Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, your inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on Markets, Leadership and Vision in Global Business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE, an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and ICE's 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now here's your host, Josh King, Head of Communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
As I'm recording this, the price of a barrel of ICE Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil from Intercontinental Exchange is $69 and 92 cents down from its recent high in early October of just above $86. And by the time you hear this podcast, who knows it's anyone's guess where it'll be. Thinking the unthinkable, to imagine how the price of oil may move over the horizon, it's critical to use creativity and imagination. You've got to paint a picture of the future. Some call it scenario planning, or even war gaming to visualize what might happen in the months and years ahead. Former US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, once called them, the unknown unknowns.
Josh King:
Rumsfeld had a point, who could have foreseen the worldwide reaction to the killing of a Saudi born journalist. The US midterm elections or the wildfires affecting California. On the flip side, how might the next discovery of shale oil affect the worldwide benchmark?
Josh King:
Back in the early 1970s, Royal Dutch Shell, the global oil conglomerate had an elite team of scenario gamers led by the fame futurists, Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz. When oil was $2 a barrel back then, that's just $2, they discovered through imaginative scenario planning that the price could spike five-fold to $10 a barrel. And by 1975, the price actually hit $13, a barrel. Convincing Shell's leaders to create mental maps of how the world could change, helped it survive the market shocks and become a behemoth of global energy.
Josh King:
Their scenarios helped them foresee later the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the collapse of the oil market in 1986, and the fall of the Soviet Union. The art of making farsighted decisions is often the art of corporate survival. It's also how you, me and our guest today, Stephen Johnson, the best selling author of Farsighted, how we make the decisions that matter the most, look at the pros and cons of taking one path or another in our everyday lives. I'm not alone among Johnson's fans, because he already has 1.2 million of them on Twitter. I'm thrilled he's with us in the ICE House today. Our conversation with Steven Johnson, right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Josh King:
Steven Johnson is the author of 11 books. Before his newest book, Farsighted, there was Wonderland, how play made the modern world, where good ideas come from the natural history of innovation. His breakout bestseller, The Ghost Map, the story of London's most terrifying epidemic and my personal favorite, The Invention of Air, a story of science, faith revolution, and the birth of America. But if are only reading Steven Johnson, you're missing a lot of the fun. If your podcast themed like me, you've heard his voice as the host of Wonderland and currently, American Innovations. Now in its fourth season, which deconstructs the surprisingly dramatic match toward finding the cure for polio.
Josh King:
Folks, if you're looking for family entertainment and education at the same time, run, don't walk to Steven's podcast. My wife, kids, and I drive for hours on our trips to the mountains of upstate New York and Steven Johnson narrates our journey to help us better understand the world around us. I'm very pleased he's with us at the New York Stock Exchange today. Welcome sir, inside the ICE House.
Steven Johnson:
Thank you. It's great to be here. That was such a lovely introduction. I appreciate it.
Josh King:
I want to play to start Steve, a clip from John Chancellor of NBC Nightly News. Back at the time Peter Schwartz was working with Shell.
Speaker 5:
This is NBC Nightly News, Wednesday, October 17th, reported by John Chancellor.
John Chancellor:
Good evening, the Middle East War produced developments all over the world today. The oil producing countries of the Arab world decided to use their oil as a political weapon. They will reduce oil production by 5% a month until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories. If the Arab countries keep that pledge, it would reduce their production by almost 50% in one.
Josh King:
As I said in the introduction, it all started with a plan for Royal Dutch Shell.
Steven Johnson:
It's really, it's an extraordinary story. And one of the things that I got to the scenario planning story and Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz, I've known Peter on and off for many years. Really in a roundabout way in that I had set out with Farsighted to write a book about complex decision making, right? The opposite of gut decisions, system one decisions, blink decisions, and there are a lot of tremendous books Thinking, Fast and Slow, Blink and so on, about those choices. But it occurred to me that the choices that end up really mattering in our lives, the ones that have consequences that last for years involve different resources and different tools and strategies and different parts of the brain on some level. And so, I wanted to write a book about those kinds of decisions.
Steven Johnson:
And one of the things I came to very early in the research in terms of what the science was out there was that prediction is so important to those decisions. Because in a sense, you're talking about... Really in choosing one path or another, you're talking about, "Well, what do I think the consequences of this are going to be in a year or two years or five years or 10, or in some cases it's 100 years." And prediction is a whole interesting subfield in and of itself. And I went back to the scenario planning story in part, because I had read and talked to Peter Schwartz over the years about scenario planning. But what I love about it is it's really a storytelling art, right? What Wack and Schwartz developed in that model and a few other people like Joe Ogilvy, is really a narrative practice, right?
