Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion 20141115

It was in constant jeopardy of losing it matters. And i think in part that has something to do with how the town began. It began as an idea on a piece of paper. There were not People Living here when it was actually proposed that it would become the state capital. First the territorial capital and the state capital and it was this guy, he was a land speculator and he had invested in this land. The only people that were really living here or those around the lake shores and there were for traders that occasionally set up shop. But on the whole no one was living here. He comes through and he sees this land and says i think this can be a great town. So he hired someone to draw the boundaries of the town and presented it to the Territorial Legislature and said that this is it, this should be the capital of the New Territory and he really had to convince a lot of people because theres nobody living here at this time. So i think that has a lot to do with how he grew and hang on to his status because there were other places in a state that had more People Living in them, larger industries. So selecting a state or territory capital is really about convincing other legislatures and it you put forth a case as to why this should be the center of government for your state. At the time the major population was in the southwest of the state where people were doing lead mining. Some suggested thats where the capital should be because that is where the people were. There were a number of people there in the green bay area, for traders and others, there was heavy concentration of people there as well. One of his arguments is that madison was kind of centrally located. It would be easy for people all over the territory to get there if they want to be in touch with their government. So its mostly just a marketing job to actually be selected as the territorial capital. So when he went to the Territorial Legislature to present his idea that matteson should be the capital, of course it wasnt the only city competing to be the capital of this New Territory. The legislatures job of the territory was to pick a capital city. So they met in belmont, which is in the southwest part of the state. So he brings this kind of extravagant plan and hes a little bit manipulative trade i say he has a financial stake in that sense and he names that matteson after the president , james madison, who had just died, he was trying to play on national sympathies of this love the president we had just lost. He named the city streets again trying to show that its a patriotic place. So he brings it over where this Territorial Legislature is meeting and he presents 19 other cities competing to be the capital and he basically starts biting people. The building they were meeting and was a little bit chilly. They found lots of people complaining about the poor quality of the building and how cold they are and he knows this and hes very smart. So he brings with him his plan your madison and buffalo robes that he starts to hand out, saying would you like to hear about my city in madison and oh, if youre cold, here is a buffalo robe. And he offers these legislators land for a discounted price. So goes through quite a number of votes until he is successful. And he had been in wisconsin for quite some time and he was probably the only person who had actually been to all of the cities that were under consideration. He had come to wisconsin in 1820s and hes a very prominent figure here. So he said that you were bound to listen to him and they did end up after many votes selected matteson as the capital and surprisingly dodi made a mint off of that decision. So by the early 1840s experienced a lot of immigration. And those are kind of the two main immigrant streams and by the 1840s wisconsin has not people to qualify for statehood and you need 60,000 people. They had way more than that. There were various groups that were trying to push forward in the legislation to move wisconsin toward statehood. So it took a while for it where they can move forward in drafting a state constitution. The democrats are finally successful in 1846 and they go to work trying to write this new constitution and they think it will be an easy endeavor getting to the point. But no one thought that the constitution would be problematic. But the constitution they wrote was a little radical for the people who are living here at the time. They had such uncommercial things as allowing africanamericans to vote. They also outlawed all bands. People were very mistrustful at the time and they sought by outlining its that they wouldnt have to worry about fraudulent activities among employees. In another controversial measure that they took as they allowed married women to own property. Pretty much at every other state of married women could own property. These were radical provisions that were included in the constitution all over the state about how they were going to move forward and how they could stand for this. It was eventually overturned because we couldnt agree on a radical constitution and we sent our legislators back to the drawing board and he grew up a new constitution that was finally approved and got rid of those controversial measures that were in the original constitution. That one was finally passed so that wisconsin could become a state in may 1848. To so by the time we get to the early 20th century, theres a man that is hired who is a Landscape Architect and