Latest / Masters in Business / Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio)

Transcript

Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · Masters in Business

0:00
Speaker 1: Brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch, committed
0:03
Speaker 1: to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most
0:06
Speaker 1: innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker.
0:10
Speaker 1: That's the power of Global Connections. Bank of America North
0:14
Speaker 1: America member f d i C. This is Masters in
0:19
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio. This week on
0:24
Speaker 1: the podcast, I have James Glick. He is an author
0:28
Speaker 1: and journalist at The New York Times who has covered
0:31
Speaker 1: science and technology for a long time. I've been a
0:35
Speaker 1: fan of his for many, many years, going back to
0:40
Speaker 1: really the first book he ever wrote, called Chaos, Making
0:43
Speaker 1: of a New Science. I'm a physics geek, it's sort
0:48
Speaker 1: of my background, and at the time this book came out,
0:54
Speaker 1: it was really cunning edge stuff. It was absolutely fascinating.
0:59
Speaker 1: It's not the most accessible subject, but i'mronically long before
1:04
Speaker 1: I joined finance, chaos UH and chaos theory had all
1:10
Speaker 1: sorts of applications UH to the world of markets and investing.
1:15
Speaker 1: It's not a coincidence that theoretical physicists and mathematicians end
1:20
Speaker 1: up working on Wall Street. The ability to deal with
1:24
Speaker 1: issues of uncertainty and probability and randomness are really really
1:30
Speaker 1: helpful when when thinking about markets. This was a really
1:33
Speaker 1: unusual book. It's a very challenging subject and Click makes
1:38
Speaker 1: it accessible and really quite quite fascinating and enjoyable. UH.
1:44
Speaker 1: From the book comes the term the butterfly effect, which
1:50
Speaker 1: Click is credited with popularizing. But that's just one book
1:54
Speaker 1: he had written many years ago. He's written dozens of books,
1:58
Speaker 1: including biographies on Richard Lineman and Isaac Newton, and What
2:02
Speaker 1: Just Happened, which is about technology, and Faster, which is
2:05
Speaker 1: about changes in technology. I think his his magnum opus
2:10
Speaker 1: is UH The Information, A History A Theory of flood.
2:16
Speaker 1: It is just a brilliant exposition about information theory and
2:21
Speaker 1: how all technology has tracked various ways of communicating uh
2:29
Speaker 1: as people. UM, It's really a brilliant, brilliant book. Who
2:34
Speaker 1: was nominated for a Pulitzer Uh. It's totally totally readable.
2:38
Speaker 1: I I found it to be delightful to just dive into.
2:42
Speaker 1: I think I read it on the beach on vacation
2:45
Speaker 1: in in in a day and a half for two days. UH.
2:48
Speaker 1: And his most recent book is actually a little off
2:52
Speaker 1: the beaten path. It's quite charming. It's called Time Travel History,
2:58
Speaker 1: and it discusses how time travel as a concept has developed.
3:04
Speaker 1: You you may be shocked to learn that before H. G.
3:08
Speaker 1: Wells's book The Time Machine, there was no such thing
3:11
Speaker 1: as time travel. Nobody had even conceptualized it. It simply
3:15
Speaker 1: didn't exist. Anyway, I could babble about the books he's
3:19
Speaker 1: written about over and over again. Rather than do that,
3:22
Speaker 1: let's just jump right to my interview, my conversation with
3:27
Speaker 1: James click Voss Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on
3:34
Speaker 1: Boomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Gleek. He
3:38
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite science writers, perhaps best described
3:43
Speaker 1: as a historian of science ideas, looking at the impact
3:48
Speaker 1: of technology on our understanding of the world. He is
3:51
Speaker 1: the author of Chaos, Making of a New Science, The Information,
3:56
Speaker 1: A History, A Theory of Flood, and his latest book
3:59
Speaker 1: is Time Travel History. Several of his books have been
4:02
Speaker 1: nominated for Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Finalist Awards. The
4:07
Speaker 1: Information was awarded the pen Literary Science Award as well
4:11
Speaker 1: as the Royal Society Witton Prize for Science Books. James Glick,
4:16
Speaker 1: Welcome to Bloomberg. Well, thank you. I'm happy to be here.
4:19
Speaker 1: I have to start out asking about your background, because
4:22
Speaker 1: you're really the fact that you're a science writer is
4:24
Speaker 1: sort of surprising. You majored in English and linguistics. How
4:30
Speaker 1: did that morph into science writing? I was a journalist.
4:33
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I wasn't any kind of scientist, and I
4:36
Speaker 1: I never intended to be a science writer, and I'm
4:39
Speaker 1: hardly I don't really think I'm a science writer now.
4:43
Speaker 1: And you know, Time Travel isn't really a science book.
4:47
Speaker 1: Well not yet, but one day it might be. Well
4:50
Speaker 1: we we can dream, but it isn't. But but it
4:52
Speaker 1: really isn't. I mean, I have a I have a
4:56
Speaker 1: feeling that if you go into the bookstore you can
4:58
Speaker 1: probably find it in the science section. But I think
5:00
Speaker 1: it's actually it's actually a mistake. So in general, your
5:04
Speaker 1: books are these deeply researched, years in the making sort
5:09
Speaker 1: of projects. What what made you approach book writing in
5:13
Speaker 1: that way? I approached book writing in the first place
5:19
Speaker 1: as a journalist and deeply researched. Well, that's you know,
5:23
Speaker 1: that's what you do. You go out and you talk
5:25
Speaker 1: to people, you do reporting. I thought of it as
5:28
Speaker 1: reporting before I thought of it as research. It's changed,
5:31
Speaker 1: it's changed a little bit over the years. But my
5:34
Speaker 1: first book, Chaos was about something dramatic that was happening
5:41
Speaker 1: in the world of science that wasn't getting any attention
5:44
Speaker 1: as far as I could see. And I learned about
5:46
Speaker 1: it almost by accident when I was writing a profile
5:49
Speaker 1: of a of a scientist, and I was only writing
5:52
Speaker 1: profiles of scientists because I was interested in science. I
5:55
Speaker 1: liked it, so which would that be Mandelbrod or or Um. No. Ways,
6:01
Speaker 1: the way it actually came about was I wrote a
6:03
Speaker 1: profile early on of Douglas Hofstader. Sure I read go
6:07
Speaker 1: to lesch Bach exactly right, and he was, you know,
6:11
Speaker 1: he was a computer scientist and was um had a
6:15
Speaker 1: lot to say about consciousness. And he was the one
6:18
Speaker 1: who told me that he had heard about this thing
6:22
Speaker 1: called Kass theory that was going on, and that that
6:26
Speaker 1: not just mathematicians and physicists but also economists and meteorologists
6:32
Speaker 1: and by all everybody was talking about chaos theory, but
6:35
Speaker 1: it was very much under the radar. And I thought, well,
6:39
Speaker 1: that sounds kind of cool, and it was, and and
6:42
Speaker 1: I've been recommending that book for for many years. Well,
6:45
Speaker 1: will come back to that, um so somewhat unusual career path.
6:51
Speaker 1: Then if you started out as a journalist, how do
6:55
Speaker 1: you veer from someone doing broad interviews to somebody doing
7:00
Speaker 1: these really deep dives into very very comprehensive and complicated
7:05
Speaker 1: subjects like information theory or chaos theory. Well, chaos theory
7:10
Speaker 1: just you know, as I said, started out as a
7:13
Speaker 1: kind of journalism I was. I felt I was reporting
7:16
Speaker 1: on something that was very real, that was happening in
7:18
Speaker 1: the world, and it just happened to be science, and
7:23
Speaker 1: I approached it. I intended to approach it the way
7:26
Speaker 1: a political reporter would approach politics, or a reporter specializing
7:32
Speaker 1: in art would approach art. You know, it just happened
7:35
Speaker 1: to be science, and a line a bunch of experts
7:37
Speaker 1: asked them questions, some dumb questions, and figure out what
7:41
Speaker 1: was going on, and I wanted to My goal in
7:44
Speaker 1: that book wasn't so much explained the ideas of chaos
7:49
Speaker 1: as tell the story of how this new science was
7:54
Speaker 1: being born, and tell the stories of the individual scientists
7:57
Speaker 1: and find out what they were thinking and how they
8:00
Speaker 1: communicated with one another. And that was just I mean,
8:03
Speaker 1: that's the kind of book I like to read, So
8:06
Speaker 1: that's the kind of book I wrote. But it's true.