Steven Johnson:
You're saying, "Okay, well, we're looking at... Let's say the oil market, we're looking at some other field, or we're looking at the... It was just a great scenario plan for the Bay Area, 50 year scenario plan that this group spur did in San Francisco." And what's important about it is you aren't making one prediction. This is the curse of most futurists is that you go to them and say, "Okay, tell us what going to happen." And the truth is, we never really know what's going to happen, right? The future is very complex and particularly when you're dealing with a global system, like the oil market or something like that, it's incredibly hard to predict. What you want to do is develop multiple narratives.
Steven Johnson:
And that's the key thing about scenario planning is you're telling three or four different stories and thinking through all the different variables that could steer those stories in different directions. The shorthand way of doing it, which I love that Schwartz talks about a little bit is to tell three stories, right? One where things get better, one where things get worse, and one where things get weird. And the conceptual exercise of trying to imagine that weird outcome, right? What would be the strange sequence of events over the next five or 10 years. Even if it doesn't end up happening, ends up being a very illuminating exercise, because you force yourself to look for clues and variables that you might otherwise not see.
Josh King:
So for an Encore, Schwartz is able to parlay the expertise and experience he gets with Shell and becomes a connoisseur of exclusive gardening equipment.
Steven Johnson:
There's a story in the book about Paula Hawkin in the early days of what became Smith and Hawkin, and Schwartz was an investor in that funding. In thinking about it, he actually ended up writing an elaborate scenario plan for this gardening tool business, high end gardening tool business in the late '70s, early '80s, the actual scenario plan, I think he actually wrote after the fact. But it was about imagining what could happen in the '80s, what are the social trends might happen that would either lead to an increased demand in high price gardening tools or less demand.
Josh King:
So having an exquisitely organized garage that you could beautifully display your trivets and other gardening things is something that's actually going to happen in the '80s or '90s, just according to Peter.
Steven Johnson:
Right, well, he went through a bunch of different scenarios and it turned out a number of them, he thought would lead towards high end gardening tools being successful as a strategy. But what's important... The other thing about the exercise is not just telling multiple stories, but these stories are what I call in Farsighted, full spectrum stories in that they involve multiple facets of experience, right?
Steven Johnson:
The full spectrum is an audio metaphor, instead of just a little slice of the audio spectrum, you've got the full range of different sounds from the lowest bases to the highest trembles. And in a decision like this, you're thinking about social movements, you're thinking about economic trends. You're thinking about the environmental movement, how that's going to affect things. And so you have new business models that might develop, new ways of selling tools, right? So you're not looking at it in a narrow band way where you're just looking at one factor.
Steven Johnson:
And that's in many ways, one of the key challenges of making complex decision is that you're forced to think on this full spectrum level. And that inevitably requires that you have multiple perspectives, right? Multiple fields of expertise that are helping you make that decision, because you can't just do it from a single vantage point.
Josh King:
You begin Farsighted with a story that strikes very close to home, a few blocks from where we sit here at the NYC, one world trade, you can take an elevator to its observatory, 102 stories in 42nd ride, and you get this amazing visualization of Lower Manhattan's history, which begins 10,000 years ago, which is how you actually start the book at the end of the last ice age, right up to the present, why did you start your book there?
Steven Johnson:
Well, it's typical of me to just zoom back 10,000 years and then begin. It's really be because I wanted to tell this story, actually, a story that I had been sitting on for 10 or 15 years and I-
Josh King:
Collect Pond.
Steven Johnson:
... had never really known which book to put it in, a story about a pond that was very close to here. I mean, just about probably 15 blocks north of here, maybe 10 blocks north of here, that was for many centuries was the primary source of clean drinking water, or fresh water on the Island of Manhattan for the native American residents before the Dutch came and then for the Dutch and the British. And it was apparently a beautiful scene. People would skate on it in the winter, and there was a Rocky Mount that was 200 feet high, right next to it.
Steven Johnson:
But New York being New York, people started dumping their trash into it and the occasional murder victim, and old dead cattle and things like that. And tanneries opened up along the bank of it and started expelling all these pollutants into it. And so by the 1770s, 1780s, it was a disgusting pit. And the city had this decision to make, right? What are we going to do with Collect Pond? And they really initially actually thought about cleaning it up and building a park around this spot.
Josh King:
Got one, L'Enfant involved.
Steven Johnson:
They got, yeah. L'Enfant who ended up designing Washington DC a few years later actually built this model, designed this model for what the park could be like. And it was going to be actually a public private partnership, a lot like what eventually ended up happening in New York Parks in recent years. But the real estate community just didn't believe that people would really live that far north. I mean, this is below canal street folks. So if you know anything about Manhattan, that was not a long term, Farsighted decision.
Steven Johnson:
And so they basically decided to fill it in and they did a very bad job of it. And they built all these nice houses on top, but the houses started to sink and these terrible smells started to come up from the biomass that was degrading underneath the homes. And so everybody left that neighborhood and left all this real estate that was basically worthless. And so all these new immigrants came in and started living in those communities. And that community became five points. The famous slum, the most famous slum in the history really of the world, certainly at that time.