city planner and his name is john nolan and hes hired to come up with a plan in madison and he kind of delivers a shocking message and he says that matteson has the potential to be a worldclass city. And he also sees and presents very specific plans for what the city can do to become in paris and new york. And they have this potential, that someone from outside saw them as a fantastic place filled with possibility. So that is where the subtitle comes from. He really called madison a model city. Some of the things he suggested never came to fruition. But a lot of the things he suggested in 1911 came through throughout the 20th century and i think that that helps them build the confidence. One of the things that he suggested was that there should be an arboretum. He thought there should be more green space in the city. When he suggested this we didnt end up getting an intolerable decades later. And that includes and he thought that needed to be a place where people can gather together. That didnt happen until the 80s. And today its only open for buses and mostly a pedestrian thruway. But that was really part of his vision for the city and he suggested that the building downtown should not be taller than the capital. And he proposed several parks, one of the things is that we are completely surrounded by water and up until recently, it was hard to enjoy it and there is a lack of restaurants and things on the water where you think that they would be. They had kind of turn their back on the lakes and he said no, these are beautiful, we need to protect them and i think that thats something thats definitely becoming much more important to the city ever since then and i wanted people reading my book to understand how mattesons history is connected to the history of our country. And so often local history is really diminished and people see it as not being very important or being kind of parochial if you are only interested in that. But knowing the history tells you so much about the world. So i really wanted people to understand that part of it. And really think Something Else that is important is how we got that way today. For more information to madison, wisconsin, and other cities located, go to cspan. Org global content. Heres a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. Booktv will be attending the National Press club annual book fair and offer night. And then booktv is live on cspan2 at the National Book awards from new york city. On november 22 and 23rd, booktv will be live from the Miami Book Fair international. Many people who were infected with ebola could not remember making any mistakes at all. They thought that the decontamination process was concise but they got it anyway. In any event, one day one individual didnt come to work and they found out that he was keeping himself a home and he had isolated him till and he was feeling ill. A notice for a few days previously that he had been taken off alone uncharacteristically and sitting in a plastic chair and smoking a cigarette and looking into space. He never smoked in the ward but he was now. Later they thought that he knew he was coming down with ebola and he wanted to protect him self and the staff. When they send someone to his house, they took a blood sample and he was positive for ebola. About when he decided that he needed to get himself away because his presence as a patient would be too demoralizing to the remaining staff. So he climbed into an ambulance and was taken for four or five hours over these terrible dirt roads to another clinic where he became sicker and sicker in isolation in the ebola ward. And there he was finding that they had a freezer. They had a human remain in their and the sierra leone government regarded the onus is a National Crisis and they called it an International Expert asking for help in the expert became aware of the fact that the drug was there in the freezer 25 feet away from the doctor. They debated for three days whether to give him the drug, zmapp, or not. The considerations were difficult work their way through and this was an experimental drug. He was an african doctor and a National Hero and if you give him the drug, and he died, than he would be an african doctor who would he kill by an experimental drug administered by doctors from the developed world. And the drug might have no effect on him, but if he died, he would be blamed on the drug. On the other hand the drug might save his life and then it would be, if he got the job, why cant anyone else have the drug. And meanwhile he didnt seem to be that sick. And to be hanging in there and so there was hope that he would at least have a good chance of just coming through natural you. And the thing about ebola is that patients can often look like theyre doing all right, but then can suddenly go into what some experts call the crash, where all of a sudden you go into a startling decline and it can happen in a matter of hours where you just lose Blood Pressure and you have organ failure and you die very fast. In the end, thats what happened to the doctor. The zmapp drug eventually ended up with the two people working for christian medical organization for doctor Kent Brantley and nancy writebol. Both survived. They split to dose of transport and in particular doctor bramley , his symptoms seem to be at the point of death when the drug was administered to him and he turned around in a period of about three to four hours on the night of july 31 of this year. When i was researching the article, i discovered that at the very moment that he was apparently being saved by the drug was the moment that it may finish digging the grave and very name the other doctor early on. