, you know, cool down and dehumidify a room in the invention of air conditioning, for instance, and they do an excellent job of that. Um. They successfully managed to create these like nice interior temperatures that are very livable. But what we don't see and we don't anticipate are all the crazy, um kind of peripheral consequences of that invention that gets set in motion

because this new thing is in the world. And so with the invention of air conditioning, what that ends up triggering is this huge migration of people, uh to you know kind of very hot places like desert states or very you know tropical um junglie places that would normally not sustain big population bases. And you know, like the entire sun Belt, for instance, is basically a creation of

air conditioning technology UM. And that itself then creates other you know, kind of strange consequences where like, for instance, people living in the desert have you know, need for water. UM that maybe we shouldn't really be living, you know, in cities and five million people in the middle middle of the desert, that that might actually not be a sustainable way to live. But air conditioning kind of made

that possible for the first time. So we need to have this ability to kind of look at these secondary effects, um, and not just look at the kind of direct problem being solved with each innovation. In your book, you uncover many of the unsung heroes of history, the people who aren't often touted or celebrated for contributing to humanity changing inventions or innovations. So which one of those heroes are

you most taken with? You know, there's so many. Uh, we we really had a lot of fun uncovering these these folks. I mean, you know, I think the whole story about Frederick Tutor and kind of inventing the ice trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century is an amazing one. Tutor himself, it seems like he was a

bit of a jerk, but but his whole process is amazing. So, you know, he kids fund this idea that um, he could take large blocks of frozen lake water from New England lakes um and ship them ship these big blocks of ice down to the American styles to the Caribbean and then eventually UH to South America and even to India. UM. And he and he has this idea like, look, you know, ice is basically free in New England. UM, it's completely abundant and has kind of no you can just go

and take it. Um. But it's unbelievably rare. In fact, it was non existent in the Caribbean. If you grew up in the Caribbean, you know, in the middle of the early nineteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds, you would have never seen ice your entire life. So he thought people were going to pay a fortune for this, and so he went to this whole laborate process of figuring out how to get the blocks of ice to the Caribbean without his melting, which was interesting in and of itself.

But the funniest thing is then it got there and nobody wanted his ice. And people were like, why, why, why would we want ice? We have been living here for three hundred years about needing any ice, and we've been fine, and so what would we do with that?

And so we had to kind of convince them of the need price and that it was a really nice resource to have to have things that were cold, and eventually became, you know, a multi veionaire and ice was briefly the second biggest export in the United States after cop um. So he was ultimately a success. But it's just a kind of a crazy story. What was the starting point at about that point in which you realize that you could create cohesive collection of jaw dropping moments

to help reframe our understanding of human innovation. Well, I had written Where Good Ideas Come From UM, which you know, is all about, in a way, the history of innovation, but not organized in terms of individual kind of objects. Uh. So it was about the kind of patterns and kind

of lessons from innovative people and environments and communities. And uh and so I knew and that book had done well, and I knew that you know that you could you could tell these stories from history and they could be kind of captivating, um if you figured out the right stories to tell on the white way to frame them. And then because of that book, uh, I got approached basically with this idea of turning it into a television show. Um, a television series and uh and so really was a

TV series first for PBS and and BBC. And it was during the early conversation is about the show that we came up with the idea of organizing it around six you know, objects, a clean glass of drinking water, a sound recording, you know, artificial light. Um. And then once you have that kind of clarity, it was clear that it was it was that's the that's the episodes,

and then the chapters as I wrote them in the book. Um, we're gonna be fun because it just kind of gave us this structure that I that I hadn't had and where good ideas come from. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, more questions with Stephen Johnson. All Right, we're back talking to Stephen Johnson. A lot of times on the podcast, we'll talk about habits or practices that we tried to do, especially in terms of creativity. Do you have any specific habits or

practices when you approach your work? Yeah, I have accumulated. You know, this is my ninth book, so I've I think there's a lot of little tricks. Actually I wrote you can you know, maybe link to it. I wrote a kind of serious little essays at at medium um called the Writer's Room about some of my little tricks that I'd accumulated over the years. But the biggest one

is this and and it's a big theme of the books. Actually, you know, I talked in the last two books, I've talked quite a bit about this idea of the slow hunch, right, that the anti Eureka moment, instead of moments of sudden clarity, sudden epiphany, breakthrough moments. Most good ideas come into the world very slowly, and they start as hunches, and then you know, they sometimes take two or three years or a decade to turn into something that you can actually