Steven Johnson:
And so I started the book with that story, because if you think about it, if you had that park, only street grids really are longer term infrastructure for cities. You build a successful park, there's every reason to believe that Prospect Park and Central Park will be here in 400, 500 years. And so that would be one of the great urban parks in the world, this beautiful Oasis with a beautiful pond and a big hill next to it in the middle of downtown Manhattan. So in a sense, you can see it is a 500 year mistake.
Josh King:
But you would've denied Martin Scorsese, a perfect plot line for one of his great movies, the Gangs of New York.
Steven Johnson:
That's true. But I think the decision to bury the pond did create that iconic part of New York's history. But I think that would've happened somewhere else, right? I mean, I think it's an interesting question. Was the economic signal of, "Hey, here's all this cheap housing in downtown New York that's suddenly available." Was that part of the signal that brought all the Irish.
Josh King:
Well, in cutting and all that gang there?
Steven Johnson:
Yeah. I mean maybe, maybe they would've gone to Philadelphia if it hadn't been there, I don't know, but I suspect probably that they were coming to New York for other reasons as well. And they just happened to settle there.
Josh King:
Sticking with our New York theme, Steven Johnson, General George Washington, was sworn in as president right outside the window from where we're sitting, had his residents at one Broadway. I want to hear how the eventual battle of Brooklyn turned out and spoiler alert, not well.
Speaker 7:
One hour after the fighting began, the Americans heard the roar of cannon behind their lines and realized they were surrounded. Now the Hessians with their bayonets fixed closed in. To buy time for his men to escape, General William Sterling with 250 troops counter attacked. Five times the Americans charged, five times they were driven back. Washington sent in reinforcement, But the battle had turned into a rout. On Long Island, the Americans had fought their first formal battle and lost.
Josh King:
So last weekend I was with the descendant of one of the aids to General Washington, Nathaniel Green, who worked with Washington for six months planning the defense of Manhattan and Brooklyn in early 1776, but Green was out of commission when the British eventually attacked. How did that create a blind spot for Washington?
Steven Johnson:
So the big question that was hovering over the City of New York for a long period of time was the British Armada was there. I mean, this is the whatever, 400 ships in New York Harbor that begins Hamilton, right? And they were just, anchored off of Staten Island and it was clear they were going to invade New York. I mean, everyone knew this was going to happen. The question was, how are they going to do it? And Washington with Green's help had outlined a couple of scenarios for how they might, would they attack Manhattan directly? Would they come through Long Island and Brooklyn, but they had completely failed to anticipate a more, elaborate flanking move that they ended up taking through Jamaica pass.
Steven Johnson:
And so they were completely defenseless when the British did eventually arrive. I wanted to tell that story, because I think one of the things that's really important to do in our own lives, but also in thinking about history and thinking about how businesses make decisions so on, is to really spend time looking at catastrophic decisions and thinking seriously about decisions that went very poorly. Not just the predictions that went well or the bold moves, but choices where people fail to see something and to understand why they failed to see it.
Steven Johnson:
And in this case, as you say, General Green was the one who knew the landscape of Brooklyn, the topography of Brooklyn, the best of anyone in Washington's inner circle. And so what happened to Washington since right, when that insight was most valuable, Green just gets sick and almost dies apparently from some virus. And so Washington, maybe not fully realizing how much he's been literally blindsided. Like he can't see the topography of long island as well because Green's eyes aren't on the case. He ends up not being able to anticipate this move that the British make. I mean, that was almost it. The great thing the Washington did is he evacuated very quickly. He cut his losses basically.
Josh King:
In the middle of the night.
Steven Johnson:
Yeah. And he got incredibly lucky too because a fog came in, basically enabled them to leave and which doesn't happen a lot, but it's a crazy story.
Josh King:
Another military engagement 205 years later has a much more satisfying ending. At least for Americans. Let's hear president Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House May 1st, 2011.
Barrack Obama:
Good evening. Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
Josh King:
The raid on Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound by Seal Team Six is a thread woven throughout your book. And farsighted, much has been written about the minutes that the Seals were on the ground and in that Pakistan neighborhood near its military academy, less so Stephen about the myriad decisions that went into it.
Steven Johnson:
Exactly. I mean, understandably right? There is this dramatic raid, great personal bravery. And so I get why people tend to focus on that, but what's so to me, fascinating about the Bin Laden raid story is that there was this nine month decision process that led up to that. That was very consciously imagined as a process using a lot of the tools for complex decision making that I talk about in Farsighted, at various stages of it. And it was really two decisions. The first was they had initially gotten this report that there was this mysterious figure in this mysterious compound on the edges of Abbottabad. And initially, actually almost everyone on the team thought that it was unlikely to be Bin Laden, because they thought he was in a game somewhere. They didn't think he'd just be right there near military academy in Pakistan, but it was intriguing.
