Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio)

science and technology for a long time. I've been a fan of his for many, many years, going back to really the first book he ever wrote, called Chaos, Making of a New Science. I'm a physics geek, it's sort of my background, and at the time this book came out, it was really cunning edge stuff. It was absolutely fascinating.

It's not the most accessible subject, but i'mronically long before I joined finance, chaos UH and chaos theory had all sorts of applications UH to the world of markets and investing. It's not a coincidence that theoretical physicists and mathematicians end up working on Wall Street. The ability to deal with issues of uncertainty and probability and randomness are really really helpful when when thinking about markets. This was a really

unusual book. It's a very challenging subject and Click makes it accessible and really quite quite fascinating and enjoyable. UH. From the book comes the term the butterfly effect, which Click is credited with popularizing. But that's just one book he had written many years ago. He's written dozens of books, including biographies on Richard Lineman and Isaac Newton, and What Just Happened, which is about technology, and Faster, which is

about changes in technology. I think his his magnum opus is UH The Information, A History A Theory of flood. It is just a brilliant exposition about information theory and how all technology has tracked various ways of communicating uh as people. UM, It's really a brilliant, brilliant book. Who was nominated for a Pulitzer Uh. It's totally totally readable. I I found it to be delightful to just dive into. I think I read it on the beach on vacation

in in in a day and a half for two days. UH. And his most recent book is actually a little off the beaten path. It's quite charming. It's called Time Travel History, and it discusses how time travel as a concept has developed. You you may be shocked to learn that before H. G. Wells's book The Time Machine, there was no such thing as time travel. Nobody had even conceptualized it. It simply didn't exist. Anyway, I could babble about the books he's

written about over and over again. Rather than do that, let's just jump right to my interview, my conversation with James click Voss Masters in Business with Barry Ridholtz on Boomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Gleek. He is one of my favorite science writers, perhaps best described as a historian of science ideas, looking at the impact

of technology on our understanding of the world. He is the author of Chaos, Making of a New Science, The Information, A History, A Theory of Flood, and his latest book is Time Travel History. Several of his books have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Finalist Awards. The Information was awarded the pen Literary Science Award as well as the Royal Society Witton Prize for Science Books. James Glick, Welcome to Bloomberg. Well, thank you. I'm happy to be here.

I have to start out asking about your background, because you're really the fact that you're a science writer is sort of surprising. You majored in English and linguistics. How did that morph into science writing? I was a journalist. I wasn't. I wasn't any kind of scientist, and I I never intended to be a science writer, and I'm hardly I don't really think I'm a science writer now. And you know, Time Travel isn't really a science book. Well not yet, but one day it might be. Well

we we can dream, but it isn't. But but it really isn't. I mean, I have a I have a feeling that if you go into the bookstore you can probably find it in the science section. But I think it's actually it's actually a mistake. So in general, your books are these deeply researched, years in the making sort of projects. What what made you approach book writing in that way? I approached book writing in the first place as a journalist and deeply researched. Well, that's you know,

that's what you do. You go out and you talk to people, you do reporting. I thought of it as reporting before I thought of it as research. It's changed, it's changed a little bit over the years. But my first book, Chaos was about something dramatic that was happening in the world of science that wasn't getting any attention as far as I could see. And I learned about it almost by accident when I was writing a profile of a of a scientist, and I was only writing

profiles of scientists because I was interested in science. I liked it, so which would that be Mandelbrod or or Um. No. Ways, the way it actually came about was I wrote a profile early on of Douglas Hofstader. Sure I read go to lesch Bach exactly right, and he was, you know, he was a computer scientist and was um had a

lot to say about consciousness. And he was the one who told me that he had heard about this thing called Kass theory that was going on, and that that not just mathematicians and physicists but also economists and meteorologists and by all everybody was talking about chaos theory, but it was very much under the radar. And I thought, well, that sounds kind of cool, and it was, and and

