Of it, the philosophy of it. We wanted to be accessible. [applause]the joining us here on our bookot tv set is over Steven Johnson. Before we get into the most recent book, you are listening pretty intently to what james glick had to say. Guest hes one of my favorite authors. His book, chaos, which i read in college was the first Popular Science book that i read in my entire life that really started me thinking that i could potentially be a Science Writer becausbecause ive not been intd in science at all. If he were still talking i would say we should go back and listen more to him. But you have to listen to me now. Host your most recent book is called wonderland. Recent what were you trying to explore . Guest if the history of what human beings have done for the fun of it. For the delight in it, for the feeling of play and amusement. And it came out of the book how we got to now, and the pbs series i did which was a history of innovation and things in the modern world that we take for granted and trying to tell the 500 or a thousand year history behind these things. So that was a great format tois work in. I love that kind of historical work. There were a lot of interesting stories. You could writ write up a thousd times over because there were so many things you could write about but i wanted with this book to have an actual argument about history, kind of a theory of how things happen in society into the argument of wonderland is the history of things we do for fun and delight actually ends up triggering much more serious and momentous changes in science and technology and politics. So, things that start out as frivolous amusements and of changing the world a more significant ways. Host where di does the concept of this come from . Guest its one of these books ive been researching for 20 years. It opens up with a chapter in the introduction of the history of fashion and shopping. H i heard when i was in grad school 20 years ago i studied at the 19th century metropolitan mobile. There is an incredible story where they come to paris, one of the great spectacular shopping. A this extraordinary thing happens where all these welltodo women dont do this for one reason orh another and become to the store and starts killing. Its a true story. There is a wave of kleptomania among the wealthy men of paris even these other grand apartment scores. No one can figure it out because they can pay for the good but for some reasons the environment is causing them to steal so ifse promoted panic and it becomes known as the Department Store disease. Eventually the whole theory in the minandthe mind develops outf studying this to say it appears new configurations of modern life in the new spaces and the new commercial environment is n actually messing with peoples brains. Its the beginning of the line of the way of thinking about the brain that we have today when we think about how our video games affecting the brain or so on. So, i had stories like that but ive been accumulating the last 20 years and so once i started the research i could put it all together. Host you call this theendles endless quest for the light. Guest if you think about what you learned when you were in school about the forces that drive history, you would think there is a quest for power and ththe tribalism and religiousef beliefs, survival, money those are the forces that drive history but theres this other side that is amused by things we like to play and have fun and be surprised and delighted by new experiences and so, that is kind painted a lovely sight of our history and it turns out to be filled with all of these courageous stories that are fun to read. Host if you have read Steven Johnson in the past, you know what kind of books he writes. The most recent is called wonderland how play made the modern world. We are going to put up the phone number so you can call and participate in the programall in today. 20,274,882,001 east and central time zones. 20,274,882,201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. Go ahead and buy only and we will get to the calls very quickly. Steven johnson is the bestselling author and heho referenced the book how we got to now six innovations that made the modern world and there is future perfect everything bad is good for you as well. T now in wonderland, to talk about how the federalist quest for delight has changed or led to exploration and stock markets and computers and probabilitybased insurance policy. Explain that one. Guest there are two ways into the modern insurance system. First is a crazy figure from about 500 years ago this mathematician and chronic gambler who had basically spent his whole life doing vice games and gambling that it was kind of a math genius on the side, near the end of his life he figured out a way to understand mathematically the likelihood of the various games of chance outcomes like in a game of dice. What is the likelihood that youll roll threyouwill roll thw or 12 versus seven. No one had done the math on th this. No one quite figured out how to explain it so he wrote this book was a cheat sheet and very advanced math this became the basis for probability theory. Th it got refined and modified over the years and that became theth basis for a whole host of the modern world of the Insurance Business its not without probability math the other side that connects is the first modern Insurance Firm took place in a coffeehouse and i have a whole other chapter about this piece is designed to be sure in hanging out sitting around Drinking Coffee or beer