Steven Johnson:
And it seemed to be too protected. And there was this mysterious figure. And then there was this, once they got to the point of relative certainty about it being Bin Laden, they had to then decide what do we do? Do we just drop a bomb on it and blow it up? Do we do some raid? Do we let the Pakistanis know that we're going to do the raid, which was a big question. And at every stage they really went through this process. In large part because they were learning from past mistakes. And so they were fighting all the ways in which groups often come together to make their own decision, group think over confidence, confirmation bias, all of those things. And they went through stages where they're like, "Look, we're not necessarily looking for the right answer right now. We're still in an experimental phase," where sometimes called a divergence phase where we just want as many ideas as possible. Don't worry about crazy as they come multiple take whatever.
Steven Johnson:
And so for instance, when they were trying to figure out how to determine if this was Bin Laden or not, they said, "Okay, let everybody brainstorm as many ways as possible to figure it out." And they came up with these incredibly stupid techniques. Like they were going to literally broadcast from hidden speakers. Like, "This is the voice of Allah, come out into the street," that's a dumb idea, but they were creating an environment where no idea was too stupid just to generate new possibilities.
Josh King:
All of the inputs go into the office of William McRaven, the Admiral in charge of special operations. I want to hear a little bit of him reflecting on that early process months before the actual raid on Abbottabad.
William McRaven:
In November of 2010, Admiral Mullen came to Afghanistan and he said the CIA had a lead on Bin Laden. And that I would probably be getting a call from the CIA at some point in time to come back to Washington DC, to take a look at the intelligence they had. I went back and forth to the CIA many times in the course of the next several months, the intelligence was good, but it certainly was not to the level of accuracy that we could say, categorically, "Yes, this is Bin Laden."
Josh King:
So a lot of this starts Steven all the way back to 1884 with fleet problems that the Naval War College would practice. And then you write about pre-mortems and Red Teams to see if the Seals could make it all the way to Abbottabad, why do you conclude that the military is so good at this process?
Steven Johnson:
It's a great question. I mean, I think maybe because the feedback is so severe and pronounced when you get it wrong, right? People die. And so it's harder to just say, "Oh, well, we're going to keep going with this old approach." Like there is a real, let's try and really learn from our mistakes and not make those mistakes again. I mean, to me, one of the things that was most impressive. So you mentioned pre-mortem. This is one of my favorite strategies from the book, right? It's from this guy, Gary Klein.
Steven Johnson:
He has this technique, which is related to scenario planning, which is when you're facing a big, complex decision and you've decided the path you're going to take, the last exercise you should do with your team is a pre-mortem, which is the opposite of a postmortem as you can imagine, a postmortem is the patient is dead. Your job is to figure out what killed the patient.
Steven Johnson:
A pre-mortem is the patient is going to die. You have to tell the story of how the patient came to die. In the case of decision making, this means, imagine the choice you're making now, you're about to make, imagine it's two years from now and it has turned out to be a catastrophic failure. Tell the story of how it became a failure. And what client has shown is that when you ask people to think about a choice in that way, where they're really forced to tell that story of a disaster in the future, their brains actually just come up with more original observations, as opposed to saying to them, "Hey, you're about to make this choice, are there any flaws?" When you asked it that way, they're like, "No, no, no. There's nothing." When you force them to tell the story, they see things.
Steven Johnson:
So in the case of Bin Laden, they ran a number of those. Like how could this go wrong, scenarios. Tell the story of how it could go wrong. And one of the things they were most worried about was, they do the raid with the helicopters and they don't tell the Pakistanis because they want it to be secret. And they are so offended, the Pakistanis are so offended by this encroachment on their airspace, that they kicked the US military out of their space altogether. And Pakistan was the major route getting supplies to the war in Afghanistan.
Steven Johnson:
And so anticipating that this could happen months before the actual raid, they quietly announced this significant expansion of what they call the Northern Distribution Network, which is this route through Russia and other places to get into Afghanistan. And no one realized that at that time, but it was basically future proofing.
Steven Johnson:
The supply chain into Afghanistan in case things went poorly after the Bin Laden raid, which in fact, they ended up doing, although it took a little bit longer. That farsightedness, right? That ability to anticipate and force yourself to think about how it could go wrong a year from now, two years from now is something that we just don't do enough of. And by the way, I think that exercise anybody who is in a disruptive industry. I think that Silicon Valley, it should be part of the culture of Silicon Valley that they run social pre-mortems on big new technologies that they're introducing into the world.
Josh King:
After the break, Steven and I get more into how corporations and individuals can use some of the tactics and decision making processes we've been talking about so far that are analyzed in his book, Farsighted, including a monumental personal decision of his own. That's right after this.