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. This weekend on booktv we are featuring new releases by Karen Armstrong on religion and other topics, including george w. Bush and john mccain on our unsung military heroes. Other books include Aaron David Miller in the end of greatness as well as books about afghanistan, winston churchill, and others. Booktv is television for serious readers. Steven johnson, author of how we got to now talked about innovations on world history. Clocks, lenses, recorded sound, and artificial light among others. He spoke in portland. This is one hour. Its so great to be in portland. I think ive done an event for all nine of my books now. From the very beginning i have come here when the whole city was reading my book and i made everyone read a book about cholera in the 19th century and i apologize for that. I feel like this is a very special place and its kind of a special day for me as an author. I got word that this book is going to be number four on the times bestseller list next week. And it just came out, ive never been in the top 10 before. So im really excited and its great kind of celebrate it. The one thing thats different from all of the other books that i had done before and another reason why its kind of appropriate to be here in portland is that i had this Great Television series that either accompanied the book where the book accompanied the Television Series depending on who youre talking to. They were developed together in tandem and its going to be airing next week on pbs and running for four or five weeks after that. And the same title as well. We have a clip from the show to give you a more information about it. So here we go. Imagine observing earth from a distance for the last 100,000 years. So how did we get to todays world . Who were the people that took us out of the dark . People who actually made the modern world and people that youve probably never heard of. Obsessive tinkerers, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Im Steven Johnson and i write about ideas and innovation. This is the untold story of how we got to now. Sonoma company. Unopposed and spontaneous as this propels. You can see how it was dangerous work. It takes is previously invisible group of people and makes them visible, triggering one of the great movements of social reform in american history. Its an appalling mix that you have to wade through on your way out to dinner. If you cant dig down, with the city up. We want to be the best we stop with a brilliant idea. Its the first ever means of secure radiocommunication. Those two things coming together are beyond understanding. Here we have the beginning of an idea that will turn out to be one of the most transformative ones of the 20th century. I had a hunch that it will take decades to finally pay off. The modern world does not get any more crazy then thats. Its the idea behind this that is important. It was an epic achievement. We make our ideas, and they make us in return. So there it is. [applause] can you tell how fun that was to make the map i hope so because it wants. We shot it all over the world. And we went skiing in the middle of the Arabian Desert which shows how insane we are. And i went into the sewers in San Francisco as well, which was literally the worst thing ive ever done in my entire life. Have these experiences where youre like, that was a tough thing, but boy, im glad i did it now that its over. [laughter] and of course i have to see these clips over and over again and so i have boater stress disorder from watching this. But what we were trying to do in this book is to take these facets of modern life and we no longer think of them as innovations wanting to technology in a sense of reawakening the sense of wonder and amazement these things work at all. So in this chapter is a basic idea of a clean glass of Drinking Water, that we would live in a world for the most part here in the developed world are you go to this fossett and you get water and you dont ever think about dying of cholera 48 hours later. Thats an incredible achievement that you can live in a city of 10 Million People and have that security. That took a history of invention and ingenuity and great Engineering Products just to make that possible. Yet while we celebrate innovation in our society all the time, Everyone Wants to talk about Silicon Valley and the next apple gadget and thats great i love those things in there worth celebrating, but we dont spend enough time talking about the people who made that class of Drinking Water part of our lives. So we are stopping to look at these objects and tell the stories and also as to talk about the unexpected places that this technology lets us. This is the idea of the hummingbird effect. We have these hummingbirds in our garden and we have success with how they work with their crazy anatomy and how they are able to hover like that. So we have flowers and plants and insects that developed a complicated dance. They have paralleled over years. But it doesnt really have anything to do with words and then all of a sudden they figure theres a way to get in on the action. It has to evolve this wing structure to hover. What seems to be this turned out to transform the anatomy of a bird. Turns out that history has a pattern. And that includes transforming the