and so both dice games and coffeehouses came together to form the business. Host public spaces. Guest the tavern is the world of this. In a way it is fueled with just countless look around you and think how many spaces are engineered for you to have fun in some fashion all around the world from movie theaters to parks, bars and coffeehouses and shopping malls, most of which. Didnt exist 300 years ago even. One of the first places to do that was the bar, tavern. It wasnt work, it was and how come it was the place you could go and it was kind of semi private, semipublic and was designed to pass a few hours and have a good time. Thats kind of nice because thats where these things came from. But they have played a really momentous role in the history of politics in the history of the country you cannot tell the history of the American Revolution. They are every step of the way the kind of Key Information node in the network of the antienglish sentiment during the period. Its possible we would have had an American Revolution had it not been invented that it would have required a different path. It would have required a different set of meeting places to happen so it is a big part of our history. Host what do we do with the information that you sharede in wonderland stuff . Guest when we are being beig amused and delighted by something it seems to bleed to more and more innovation. People think thats fun, thats interesting what if we added this work changed this. Would change this. There is something that is thoughtful. Theres a whole chapter about the history of games. Think about this in the context of history. When you watch kid play games whether they are video games or board games are educational games they concentrate the mind. I play these kind of simulation games with my kids that say they play them when they were seven a or eight and they would be building an entire geopolitical empire learning about taxation when they are seven. Its the nature of the game to try to teach them about tax reform and Industrial Development when they were seven they would never pay attentionon but the game structure pulls you in and makes you want to learn in spite of yourself. Host appear from theth rai callers, Steven Johnson. You are on with all her Steven Johnson. Go ahead. Caller i wonder if mr. Johnson has read [inaudiblet the only translation that ive been assigned what he thinks about the irony of the preposition so carry away, please. Guest it is a fascinatingast book. It was written right at the beginning of world war ii. In fact he died during world war ii so you have this kind of extraordinary thing writing about the centrality of the play to the human species as the nazis are marching across europe its a kind of tragedy in the middle of a powerful book so i closed iquoted at the beginninge final chapter. The basic idea is that we share that. He is referred to little more abstract and philosophical where if you get the chance to see wonderland it is filled with examples of how this instinct or appetite for play actually camea to pass in all of the kind of crazy stories that people tried to amuse themselves in ever more inventive ways comes with the approach is that the books philosophically are in line. Host david in rochester, new york. Youvyoure on the air. Caller how are you doing, yes. Rochester, new york and i wonder if you know here in rochester have a Strong Museum of play and its a history of all three items throughout history, all different kinds of things and if you were ever been rochester new york you can come to visit so i wonder if youve heard of it. Guest i need to make a pilgrimage there. I am on book tour. I need to go there. This is the thing. How do we think about this as a role of the objects in play where do they go to movie that we think about history and we think of them as just kind of something if well history happens on the battlefield or in parliament, or do we recognize that the play space and the objects that we have made have been part of the march of progress and i think it is the latter so its good that we have some museums out of celebrating this and everyone should go to rochester new york. Host was chess technological innovation . Guest it then led to the Technological Innovations because it was central to the early days of computing. If you look back to the first in the idea of Artificial Intelligence, and now indias essays we are all kind of in urging this question could you teach a computer to play chess . Host he said you could do but it would be possible. Guest he was a little pessimistic about it because of how computers are better than humans, but thats a long time and so it is a good example of the power of play in the history of Artificial Intelligence gamet have been the way that we would measure and train these new machines so they started with checkers. There was no way to get the computer to play chess and now we brought in backgammon and go is the next hurdle but it was arguably one of the most intelligent forms of artificial computation out there. How did they train us, by having it play jeopardy and then eventually when so they were likely need to figure out a way to play this machine. I think a game show would be the perfect way to do it. So the connection between gaming and Digital Technology is a very rich one. Host we were looking at the iphones a little bit. I dtalking to somebody the other day and they said someone0 should remake 2001 a spacethere. Odyssey where siri is like im sorry, dave. [laughter] a host she is kind of a play