use in a really actionable way. And so the trick is to like preserve all of those hunches and keep them alive for as long as you can, because you know that idea you had in two thousand eight might not really make sense in two thousand eight, but it makes total sense to do Thousen fourteen because something has changed, or you've met someone who has another either kind of completes it, or the technology has changed in the world and lets you kind of build on it, or you

understand something differently that you didn't understand before. So I've I've been keeping this single document for the last uh it's almost ten years now actually. Um. It was originally like a word document and then it became a Google

doc so that I could just get to it. But it's one one document, and I just in that document, I write down every single random idea I have for anything, whether it's like a talk or a startup or a episode or you know, just like or a entire book or a magazine article or even I don't know where it's supposed to go, but it's just an idea that popped into my head and I and I write it down that same place that don't organize it at all. It's that file is now about seventy thousand words long. UM.

So it's longer than all of my books. Um. That file is longer like the longest book I've written. It's probably about seventy thousand words. Everything else's short than that. UM. And what I try and do is I go back and reread it every six months or so. It takes a while. It takes like a book flenks worth of time to reread all these things. But I try and go through and reread it because you know you're constantly finding things in your past. We're like, oh right, I

forgot I had that idea. That's such a good one, and now would makes total sense to do it here, you know. So that's one of the key kind of techniques that I've had over the years, just to keep that one. I call it my spark file. Um. And uh, it's been incredibly helpful to me. So just looking back at that spread to give you any insights into how you work or your thought process, yeah, well it really

doesn't mean. The cool thing is sometimes I go back and I'm rereading it and I'll come across one little passage and I'll be like, that was the night I came up with the idea for invention of air. My book, Like the whole book came out of that little nugget that I had, you know, like that that night, And here I am writing it down, you know, for the first time. So you can see the idea of starting to take shape, which is really great, and and it

just you know, it encourages you. It makes you feel like, Okay, you know, if I keep doing this, I'm going to generate another book idea in here, you know, sooner or later. Um. And then sometimes I read, you know, notes that I've written that I'm like, how many glasses of wine that I had when I wrote that down? I don't even know what I'm talking about. So, you know, some are you see a lot of like dead ends and things

that didn't work. But you know, you know, it's a big theme of of the show in the book too, that there's you know, productive failure. You know, you you you end up innovating more if you take a lot of risks and if you're constantly like experimenting with ideas, most most of which aren't going to work out. Um uh, But if you do that, eventually you'll start hitting you know, hitting some that that actually do work out. All right, So this one might be a bit of a doozy.

But but how does this understanding of innovation's history color our expectation for humanity's future, perhaps humanity's future beyond Earth? Well, I don't know, beyond Earth. That's that's probably kind of above my pay grades speculated on. But but but I think it should color our long view of human history in in a in a positive way, right, um. And then you know, one of the things that I tried

to do in in this book. Um. And in a way, in my last book, Future Perfect, was to just remind people how much incredible progress we've made over the last particularly two hundred years. Um. You know, I have a whole risk in the book and the show about the introduction of chlorination into drinking water and the crazy story

behind that. And and you know that one little step understanding that chlorine and small doses would be harmless to humans but could kill bacteria, that one little innovation, you know, ended up reducing inframortality and child mortality by more than and you know, just think about that. I mean to think about how common infident child more stality was high those numbers were in the developed world a hundred and

fifty years ago. I mean, it's just it is the single worst thing that you can imagine happening to you as as a parent, the loss of a child. And through through all these kind of collaborative innovations over the last hundred fifty years, we've taken something that was very common in the middle of the nineteenth century, it made it very rare here at the beginning of the twenty one.

And that's just extraordinary. And that is that is actually happening in the developing world even faster now than it happened in the developed world a hundred years ago. So yes, they're lagging behind us, but they're seeing even faster rates of progress on something like that. So I think, look, we have big challenges that we have to confront. We have energy challenges, we have climate challenges. Um, you know,

we have any quality challenges and things like that. But the track record as the last you know, two hundred to three hundred years is an extraordinary one and as extraordinary all around the world. Um, it's not just anymore or the story of you know, the West with an impoverished, um third world, that is not what's happening. We're seeing actually the developing world, you know, increase in its basic standards of living faster than any human settlement uh in history.