world and all of these predictable ways and thats the kind of effect that i talked about. In the history of things we end that episode and in the chapter we have a visit in austin, texas and i briefly dressed up in a spacesuit. And this is one of the cleanest environments on the face of the earth and thats where they make microchips. We generally assume youre being protected from something. In her room they have to protect the chimps from you. Soap is too dirty and it will set off little particles. And it turned out one of the things that is essential are these chips of what they call ultraclean water, which is water that is just pure h2o and in fact, its so clean that human beings cant always drink it. Normal Drinking Water has a lot of minerals and they wouldnt even let me taste it. But required do this final part of these microchips and to an extent this technology is making our water clean that we can come in terms of Drinking Water and being able to take a shower or a bath or Something Like that and it also makes the digital revolution possible that we have phones and computers and all of these amazing gadgets. The book takes you on these different journeys and in this sense it is a different way of telling history and so until much of the history that we tell is centered around president ial figures, great political figures come out military conflicts, and this is really history to give you the ideas about these breakthroughs in the often crazy people who set them into motion in the world and all these unintended consequences. So theres an opening chapter on the importance of glass. So if you could wave a magic wand and remove class from the last thousand years of human history, it would radically change just about everything in society and eliminate not just the armys things like windows and classes for clean Drinking Water but spectacles and lenses and microscopes and telescopes and it would eliminate the cameras in our Television Screens and honor owens. And the fiberoptic cable connecting the internet. On some fundamental level the internet is made of glass. So we dont even think about this becoming a natural part of our world with billy actually was the technology in the beginning of the 1200 and 1300s and sort of the most advanced technology was glass makers. One of the stories is one of my favorite ones in the book, the story that actually involves one individual who most of us feel that we have a pretty good read on gutenberg. Probably the single biggest mutations revolution at the last millennium. And we know the story that people start to read and that triggers revolutions in science and theology and art and all these things happen because of books and because of the literate populations. But there is an unsung thing and a story here that almost never gets talked about, which is that once the book got into circulation in european society, and had an interesting secondary effect or all of these were reading for the first time suddenly said that i cant read this, i need glasses. I am farsighted. And so as we have seen it is an essential problem that didnt exist until books came along to make it a problem. And so a certain percentage of the population who could not read books but they never had to read books and in fact the original spectacles were invented by monks because they were the only part of the population doing reading in the first place. So then we had the construction of spectacles and a demand begins. For the introduction of the need for spectacles and it sent out a signal throughout europe that there is a sudden demand for lens makers. People can manipulate last to make spectacles and because of that we talk about manipulating this through the lenses. People like to tinker with the invention and say okay, lets put these together and i can get a telescope and if i do it this way i can get a microscope. Almost immediately galileo takes a telescope and sees jupiter and revolutionizes this along with theology. In the microscope takes about 70 years to really change the world when robert houck analyzes this and in analyzing this he sees little boxes which he decides to call cells. Its the first time that the cell structure of life as we know it is named and seen for the first time. When we think of all the changes in society that came out and the ability to see the small things in a very big things after that. In a funny way he unleashed the scientific revolution by letting people share and he had almost as big an effect in his lateral move which made people say they knew lenses, so they could see the world for the first time. Its that kind of movement to history that runs throughout the entire book and what i like about it is that there are fun and playful stories on some level and they show a profound truth about how society change. On some level you can point to the individual and you can point to the geniuses were the hubs of innovation who were deliberately setting out to solve a problem and you also have to see that their ideas have a life of their own and they get into circulation and if you dont tell that part of the story, you are not being true to what really happened into understanding this basic question of how we got to now. The other thing that i find interesting that i think is the one to do is when we look at the history of ideas and we think of a march of progress, we tend to celebrate the victors and the winners and the folks that invented this technology that we now all use today and they are the ones that came