Speaker 10:
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Josh King:
Back now it's Stephen Johnson, author of Farsighted. How we make decisions that matter the most, the newest of his 11 books, along with his podcasts, Wonderland and American Innovations. Before the break, we were talking about the decisions by military leaders resulting from hundreds of years of weighing costs and benefits. And now I want to dive into the decisions that we as individuals make. You're a great advocate, Steven of consuming creative content to guide thinking and decision making. There was your 2005 piece, which I reread last night for the New York Times magazine, watching TV makes you smarter. You devote a lot of space in Farsighted to George Elliots, really Mary Anne Evans's middlemarch. You call the novel a remarkably nuanced portrait of the deciding mind at work.
Steven Johnson:
I'm an old English lit grad student who never finished his PhD. And so I have to insert every now and then these, I ended up being a science and technology writer, but the grad student in me never totally leaves. So we talked about full spectrum decisions, right? And the complexity of thinking through choices in your life, where there are so many different variables on so many different planes of experience, and what I tried to argue near the end of Farsighted, although it runs through the book as well. I think it's the only book ever written where the Bin Laden raid in middlemarch are the two dominant things.
Josh King:
I can't think of another too.
Steven Johnson:
And probably the only one ever that will be written and maybe it shouldn't have been written, but one of the things you get out of reading great literary fiction.
Josh King:
Or watching the sopranos.
Steven Johnson:
No, or watching television, right? Actually, I just finished rewatching Friday Night Lights and Friday Night Lights is actually structurally very similar to Middlemarch.
Josh King:
Eric and Tammy Taylor have all stuff going on in Dylan, Texas.
Steven Johnson:
And it's a story about a marriage. It's a story about a school and institution. It's a story about a community and a town. Every episode has these really complicated choices that the characters have to make and what it does so brilliantly as MiddleMarch does as well is show you how those choices involve all those different scales. There's a personal connection to another person, a romantic connection to someone else or parental relationship. But then there are economic pressures that are weighing on the decision or there's a complicated battle between two different parts of the community that's happening, their racial issues.
Steven Johnson:
And the show as a great novel does, can bring together and show you all those different forms. And in a sense, what that fiction, whether it's televised or in a novel, does for your own choices, in your own life, is in a sense gives you practice, right? You're running these simulations of other people's lives. And you're watching them think through the complexity of a problem. And in doing that, you in a sense, get exercise for those conceptual muscles that when you then go to your own life and you try and analyze your own situation, you see it with more subtlety and more nuance.
Josh King:
When I reread your 2005 piece to use Sopranos and Hill Street Blues as these nuanced and layered dramas. I mean, in 13 years, you look at the walking dead or even Westworld. I mean, do you credit showrunners and writers with exercising our mind even more when we're watching TV than we use to?
Steven Johnson:
I'm so glad you actually brought this up. So that material was out of a book I wrote called Everything Bad is Good for You. That was in that Times Magazine article. And it was about how popular narratives in large part, both in video games and in television and stuff like that, we're getting so much more complex. If you took somebody who was watching gun smoke and I love Lucy, and then sat them down to watch the Sopranos or the wire, they'd be like, "There're too many characters. Like I can't keep track of these plot lines." But in fact, somehow over that time, our brains were being trained to consume more complex stories. And that was an important skill, understanding complex social networks is a very important profound skill. Now I'm glad you brought this up because I'm actually working on a new piece also for the Times Magazine that builds on some of the material and Farsighted about the way in which our brains shift back and forth in time.
Steven Johnson:
And there's a whole riff in Farsighted about something called the default network, which is a part of the brain that's been kind of discovered in the last 20 years and what the default network seems to do in a way that's probably unique to humans is the shorthand description of it is daydreaming, right? Where you're sitting around and just thinking about, well, what you're doing when you're daydreaming is often flipping back and forth between past and future events at incredible speed. You're like, "All right, I had that meeting yesterday and I think it went well. So maybe in two weeks I could ask for that raise. If I got that raise, I could probably buy that house. That's back there. And then what about that thing that happened a couple years ago? I wonder how that'll affect tomorrow," and going back and forth in time like that.
Steven Johnson:
There's an argument that one that is a key part of our species level ability to succeed and to invent new things and to create new technologies. This is our ability to project into the future. And if you believe that then presumably part of our success as individuals is probably how good we are at running these little time traveling simulations in our heads. So people who are really good at that, we don't test for this, but people who are really good at testing out these hypotheses, imagining what will happen in the future, thinking about the past and projecting forward, those people are probably, successful because they have that skill. And so here, I'm going to bring it all the way back. That is actually the big thing that has changed in popular narrative since 2005, which is the shows have gotten incredibly complex in terms of the time schemes.