toy in a sense. Guest theres a chapter in the book on evolution about how much time they spent trickingw our eyes into perceiving things that are out there starting with the perspective of going through the Magic Lantern shows and one of the arguments i made in the chapter is there is something about just as with an optical illusion, you cant you know that it is a to be image that you see the three d. Square and cant tell your brain otherwise. Thats just the way that our brains are. Once you get to more than 12 frames per second and a human being talking with audio you feel like you know that person didnt like there is some kind of an emotional connection to that person. What we are going to experience pretty soon is a similar kind oi emotional illusion where we have these Virtual Systems like siri only they actually know us a little bit and engage in real conversation and change over time. There would be this personality to develop intense emotional connections to these devices like the movie her, spike jones movie. It has to do with facial expressions, so we might have a very complicated in the next five years maybe these relationships with completed the artificial characters and devices. Host kimberly in new york you are on with Steven Johnson. Caller i was calling to see if his book touches on thelo philosophy of aesthetic realism because based on your description that i look forward to reading they are so focused with art rather than play but you seem to have some similar things going on. Things guest in the book of how i was going to handle art because there is a chapter on music and there is a chapter that gets into the cinema and animation and things like that, but other than that, i try to steer away from art that was representational. So the literary novel which i spent a lot of time readingel because i went to graduate school and its a great passion of mind and representation where you have work that is trying to speak to the higher faculties in big sweeping connections of what it means to be human or the realities and whatnot because the students seem playful enough. We already accepted the idea. Since others have already made it more eloquently than i could i tried to do is make the case for the lower forms. And i included music because we have no idea what its good for. If we have an idea of how much music moves us and its of no functional value at all floating in the air should produce theser strong feelings. I didnt cover the aesthetic realism and things like that but maybe in another one. Host albert in texas, go ahead. Caller with us host i think we lost albert. Lets move on to a ahmad in michigan. Caller hello, how are you guys . Host go ahead with your question or comment. Caller my question is on technology. I just want to know how can we make social media better for the next generation and just make it safe for children and kids. Host before we hear from Steven Johnson, what would you like to see changed . Caller i would like to see the social media working faster and blocking out some of the negative ads. Host what kind of technology do you use . Caller my ipad and cell phone. Guest its an important question and ive written about this class in wonderland but others like future perfect and if you go back to emergence into social media is in a system them where you have a bunch of gatekeepers, editors, folks controlling the flow of information deciding whats true and whats not, whats appropriate, whats not and we shifted and distributed the system where the whole network is how everybody is generating news and shipping ideas or creating a filter to show thisri is relevant or not. We have seen some significant cracks beginning to appear. My concern is with Something Like facebook as the medium. Its almost as big as the web itself and cant get is a huge impact over what we read and consume and what we feel about our children experience we dont have any control over how the media works the way that we door over the web it is a platform people can modify and expand and push in different directions. Facebook is a platform by a Different Company but its the size of the intranet for the web so when we want to change something that facebook from the topic thats been on the tip of everybodys time with the last week or two, we have to go and kind of ask them to change it. Its not an open standard we could change so that will be something that happens the next few years. Host we have a president elect that likes his twitter account. Guest i have been a longtime user of twitter and i think there is an argument thati without twitter, he wouldnt no have when the republican race because it gave him this kind of mouthpiece for 0 basically. Host so why does he need a filter to filter it today . Guest its going to be fascinating. As you know, people took his ths phone away from him so he couldnt anymore but they ended up giving it back to him and apparently hes just going to keep going from the oval office. He puts this in a whole new world. Host next call for Steven Johnson guest that is as the founders intended. Host do you think that he had any idea . Guest they were interested. One of the things in the invention of air that we talked about a few minutes ago in the adams and jefferson letters, the famous correspondence between the two had fallen out. They have been spoken for many years and been at the end they started to correspond and the way they begin the conversation for the first few letters is noting how fast the letters were giving to each other which is t. Say in the