8:09
Speaker 1: Um not the usual approach to writing a book on
8:13
Speaker 1: science then, or do you think of the Worst Day
8:16
Speaker 1: of Dagon? Similar? But I'm not sure there is one
8:18
Speaker 1: usual approach. You know, science writing covers a lot of territory,
8:23
Speaker 1: a lot of there's a kind of science writing that's
8:26
Speaker 1: written by scientists, and they write about their own work,
8:29
Speaker 1: or they write about other things in the field. I mean,
8:33
Speaker 1: I was a huge admirer of Stephen Jay Gould, who
8:36
Speaker 1: wrote um the most beautiful essays, and they often turned
8:40
Speaker 1: into books about his own work and work that was
8:44
Speaker 1: connected to his work. And he had a very broad
8:47
Speaker 1: view of the world, and you could learn a lot
8:50
Speaker 1: from reading his stuff. And there are many there are
8:53
Speaker 1: people today who write about physics, who are physicists, and
8:57
Speaker 1: they're just trying to explain, maybe in a popular way,
9:01
Speaker 1: the things they know. I don't like the word popularization,
9:08
Speaker 1: maybe because I'm not an expert myself. You know, I'm
9:12
Speaker 1: not trying to popularize things. I'm trying to write about
9:16
Speaker 1: things that I care about and in some cases barely
9:18
Speaker 1: understand when I get started. The word popularize often implies
9:23
Speaker 1: a dumbing down from mass audience. Exactly, you're you have
9:27
Speaker 1: never been accused of of doing and I don't know
9:30
Speaker 1: how you dumb care. I don't know. I've been accused
9:33
Speaker 1: of just about everything. Barry, thank you, but um, but
9:36
Speaker 1: not that. No, but I'm not. I don't need to
9:38
Speaker 1: dumb anything down. I need to raise my own understanding
9:42
Speaker 1: to the level of grasping the stuff I'm writing about.
9:45
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
9:48
Speaker 1: guest this week is James Glicky is the author of
9:51
Speaker 1: numerous books, most recently time Travel History, and let's jump
9:57
Speaker 1: right into this. I was astonished to learned from your
10:00
Speaker 1: book that prior to H. G. Wells, there really wasn't
10:04
Speaker 1: a whole lot of discussion of time travel. How is
10:07
Speaker 1: that possible? Not just not a lot of discussion? Time
10:10
Speaker 1: travel didn't exist. The words the words literally were not
10:14
Speaker 1: used in English. If you had said to somebody, are
10:17
Speaker 1: you interested in time travel? They would have just looked
10:19
Speaker 1: at you as if you were crazy. And yes, I
10:21
Speaker 1: was astonished too. If there was one thing that got
10:24
Speaker 1: me going on this as a book subject, it was
10:27
Speaker 1: that discovery that that the idea of time travel has
10:31
Speaker 1: had a relatively short lifetime, barely essential. And the reason
10:37
Speaker 1: it's hard to believe. I mean, I I assume that
10:40
Speaker 1: that some of the people listening to us are thinking, well,
10:42
Speaker 1: that's not true, that's ridiculous. What about X and X
10:47
Speaker 1: might be I'm going to guess now people might be thinking,
10:50
Speaker 1: weren't there Greek myths that involved traveling through time? Or
10:54
Speaker 1: what about a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was
10:58
Speaker 1: a little before H. G. Wells that clearly didn't involve
11:01
Speaker 1: time travel, then involved We're going to show you a
11:04
Speaker 1: potential future. That is the difference, and then rip Van
11:07
Speaker 1: Winkle sleeps into the future. And you could say, you
11:11
Speaker 1: could argue, with the advantage of hindsight, that that's a
11:14
Speaker 1: kind of time travel if you want to explore the literature,
11:17
Speaker 1: which I did have to do extensively there. Um, there
11:21
Speaker 1: were sort of precursors to the idea, but until H. G. Wells,
11:25
Speaker 1: nobody imagined a machine or any other method where you
11:30
Speaker 1: could choose to transport yourself to another place in time,
11:35
Speaker 1: in the past or in the future. There was no
11:38
Speaker 1: possibility of volition, and of course Wells jumped right into it.
11:41
Speaker 1: He invented a machine with a lever, and his time
11:45
Speaker 1: traveler as he called him, hops on the machine and
11:49
Speaker 1: sends himself hurtling into the future. So what was it
11:53
Speaker 1: that led you to an interest in time travel? It's
11:57
Speaker 1: so different than most of your other world, where there's
12:01
Speaker 1: an underlying theme of some specific branch of science and
12:06
Speaker 1: the impact that it in technology has on society and culture.
12:10
Speaker 1: And it's a more philosophical approach to a harder science
12:15
Speaker 1: e sort of discussion. This is very science fiction, fun
12:19
Speaker 1: sort of thing. What made you say let's try this?
12:23
Speaker 1: I would say it's you're right, it's not a science book.
12:27
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's a philosophical book. At least
12:31
Speaker 1: there's some certainly some philosophy in it. It couldn't be avoided.
12:34
Speaker 1: Once again, I I wanted to tell a story, and
12:37
Speaker 1: the story was It started with a question. The question
12:41
Speaker 1: was why did this powerful and exciting, kind of exhilarating
12:47
Speaker 1: idea of time travel arise in the first place? Why
12:50
Speaker 1: did it arise at this particular time in the mind
12:52
Speaker 1: of H. G. Wells, a young writer he had never
12:56
Speaker 1: written a book before, trying to make a living in
12:59
Speaker 1: eighteen England. And then what happened to turn this primitive
13:05
Speaker 1: version of time travel, born out of the blue, into
13:08
Speaker 1: the very complicated and various cornucopia of things that were
13:13
Speaker 1: so familiar with today. I mean, we've got time travel cartoons,
13:17
Speaker 1: you know, I know, eight year old to get up
13:19
Speaker 1: in the morning and start arguing about the paradoxus of
13:22
Speaker 1: time travel. We are very sophisticated about time travel, and
13:26
Speaker 1: so I wanted to chart that as a story, to
13:30
Speaker 1: watch the ideas get handed from one person to another,
13:34
Speaker 1: and watch new writers. And we're talking about people who
13:38
Speaker 1: range from pulp science writers in New York in the
13:43
Speaker 1: nine twenties to literary writers like James Joyce and Virginia
13:49
Speaker 1: Wolf also in the early twentieth century, and scientists beginning
13:54
Speaker 1: with Einstein, all toying with ideas of time in very
13:59
Speaker 1: imagine native new ways. We have a tendency to you know,
14:03
Speaker 1: we live in the world and we know how things are,
14:06
Speaker 1: and we have a tendency to think it's always been
14:08
Speaker 1: like that, but it hasn't. And I just think it's
14:11
Speaker 1: it's really fun to watch the ideas transform. That's classic
14:16
Speaker 1: hindsight biases that well, of course it worked out this way.
14:19
Speaker 1: How else could it have worked out. It's very difficult
14:22
Speaker 1: to go back and unimagined an idea after you're familiar
14:25
Speaker 1: with it. So what was it about the Industrial Age
14:29
Speaker 1: and whatever, all of the new technologies that came about
14:33
Speaker 1: at the turn of the prior century, in the ninet
14:36
Speaker 1: whatever that put this out in the air and allowed
14:38
Speaker 1: so many people to conceptualize it when it had never
14:41
Speaker 1: really been thought about previous. There were a lot of
14:43
Speaker 1: things happening all at once. One thing that was happening
14:46
Speaker 1: was that there was a new idea of futurity. There
14:50
Speaker 1: was a new ability to imagine the future and a
14:53
Speaker 1: new interest in the future that depended on the Industrial
14:57
Speaker 1: Revolution and then the acceleration of technology. G When you
15:00
Speaker 1: think about it, if you took your time machine back
15:03
Speaker 1: and arrived on a farm in the fifteenth century and
15:07
Speaker 1: asked the first person you met, what is what do
15:09
Speaker 1: you think the world is going to be like for
15:11
Speaker 1: your grandchildren? They would say, what are you talking about?