up with it and its fantastic area on the other hand we have multiple inventors were given thing and theres a long risk of how Thomas Edison didnt invent the electric light bulb. Twenty people were inventing this in parallel with edison. So the story is all more complex than the word genius. And the other thing is the history of progress, the history of innovation, its still all of these beautiful mistakes are you places where people were being so innovative and working so far ahead of their peers and the general public but they failed to see things that would now seem obvious to us looking back in hindsight. And its important to study this because its what happened and second its probably happening to all of us right now. Theres something that we were not able to see in some ways, a cultural blind spot that we cant see, even those trying to invent new things are even more horrible to this because we are living in this kind of new possibility. An example of this is the chapter on sound and how many important breakthroughs came out of the pursuit of either have sharing more ample find the sound of the human voice and its just done all this Amazing Technology that has come out of the pursuit. One of them is the story of a french inventor who had a great french name [inaudible] and he invented a device that captured the recorded audio and sound waves in the middle of the 1850s and he actually patented this device until you are probably thinking well, im pretty sure that he invented the phonograph about 20 years later. But no, this guy was a 20 year timeframe ahead of edison recording audio and it was amazing, almost a generation ahead of Thomas Edison. And it turned out that it basically took cam is parchment to vibrate, sending these sound waves that would then put them on a rotating cylinder and you can just see these sound waves ridden on this piece of paper. And so was completely brilliant, but he forgot to include one key feature which was playback. Theres no way to listen to the audio that you have recorded which turns out to be a feature that people really like when they are investing in audio equipment. Theres a reason why when they invented the ipod, the put the headphone jack in it. Otherwise it could be a pretty lame product. And it was important. So he couldnt see this extra component in what i love about it is that he wasnt trying to have it. It wasnt that he failed but it never occurred to him. And so you might ask what the heck was he thinking, who wants a bunch of squiggly lines. But he was obsessed with shorthand and dictation and he saw how human beings have learned how to create this code where they can very quickly convert to stick spoken word and then learn how to decipher it and translate it back and he thought, well, i cut out the middleman and i can do this much faster and basically transcribe the sound waves onto the page and people will learn how to read the sound waves and we will be able to read it directly. Honestly it was a pretty good bet that humans have learned how to read scribble and turn them into words and images in their heads. It just happens that it doesnt include the capacity to read soundwaves and no one to this day has ever been able to read soundwaves and turn it into words. It was actually kind of illogical thing and i think that going back and looking at the history of ideas and showing how people got a little lost, reminding us that its not a Straight Line but its often strange little detours. And sometimes its a loss or failure for an individual and an ultimate gain for society. So this story is kind of tragic. And a few other researchers also uncovered part of this. But it turned out his technology was about 10 years later being used in an experimental way by another inventor who figured out a way to actually come out of it and that was Alexander Graham bell. And so his idea never became the product that he envisioned, but it made the groundwork a seed that totally changed the world and created the telephone. So there are a lot of strange detours through history that i think are important. The other thing that is important about the book, and i hope what you see in all of these people, some of them are borderline insane, number of them get arrested at various points in their rears. They raise money, it fails, they get thrown in jail for defrauding people. Some of them are mocked in various ways, as you would expect. In the vein that is so extraordinary and i hope that is part of the spirit of the project and is infectious, as they have this amazing curiosity about the world and a willingness to follow threads of interest and not being clear where the threats are going to take them. In my book i talk about this as a slow hunch. The idea that innovation doesnt always come from a eureka moment but getting interested in something without a clear idea of why youre interested in it and then following that interest sometimes for decades. Just teasing it out until it turns into something that can really change the world. Theres a version of that in the episode on cold where we have this whole history of the mastery of cold and the creation of artificial refrigeration and then air conditioning which change the world a great deal. One of the things is birdseye of birdseye frozen foods, who invented the technology of flash freezing almost 100 years ago. And it was dutiful kind of security is thing, he was a nationalist and a park ranger and at one point we recreated this in the show and he moves with his family