programs. the book tv.org you can get the full schedule there. join us here on our book tv set is author stephen johnson. what did you think about that. he's one of my favorite authors. it 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 because i not been

interested in science at all. if he were still talking i would just say we should go and listen more to him. he will be able to listen to me now. your most recent book is called "wonderland". >> it's a history is a history of things that human beings have done for the fun of it for the delight in it. but the feeling of play or amusement and it came out of the book how we got to now. it is the history of things in the modern work that we take for granted. and try to tell that the house in the air history behind all of these things. that was a really great format to work in. i love that kind of historical work. there were a lot of interesting stories. and you could write that book a thousand times over.

i wondered with this book if we could have an actual argument about history i theory of how it happens in society. the argument of wonderland is that history that we do for fun and delay ends up triggering much more serious and momentous changes in politics the things that start out as frivolous amusement. they chained and much more significant ways. what did the concept -- where did the concept of this come from. i've been researching it for 20 years. it opens up with a chapter out with the introduction of a shopping and fashion. i have heard when i was in grad school more than 20 years ago i have studied the 19th century metropolitan novel.

there is an incredible story about the first department stores where they come to paris the spectacular shopping wonderland really this happens where all of these well-to-do women who don't need to do this for economic reasons whatsoever come into the store and start stealing. there is a wave of kleptomania among the women of paris and his new department stores. and we can figure it out. for some reason the store environment is causing them to steal and this provokes the huge moral panic and discussion about it. it becomes as a department store disease. eventually the whole theory developed after studying these. it appears that new configurations of modern life and new spaces and new

commercial environments is actually messing with their brains. and in the beginning of a line of the brain that we have today. i had stories like that that i had been accumulating for the last 20 years. once i started to research i can kind of put it all together. you call this the endless quest for delight. if you think about what you learned when you are in school about the forces that drive history you would think there is the quest for power there is nationalism and the religious beliefs the survival and money those are the big forces that drive history. there is the other side of being human which is what we are amused by things. we like to play we like to have fun we like to be surprised if they get is a

lovely side of our history and it turns out to be filled with all of these crazy stories that are fun to read. you know what kind of books he writes. the most recent just out is "wonderland". we are in a put up the phone numbers so you can call in and participate in the call in program today with stephen johnson. go ahead and dial in and we will get to your calls very quickly. he is a best-selling author. he referenced -- referenced his book how we got to now. everything bad is good for you as well. now in wonderland talk of to how the so-called endless quest for delight has changed or led to expiration in stock

markets in computers and probability there is a crazier -- crazy figure. the mathematician and chronic gambler who have basically spent his whole life doing a day's games and gambling but was kind of a math genius on the side. he figured out a way to understand mathematically the likelihood of various games of champ outcomes. what is the likelihood that you're your can roll three sixes in the role. and no one had actually done the math on this. no one has quite figured out how to explain it.

it was a cheat sheet for how to win at dice and also that theory then that refined and modified over the years and then became the basis of a whole host of things. but the other side of it was that the first modern insurance firm which was lloyd's of london took place in a coffeehouse. i've a whole other conversation about those. and it was originally coffeehouse. both day schemes and coffeehouses came together to form the modern insurance business.

with the bars and coffeehouses in shopping malls. it is just filled with these things. most of which didn't exist. in one of the first spaces to do that was the bar in the tavern. it was a space that was at work. it wasn't just nature. it was a space where you can discover. it was designed for you to pass a few hours and have a good time. bars and taverns had played a really momentous role in the history of politics. you cannot tell the history of the american revolution.

without taverns. it is the network. now it's possible that we would've had an american revolution. it would have whatever quite a different path. i different set of meeting places for it to happen. >> what we do with the information that you shared with us. how creative it seems to lead to more and more innovation. people just get into that it's fun and interesting. think about the conflict of

education. if you watch kids playing games whether their video games or board games they concentrate the mind. i play these simulation games with my kids who play them when they were seven or eight and they will be building an entire geopolitical empire in different historical times. i'm not saying they're gifted. when they were seven they would never pay attention. makes you want to learn in spite of yourself. let's begin with rain and -- wayne in san diego.