15:15
Speaker 1: The world is going to be the same for my grandchildren.
15:18
Speaker 1: You know they're going to be using the same plows
15:20
Speaker 1: that I'm using because my grandparents used those plows, and
15:23
Speaker 1: there was nothing like the conception that we have of
15:25
Speaker 1: the progress of technology, which starts to seem inevitable to us.
15:30
Speaker 1: But by the end of the nineteenth century, there were
15:32
Speaker 1: railroads steaming across the landscape. There was the electric telegraph
15:36
Speaker 1: sending instant messages at the speed of electricity, and people
15:41
Speaker 1: were very conscious of how life was changing. They could
15:45
Speaker 1: see their lives changing right in front of them, and
15:48
Speaker 1: then they could start to wonder and get excited about
15:52
Speaker 1: how life was going to be in a hundred years.
15:54
Speaker 1: How significant were railroads along with the telegraph and in
15:59
Speaker 1: having people recognize that time wasn't necessarily a constant that
16:05
Speaker 1: they had to think about time zones in different places
16:07
Speaker 1: across the country. How important was that development to Ah, Well,
16:12
Speaker 1: that's a really good question, Barry, because you're right it was.
16:15
Speaker 1: It's exactly because of railroads and the telegraph, both of
16:19
Speaker 1: those technologies that clocks were changing. The telegraph made it
16:24
Speaker 1: possible to synchronize clocks electrically across great distances, which had
16:28
Speaker 1: never been possible before. When you think about it, if
16:31
Speaker 1: you had a clock in New York and you had
16:33
Speaker 1: a clock in Chicago, who would care what those you know,
16:39
Speaker 1: because because it would take days to get from New
16:41
Speaker 1: York to Chicago. So first the railroad made it kind
16:45
Speaker 1: of necessary to have accurate clocks in different places and
16:49
Speaker 1: help people notice that the sun was in a different
16:51
Speaker 1: place in the sky in New York and Chicago. And
16:55
Speaker 1: then the telegraph made it possible to synchronize the clocks.
16:58
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just Eighth d Well, it was also
17:00
Speaker 1: Einstein who was living in a world with these new technologies,
17:04
Speaker 1: and as a patent clerk, he was reading patents that
17:08
Speaker 1: had to do with synchronizing clocks, and he was starting
17:11
Speaker 1: to think about what what if you take a clock
17:13
Speaker 1: and you put it in motion at high speed? Does
17:16
Speaker 1: anything change? You know, all of these things were happening
17:19
Speaker 1: at once. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Master's in
17:23
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Glick.
17:27
Speaker 1: He is the author of numerous books, most recently time
17:31
Speaker 1: travel History. His first book was Chaos, Making of a
17:37
Speaker 1: New Science. And I have to ask you, this is
17:40
Speaker 1: an extremely complex subject in physics. What on Earth made
17:45
Speaker 1: you for your first book say, I know, I'll tackle
17:49
Speaker 1: chaos theory? Well, it wasn't, I know it was it
17:54
Speaker 1: was Woa, there's a thing called chaos theory. Okay, I mean, right,
17:58
Speaker 1: we we've it's it's kind of familiar now. People now,
18:02
Speaker 1: for example, have seen Jurassic Park and they watched Jeff
18:05
Speaker 1: Goldblum explain chaos mansplain chaos theory in fact, but it
18:12
Speaker 1: was brand new. And I was interested in science and
18:15
Speaker 1: writing about some scientists, and I heard about this thing,
18:18
Speaker 1: and I thought, I want to know what that is.
18:20
Speaker 1: And then as I learned what it was, I realized
18:24
Speaker 1: that it was a kind of science that really mattered
18:29
Speaker 1: to people who might not otherwise care about the esoterica
18:34
Speaker 1: of theoretical physics. It was a very, I felt, a
18:37
Speaker 1: very human kind of science. And one thing, one thing
18:41
Speaker 1: that was unusual about it was that it was cross disciplinary.
18:44
Speaker 1: That it involved people studying the weather, people studying the
18:49
Speaker 1: physiology of the human heart. It involved economics as well
18:53
Speaker 1: as theoretical physics. And that was because irregularity and disorder
19:02
Speaker 1: and complexity arise in all of these different areas, and
19:07
Speaker 1: as humans, we're interested in that, right. I mean, I'm
19:11
Speaker 1: not a scientist myself, so I have the kind of
19:14
Speaker 1: I have the prejudice that if I'm interested in it,
19:17
Speaker 1: other people are going to be interested in it too.
19:19
Speaker 1: It can't be that esoteric, and that was true of chaos.
19:23
Speaker 1: So you're credited with making the expression the butterfly affect
19:28
Speaker 1: a household word. Um explained what the butterfly Well, I
19:32
Speaker 1: didn't invent the butterfly effect. It was invented by a meteorologist,
19:36
Speaker 1: Edward Lorenz, who was one of the pioneers of chaos theory,
19:40
Speaker 1: and he discovered and proved that the Earth's weather is
19:46
Speaker 1: a chaotic system in this in this definite technical sense,
19:50
Speaker 1: that it's so unstable and so subject to small perturbations
19:57
Speaker 1: that the flapping of a butterfly's wing in one part
20:01
Speaker 1: of the globe at one instant can actually affect the
20:06
Speaker 1: the path of a hurricane a month later on the
20:09
Speaker 1: far side of the globe. That is not obviously true.
20:14
Speaker 1: I mean it could be the Earth's weather could be
20:18
Speaker 1: designed in a different way such that the flapping of
20:20
Speaker 1: the butterfly's wings would just dissipate and it wouldn't be important,
20:23
Speaker 1: and it would take a giant perturbation to actually have
20:27
Speaker 1: an effect on something as large as the course of
20:30
Speaker 1: a hurricane. So that's a surprise, and it had to
20:33
Speaker 1: be proved mathematically and it does turn out to be true.
20:36
Speaker 1: And it's why to this day, weather forecasting, no matter
20:40
Speaker 1: how powerful our computers get, is such an imperfect science.
20:44
Speaker 1: So so let's talk about something else that involves imperfect
20:48
Speaker 1: forecasts where small perturbations have outside effects, and that's the
20:53
Speaker 1: stock market. I'm gonna pull a line from Chaos the book.
20:57
Speaker 1: Markets exhibit unstable, a periodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamism
21:06
Speaker 1: sensitive to initial conditions. Now you were writing in general
21:10
Speaker 1: about theory of chaos, but that is very applicable to
21:15
Speaker 1: stock markets. That they're nonlinear, meaning a small change can
21:19
Speaker 1: have an outsize effect. That they're not they're a periodic
21:24
Speaker 1: in that there's sort of a cycle. You know, it's
21:27
Speaker 1: colder in the winter and warmer in the summer, but
21:30
Speaker 1: the day to day changes appear to be fairly random.
