Steven Johnson

Yeah, and the centerpiece of that ancient jewelry is a carved piece of that very same desert glass.

So today we are taking your stack of source material, primarily drawing on Steven Johnson's brilliant book, How We Got to Now, to go on a deep dive into the truly unexpected evolution of glass.

It really is a wild story.

It is.

But before we get into what humanity did with clear glass, let's unpack the physics of the material itself.

Good idea.

'Cause Steven Johnson's work brings up a fascinating point.

Science didn't fully understand why glass was transparent until the 20th century.

generating $6.2 million in sales by 2011.

Citing Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From, the author concludes that serious hobbies signal the unbounded curiosity that unites all genuinely creative people.

We should also use employees as hiring resources.

Working alongside someone is the most reliable way to assess capability, and everyone maintains a mental shortlist of people they'd love to work with again, and those they'd avoid.

All right, let's move on.

um okay leonardo da vinci could not have invented the iphone and he was a genius so it's not because he wasn't creative enough it's because creativity can only reach so far beyond what already exists like I love how Steven Johnson actually explains this in the book, Where Good Ideas Come From.

He shared a concept called the adjacent possible.

And I think it's one of the most useful ideas of creative to understand.

If we were to do that, is there one thinker or one or two that you think stand out as someone worth seriously kind of thinking through what their contribution was?

Maybe I would talk about Derrida and Foucault, very different thinkers who knew each other, who were friends and then, frankly, enemies for an entire decade.

And one of the interesting things is both ended up having enormous influence and followings in the United States on opposite coasts.

So Foucault ended up becoming someone who returned again and again to Berkeley, and Derrida was someone who was a visiting professor at Yale during a period when they really weren't speaking to each other.

And of course, language isn't simply the purview of the humanities, but language is the mode in which science is explained and circulated.

And so these ideas, this sort of deconstructionist methodology is relevant to every discipline and every profession.

And this development happens, he says, right at a moment when in the job market, You have a rise of what he calls a professional managerial class so that it no longer is valuable to go to a job interview and show that you can recite passages from Hamlet that, you know, you're going to be chummy with your dad's Ivy League friends and get the job.

You have to show you know how to do something technical and rigorous.

Right.

And this brings us to the Q&A feature, which the developer of this tool, this guy Steven Johnson, he highlighted this during a demo.

According to the publisher's weekly piece, Johnson noted that when you interrogate the book, the answers come in two distinct forms.

Yes.

The development timeline mentioned in the report is incredibly revealing regarding Google's strategic foresight.

Yeah.

The report states that the application was developed by Steven Johnson.

Now, his title is what jumped out at me.

Sonia Shah's The Fever.

I, in my, uh, sociology of health and healthcare class, I love to have students read Steven Johnson's Ghost Map about the cholera outbreak, uh, in London around 1850.

Just riveting, you know, and, and really takes you into not only what it was like to sort of investigate the causes of this illness that was killing people, um, but also what it was like to fight against a whole different disease paradigm.

You know, at that time, miasma was dominant rather than, you know, germ theory, and, uh, really helps put science into kind of historical context.