>> if he has a red translate inflation. as the irony of what the author insists it should be so take it away please. >> is an outstanding book. it was written right at the beginning of world war ii. you have this extraordinary thing writing this epic book about the history of play to the human species as the nazis are marching across europe. can a tragedy in the middle of a very powerful book.

the only thing is approaches in the basic idea that they are center of the culture. they approach a little bit more abstract. how did this actually came to pass. they have the stories of people. let's hear from david and rochester. i'm from new york and i wonder if you know here in rochester we have the strong museum of play. it is a history of all of the play items throughout history all different kinds of things. and if book tv ever comes to

hear. i need to make a pilgrimage there. where do they go in the way we think about history. do we think about them as just kind of something at the margin. the real history happens on the battlefield. where do we recognize that it's been for thousands of years. i think it is a ladder. everyone should go to rochester new york. it was at technological innovation. it was a conceptual innovation that then led to technological

innovation because it was essential to that. the first essays written about it. and now those essays. we are anchored in this could you teach a computer to play chess. in a way he was a little bit too pessimistic about it. it's a great example of the power of play here. all along the gains have been the way in which they both measure and train these new machines. it started with checkers. there is no wait to get way to get the computer to play chess. look at watson.

the supercomputer which is one of the most intelligent forms of artificial computation out there. and how do they change it. eventually when at jeopardy. we need to figure out a way to train this machine. the connection between gaining is a very rich one. now we were looking at iphones a little bit. do you use siri? 's to. >> i do just a little bit. someone should remake 2001 a space odyssey with siri there. and hopefully that is the truth. >> i found this on the web. how advanced is siri and she is kind of a play in the sense.

about how much time with spent putting our eyes into things that aren't there. starting with perspective in painting. and going through the magic lantern --dash lantern shows. there's something about just as with an optical illusion you know that it's it to the image image-based still see the 3d scare and you can't tell it otherwise. that's just the way our brains are wired. once you get to more than 12 frames per second on a close-up of the human being talking with audio you just feel like you know that person. you feel like you've built in some kind of that.

and what american experience. the similar emotional illusion where we have that. the assistance and actually know us a little bit. they change over time and so after you been with us for a year. people will develop very intense emotional connections. it may start there. it's a lot easier to do than facial expressions. we may have these very complicated in the next five years may be. relationships with completely artificial characters. hi kimberly. i was calling to see if

perhaps his book touches at all on the philosophy of aesthetic realism and the work of eli siegel. just based on your description of your work which i look forward to reading they are more so focused with art rather than play. you seem to have some similar things going on. >> what is really interesting in the book of how i was can handle art there is a chapter on music and there is a chapter on allusions which gets into cinema and animation. but other than that i tried to steer away from art that was particularly presentational. the literary novel which i

spent a lot of time reading it's a great passion of mine. and representational painting where you had work that is trying in a sense speak to our higher faculties in a way that's trying to attack big sweeping questions. because those didn't seem place full enough. i think we already accept the idea that serious art narrative fiction is an important part of our cultural history and it feel the need to make the case for that. since others had artie made it more eloquently than i could. i was try to make a case for the lower forms and i included music in there because there is this mystery about music which is as we have no idea what it's good for. if you think about how much you sick moves us and how much passion we feel and yet it seems to have no functional value at all. it's unclear why the wave forms floating in the air should produce these very

strong feelings it was an opening and it allowed me to write about music in this book. i didn't cover aesthetic realism and things like that and this one in this one but maybe in another one. albert go ahead. >> are you with us albert. i think we lost albert let's move on in royal oak michigan. you are on with author steve johnson. go ahead. >> were good. please go ahead with your question or comment. my question is on technology i just want to know how can we make social media better for the next generation and just making it safer for children

in kids especially nowadays. >> what would you like to see changed. >> i would like to see social media working faster for the youth and blocking out some of the negative ads and things looking up technology do you use. >> i use my ipad and my cell phone. it's a very important question. lesson wonderland binds mothers others you have a

bunch of gatekeepers and editors and folks who are controlling the flow of information who are deciding what is true and what's not. we shifted it where everybody on the network is generating news and sharing ideas. deciding that this is relevant or not. there are some significant is some significant practicing and beginning to appear. and so i think because it's like facebook. it is the size of an entire medium now. it's almost as big as the web itself. it's a huge impact over what we read and consume.

to show how that works over the rebbe. they can modify and expand on. facebook is a platform that is owned by a private company and yet it is the size of the internet or the web in many ways. when we want to change something and want to make something like facebook less vulnerable to fake news it's going to the last week or two. you can ask facebook to change it. it's not an open standard that we could change. that's something that would have to wrestle with over the next few years. >> we have a president elect to likes his twitter account. >> i had been a longtime user of twitter. i think there is an argument that without twitter he wouldn't had one. he may not had been able to one the republican race.

it just gave him in many ways he decided he doesn't. and what happens in the white house as can gonna be fascinating. there are parts of the race where the people took the phone away from him so he could tweet anymore. apparently he is just to keep tweeting from the oval office. >> and he puts it in a whole new world. and mister trump will get those special accounts. the next call for stephen johnson. >> they were very interested in communication. one of the things i wrote about in the adams jefferson

letters the famous correspondent and they had fallen out as most people probably knew. and that at the end of their lives they start this epic correspondence. the way they begin the conversation as they are nerdy now to about how fast the their letters are getting to each other. your letter only got here in six days. a very high bandwidth. they would've been shocked but they would've quickly figured it out. david you're on with stephen johnson. >> my grandfather started a toy company in 1920 and he have a philosophy and hero he wrote a lot about which was bringing reality into the land of make-believe.