21:34
Speaker 1: There are all sorts of interesting parallels between chaos theory
21:38
Speaker 1: and the markets. Have you ever heard much back from
21:40
Speaker 1: people who work in finance or or work investing as
21:45
Speaker 1: to how chaos theory is applicable to investing. I have
21:48
Speaker 1: heard from people, and people have tried to explore it,
21:52
Speaker 1: and in fact, some of the chaos scientists who I
21:55
Speaker 1: wrote about in that book all those years ago, try
21:59
Speaker 1: to apply k Us theory to the markets, and I
22:02
Speaker 1: can't say whether they had any particular success. Personally, I'm
22:06
Speaker 1: a little bit skeptical. I think if anybody had had
22:10
Speaker 1: a magic trick for applying the science of chaos to
22:14
Speaker 1: making money in the market, well, I don't know if
22:17
Speaker 1: we'd know about it. Coming up, we continue our conversation
22:20
Speaker 1: with James Glick discussing information theory and human history. I'm
22:24
Speaker 1: Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on
22:27
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is author James Glick,
22:32
Speaker 1: whose most recent book is called Time Travel History. He's
22:36
Speaker 1: previously written biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, as
22:42
Speaker 1: well as a couple of other books, Chaos, The Making
22:45
Speaker 1: of a New Science, and what I think is a
22:48
Speaker 1: tour to force book. The information a flood, a history,
22:53
Speaker 1: a theory. I got that backwards somewhat. Let's talk a
22:56
Speaker 1: little bit about this, because this is really a fascinating,
22:59
Speaker 1: fascinating book. Human beings are information seeking creatures? Discuss Well,
23:07
Speaker 1: it's like an essay question. Yes, first of all, that's
23:11
Speaker 1: obviously true, right, Information is is what we live on. Well,
23:14
Speaker 1: is it obviously true? Because when you were referring previously
23:18
Speaker 1: to the farmer who lived the same life as his
23:20
Speaker 1: grandparents and expected his children and grandchildren to live the
23:24
Speaker 1: same life, and there was no growth from learning and
23:27
Speaker 1: applying new information, maybe we haven't always been information seeking creatures. Well, exactly,
23:32
Speaker 1: you're making my point for me, Barry. We have always
23:35
Speaker 1: been information seeking creatures. We didn't always know it. We
23:39
Speaker 1: didn't we didn't use the word information. The word information
23:43
Speaker 1: now has a scientific meaning, and we're comfortable with that.
23:47
Speaker 1: Even if we aren't scientists. We know what the unit
23:50
Speaker 1: of measure of information is. It's the bit, right, That's
23:54
Speaker 1: a fundamental particle, on or off, yes or no. It's
23:58
Speaker 1: at the root of all of our computers and our
24:01
Speaker 1: communication devices. Information is being transmitted in bits, but that's
24:05
Speaker 1: the language of how it's communicated. It's it's on or off.
24:09
Speaker 1: And with that binary system you can create a universe
24:13
Speaker 1: of things. Is but is that really the bottom building
24:17
Speaker 1: block of of information there is? Because there's nothing smaller
24:22
Speaker 1: than yes or no, than yes or no. It's if
24:25
Speaker 1: you want to if you want to measure how much
24:27
Speaker 1: information there is in something, how much information is there
24:30
Speaker 1: in a book? How much information is there in three
24:33
Speaker 1: minutes of audio of a certain quality? How much information
24:37
Speaker 1: is there in a photograph or a video. We're fairly comfortable,
24:40
Speaker 1: I think, asking that question how much information? It implies
24:46
Speaker 1: that information is a thing you can measure, and if
24:48
Speaker 1: you're measuring it, there has to be a unit of measure,
24:50
Speaker 1: and there has to be well, there wouldn't have to
24:52
Speaker 1: be a smallest amount. You could imagine an infinitesimal amount
24:56
Speaker 1: of information, But in fact there is a smallest amount.
25:00
Speaker 1: It's one bit. There can't be any less than that.
25:03
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about some of the
25:05
Speaker 1: concepts that come up in the book, starting with drums
25:08
Speaker 1: and going to alphabets. How does that then move on
25:13
Speaker 1: to computing and more complex technologies. Because we now have
25:18
Speaker 1: this expansive view of information as a kind of general
25:21
Speaker 1: category of things, we can think about all the different
25:24
Speaker 1: information technologies. Well, we know there are a lot of
25:27
Speaker 1: them that rule our lives now, right, we've got an
25:30
Speaker 1: information gadget in our pocket. Probably we a lot of
25:33
Speaker 1: information comes to us on screens. The networks of the
25:37
Speaker 1: Internet are a kind of information technology, just as television
25:42
Speaker 1: is and before that the radio. But before that there
25:46
Speaker 1: was the telegraph, and before that, if you you know,
25:51
Speaker 1: we start to think more broadly about information. We know
25:53
Speaker 1: that the printing press was an information technology, and even
25:57
Speaker 1: before that, the invention of the alphabet changed the way
26:01
Speaker 1: human beings process, transmit, and store information. So all of
26:07
Speaker 1: those are technologies, and you can start to think about
26:09
Speaker 1: what they have in common and what the differences are,
26:12
Speaker 1: and how they evolved and how they changed our lives.
26:15
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the modern era and the Internet.
26:19
Speaker 1: What's the significance of Wikipedia. What's the significance of the
26:23
Speaker 1: Internet for our ability to perceive and manipulate information. That's
26:29
Speaker 1: a pretty big question. What's the significance? There are a
26:31
Speaker 1: lot of things going on all at once. You mentioned Wikipedia.
26:35
Speaker 1: I happen to like Wikipedia. I'm a fan. In fact,
26:38
Speaker 1: I think it's it's really an extraordinary monument in the
26:43
Speaker 1: information era. Of all of the giant information enterprises, it's
26:48
Speaker 1: the only one that isn't designed to make money. It's
26:51
Speaker 1: never made a penny, and if it continues on its
26:54
Speaker 1: current course, it never will. It's entirely crowdsourced. When it
26:58
Speaker 1: started out, it was kind of famously inaccurate, right, And
27:03
Speaker 1: maybe it is in some circles famously inaccurate. Schools probably
27:08
Speaker 1: don't allow students to cite Wikipedia as a final source
27:14
Speaker 1: on anything. Newspapers certainly don't. On the other hand, we
27:18
Speaker 1: all rely on it, a lot, more of us rely
27:21
Speaker 1: on it than it then admit it. And it's astoundingly
27:24
Speaker 1: good when you think about it. You know, if you
27:26
Speaker 1: want to start doing research on any subject, you look
27:29
Speaker 1: it up on Wikipedia, and it doesn't matter so much
27:31
Speaker 1: what was written. As the whole run of sources to
27:35
Speaker 1: truly authoritative sources at the bottom is a great place
27:39
Speaker 1: to start doing sources you can cite and quote if
27:42
Speaker 1: you can't quote Wikipedia, right, Okay, So here we are
27:44
Speaker 1: both praising Wikipedia. And yet it remains true that at
27:47
Speaker 1: this moment anybody who's listening to us could, as a
27:51
Speaker 1: prank look up any not any because some of them
27:54
Speaker 1: are are kind of protected now, but could look up
27:58
Speaker 1: most of what's on Wikipedia, just change it. So it's
28:02
Speaker 1: a kind of miracle that, given its vulnerability to mischief
28:08
Speaker 1: and to just plain carelessness, it's as accurate as it is.
28:13
Speaker 1: The people who are inclined to make mischief are far
28:18
Speaker 1: less motivated than the people who really care deeply about
28:22
Speaker 1: a subject. You have a run of different experts writing
28:25
Speaker 1: about it. It's a crowdsourced version of an encyclopedia. And
28:29
Speaker 1: it seems Yeah, the mischief makers can have a little
28:32
Speaker 1: fun on the on the periphery, but the people who
28:35
Speaker 1: cared deeply about something aren't gonna allow it to be despoiled.
28:39
Speaker 1: Or at least that's how it seems to work in
28:40
Speaker 1: the real world. Yeah, of course there are other problems too.
28:43
Speaker 1: Besides besides obvious errors, there there's opinion and their points
28:47
Speaker 1: of view, and and we we seem to be living
28:50
Speaker 1: through an election where um, people have not just different opinions,
28:56
Speaker 1: but they feel entitled to their own sets of facts.