and he has a young 1yearold child and hes out there in the winter in the most extreme environments in the plan and hes having a very hard time finding nourishment for his family. Theres nothing growing, everything is frozen. Until one day he goes icefishing with the local in a wet ice fisher and i was icefishing and i was incredibly bad. And because its like 30 below, the fish come out and instantly freeze. So he takes it back and then two days later he eats it and he says this is really good, this is better than any other frozen food that we have all winter long. Its really tasty and taste almost completely fresh. So most of us at that point would say great. That was a good meal. That was tasty fish and not going to go read my book. Whatever. But he was like, why was the fish tasty. What was different about it. And so he begins a bizarre set of experiments with all of these different forms of food, vegetables, meat, fish, he reprises them at different temperatures and in does it taste test and all sorts of things and again for no apparent reason. And his wife is like, what are you doing, cut it out. And it turns out that over time he begins to realize that it was happening is that things that are frozen quickly are not damaging the cellular structure of the food and that preserves it better and makes it tastier. Until another eight years pass and he eventually starts to put together the idea that theres an industrial process needed to make frozen food and he ultimately sells lists to what becomes general foods and he becomes very wealthy and all of a sudden our kitchens are filled with refrigerators are being populated by foods with the birdseye name on it. This sounds like a nice story, i have frozen tv dinners when i was a kid, they werent that great, as was the. But flash freezing is a technology that is also central to breathing human embryos. This is a central part of old world of flexibility over conceiving children that we enjoy today that is dependent upon our ability to master the cold and it becomes almost directly out of the research. So yes, there are millions of people live today that would not be alive had we not mastered cold in that way. And so that is the movement to history that the book and the show tries to talk about and show. When i look at it, i think about it as a parent and i have three kids, a 13yearold, an 11yearold, and an eight year old, and i always say when the kids were young that i really its one thing the one thing that i wanted from them is that they have that curiosity and then they get really into things and they want to know everything about it and as long as they are learning that feeling of i have to Read Everything about this topic. Because that is an incredibly useful mental muscle to have or a drive to have when you become a grownup and if you learn the pleasure of just diving into something trying to learn everything you can about whatever field youre into, thats the kind of kid that i was. I always wanted out of my children and now in a careful what you wish for category, they have that, but they have the luxury yachts. Which is a total waste of their time. And theyre like, why dont we have a yacht like that. [laughter] but i think and i watch the show and its funny watching the show with them because they really couldnt care less that im in it. Im a liability in the show for them am a billig oh, dont make jokes on camera, its not funny. [laughter] but you can see them getting pulled into the narrative. Weve spent a lot of time thinking about the show and thinking about the book, trying to get to the point where an 11yearold will enjoy the book and its hard for an 11yearold to read the book. And i think that most of the stories in the book will be new to most people and well read educated history buffs as well. Sweet really try to find stories that would be surprising to people and not just bring out the old favorites. And of course an 11yearold, its all knew on some level. But i hope that it is energizing and inspiring with what we found and have researched in writing the book, just diving in history with all these amazing characters as well as the feeling of optimism that you havent seen how many problems to get solved and when we think about what we have to confront now, its like, okay, we have problems, and a quality problems, we havent figured it all out yet. Though weve made a lot of progress in the last 200 years were 300 years and it came from these people, some of whom were seeking an economic reward for actions and most were just trying to make the Drinking Water clean. So to look at that history and to really think of it almost as a launching ad for the future, then im going to try to use the same skills and ingenuity is other people, i hope thats a message that gets across as they get to see the show. They created it in part because we have equivalent stories that were happening now around the world and the book has kind of a europeanamerican focus to it and theres some interesting things happening on the Global Development scale. So we created a website of how we get to this next. Kind of like a website updates different stories and in these would be the people we would profile. We are continuing this online and anyway, it seems to me like that spirit of creativity and innovation in that slightly maverick sense of, you know, has seemed to be very much alive here and so its fitting to have one of the first events of the book be part of it. I hope you get to see the show as well because ive