Steven Johnson:
So if you look at a show like, This Is Us, if you look at a show like Westworld, if you look at Arrival, the big Sci-Fi movie, they all have incredibly complicated time schemes where they're jumping back and forth, forward five years, backwards, six years, a new twist that we have is you don't know where you are, is this the past or the future? And we're so willing to make these temporal jumps that we're willing to be like, have that be part of the mystery of a show. And so I think that actually just as it was happening with characters and plot lines in 2005, with the Sopranos and the wire and things like that, these new narratives are exercising that time traveling skill in our brains. And that's probably good news as well.
Josh King:
I want to go from the incredible complexity of Westworld to something very simple. Another picture of the deciding mind at work, but maybe the ultimate linear either or situation Robert Frost, reading the Road Not Taken.
Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel both and be one traveler. Long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth then took the other as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear, though as for that, the passing there, had worn them really about the same, and both that morning, equally lay in leaves, no step had trodden black.
Robert Frost:
Oh, I kept the first for another day yet, knowing how way leads on to way. I doubted if I should ever come back, I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages, hence, two roads diverged in the woods. And I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Josh King:
All the difference. Stephen, is Frost following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin? You're fascinated by Darwin, not because of survival of the fittest, but for making rational choices.
Steven Johnson:
So I've been writing this very slow, distributed intellectual biography of Darwin. He keeps showing up in all these books about at different little pieces. And I had years ago where good ideas come from written about Darwin's journals, which are fascinating documents on multiple levels, particularly because you see a world changing idea happening on the page slowly over time in the 1830s, as he's coming up with the idea for natural selection.
Steven Johnson:
So I'd written about it, but there's another thing that happens in those journals, right around that same period within a couple of months of when he finally has the theory, which is he devotes two pages of the journal to another question, which is, should he get married? And he basically creates a pros and cons list. And at one side it's not marrying and the other side is marrying.
Steven Johnson:
And he writes down the attributes of both sides. And one of the things that he's bummed about in the marrying scenario is that there will be less time for clever conversation of men in clubs. What struck me about it is the pros and cons list is one of the only strategies or techniques that most people do learn at some point in their lives in terms of making a decision. And it actually, it dates back to Joseph Priestley and Ben Franklin, the heroes of invention of air, Franklin actually suggested the technique to priestly and in a letter. So that was more than 200 years ago. And so basically one of the things that excited me about writing this book was that surely the science of making a complex decision has advanced over the last 200 years. If we're still using the same tool, there must be more things out there.
Steven Johnson:
The problem with the pros and cons list is... The two big problems. One it's an either or kind of decision it's like, "Should I do this or not?" It's hard to do a decision with five different options. And two, all the different variables are not equal, right? I mean, on one side for Darwin, he had the possibility of having children, on the other side, he had clever conversation of men in clubs, presumably however, clever those men were, the children were more important to him. And we think that they were because of what subsequently happened in its life, but in a pros and cons list, if they're all waited the same, basically it doesn't really help you.
Josh King:
So Franklin goes into this waiting process. You call moral algebra telling Prestlie, "Look, if you're going to go to work for the Earl of shell borne and leave leads, you got to do multiplication in on certain sides of the pros and cons list."
Steven Johnson:
Yeah, he calls it moral algebra actually. And I do think it's funny. Priestley writes to Franklin. I need advice for this decision. And Franklin writes actually, like, "I can't tell you what to decide, but I can tell you a useful technique for making a decision." And that I call moral algebra. He basically says create a pros and cons list, but then cross out the ones that are equal in measure. It's unclear how that ultimate tabulation really works. But there is this idea that if you have something on one side, that's equally important to you as something on the other, you can balance it out, given that. So he has a crude concept of waiting, which is a really important faculty to use and making decisions like this.
Josh King:
And just because I'm such a huge fan of Joseph Priestley, can we do a quick sidebar on the greatest philosopher, inventor theologian that the world has never really known, at least to my satisfaction, at least we can sell a couple more books of the Invention of Air.
Steven Johnson:
Yeah. Priestley is just an extraordinary figure. So I got to him in this really roundabout way where I was starting to work on my book where good ideas come from about the history of innovation. And I knew there was going to be a big metaphor about ecosystems in that book. And so I thought, "Well, maybe I can talk about where the idea for ecosystems came from in the first place." And I started researching that. And then eventually I came across this story about how Priestley really collaborating with Franklin, was the first person to real... Priestley most famous for isolating oxygen for the first time. Although two other people did it at the same time, but what he should be most known for is that Priestley with Franklin's help is the first person to realize that plants were creating a breathable oxygen rich atmosphere.