Communication Infrastructure at the time your letter only got here in six days for monticello. You have very high bandwidth. [laughter] said they would have been shocked if they would have figured it out. Host david, you are on weren with Steven Johnson in his new book, wonderland. My grhe caller good afternoon. A my grandfather started to a company in 1920 and he wrote atu loss of bringing reality into the land and if he were alive, i never knew him tha but i would e argued that we need to keep play and reality separate. So he believed that by getting children actual miniature things his work is in the smithsonian. He went to a lot of trouble to make his toys so real they would now be playing with a real w object and therefore become more realistic and go on to meet corporations and do practicalula things. I would have argued with hi himn the play hatthe plate should bed and not directed and make children more pragmatic. They should be openended. Host i think we got the point. Guest that is an interesting family history. The blurring of the linessele between reality and the play space is an interesting one. St there is a big divide betweenis the games that are strictly limited and the rules are defined. I remember when my kids were young and i would play candyland yo with them you know whats crazy about this game, there is no choice you literally cannot take a position. Thats the ultimate kind ofkindo constrained. They have no free will in this game and then you go to the others in there as dungeons dragons or Something Like that. Theres different games at different times. But the boundary between the real world and the play thats something that we will see moreh and more of and we saw the first exposure of it this summer with. Pokemon go. On some level it is frivolous evd not that important in any functional way but the rot people out. My kids were begging to go for a walk for the first time. They were still going for a walk and getting exercise and this is one of the big arguments of theg wonderland. The predictor of the changes coming to society. In ten years or so we look at the augmented realities and when its being imposed in the real world we would say this started with pokemon go into kids running around chasing japanese creatures but now we do it asw part of an ordinary life and a straight life that began in a game. Guest a couple of major choices have come out and one is adopting the chapter thinking if we went back and looked at these early 19th century illusions like this Haunted House show and defenthen the 360degree paintie panorama and other different kind of shows i think those are a preview of the coming attractions that are coming in Virtual Reality. What those have this interesting is they were not about stories or characters to follow the plot or feel empathy for her character. They were about being thrown into space and immersing yourself in a sensory overload and being frightened or amazed or being transported somewhere. When people look at Virtual Reality to figure out how to translate movies to this new form looking as we try to do in wonderland at the earlier forms of amusement might be be in instructive. When you look at the pieces where we are making titanic for vr. The whole storyline of the rose and the stowaway that would be a waste of time. You just want to be on the ship and try to surviv survive or trt to. Re you wouldnt care so much about the characters. It would be about the environment. And that is what we are going to learn. But looking back at the oldlookn forms of play is illustrative. Host go ahead, we are listening. Ill ha caller i have a background in mathematics, and ive also taught introductory mathematics to adults and ive become convinced the mathematicalin par talent requires in part a spirit of play and conceptual worlds and manipulating them and children have often times exhibited when they havent been poisoned by adults a willingness to play with ideas when they are first introduced, so they play with numbers. What can you do with numbers . I would be interested with this relationship between mathematicn and play and how to teach thet rest of death. Guest that is a great observation. There is a chapter in the book about the first wearable computer that you can feel in your body that was developed by Claude Shannon who was a genius mathematician and advocate for computers and was involved in a lot of fields. They built this device to win and figured out this kind of crazy way of calculating when the ball was dropped exactly how long it took before it started to settle and make predictions if you have a little computer on you and they successfully did it and it was so far from beingdidt inconceivable because it was the size of a room much less what you could fit in your pocket. But, i talk about this in thei a book, he was this incrediblypl playful guy and almost a kind of philosopher in a way. If you went over to his house he had a tway toy broom and he would talk about mathematical theorems. Children come into the world wired to play and the other thing they come in a layered to do is invent new rules. Its they say okay what is it going to be this time. That kind of thinking is a very highlevel norm of cognition. Lets design a system and figure out what the rules should be and how its going to be fun or not or engaging enough for challenging enough and lets modify the rules as we go to get feedback in the third whether that worked well or made it easy for one side or another. That doesnt look like the scientific method. Lets build a