never worked so hard on any project in my entire life, its been four years working on this, we would shoot for 10 hours and i would go back to the hotel room and work on the book at night. And it was truly a labor of love and there was a lot of labor involved. And so its exciting to get to talk about them in public for the first time and i hope you get to check it out. Thank you for coming out tonight. [applause] and so we have some time for questions and we just have a microphone. So if you can just wait until the mic comes over, that would be great. Any questions . Right up front. Okay, i was curious as i was thinking about how you developed and ran into these ideas. I have a background in science and i think its awesome. I love to run into these questions. And so youre researching all these different concepts together. One thing im wondering about is if you ever feel like youre in over your head in terms of these things. And also youre doing an interpretation of the concepts and also going to film, like they like to sensationalize things. So its like interpreting twice. How do you do that would deal with that . Its a great question and the quick answer is yes, all the time. Because on two levels. On one level, i dont care on some things. My parents are like, we saw your High School Biology grades. But also because for whatever reason i have this aspect that i like to write about lots of different topics. And these are condensed into one book. Ive written about video games, science, 18th century chemistry. So im always in the position of an outsider coming in to a field where theres expertise and its often a great gift and its one of the things i love most about my job. And i get a graduate degree every time i write a new book. But you spend a lot of time talking about that information process. Part of it is one id dive into the field im almost my own reader and im looking at it with fresh eyes and i am thinking about how thats interesting or i dont understand that, probably the reader wont understand that, so i will need to figure out so i can explain it to the reader. One of the things you often find particularly when he tucked a scientist is that they will in passing mention one thing and then hell say, thats the most interesting thing about your work and some part of their field that they reach a Scientific Consensus on like five years ago. But trying to figure out this new problem, but no one has figured out what the scientist agreed upon. So they say that that is the great thing and you will take that nugget out and turn it into the center of the story. So we think about that a lot. In terms of this is the first time that i have developed this and a book in parallel and that includes writing a little notation about this going into more detail. What i found is that television wants to have people. And it wants to gravitate around characters. I realize looking back on my work that for the most part i have let this idea and the people were secondary in a way to this. And i notice as a writer whenever im writing and i feel the need to describe physically what they look like and it feels like a flock. And its like, lets get to the ideas. And so he walked into the room he had this. [laughter] so as a shill working with producers and directors, they said that we have to anchor this and we want the birds eye view and we want the french inventor and we want to see them and have their narrative. And that can arrest on top of that. It works out very well. And i think you could happily watch the show and then go read the book and not feel like you were redundant. Because the book is able to kind of get into the broader theory of history and the hummingbird thing is not even mentioned in the show. We dont even get into the theory of how that changed happens. But the the show is anchored and i think that we have a good balance. But ive spent a lot of time asking what the book does really well and lets make sure that they are doing this. Are there questions . Okay, there is a kind of revolution going on in engineering. We talked about one guy and his stance was that engineers should be taught that what they are doing is a natural extension of biological revolution. Not to say that it isnt an engineering question. Okay, so you wanted to ask me an easy question. It is an interesting thing and whenever one uses this, and i dont think guilty is the right word for it, but whenever everyone uses revolutionary terms to describe the cultural activity, there is certainly assistant to that. Part of the resistance is, i think, which is to say that yes, it does not always evolve through conscious choice. We are sometimes went to random variation and selection. But the process of evolution is constantly stumbling across independently very Similar Solutions to problems. So it independently evolved in very similar structures multiple times all around the planet. And theres only a certain number of ways that you can build a given enough time you will hit on those same strategies and that same process happens in a slightly different way of human beings and human culture and thats the phenomenon that i was talking about where all of a sudden at a certain point in time a certain breakthrough becomes imaginable at a certain point in time. Then all of a sudden five or 10 or 20 people will simultaneously discover this without talking to each other. And there are hundreds of examples of this. And what it is is a network of ideas coming together and 20 people inventing the electric