Steven Johnson:
And that the whole reason mammals walking around breathing air is because the plants are creating this for us, no one understood that until Priestley did. And so the idea of atmospheric science and ecosystem theory, Priestley's a key figure in that. So I thought, "Oh, I'll just tell this little story about Priestley, at the beginning of my book. And then I started diving into his career and it turned out that he had the single biggest impact, although he is British by birth, on Jefferson's eclectic view of Christianity and some ways Priestley's writings kept Jefferson nominally, a Christian for the rest of his life.
Steven Johnson:
He's mentioned in the Adams Jefferson letters, something I can't even remember what the number is, but 10 times as much as Washington or Franklin, right? So he is this lost founding father, who's influential in all these different fields. And once I've realized that part of his biography, I thought I got, hold on. This is a whole other book. And then I had to go to my publisher and be like, "I know you want me to write this book about the History of Innovation, but I think a book about 18th century chemistry is what the world is really dying for."
Josh King:
And for the record, the great man is also the inventor of seltzer.
Steven Johnson:
He is yeah. Doing these science experiments. And all of a sudden he is like, "Wait, this water is delightful and fizzy. I think I'm going to..." And typical Priestley, he just gave away the formula he never tried to-
Josh King:
Open source.
Steven Johnson:
Yeah, he was an open source guy before the term existed.
Josh King:
So in the first part of the show, I played a clip of president Obama announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden. I want to pick up for 30 seconds where we left off in the East Room of the White House May 1st, 2011 for another angle on that story.
Barrack Obama:
It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people. In our history, the images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory, hijacked planes, cutting through a cloudless September sky, the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground.
Josh King:
Steven, you were witness to that moment from the West Village of Manhattan where I lived now, it's something Malcolm Gladwell also recalled in his Season of Revisionist History.
Steven Johnson:
I have little story about it and was very small compared to so many other narratives, but we had just had our first child and the 11th was our first full day home from the hospital. And the first plane flew right over our apartment. And they don't have a chapter in what to expect when you're expecting on what you do with a three day old baby when there's a major terror attack in your neighborhood. So it had an interesting effect, which is, I think in our family, it bonded us very quickly. Like we had this exterior threat. And so that adjustment period, when you have a child for the first time, you're like, "Well, this is weird. I'm not a parent and you're a parent and why do we have this little human here?" We were suddenly like, "Oh, we're in this lifeboat. And we got to keep everybody healthy and safe. And what do we do?"
Steven Johnson:
But I also, I've written about it a little bit. I did a Ted Talk about it. It was incredible to see how resilient the city was. It showed you how cities are centralized in geography, but decentralized in control in many ways. And you could walk around the West Village. And it was almost as if there were no cars, is the only thing that was unusual for a couple of weeks, but people were out walking around and carrying on. And the fact that the city was able to survive something. So, right at the center at the part of the economy and actually continue to function in so many ways without having a catastrophic failure as a system. To me a great reminder of the power and resilience of cities.
Josh King:
And yet a few months after Obama made that speech, you started wrestling with your own big decision. I think that may have been percolating before that, but whether to uproot from Brooklyn to Marin county, why leave these beckoning shores for the Bay Area?
Steven Johnson:
Right. This has been such a big pro New York thing, and now you're going to drop it off at the end that I've been well, look, first off I'm back. So the two things that really started this project for me, was that story about Darwin and his pros and cons list. And then our own personal choice that we had to make, where my version of a midlife crisis was that I having lived in New York, my entire adult life. I felt like I had to live in Northern California for a stretch of time.
Steven Johnson:
And I wanted to try and live somewhere else for a bit. And our kids were at a good age. I thought to do it. And my wife did not have the California bug at all, didn't know people out there. And so we had this complicated crossroads that I think sometimes this is not explored enough where you're trying to deliberately make the choice of where you want to live.
Steven Johnson:
I think people tend to either default into places or their job takes them to a certain place, but we were fortunate enough to be able to decide where we wanted to live pretty much on our own terms. And it was a complicated choice and I feel like it was coming out of it. That I realized that perhaps I didn't really have a process. Like I didn't have any techniques for making a choice like that. My initial strategy, which is incredibly embarrassing, but I'll share it with you is that I created a PowerPoint presentation. It was an attempt to deal with the full spectrum nature of it, right? There were a lot of different variables and you wanted to go through it. Each one had different slide.
Steven Johnson:
We ended up writing letters, which is interesting because it was hard to do. It was such an emotionally fraught conversation. And so sometimes is easier to sit there and write four pages, this is why I think we should do it, whatever. But so we moved in, and then we ended up moving back.
Josh King:
So since then your world has bastioned beyond those first few books and as a huge fan of podcasts, I admire all the work that you've done with your voice and the scripts for American Innovations and Wonderland. How did you get hooked on that side of the creative process?