hypothesis about the system and test it and modify based on feedback tha thk that we get in the system. That is incredibly important. Host last call comes from austin, texas. Austin texas. We are going to try sacramento. Fill in kansas, third time is the charm. Caller i think so. How are you today . Caller to preface my question, my wife and i worked many years for fedex which most people think is a Transportation Company but in reality when people would talk to us, we are in Management Information company and we found with realtime information when you know where things are at all times, things will work the right way so that his preface to when you talk about different platforms people rely on that used to be traditional media that people trusted them less and less so theyve gone to the platforms i have but i dont use. I wonder this is my wife and myself, most of the information we get from cspan. I know if i watch cspan, i will get Accurate Information from the people that are the sports im trying to find out so i wonder how that stuff fits together. Endorsem guest i agree with your endorsement of cspan. Also the broad purview that the technologies we are going to give you direct access to whats going on in congress for example that would lead to more democratic participation. And whats happening is a linear that hadebt has gone up around e pepsi you have less direct kind of access to your leaders on the house floor and more people to make it more personable but also creates a positivity fors a poss distortion and we need to get it balanced a little bit. Host wonderland how play made the modern world. As you can see, it is a very interesting and colorful and busy cover. Steven johnson is the author. Thanks for being with us. Guest good to be back, thank you. I think the other aspect of the phenomenon that is important to talk about is the notion that they ask the women to take on the scrolls because no man was willing to do so. And when and because of how we proceed the role and the conscious biases are still seen as something of an odd duck so they are subject to greater scrutiny but i think by the same token perhaps they are more willing to take on the highrisk assignments, because they want to prove that they can do it. They were doing relatively well at the time and then theres this huge recall crisis and the problems they were having with their cars. I think there were many doubting thomas mr. Didnt see her as surviving one of the worst crises in years if ever and i think that to her credit she took personal responsibility for getting it right and made it clear in her town hall meetings. Everybody else was responsible for fixing what was going on and i think that crisis like so many others overcame the crises big and small unit became better leaders for it. I think that shes a better ceo because she had a trial by fire. After words airs every saturday at 10 p. M. And sunday at 9 p. M. Eastern. You can watch all previous programs on the website, booktv. Org. A ton of things happening constantly that are affecting our politics. The way that things get changed in the country, my favorite example is in new york everybody here is familiar with the governor and how hard he fought against raising the minimum wage up to the moment he decided he wanted to take credit for it. The protest was right down the street. You also have we should be real he was under investigation looking for some friends but these things work and we have an increasing the minimum wage that will get to 15 an hour from new york city and those that found tat downstate. Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of occupied wall street and people are like what are they doing, they are all over the place. I saw four or five people i met from occupied wall street at the Standing Rock and that pushed the administration to ask for a temporary halt on construction on the part of construction. They are still constructing parts of it. Meanwhile, the protesters are still walking down equipment because the temporary hold isnt a win completely. [inaudible conversations] pella. Welcome to the 21st annual texas book festival. Thank you for coming out today in support of our authors, the festival and celebrating great literature. As you know, the texas book festival is a Nonprofit Organization that works yearround to strengthen literacy by a warning library ly grants with reading rock Stars Program sending nationally recognized authors and autho illustrators and into title i schools and donating books to those students. By being here today, and by biting the books, we are funding these important initiatives. Thank you very much. Please, silence your cell phones. There is no flash photography allowed. As the author will be signing books after the session, including alberto gonzales. Books are available in the tent. My name is clay johnson iii, and it is an honor to be the t moderator this session today. We are here to hear from alberto gonzales, the author of his newh book, true faith and allegiance a story of service and sacrifice in war and peace. He served our country and our state as attorney general, as the white house counsel, senior counsel to the president in the white house, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court and chief of the secretary of state of texas. I worked with al in austin and washington, d. C. , and we both agreed it was such an honor and privilege and hard work to work at the highest level of government in the state of texas and washington, d. C. I thought i knew everything, big