I think we are wrapping up now. Really enjoyed the conversation! I hope you get to tune in to the Season Finale (that sounds funny to describe it that way) tonight at 10PM/9C on PBS. It's a very fun episode that starts with me chanting in a French cave and ends with me swimming with dolphins. And I might just mention…

I'm going to start pointing people to that incredible bit that John Oliver did the other night with the "statistically representative climate change debate" featuring three deniers and ninety-seven believers. That was awesome.

Great question. I'm not sure I have a good answer. Controlled fire and steam engine are the obvious ones. What would you say?

I'm sure it's always a hard pill. I've had projects that just didn't work out quite the way I'd hope, and it's never fun. But I think we've gotten better as a society — driven by the tech culture — at recognizing that failure is an inevitable feature of progress. That's one of the reasons why we tell stories in the…

Glad you all like the Collect Pond story. Further evidence that I should figure out a way to write about that some day.

Probably whatever form of renewable energy finally gets us off of carbon for good.

You know, I'm honestly not sure about Google Glass. I haven't tried it yet, so I should withhold judgment. I am pretty confident that wrist-based computing is going to be a big deal, whether Apple makes it big or someone else. I think it will be the primary interface for the Internet Of Things, for instance, and an…

I guess I would say solar panels. They are obviously a big deal now in the sense that people understand that it's an interesting technology, but the vast majority of us don't interact with them in any way — they're more more exotic really. But I think that will change very quickly over the next ten years...

In the glass episode, we talk about the way that Gutenberg revolutionized the technologies of glass by making a huge part of the population realize that they needed reading glasses for the first time, which then led to the invention of the telescope and the microscope. I love that story because I thought I knew just…

This is more an historical answer, but I have always wanted to write about Collect Pond, which was the original source of fresh water on Manhattan in the early days of the Dutch settlers. It eventually became effectively a trash dump for the city, and was then paved over — and an entire neighborhood that came to be…

I went to Shanghai a couple of years ago — which as I'm sure you know is growing at this incredible pace — and they have an amazing "museum of urban planning" there. Museum isn't really the word though, because it's really a showcase for all the big infrastructure projects they have recently completed, or that are in…

We have a long section (in tonight's episode actually) about Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood movie star, who with the help of an avant-garde music composer managed to invent a system for secure wireless communication that is closely related to what we use for things like Bluetooth today. But in the book version, my chapter…

That would have to be the fecal transplant. :)

In the Sound episode that airs tonight, we tell the story about the Phonautograph, invented by a French printer in the early 1850s — it was the first technology that enabled recorded sound. Twenty years ahead of Edison and his phonograph! Amazing, right? Except that the inventor forgot include any mechanism for…

This is more of a recent past answer but I think Twitter might fit that category: it was an innovation in the way we communicate that seemed, at first, to be very silly. (I certainly felt that way about it.) But then it turned out to allow a wonderful new kind of communication that was both playful and important.

Connections was a wonderful series (and book!). I'm always flattered when people see what we've been doing with the show as belonging to that tradition.

We have an episode (and I wrote a chapter) entirely devoted to the importance of glass as a technology; basically, it argues that glass was the single most important material of the past thousand years to human progress. Imagine a world without glass: no spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, lenses, screens,…

I'm actually reading it right now! There's a lovely symmetry between our two books, in that his starts with Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, and mine ends with those two. Isaacson and I share a belief in the collaborative nature of innovation; one of the things I think it's important to stress about the Internet is…