28:59
Speaker 1: And Wikipedia, like the rest of us, gets embroiled into
29:03
Speaker 1: disputes over over what's actually true because and this has
29:08
Speaker 1: been called the post factual era well, and and with
29:12
Speaker 1: the best of intentions, we can't ever be absolutely certain
29:16
Speaker 1: that we have a claim to to the truth. And
29:19
Speaker 1: so now another thing I guess we've learned from Wikipedia,
29:23
Speaker 1: or maybe from the Internet in general, is two always
29:28
Speaker 1: at least I think this is what we should have
29:30
Speaker 1: learned to have a little bit of humility about what
29:32
Speaker 1: we think we know to be true, to recognize that
29:36
Speaker 1: our knowledge is provisional, to keep an open mind and
29:40
Speaker 1: continue to listen to other possibilities as scientists do as
29:45
Speaker 1: the best scientists have always done. The best scientists don't
29:49
Speaker 1: say here's the truth. I have arrived at it. That's final,
29:53
Speaker 1: end of story for those of you joining us. Now
29:56
Speaker 1: we're speaking with James Glick. He's the author of The Information,
30:00
Speaker 1: A Theory of History of Flood. Let me pull a
30:03
Speaker 1: quote out of the book that I really like you wrote,
30:06
Speaker 1: the same paradox was destined to reappear in different guises,
30:11
Speaker 1: each technology of information bringing its own power and its
30:15
Speaker 1: own fears. Would we say that's still true today? Well,
30:18
Speaker 1: isn't it. Every time we get a new social network,
30:22
Speaker 1: or a or a a new uh, a new device,
30:26
Speaker 1: some people worry that it's just gonna drain us of humanity, right,
30:31
Speaker 1: that we're gonna we're going to maybe gain some kinds
30:35
Speaker 1: of knowledge and then lose some of their skills. And
30:38
Speaker 1: that's always been true. I mean, when when electronic calculators arrived,
30:42
Speaker 1: people started very quickly to forget how to do arithmetic.
30:45
Speaker 1: But before that, when well, for that matter, when writing
30:50
Speaker 1: was invented, Plato worried about the effect it was going
30:53
Speaker 1: to have on human memory. I used to have a
30:56
Speaker 1: thousand phone numbers in my head. Now, courtesy of the
30:59
Speaker 1: I phone, I don't know anybody's phone number. So there
31:02
Speaker 1: you go. And is that a good thing or a
31:04
Speaker 1: bad thing? You can take your pick. I would I
31:08
Speaker 1: suspect I only have a finite capacity, and I'm freeing
31:11
Speaker 1: up some space for perhaps more useful functions. But along
31:16
Speaker 1: the same lines, while I was preparing for this, uh
31:19
Speaker 1: and researching and googling certain things, I came across Louis c.
31:24
Speaker 1: K On I think it was on Conan, and he
31:28
Speaker 1: does this hilarious bit about everything is amazing and nobody's happy.
31:35
Speaker 1: It's told in Jess. But how accurate is that sentiment? Well, yes,
31:41
Speaker 1: it's it's partly a joke because it's an exaggeration to
31:44
Speaker 1: say that nobody's happy. But I think what he's pointing
31:47
Speaker 1: out is is something that's healthy that we have these
31:51
Speaker 1: We have tremendous powers. We have what would have looked
31:54
Speaker 1: to our grandparents like the magical abilities to access one
31:59
Speaker 1: another there and to access sources of information. And yet
32:03
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily feel any smarter, and that's good because
32:08
Speaker 1: we aren't any smarter. We have we have new sources
32:11
Speaker 1: of knowledge, and we have new reasons to worry about
32:16
Speaker 1: attention deficit disorder, to worry about um, about new sources
32:22
Speaker 1: of error, and as I say too, hopefully remain humble.
32:27
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with author James Glick, most recently
32:32
Speaker 1: writing Time Travel a History on Twitter. You're at James
32:36
Speaker 1: Glick spelled g L E I c k at James Glick.
32:40
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and stick around
32:43
Speaker 1: for the podcast extras, where the tape will continue to
32:46
Speaker 1: roll as we discuss all things time travel related. Be
32:50
Speaker 1: sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View
32:54
Speaker 1: dot com or follow me on Twitter at Riholts. I'm
32:58
Speaker 1: Barry Riholts. You've and listening to Masters in Business on
33:02
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch.
33:09
Speaker 1: Seeing what others have seen, but uncovering what others may not.
33:12
Speaker 1: Global Research that helps You Harness disruption. Voted top global
33:16
Speaker 1: research firm five years running. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Finner and
33:20
Speaker 1: Smith Incorporated. Welcome to the podcast, James, thank you so
33:23
Speaker 1: much for doing this. I have been a fan of
33:25
Speaker 1: yours for quite a while, and i've I've enjoyed your books, Um,
33:30
Speaker 1: and I remember not just plowing through Chaos, which for
33:34
Speaker 1: a recovering physics want was a delight, but The Information
33:39
Speaker 1: was one of those books that was I can't complimented enough.
33:45
Speaker 1: It's a tour de force of information theory and human
33:50
Speaker 1: technological development. It's almost as if information theory is an
33:55
Speaker 1: overlay across every single technology that we've developed, more or
34:00
Speaker 1: less from sharp and Stones forward. Is that an overstatement
34:05
Speaker 1: or no? I think you got that. I think you've
34:07
Speaker 1: got that exactly right, Mary, And you know we're pretty
34:11
Speaker 1: well aware of that. These days, we hear a lot
34:14
Speaker 1: about information. We know this is the information age. It's
34:17
Speaker 1: been the information age now for more than fifty years.
34:20
Speaker 1: So it's it's interesting too to stop and explore that
34:24
Speaker 1: and figure out how information became a thing and and
34:28
Speaker 1: how we can make it a useful part of our
34:32
Speaker 1: lives without letting it overwhelm us. So I I went
34:35
Speaker 1: through Chaos, I reviewed UM the Information I revisited faster. UM.
34:44
Speaker 1: I didn't go through Isaac Newton or or Feynman, Although
34:47
Speaker 1: I've listened to his lecture, so I'm kind of more
34:51
Speaker 1: or less up to speed with that. And I started
34:53
Speaker 1: time travel recently, and I'm I'm pretty much halfway through.
34:57
Speaker 1: So I have some questions for you about it that
35:00
Speaker 1: I find fascinating, many of which you allude to in
35:03
Speaker 1: the beginning, And hopefully I'm not going to ask you
35:05
Speaker 1: stuff that you resolve later in the book. But one
35:08
Speaker 1: of the questions that comes up over and over again
35:11
Speaker 1: philosophically in the book is time real? Does time actually exist?
35:17
Speaker 1: Or is it just an allusion to us pathetic humans?
35:21
Speaker 1: And isn't that kind of Isn't it funny that we
35:24
Speaker 1: even ask a question like that, because and physicists do
35:27
Speaker 1: ask it. Physicists even have they have symposia on the
35:31
Speaker 1: question of whether time is real? Well, what does that mean?
35:35
Speaker 1: Because if time isn't real, what have we been talking
35:38
Speaker 1: about for all of these millennia. It's one of the
35:40
Speaker 1: oldest concepts in the book. It is, I believe, in English,
35:45
Speaker 1: the noun most frequently used in the language time time.
35:49
Speaker 1: That's quite fascinating. Well, the the counter argument is, there's
35:53
Speaker 1: only the presence you going from. We'll start with the
35:57
Speaker 1: big bang and end up with universal entropy and the
36:00
Speaker 1: heat death trillion years in the future. And we can
36:04
Speaker 1: conceptualize the future, we can recall our own distorted perspective
36:09
Speaker 1: of the past, but really there's only the here and now,
36:12
Speaker 1: and what might be or what might have come before
36:16
Speaker 1: is just that progression along. Well, there's there's what you
36:22
Speaker 1: you might call the kind of naive person in the
36:25
Speaker 1: street view of time, and before before that sounds too condescending,
36:31
Speaker 1: I should say, that's that's my view of time. That
36:34
Speaker 1: is I'm going to endorse the naive view. And and
36:37
Speaker 1: that view is is this. It's that the only thing
36:40
Speaker 1: that's real is the present. What's happening now, that's real,
36:45
Speaker 1: this instant, this instant, I'm looking at you, you're looking
36:48
Speaker 1: at me. Here we are. But I said that a
36:51
Speaker 1: few seconds ago, and now it's gone. It's the past
36:55
Speaker 1: and it was real, but it's not real. We have
36:58
Speaker 1: lost access to it. We have a memory of it,
37:02
Speaker 1: we have records, we have artifacts, we have ruins. But
37:05
Speaker 1: the past is gone and the future isn't real because
37:10
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist yet. We can imagine it, we can
37:13
Speaker 1: think about it, we can worry about it, we can
37:15
Speaker 1: fear it. But it's not real the way the present is.
