Hey, prime members. You can listen to Business Wars ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

From Wondery, this is Business Wars. I'm David Brown. Joining us now is Stephen Johnson

He's the best-selling author of 10 books on science, technology and the history of innovation including the ghost map

where good ideas come from and Wonderland. And you may also remember him as the host and co-creator of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series How We Got To Now.

He's been named by Prospect Magazine as one of the top 10 brains of the digital future. Hey, Stephen, welcome.

Great to talk with you. Thanks so much for taking a few minutes out to speak with us.

Oh yeah, well, it's great. I'm a big fan of Business Wars, so this is fun.

Well, this is really exciting. Tell us a little bit about American innovations and what the big idea is.

Well, it's a look back at innovations that really, you know, transformed the world in various ways. Some of them got scientific breakthroughs, some of them more technological breakthroughs.

And we have, it's similar to Business Wars and the sense that, you know, you're talking about these extraordinary stories with really interesting people.

And there is a sense of kind of drama behind these ideas, but we're also talking about the environments that made these breakthroughs possible.

You know, you're going to learn about science and the history of technology, but also some really extraordinary lives.

What is your passion? Forgive me for interrupting, but I don't know.

What is your passion here? Is it more the history stuff?

Everything, you know, I've written all these crazy books on all these different topics from cholera epidemics to video game culture to neuroscience.

But the thing that unites all of my interests that really kind of come to the fore with this podcast is kind of new ideas coming into the world, right?

When there's a new idea that really changes things, it changes the way we interpret things, it changes the way that we, you know, create or communicate with each other, or how we understand where we came from.

Like, how do those ideas happen, right? What kinds of people bring them into the world, what kinds of environments make those ideas possible?

And that's what we really kind of focused on in American innovations.

And so we have these kind of six episode kind of story arcs.

The first one is on the history of DNA, our understanding of genetics and heredity.

And we have other ones about history of space travel and flight and artificial intelligence and nuclear power.

...