i never knew him. i would have argued that we need to keep play in reality separate. so he believed that by giving children actual miniature real things his work was in the smithsonian we went to a lot of trouble to make his toys so real that he said children instead of playing with a fantasy object would now be playing with the real object and therefore become more realistic. and go on to lead corporations and do practical things. i would have argued with him that it should be open ended and not interrupted. and making them more pragmatic.

select in playspace is a really interesting one. just in the history of games there is a big divide between games that are strictly limited. i remember when my kids were young and we played candyland with them. >> there's no choice in this game. you can't make a decision you have to pick a card and had to move your piece no matter what it says. it's the ultimate kind of constraint game. they have no free well in the scheme. and then you go to the other extreme where you are inventing a whole world and it's all about changing the rules i think developmentally

there are different games at different times. the other question that you raise as the blurring of the boundaries between the real world and the play world. that is something that were gonna see more going to see more and more of and we saw the explosion of it with pokemon go. three of a game that is on some levels very frivolous and not that important in any functional way. but it brought all of these people out into the world exploring my kids were begging to go for a walk for the first time in their lives. they wanted to go outside. they were so going for a walk and getting exercise. this is one of the big arguments of wonderland. when we look at what people do for fun it's often a predictor of more serious changes coming to society.

you will find of the future wherever people are having the most fun. we will look back in ten years and so when virtual information has been superimposed we will say this started with pokemon go. now we do as part of ordinary life but it began in a game. >> virtual reality has taken off this year has in it? yes a couple of major devices have come out. thinking that if we went back and looked at the early 19th century illusion shows like this haunted house show. and there was a 360-degree painting. and hundreds of other kinds of shows. i think those are a preview of coming attractions that will

come to us in virtual reality. and what they have they weren't really about characters you went to the movie. or to feel empathy. they were about being thrown into a space and immersing yourself in the sensory overload of that space and being frightened or amazed or feeling you are transported somewhere but they were narratives and i think when people look at virtual reality they think how do we translate video games to the new form. they might be instructive. the example is if james cameron were making a titanic the whole story line of the stowaway with the well-to-do lady. you just want to be on the ship. you want to run around and

jump off the edge. you and care so much about the characters it would be about the environment and i think that's what were to learn. but again looking back at the older forms of play and it's very illustrative. >> i have a background in mathematics and i will have also taught introductory mathematics to adults. and i've become convinced first of all that the mathematical talent requires in part a spirit of play and playing with conceptual worlds and manipulating them. a willingness to play with mathematical ideas when they're first introduced. they play with numbers and what can you do with numbers.

and i'd be interested in your comments on the relationships between mathematics and play and how to teach it and the rest of that. >> that is a is a great observation. there's a story in the book about the first wearable computer can of us computer small enough that you could feel it on your body. the computers and a lot of fields. they built this device they figured out the crazy way of calculating about how long it took before it started to settle and you can make predictions based on that. and they successfully did it and it was so far from being conceivable because this was in the late 50s when they were it wasn't against the

law. i talk about that in the book. he was just incredibly playful. and almost kind of a philosopher in the way. if you went over to his house you have this toy room and he would love to juggle and he would get on his unicycle and he would juggle and he would talk about mathematical theorems. there is a rich history in that. children come into the world wired to play in the other thing they come into the world to do is invent new rules this is a beautiful thing about young kids. it's not just like her to to play this game according to the rules there and say what are the roles can be this time. that kind of thinking is a very high level form. let's figure out what the

rules are to be. whether it will be fun or not. let's modify the rules as we go. that's almost like that. based on the feedback we get from the system. as another way. val and austin texas. we will try ashland in sacramento. the third time is a charm. i think so.

preface my question. my wife and i work many years for fedex and most people think of as a transportation company in reality when people talk to us about it were really not where management information company. we found that with real-time information if you know where things are at all times things will work the right way. that is profits that you talk about the different platforms. they used to be traditional media but people have trusted them less and less and so they've that got to platforms like facebook which i have and i don't use. most of our information we get from c-span. i know if i watch it i'm in to get accurate information right from the people who are the source of what i'm trying to find out. so i'm wondering how all of

that stuff fits together. i agree with your endorsement. i hope it. the ideas that they were to give you direct access to what was going on. it would lead to more democratic participation it has gone up around that. it was the access to the data -- to the leader. and more people talking about it on social media which makes it more personable. it also creates a possibility for distortion there. and we probably we probably need to get that balance a little bit .

here is a book. it's called wonderland. how play made the modern world. it's very interesting and colorful and busy