37:19
Speaker 1: And so if you believe that, then you have what
37:23
Speaker 1: I consider to be a kind of reasonable view of
37:26
Speaker 1: how time works. Um, why do you say that's the
37:29
Speaker 1: naive man in the street view? Because physicists have developed
37:34
Speaker 1: a more complicated view of the universe, which which we're
37:38
Speaker 1: also familiar with, in which time is like a fourth
37:43
Speaker 1: dimension of space, and time and space together have an
37:48
Speaker 1: independent reality that we call space time. And you can
37:51
Speaker 1: imagine all of creation, all of existence, as a four
37:55
Speaker 1: dimensional space time continuum. And if you imagine this thing
38:00
Speaker 1: as a big block, then the past is there, and
38:04
Speaker 1: the future is there, and there's a point that our
38:07
Speaker 1: consciousness happens to be moving through and we call that
38:11
Speaker 1: the present. But it's an illusion to think that only
38:15
Speaker 1: that part is real. All the rest is real too,
38:17
Speaker 1: and you can make calculations about them using the equations
38:21
Speaker 1: of physics. So along those lines, I think the phrase
38:24
Speaker 1: in the book is the pink worm. Basically, somebody's life's
38:28
Speaker 1: lifespan as existing through four dimensions, and you're seeing them.
38:32
Speaker 1: They start out crawling, they end up on two legs,
38:35
Speaker 1: and ultimately end up on on on three legs with
38:38
Speaker 1: the cane. Isn't that just an abstract conception as well?
38:43
Speaker 1: Or does physics say, well, if you really make the
38:46
Speaker 1: fourth dimension real, that that is its own existence as well? Well?
38:52
Speaker 1: That that pink worm that comes from a science fiction
38:55
Speaker 1: story by Robert Heinlin, And we can we can imagine that.
38:59
Speaker 1: You can wrap your heads around that. If you imagine
39:02
Speaker 1: the human being that you are now as a three
39:05
Speaker 1: dimensional object, what's the four dimensional version? It starts with
39:09
Speaker 1: you as a baby, and it ends with you dead,
39:12
Speaker 1: and along the way you could, you know, construct a
39:16
Speaker 1: well along pink worm. But that's you know, that's a match.
39:20
Speaker 1: That's a fantasy, right, I mean, we're still here are
39:25
Speaker 1: We're just the three dimensional blobs that we are, and
39:28
Speaker 1: and we are changing from one form to another. What
39:33
Speaker 1: about Stephen hawkings um time travel party. I found that
39:37
Speaker 1: to be kind of amusing, although I think he made
39:39
Speaker 1: a small error in his in his calculus. What's the error?
39:45
Speaker 1: So my naive view of time travel, assuming it exists,
39:49
Speaker 1: which is a giant assumption. Um, you could go back
39:53
Speaker 1: in time, and you could go so there's time that
39:56
Speaker 1: has not yet unrolled yet. Picture the manaphor is a
40:01
Speaker 1: film camera. You can you can shoot a movie and
40:04
Speaker 1: you can always go back and rewind and look at
40:06
Speaker 1: anything you've shot, and you could go forward to where
40:09
Speaker 1: you currently are, but you can't see anything that has
40:12
Speaker 1: not yet been filmed. So you can travel back in time,
40:16
Speaker 1: and you could travel up to the present, but no
40:19
Speaker 1: further than that. Um, so you can't go into the
40:22
Speaker 1: future that has not yet uh unrolled. So the first
40:27
Speaker 1: time Stephen Hawkins does that the future hasn't occurred. There
40:31
Speaker 1: are no time travelers to come back. It's only at
40:33
Speaker 1: some future date in an alternative lot timeline that travelers
40:38
Speaker 1: can come back to the future. And so this is
40:41
Speaker 1: that's how we know, Stephen Hawkins taught us. This is
40:44
Speaker 1: the first go through. We're not really living an alternative time. Well,
40:48
Speaker 1: you've got an interesting theory, so in in your theory
40:51
Speaker 1: as possible to the pet as possible, to the past,
40:54
Speaker 1: but not to the future beyond where it's unrolled. And
40:59
Speaker 1: we're talking about Stephen Hawkings famous invitation to time travelers.
41:03
Speaker 1: He printed up an invitation and said, dear dear time
41:07
Speaker 1: travelers from the future, you're invited to this party, which
41:10
Speaker 1: took place last week. And then he said, well, nobody
41:13
Speaker 1: showed up. Therefore, I have proved that time travel doesn't exist.
41:19
Speaker 1: There are no time travelers from the future among us.
41:22
Speaker 1: He should know better because he created the paradox, had he,
41:26
Speaker 1: and he was right this go around. But if there
41:28
Speaker 1: is time travel that's evented a thousand years hence, then
41:32
Speaker 1: in the alternative timeline where they come back and visit
41:36
Speaker 1: his party, won't he be surprised? Well, I think Hawking was.
41:40
Speaker 1: It was partly putting that out there with his tongue
41:43
Speaker 1: in his cheek, just to touch and then he, like
41:47
Speaker 1: like other physicists, like to have fun with time travel
41:50
Speaker 1: because it's such an exciting idea. Um. One person I
41:54
Speaker 1: ran into said he had he had yet another theory
41:57
Speaker 1: of for why we aren't seeing the time travelers in
41:59
Speaker 1: our midst and it's that they're afraid of disease. There
42:03
Speaker 1: you go, they don't have an immune system the way
42:05
Speaker 1: settlers on a new continent catch diseases that they aren't
42:09
Speaker 1: prepared for. And so what we should do is create
42:12
Speaker 1: quarantine areas and then sound send out the infantition. Again.
42:16
Speaker 1: There you go. That that makes a lot of sense.
42:19
Speaker 1: Or they could be similarly fearful of the butterfly effect
42:22
Speaker 1: and not wanting to change future history. I'm early in
42:26
Speaker 1: the book you talk about something I've always wondered, which
42:29
Speaker 1: isn't the time aspect of it, but it's the physical
42:33
Speaker 1: space aspect of it. We have we have the Earth
42:36
Speaker 1: um rotating, revolving, we have the Sun and moving around
42:41
Speaker 1: the entire galaxy. The galaxy is expanding from from the
42:45
Speaker 1: point of of the Big Bang. How do you physically
42:48
Speaker 1: end up given all this motion in those three dimensions?