I've been recommending that book for for many years. Well, will come back to that, um so somewhat unusual career path. Then if you started out as a journalist, how do you veer from someone doing broad interviews to somebody doing these really deep dives into very very comprehensive and complicated subjects like information theory or chaos theory. Well, chaos theory just you know, as I said, started out as a

kind of journalism I was. I felt I was reporting on something that was very real, that was happening in the world, and it just happened to be science, and I approached it. I intended to approach it the way a political reporter would approach politics, or a reporter specializing

in art would approach art. You know, it just happened to be science, and a line a bunch of experts asked them questions, some dumb questions, and figure out what was going on, and I wanted to My goal in that book wasn't so much explained the ideas of chaos as tell the story of how this new science was being born, and tell the stories of the individual scientists and find out what they were thinking and how they

communicated with one another. And that was just I mean, that's the kind of book I like to read, So that's the kind of book I wrote. But it's true. Um not the usual approach to writing a book on science then, or do you think of the Worst Day of Dagon? Similar? But I'm not sure there is one usual approach. You know, science writing covers a lot of territory, a lot of there's a kind of science writing that's written by scientists, and they write about their own work,

or they write about other things in the field. I mean, I was a huge admirer of Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote um the most beautiful essays, and they often turned into books about his own work and work that was connected to his work. And he had a very broad view of the world, and you could learn a lot from reading his stuff. And there are many there are people today who write about physics, who are physicists, and they're just trying to explain, maybe in a popular way,

the things they know. I don't like the word popularization, maybe because I'm not an expert myself. You know, I'm not trying to popularize things. I'm trying to write about things that I care about and in some cases barely understand when I get started. The word popularize often implies a dumbing down from mass audience. Exactly, you're you have never been accused of of doing and I don't know how you dumb care. I don't know. I've been accused

of just about everything. Barry, thank you, but um, but not that. No, but I'm not. I don't need to dumb anything down. I need to raise my own understanding to the level of grasping the stuff I'm writing about. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest this week is James Glicky is the author of numerous books, most recently time Travel History, and let's jump right into this. I was astonished to learned from your book that prior to H. G. Wells, there really wasn't

a whole lot of discussion of time travel. How is that possible? Not just not a lot of discussion? Time travel didn't exist. The words the words literally were not used in English. If you had said to somebody, are you interested in time travel? They would have just looked at you as if you were crazy. And yes, I was astonished too. If there was one thing that got me going on this as a book subject, it was that discovery that that the idea of time travel has

had a relatively short lifetime, barely essential. And the reason it's hard to believe. I mean, I I assume that that some of the people listening to us are thinking, well, that's not true, that's ridiculous. What about X and X might be I'm going to guess now people might be thinking,

weren't there Greek myths that involved traveling through time? Or what about a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was a little before H. G. Wells that clearly didn't involve time travel, then involved We're going to show you a potential future. That is the difference, and then rip Van Winkle sleeps into the future. And you could say, you could argue, with the advantage of hindsight, that that's a kind of time travel if you want to explore the literature,

which I did have to do extensively there. Um, there were sort of precursors to the idea, but until H. G. Wells, nobody imagined a machine or any other method where you could choose to transport yourself to another place in time, in the past or in the future. There was no possibility of volition, and of course Wells jumped right into it. He invented a machine with a lever, and his time traveler as he called him, hops on the machine and sends himself hurtling into the future. So what was it

that led you to an interest in time travel? It's so different than most of your other world, where there's an underlying theme of some specific branch of science and the impact that it in technology has on society and culture. And it's a more philosophical approach to a harder science e sort of discussion. This is very science fiction, fun sort of thing. What made you say let's try this? I would say it's you're right, it's not a science book. I don't know if it's a philosophical book. At least

there's some certainly some philosophy in it. It couldn't be avoided. Once again, I I wanted to tell a story, and the story was It started with a question. The question was why did this powerful and exciting, kind of exhilarating idea of time travel arise in the first place? Why did it arise at this particular time in the mind of H. G. Wells, a young writer he had never written a book before, trying to make a living in

eighteen England. And then what happened to turn this primitive version of time travel, born out of the blue, into the very complicated and various cornucopia of things that were so familiar with today. I mean, we've got time travel cartoons, you know, I know, eight year old to get up in the morning and start arguing about the paradoxus of time travel. We are very sophisticated about time travel, and so I wanted to chart that as a story, to watch the ideas get handed from one person to another,

