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