42:52
Speaker 1: When you so the Earth today, if you go into
42:54
Speaker 1: a time machine right here and you want to go
42:57
Speaker 1: back a thousand years, you're that taught three dimensional, those
43:00
Speaker 1: three coordinates. It is not here, it's it's we're really
43:04
Speaker 1: getting into the weeds here, Barry. And And it's true
43:06
Speaker 1: that this is the kind of thing that if you're
43:08
Speaker 1: going to construct a science fiction story, you have to
43:11
Speaker 1: worry about, or if you don't want to worry about it,
43:13
Speaker 1: you have to you know, a little a little hocus focus,
43:17
Speaker 1: a little hocus focus. So H. G. Wells, when he
43:20
Speaker 1: wrote The Time Machine, didn't worry about that. You know,
43:23
Speaker 1: it didn't occur to him, or if it occurred to him,
43:25
Speaker 1: he decided his readers weren't going to think about it,
43:28
Speaker 1: so his time machine just advances through space and he
43:32
Speaker 1: ignores the fact that the whole Earth is going to
43:35
Speaker 1: be in a different place. You know, um, nowadays you
43:39
Speaker 1: can do whatever you want if you if you want
43:41
Speaker 1: to construct a science fiction story. And everybody who watches
43:46
Speaker 1: Doctor Who knows that the tardest, the Great Blue British
43:52
Speaker 1: London Police block box travels through time and through space
43:57
Speaker 1: and so it gets to go wherever the Doctor wants
43:59
Speaker 1: to ascended. So I know, I only have you for
44:03
Speaker 1: a finite amount of time, and I have a million
44:06
Speaker 1: questions for you. Let me jump right to my favorite
44:09
Speaker 1: few questions I asked all my guests. Um, So, as
44:13
Speaker 1: a writer, who are some of your early mentors? I
44:18
Speaker 1: don't think I had mentors because I started out as
44:22
Speaker 1: a as a journalist. I was a reporter. I was
44:25
Speaker 1: an editor. My my first boss at the New York
44:27
Speaker 1: Times was the great Sydney Schanberg, who was a magnificent
44:32
Speaker 1: foreign correspondent who was Metropolitan editor when I started working
44:37
Speaker 1: at the New York Times, and I I revered him
44:40
Speaker 1: and still still revere him. But I can't say that
44:45
Speaker 1: he had all that much time for me. Um, So
44:48
Speaker 1: let's talk about other writers and editors who might have
44:51
Speaker 1: influenced your approach to writing. Who who do you feel
44:54
Speaker 1: has been a um an influence on on your work? Well? Also,
45:00
Speaker 1: let me say two contradictory things. One is I write
45:03
Speaker 1: a kind of nonfiction that is has journalism at its root,
45:09
Speaker 1: even though I haven't really been a journalist for a while.
45:11
Speaker 1: And one person, one writer I admired very much when
45:16
Speaker 1: I was starting out, was Gay to Leaves, who, um
45:21
Speaker 1: you know his he's known for his books now. I
45:23
Speaker 1: don't know how well known he'll he'll be to our listeners,
45:27
Speaker 1: but um, he wrote in Back in the Dark Ages
45:32
Speaker 1: profiles for Esquire magazine that were absolutely magnificent. They were
45:37
Speaker 1: a kind of writing that I really aspired to that
45:41
Speaker 1: involved no first person, nothing about him, just kind of
45:49
Speaker 1: intensively reported kind of work where you knew so much,
45:55
Speaker 1: you spent so much time with your subject and knew
45:58
Speaker 1: so much about your subject that you could that you
46:02
Speaker 1: could achieve something close to omniscience, and you could write
46:06
Speaker 1: about your subject the way a novelist would you. You wouldn't.
46:11
Speaker 1: You wouldn't just do an interview where you're talking to
46:13
Speaker 1: your subject but but you would be eavesdropping on the
46:15
Speaker 1: conversations that your subject is having as he or she
46:19
Speaker 1: went through daily life. Narrative nonfiction. I love that kind
46:22
Speaker 1: of writing. And so the other half of my answer
46:25
Speaker 1: to your question is I read fiction. It's it's I
46:29
Speaker 1: don't read very much nonfiction myself, because the writer's I
46:33
Speaker 1: admire most tend to be fiction writers. So let's talk
46:36
Speaker 1: a little bit about your favorite books. Tell tell us
46:39
Speaker 1: some books that either recently or way back when, that
46:43
Speaker 1: that you've really enjoyed. All right, Well, you know, favorite
46:46
Speaker 1: books books is so arbitrary and changes week by week.
46:51
Speaker 1: So I feel entitled to name a couple of books
46:54
Speaker 1: that I talked about in time Travel because their time
46:56
Speaker 1: travel books, and but they aren't necessarily obvious time travel books.
47:01
Speaker 1: So one of them is um by the great Ursula
47:05
Speaker 1: k Legwin, a novel called The Lathe of Heaven, and
47:11
Speaker 1: it's not exactly time travel. It involves a helpless man
47:16
Speaker 1: who discovers that when he dreams, he is reshaping the future.
47:22
Speaker 1: And well, hilarity ensues that I want to give the
47:25
Speaker 1: book away. It's a it's an imaginative tour to force
47:28
Speaker 1: someone just did a fantastic profile on her. I want
47:32
Speaker 1: to say it was either The Atlantic or Esquire New
47:36
Speaker 1: Yorker New Yorkers that just was out like two weeks ago.
47:39
Speaker 1: Actually I say that, and now I'm not a d
47:41
Speaker 1: percent sure, so they can check this and go back
47:45
Speaker 1: and edit it. But yes, I'm a great fan of hers.
47:47
Speaker 1: She's she is just a great spirit as well as
47:50
Speaker 1: a great writer. Who else? Who else? Do you? What
47:52
Speaker 1: other books are you? Well? And the last book that
47:55
Speaker 1: I wrote about in time Travel is the most recent
47:58
Speaker 1: book by William Gibson, science science fiction writer who really
48:02
Speaker 1: is his visionary and transcends science fiction. And he had
48:06
Speaker 1: avoided time travel through his whole career, even though his
48:11
Speaker 1: books were set in the future. He for one reason
48:14
Speaker 1: or another wasn't interested in time travel. And then suddenly
48:17
Speaker 1: in his latest book, The Peripheral, he invents a new
48:21
Speaker 1: kind of time travel that is very um redolent of
48:27
Speaker 1: our world of cyberspace, which is appropriate because William Gibson
48:31
Speaker 1: invented cyberspace. Neuromancer was mona Lisa overdrive, And so I'll
48:38
Speaker 1: recommend The Peripheral. The Peripheral give us a non time
48:42
Speaker 1: travel book that you've enjoyed of recently. Um alright, well
48:47
Speaker 1: just um, because I just finished reading it and Patchett's
48:51
Speaker 1: new novel, Commonwealth, which is nothing that there's no science
48:56
Speaker 1: fiction or anything else. She's a beautiful writer. It's a
48:59
Speaker 1: family story that takes place over generations. And if you
49:04
Speaker 1: forced me to bring it back to the conversation, which
49:06
Speaker 1: you're not trying to do, I would say that she
49:10
Speaker 1: also is a master of using time and memory in
49:16
Speaker 1: creative narrative ways. Sommon Wealth, so let me I'm gonna
49:22
Speaker 1: go or of script a moment. You're an accomplished writer. No.
49:28
Speaker 1: Three of your books nominated for Pulitzers. When you are
49:32
Speaker 1: reading something, are you just reading for escapist pleasure? Does
49:37
Speaker 1: the craft intrude on your ability to read? Are you
49:41
Speaker 1: sort of noticing little oh, I see what they did here?
49:44
Speaker 1: Are you noticing techniques? Or do you get definitely? But
49:49
Speaker 1: first of all, why escapist pleasure? Can't I just read
49:53
Speaker 1: for you know, virtuous life, life enhancement. Well, but but
49:58
Speaker 1: that's how the criticism has always been about fiction versus nonfiction.
50:03
Speaker 1: I need for pleasure, and I don't feel guilty about that.
50:06
Speaker 1: But it's it's true that when I'm writing. In particular,
50:11
Speaker 1: there are times it often happens that I'm reading a
50:14
Speaker 1: book and suddenly I think, ah ha, I can steal that.
50:19
Speaker 1: And I and I'm meaning a technique or meaning a
50:24
Speaker 1: technique or the way a sentence is constructed, or a
50:28
Speaker 1: rhythm or something I don't even know what it is,
50:33
Speaker 1: but something I'll need to I'll need to put the
50:36
Speaker 1: book down for a second and rush over to the keyboard.
50:38
Speaker 1: So so you, as you're reading, you are stealing. But
50:43
Speaker 1: by the way, the reason I ask every single guest
50:47
Speaker 1: for some of their favorite books. I've had a dozen billionaires,
50:53
Speaker 1: I've had just as many Nobel laureates in the studio
50:57
Speaker 1: and other people of accomplishment, and pretty much every single one.
51:02
Speaker 1: When you get to the question, so what do you
51:06
Speaker 1: attribute your success to? The concept of constantly learning, constantly reading,
51:14
Speaker 1: being able to take advantage of the information that someone
51:20
Speaker 1: someone basically lives a lifetime and says, here, I'm gonna
51:24
Speaker 1: spend a year and spill out what I've learned over
51:26
Speaker 1: fifty years. Have this to to ignore? That is a
51:30
Speaker 1: a tremendous waste and the idea of accessing books and
51:34
Speaker 1: knowledge and other people's experience comes up over and over.