and watch new writers. And we're talking about people who range from pulp science writers in New York in the nine twenties to literary writers like James Joyce and Virginia Wolf also in the early twentieth century, and scientists beginning with Einstein, all toying with ideas of time in very imagine native new ways. We have a tendency to you know, we live in the world and we know how things are, and we have a tendency to think it's always been like that, but it hasn't. And I just think it's

it's really fun to watch the ideas transform. That's classic hindsight biases that well, of course it worked out this way. How else could it have worked out. It's very difficult to go back and unimagined an idea after you're familiar with it. So what was it about the Industrial Age and whatever, all of the new technologies that came about at the turn of the prior century, in the ninet whatever that put this out in the air and allowed so many people to conceptualize it when it had never

really been thought about previous. There were a lot of things happening all at once. One thing that was happening was that there was a new idea of futurity. There was a new ability to imagine the future and a new interest in the future that depended on the Industrial

Revolution and then the acceleration of technology. G When you think about it, if you took your time machine back and arrived on a farm in the fifteenth century and asked the first person you met, what is what do you think the world is going to be like for your grandchildren? They would say, what are you talking about? The world is going to be the same for my grandchildren.

You know they're going to be using the same plows that I'm using because my grandparents used those plows, and there was nothing like the conception that we have of the progress of technology, which starts to seem inevitable to us. But by the end of the nineteenth century, there were railroads steaming across the landscape. There was the electric telegraph sending instant messages at the speed of electricity, and people

were very conscious of how life was changing. They could see their lives changing right in front of them, and then they could start to wonder and get excited about how life was going to be in a hundred years. How significant were railroads along with the telegraph and in having people recognize that time wasn't necessarily a constant that they had to think about time zones in different places

across the country. How important was that development to Ah, Well, that's a really good question, Barry, because you're right it was. It's exactly because of railroads and the telegraph, both of those technologies that clocks were changing. The telegraph made it possible to synchronize clocks electrically across great distances, which had

never been possible before. When you think about it, if you had a clock in New York and you had a clock in Chicago, who would care what those you know, because because it would take days to get from New York to Chicago. So first the railroad made it kind of necessary to have accurate clocks in different places and help people notice that the sun was in a different place in the sky in New York and Chicago. And then the telegraph made it possible to synchronize the clocks.

And it wasn't just Eighth d Well, it was also Einstein who was living in a world with these new technologies, and as a patent clerk, he was reading patents that had to do with synchronizing clocks, and he was starting to think about what what if you take a clock and you put it in motion at high speed? Does anything change? You know, all of these things were happening at once. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is James Glick.

He is the author of numerous books, most recently time travel History. His first book was Chaos, Making of a New Science. And I have to ask you, this is an extremely complex subject in physics. What on Earth made you for your first book say, I know, I'll tackle chaos theory? Well, it wasn't, I know it was it was Woa, there's a thing called chaos theory. Okay, I mean, right,

we we've it's it's kind of familiar now. People now, for example, have seen Jurassic Park and they watched Jeff Goldblum explain chaos mansplain chaos theory in fact, but it was brand new. And I was interested in science and writing about some scientists, and I heard about this thing, and I thought, I want to know what that is. And then as I learned what it was, I realized that it was a kind of science that really mattered to people who might not otherwise care about the esoterica

of theoretical physics. It was a very, I felt, a very human kind of science. And one thing, one thing that was unusual about it was that it was cross disciplinary. That it involved people studying the weather, people studying the physiology of the human heart. It involved economics as well as theoretical physics. And that was because irregularity and disorder and complexity arise in all of these different areas, and

as humans, we're interested in that, right. I mean, I'm not a scientist myself, so I have the kind of I have the prejudice that if I'm interested in it, other people are going to be interested in it too. It can't be that esoteric, and that was true of chaos. So you're credited with making the expression the butterfly affect a household word. Um explained what the butterfly Well, I

didn't invent the butterfly effect. It was invented by a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, who was one of the pioneers of chaos theory, and he discovered and proved that the Earth's weather is a chaotic system in this in this definite technical sense, that it's so unstable and so subject to small perturbations that the flapping of a butterfly's wing in one part of the globe at one instant can actually affect the the path of a hurricane a month later on the

far side of the globe. That is not obviously true. I mean it could be the Earth's weather could be designed in a different way such that the flapping of the butterfly's wings would just dissipate and it wouldn't be important, and it would take a giant perturbation to actually have an effect on something as large as the course of a hurricane. So that's a surprise, and it had to be proved mathematically and it does turn out to be true.