So I think, while we do have these problems, hopefully you look at you look at it from this angle and you see, you know, you see a lot of reasons for optimism. You've written about how innovation tends to keep tabs on itself and not unleash anything too terrible or harmful upon the world. But in terms of today's technology, which moves at a far faster pace than the current legal system. Do you see a downside or a need to address the oversight system in place. Yeah, that's a

really good question. I mean, this is the classic you know, concern about why why we haven't detected any radio signals in like the SETI projects and things like that. And one of the arguments is that it may well be that civil sizations that advance far enough to send out structured radio signals. It's some you know, other planet are almost immediately wiped out by some self destructive technology that follows the invention of radio UM, which is the the

less optimistic view of what happens UM. And I think we do have you know, we live in a much more you know, kind of connected world. And so if there were some kind of you know, self replicating style biotechnology or nanotechnology, this is the kind of gray goo um nightmare scenarios that we would you know, we could unleash something that's that you know, was incredibly damaging to society, that that could be a risk. And you know, I suppose like genetics meddling people are concerned about UM. I

think it would be really good you know too. We we certainly need to have better systems for thinking about risk, and particularly for thinking about these unintended unintended consequences in terms of risk. Um I'm not sure if our existant kind of regulatory bodies are the best set up for that. I don't think, you know, government agencies do a particularly good job of thinking about that kind of risk. But

I'm not sure really what the alternative is. Um. It's one of the places where I think, and I'm not actually a big reader of this, but one of the places where I think science fiction is probably pretty healthy for the society because basically science fiction authors just sit around and like imagine pretty alternate future scenarios based on you know, projecting out from the present, and that that's a pretty healthy attitude because it sometimes helps us steer

away from those things, right, you know, we we had fears about what would look like and we're able to kind of largely for the most part, some of it a true, but some of it didn't. I think partially because in my eighty four was such a powerful and evocative book. Um So, it made us worried about entering into that kind of state. Um So, I think in some ways the kind of divisionaries and the sci fi authors maybe as important to this kind of stuff as

the traditional regulators. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and we get back. We will have more from Stephen. All right, we're back. More questions here. We'll author Stephen Johnson. Uh, Stephen, what's the next topic that's going to keep you up at night making connections to that wider world. We're talking about doing another series, another season of this show, which would have another book. Um and so the question is what would it you know, what would be the uh

focus of it. I'd like to have it have a kind of a distinct focus, so it's not just like

six more objects that changed the world, you know. Um. And I'm really interested in in leisure and kind of recreation, because that's another measure of progress, is how much time we have to sit around, like playing video games, are going on vacations like our hunter gatherer ancestors didn't have as much of um And so it would be interesting to do kind of a history, a connected history of of the things that we do for fun, um and how those things came into being. I think that would

be pretty cool. Okay, if you don't mind indulging us. We have a couple of standard questions we like to ask people. So Woolly Mammoth, bring it back or don't bring it back? Well, you know, Stewart brand is uh, my neighbor in California and old friends. So whatever Stewart is doing, I'm I'm in favor of. I think it'd be cool to bring it back. All right, This question is fairly serious and you don't have to answer it if you're uncomfortable. Um, but we're just wondering do you

have a cost don't pick out for Halloween? Sadly, I'm going to be in London actually doing the UK uh publication tour of the book. Um, and they don't really do Halloween over there quite the way we do in the US, so I will be just sitting in my hotel room ordering in room service. Uh. But my kids went out and got some very disturbing costumes the other day, so uh, they'll be they'll be in style here in Brooklyn. All right, Stephen, Well, thank you for talking with us

before we go. Is there anything else you'd like listeners to know about the book and the series? Well, I you know, I think the one thing I say about the series, um, is it it's really it's a really fun show to watch with your kids, like to watch with like an eleven year old, um, or if you're a kid, to watch with your parents. Is it just it really like it's pitched at this level. The book is slightly you know, older. I think it would be

hard for eleven year old to read the book. But um, the show is right in the sweet spot where I think most of the grown ups will have not heard. The stories are all we worked really hard to has, you know, stories that you will not know and that we'll kind of blow your mind a little bit. Um. But at the same time, there's nothing in it that an eleven year old won't get. And I think it's it's told and kind of a playful, fun way. It's

not like you're normal kind of history series. Um. I think it's I think it should be a good family show. All right. So there you have it. Our chat with Steven Johnson again the book How We Got to Now? The TV series also How We Got to Now. We highly recommend books. Yeah, airing on PBS Wednesdays, that's Tenny Stern and nine Central. And if you guys have any thoughts about this, I hope that you send them our way. Indeed, and in the meantime, be sure to check out stuff

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