51:38
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you specifically what you get out
51:42
Speaker 1: of reading, because you're a professional writer and and you
51:45
Speaker 1: pretty much address the question the way I was hoping,
51:50
Speaker 1: But I always asked the question. And it's amazing how
51:54
Speaker 1: animated some people become about the books that are so
51:58
Speaker 1: significant to them. They really, um seem to have credited
52:04
Speaker 1: reading as as an enormous part of their development. So
52:08
Speaker 1: so that's why that that comes up. Um, So what
52:12
Speaker 1: do you do outside of writing for for pleasure? What
52:17
Speaker 1: do you do, uh to to keep yourself? Um, I'm
52:23
Speaker 1: gonna rephray, I'm gonna ask that again in a slightly
52:26
Speaker 1: different way. So outside of the office, outside of writing,
52:29
Speaker 1: what do you do to relax away from books? What
52:40
Speaker 1: does anybody do? I don't know. I go to movies,
52:43
Speaker 1: I listen to music, I go to place I occasionally
52:49
Speaker 1: it's hard, as as it may be to believe I
52:51
Speaker 1: actually just sit quietly. Okay, that that's not hard to
52:56
Speaker 1: believe at all. And and now, um, by the way,
53:00
Speaker 1: that's a question that had come from listeners, and people
53:04
Speaker 1: always ask ask people what they do to relax outside
53:06
Speaker 1: of the office. And then my last it's kind of
53:09
Speaker 1: an interesting question. There's no office, you know, I mean
53:13
Speaker 1: there is an office. You have a computer somewhere. Are
53:15
Speaker 1: you have a desk? Right? So what do you when
53:17
Speaker 1: you're away from the desk? That I I for the
53:21
Speaker 1: most part, I assume people are conceptualizing, um, a sort
53:26
Speaker 1: of grinding workload and what do people do outside of that?
53:30
Speaker 1: And these are not I can as someone who writes
53:33
Speaker 1: a daily column, I can tell there's an enormous amount
53:37
Speaker 1: of work and thought and activity and energy that goes
53:41
Speaker 1: into this. It's not There may not be a physical office,
53:44
Speaker 1: but there is clearly a defined workspace and a lot
53:48
Speaker 1: of labor goes into that. Is that a fair statement?
53:51
Speaker 1: That's fair? Um? And there is an office, it's just
53:55
Speaker 1: in my house. Okay. Uh So, if a millennial or
53:59
Speaker 1: someone who graduated from college came up to you and
54:02
Speaker 1: said they were interested in a career as either a
54:05
Speaker 1: journalist or an author, what sort of advice would you
54:09
Speaker 1: give them? Well? I got two pieces of advice. The
54:14
Speaker 1: first one is don't take too much advice from um,
54:20
Speaker 1: people much older than yourself, And the second is just um, right,
54:26
Speaker 1: the only way to the only way to learn how
54:28
Speaker 1: to write is to write, and um, reading about writing
54:32
Speaker 1: isn't going to help. Going to school to learn how
54:35
Speaker 1: to write isn't going to help. You just have to
54:37
Speaker 1: have to write. And um, if you need to find
54:42
Speaker 1: somebody to give you orders, then you know, try to
54:45
Speaker 1: work for a newspaper. So I like the paradox of
54:49
Speaker 1: here's my advice, don't take my advice. I find that interesting.
54:53
Speaker 1: And finally, so you've been writing The Chaos came out
54:57
Speaker 1: in eighty seven, You've been writing thirty plus years. What
55:00
Speaker 1: is it that you know about the craft of writing today?
55:03
Speaker 1: You wish you knew thirty years ago? When you begin,
55:08
Speaker 1: the question implies that I know something about the craft
55:11
Speaker 1: of writing. And are you really going to fight me
55:13
Speaker 1: on that? I really am seriously, Ye, Pulitzer nominations, I
55:19
Speaker 1: know this is embarrassing. Three National Book Awards. You clearly
55:25
Speaker 1: know a thing or two about writing. Maybe I don't
55:27
Speaker 1: know what I know that I feel each time I'm
55:31
Speaker 1: still figuring it out each time. Is that true you
55:34
Speaker 1: when you approach a new book. I do not lie
55:36
Speaker 1: to you, Barry. I do not sit down and think, Okay,
55:40
Speaker 1: here's I don't have a file of index cards of
55:42
Speaker 1: things I've learned. I think, oh my god, what am
55:45
Speaker 1: How am I going to do it this time? So
55:48
Speaker 1: each time you approach a new topic, a new subject,
55:50
Speaker 1: a new book, you're starting from scratch. It's literally a
55:55
Speaker 1: blank page. Now what am I going to do with this? Oh,
55:58
Speaker 1: it's always it's always a blank page. It well, the
56:02
Speaker 1: page itself, but the approach how you I have to
56:06
Speaker 1: imagine that you have developed some skills and some techniques over,
56:10
Speaker 1: I must have some skills. But if you're accusing me
56:13
Speaker 1: of of withholding some some magic sand click, he's not sharing.
56:20
Speaker 1: You know. If if other people are giving you the secret,
56:23
Speaker 1: I'd like I'd like to know what they are. But um, yeah,
56:26
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that when I write the book about
56:28
Speaker 1: this radio series. Here. Let me save people the three
56:34
Speaker 1: things that come up over and over and over again.
56:37
Speaker 1: It's hard work, it's reading, and it's a little bit
56:41
Speaker 1: of luck that has those three things have come up
56:44
Speaker 1: from person to person to person. And I'm referring to
56:48
Speaker 1: people who are you know, by any measure of traditional wealth,
56:54
Speaker 1: professional accolades, whatever, awards, and you kind of nor when
57:01
Speaker 1: you hear the same things over, I'm fortunate that somehow
57:04
Speaker 1: I've talked this building into allowing me to do this
57:08
Speaker 1: and conning people like yourself into coming here. Um, and
57:12
Speaker 1: and that comes up over again. Well, I absolutely agree
57:16
Speaker 1: with all three of those. Oh, so there it is.
57:18
Speaker 1: I didn't mean to put words into your math. I
57:21
Speaker 1: just wanted to share those three. We have been speaking
57:25
Speaker 1: with author James Glick, most recently. Um, he put out
57:29
Speaker 1: the book Time Travel of History. I also highly recommend
57:34
Speaker 1: the information. And if you have any sort of bend
57:36
Speaker 1: towards physics, I would tell you chaos is just a
57:40
Speaker 1: fascinating and by the way, it's held up very well,
57:44
Speaker 1: mostly because you don't make any declarations. Um, this is
57:48
Speaker 1: how it is, and this is how it's always going
57:49
Speaker 1: to be. It's a history of what took place in
57:53
Speaker 1: chaos theory up to that point. And I think the
57:55
Speaker 1: book is the test of time. You're raising your eyebrows
57:59
Speaker 1: and now I'm I'm I'm thanking you for saying that. Okay, well,
58:02
Speaker 1: I'm not the only person who said that Time Travel
58:05
Speaker 1: of History. If you enjoy this conversation, be shure and
58:08
Speaker 1: check out the other hundred or so uh such chats
58:12
Speaker 1: on iTunes. Just look up an inch or down an
58:14
Speaker 1: inch and you can see the rest of them. I
58:17
Speaker 1: would be remiss if I did not think my booker,
58:20
Speaker 1: Taylor Riggs. We love your comments and feedback. Be sure
58:24
Speaker 1: to write to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg
58:29
Speaker 1: dot net. I'm Barry rid Holts. You've been listening to
58:33
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by
58:36
Speaker 1: Bank of America. Merrill Lynch committed to bringing higher finance
58:40
Speaker 1: to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for
58:43
Speaker 1: climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power
58:47
Speaker 1: of Global Connections. Bank of America North America member f
58:51
Speaker 1: D I C