lightbulb between 1860 and 1880, no one was inventing it in 1760. So you didnt understand enough about this or that or the things that have to come together to make that central. So the roundabout way of saying that when you look at change in an evolutionary way you think about engineers building a certain building and you compare it to a snail engineering a shell, you can say that that strategy evolved without a conscious mind and thats not the way it works in human culture. But at the same time the simultaneous discovery phenomenon is quite similar because in a sense it enables this constellation of ideas floating around and since it is they are being fought in this particular moment in time, theres a whole book to be written on that. Wait one second for the microphone. [inaudible question] you think and are there other nontraditional things you can innovate that in the classroom . We are hopeful to use a lot of this material. Pbs has a Big Education push for this. And i hope that this will be as simple as showing the video because i think that it is exciting. And i wrote about this before, im really obsessed with the idea of simulation and theres a whole world of interesting stuff happening and its like an alternate universe and my kids live in my craft world and what they do for fun is given to this environment and they borrow my computer and then they build things. It will be a crazy thing where someone will be in tears because someone burned down there for it. And i thought, this is a problem my parents and have. [laughter] and my one son was unleashing sheep and the other one was building a capital and another one was filling the castle everywhere would thousands of sheep. And so he was crying and talking about this and i scarcely have no idea what to tell you. [laughter] told you think about it through history, if you take the simulation where you have a revolutionary war and you taught it where the simulation was the centerpiece and then you are reading and going and visiting places and whatever and you were simulating what the military tensions were at people were doing roleplaying in a historical simulation which you can do. The kids would run to School Every Day and they would have as understanding of what was really happening. Where we have this problem where we couldnt get enough energy here to make gunpowder, and we needed to get the gunpowder from france and once we did that, suddenly this change in and all this kind of stuff. The department of simulation then, so you have to go back and say, okay, here are the facts of what happened. So you get this experiential relationship to that. And its an innovative way to think about making this experience more electric. Given what you have said about unintended consequences and the role do that plays in making innovation possible, is the corollary to that, how would you occupy or put together from a policy perspective this innovation and how would you engineered in a way that we can be more predictable with our innovations. You certainly give me the good questions, thank you. [laughter] its a great theory of development and how it happens in history. If your work sort of debunking that or do you think that these to happen simultaneously . Second question first. There are individuals that on the world stage that make a difference. In that same way if you could take jefferson out of the last 300 years, things would be totally different. But he was a very interesting figure. And so i think its about getting the balance right. And in part for the same reason that television wants to talk about characters that we like. And so when we look back over five years of history, a unit of measure that we naturally gravitate towards his people and their stories and their narrative. The problem is that thats only part of the story and i will call it the long doom approach. But the physical properties that make this up, but it allows light to transfer through it and the ability to melt it is very important because they will do anything important as you get a lot of high temperatures. And those physical properties were crucial to last thousand years. And we shouldnt tell this without talking about this. At the same time the individuals who came up with those innovations, if we can find them and we know some of them, those individuals at the same time where the glass makers were with the social and political history of how that came about is interesting. And then the larger system where they started circulating, that is also part of the story. And so to tell the truth of what happened, you have to start and make it all the way up and then figure out a way to go back and forth between them. I find that that is amazing and it works as a writer and historian and a reader. To me that is weirdly more interesting than the individual thing in someones life. So if you can figure out a way to do this, thats great. In two sides in society, you want to leave room for an unplanned connection. Like serendipity is a huge driver of progress and he put it together and that is one of the reasons i think that we are heavy on intellectual property restrictions and patents and things like that in society because some fluid collide with other ideas creasing this kind of freedom and flexibility and it actually can drive innovation as much as the proprietary nature and i think the balance is a little bit off. But its also that the unintended consequences are often where the problems are. Generally when someone steps up to solve