Steven Johnson:
The missing piece in there and the evolution is that I did a TV series for PBS and BBC called how we got to know. And that was building on where good ideas come from history of innovation kinds of stories. And that was fun. Just thinking about storytelling in a slightly different mode with my voice and on camera, shooting a show is very time consuming and difficult in a lot of ways. And I find watching myself on TV, incredibly annoying. I like reading my books. Like I don't have that feeling when I read my books and I don't have a feeling when I listen to myself on a podcast, but watching myself on TV, I find really annoying.
Steven Johnson:
So the podcast, particularly with the American Innovations, and there's a whole really team that does it, I don't really write them. So I'm in a sense voice talent for it away. I give them some advice about themes and the way that narratives can be structured. But it's other folks who are really doing the words and they're great storytellers, wondering the folks that put it together. And they're immersive in the sound design and everything. And it's fun to experiment with doing something where actually when I'm adding to it is performance on some level, right? Like it's about my local performance.
Josh King:
And you do a lot of these dialogues between people that go back to Jonah Salk.
Steven Johnson:
Yeah. And It's trying to hit a sweet spot, which I don't always hit of. I'm not a voice actor. Right? I don't, for instance, I don't do accents. Right? Because that would be a little cheesy because I'm not a trained actor.
Josh King:
You do urgency very well.
Steven Johnson:
But I do, but they are designed to make it sound like the person is there and they're in the scene. So it's just a little bit immersive. And initially it was tricky and I've gotten into it. I mean I really enjoy recording them. Like I go on and I'm like, "Okay, I want to play these different roles." It's fun.
Josh King:
Do they mix the sound effects while you're talking or-
Steven Johnson:
No.
Josh King:
Because the sound effects make all the differences you're bringing people back to the '50s, and it's the crappy phone call connection.
Steven Johnson:
Yeah, that is a great thing. And also the dialogue seems where it's basically me talking to me but they mix them after the fact where you can clearly hear that they're two different people and keep track of the conversation. I think it really, I think it really works well and it's been a successful show. So it's a lot of fun to do.
Josh King:
On your podcast app, go to American Innovations and listen to Steven. What are some of your other favorites that you are not the voice of?
Steven Johnson:
It's funny. I actually don't listen. I mean, my favorite thing in the world is song Exploder. So I'm an amateur musician. And so song Exploder takes a, one song. Each episode, it talks to the musician or the producers and basically tells the story of how that song was written. Everything from the lyrics, but also all the different parts. And you hear all, you hear the baseline as it was first laid down or some alternate take whatever. And I could listen to that thing all day long. I actually, I find that I don't listen to spoken either audio books or podcast.
Steven Johnson:
So as much because I read really fast and I skim really well. I hate to say this, but skimming is a greatly underappreciated skill. And so I just tend to find that it's too slow and I know you can speed up the audience. So maybe I should experiment with that more when I'm in California and I'm driving a lot. I listen to podcasts a lot more when I'm in New York, I tend to just read.
Josh King:
Another world. You're exploring is how we got to now six topics, glass, cold sound, clean time and light giving young readers the same thrill, us older folks got the first time we turned the pages of the ghost map.
Steven Johnson:
This just came out. So this is the... When we did how we got to know as the TV series on PBS, I came out with a book version and the book version was for grownups. But the TV show somewhat surprisingly, as you were saying, American Innovation, so I'm glad to hear you say that, the TV show was a total family show. You could watch it as an eight year old and you could watch it as a 48 year old. And there are things for both audiences, which is hard to find, right? It's hard to watch, The Wire, with your eight year old, right? So the book version was very much a grown up book.
Steven Johnson:
And so basically a couple years ago, Viking young readers came to me and said, "Hey, listen, let's adapt this for kids." The show was being taught in schools for in STEM programs and things like that. And so just a couple of weeks ago, we came out with a new, it's been opted for a 10 to 15 year old reader, lots of great illustrations. It's a really fun book. And I think hopefully it'll be a book that's taught in schools as well
Josh King:
Beside being among the 1.2 million Twitter followers for Stephen@StephenBJohnson, how else do people follow what you're up to?
Steven Johnson:
Well, we used to call a blog, which is stevenberlinjohnson.com. I write pretty regularly for the Times Magazine and for Wired. So if you subscribe to those publications, you'll see my work there as well.
Josh King:
What's next up?
Steven Johnson:
I've never had so many projects. Trying to do another TV series. I have just finished the first draft of the next book, which is a story you'll be happy to hear in the Invention of Air, Ghost map mode, a single narrative history about a pirate. So that hopefully will be out late next year.
Josh King:
Can't wait to see that. Thanks so much for joining us in the ICE House today.
Steven Johnson:
Hey, really enjoyed it.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Steven Johnson, author of Farsighted. How we make decisions that matter the most. If you like what you heard, please rate us in iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle in a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us @NYSE. Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca, and Ian Wolf, with production assistance from Pete Ash and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening, talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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