And it's why to this day, weather forecasting, no matter how powerful our computers get, is such an imperfect science. So so let's talk about something else that involves imperfect forecasts where small perturbations have outside effects, and that's the stock market. I'm gonna pull a line from Chaos the book. Markets exhibit unstable, a periodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamism

sensitive to initial conditions. Now you were writing in general about theory of chaos, but that is very applicable to stock markets. That they're nonlinear, meaning a small change can have an outsize effect. That they're not they're a periodic in that there's sort of a cycle. You know, it's colder in the winter and warmer in the summer, but the day to day changes appear to be fairly random. There are all sorts of interesting parallels between chaos theory

and the markets. Have you ever heard much back from people who work in finance or or work investing as to how chaos theory is applicable to investing. I have heard from people, and people have tried to explore it, and in fact, some of the chaos scientists who I wrote about in that book all those years ago, try to apply k Us theory to the markets, and I can't say whether they had any particular success. Personally, I'm

a little bit skeptical. I think if anybody had had a magic trick for applying the science of chaos to making money in the market, well, I don't know if we'd know about it. Coming up, we continue our conversation with James Glick discussing information theory and human history. I'm Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is author James Glick,

whose most recent book is called Time Travel History. He's previously written biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, as well as a couple of other books, Chaos, The Making of a New Science, and what I think is a tour to force book. The information a flood, a history, a theory. I got that backwards somewhat. Let's talk a little bit about this, because this is really a fascinating, fascinating book. Human beings are information seeking creatures? Discuss Well,

it's like an essay question. Yes, first of all, that's obviously true, right, Information is is what we live on. Well, is it obviously true? Because when you were referring previously to the farmer who lived the same life as his grandparents and expected his children and grandchildren to live the same life, and there was no growth from learning and applying new information, maybe we haven't always been information seeking creatures. Well, exactly,

you're making my point for me, Barry. We have always been information seeking creatures. We didn't always know it. We didn't we didn't use the word information. The word information now has a scientific meaning, and we're comfortable with that. Even if we aren't scientists. We know what the unit of measure of information is. It's the bit, right, That's a fundamental particle, on or off, yes or no. It's at the root of all of our computers and our

communication devices. Information is being transmitted in bits, but that's the language of how it's communicated. It's it's on or off. And with that binary system you can create a universe of things. Is but is that really the bottom building block of of information there is? Because there's nothing smaller than yes or no, than yes or no. It's if you want to if you want to measure how much information there is in something, how much information is there

in a book? How much information is there in three minutes of audio of a certain quality? How much information is there in a photograph or a video. We're fairly comfortable, I think, asking that question how much information? It implies that information is a thing you can measure, and if you're measuring it, there has to be a unit of measure, and there has to be well, there wouldn't have to

be a smallest amount. You could imagine an infinitesimal amount of information, But in fact there is a smallest amount. It's one bit. There can't be any less than that. So let's talk a little bit about some of the concepts that come up in the book, starting with drums and going to alphabets. How does that then move on to computing and more complex technologies. Because we now have this expansive view of information as a kind of general category of things, we can think about all the different

information technologies. Well, we know there are a lot of them that rule our lives now, right, we've got an information gadget in our pocket. Probably we a lot of information comes to us on screens. The networks of the Internet are a kind of information technology, just as television is and before that the radio. But before that there was the telegraph, and before that, if you you know,

we start to think more broadly about information. We know that the printing press was an information technology, and even before that, the invention of the alphabet changed the way human beings process, transmit, and store information. So all of those are technologies, and you can start to think about what they have in common and what the differences are, and how they evolved and how they changed our lives. So let's talk about the modern era and the Internet.

What's the significance of Wikipedia. What's the significance of the Internet for our ability to perceive and manipulate information. That's a pretty big question. What's the significance? There are a lot of things going on all at once. You mentioned Wikipedia. I happen to like Wikipedia. I'm a fan. In fact, I think it's it's really an extraordinary monument in the information era. Of all of the giant information enterprises, it's

the only one that isn't designed to make money. It's never made a penny, and if it continues on its current course, it never will. It's entirely crowdsourced. When it started out, it was kind of famously inaccurate, right, And maybe it is in some circles famously inaccurate. Schools probably don't allow students to cite Wikipedia as a final source on anything. Newspapers certainly don't. On the other hand, we all rely on it, a lot, more of us rely

on it than it then admit it. And it's astoundingly good when you think about it. You know, if you want to start doing research on any subject, you look it up on Wikipedia, and it doesn't matter so much what was written. As the whole run of sources to truly authoritative sources at the bottom is a great place to start doing sources you can cite and quote if you can't quote Wikipedia, right, Okay, So here we are

both praising Wikipedia. And yet it remains true that at this moment anybody who's listening to us could, as a prank look up any not any because some of them are are kind of protected now, but could look up most of what's on Wikipedia, just change it. So it's a kind of miracle that, given its vulnerability to mischief and to just plain carelessness, it's as accurate as it is. The people who are inclined to make mischief are far less motivated than the people who really care deeply about

a subject. You have a run of different experts writing about it. It's a crowdsourced version of an encyclopedia. And it seems Yeah, the mischief makers can have a little fun on the on the periphery, but the people who cared deeply about something aren't gonna allow it to be despoiled. Or at least that's how it seems to work in the real world. Yeah, of course there are other problems too.

Besides besides obvious errors, there there's opinion and their points of view, and and we we seem to be living through an election where um, people have not just different opinions, but they feel entitled to their own sets of facts. And Wikipedia, like the rest of us, gets embroiled into disputes over over what's actually true because and this has been called the post factual era well, and and with the best of intentions, we can't ever be absolutely certain

that we have a claim to to the truth. And so now another thing I guess we've learned from Wikipedia, or maybe from the Internet in general, is two always at least I think this is what we should have learned to have a little bit of humility about what we think we know to be true, to recognize that our knowledge is provisional, to keep an open mind and continue to listen to other possibilities as scientists do as the best scientists have always done. The best scientists don't

say here's the truth. I have arrived at it. That's final, end of story for those of you joining us. Now we're speaking with James Glick. He's the author of The Information, A Theory of History of Flood. Let me pull a quote out of the book that I really like you wrote, the same paradox was destined to reappear in different guises, each technology of information bringing its own power and its own fears. Would we say that's still true today? Well,

isn't it. Every time we get a new social network, or a or a a new uh, a new device, some people worry that it's just gonna drain us of humanity, right, that we're gonna we're going to maybe gain some kinds of knowledge and then lose some of their skills. And that's always been true. I mean, when when electronic calculators arrived, people started very quickly to forget how to do arithmetic.

But before that, when well, for that matter, when writing was invented, Plato worried about the effect it was going to have on human memory. I used to have a thousand phone numbers in my head. Now, courtesy of the I phone, I don't know anybody's phone number. So there you go. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? You can take your pick. I would I suspect I only have a finite capacity, and I'm freeing

up some space for perhaps more useful functions. But along the same lines, while I was preparing for this, uh and researching and googling certain things, I came across Louis c. K On I think it was on Conan, and he does this hilarious bit about everything is amazing and nobody's happy. It's told in Jess. But how accurate is that sentiment? Well, yes, it's it's partly a joke because it's an exaggeration to

say that nobody's happy. But I think what he's pointing out is is something that's healthy that we have these We have tremendous powers. We have what would have looked to our grandparents like the magical abilities to access one another there and to access sources of information. And yet we don't necessarily feel any smarter, and that's good because

we aren't any smarter. We have we have new sources of knowledge, and we have new reasons to worry about attention deficit disorder, to worry about um, about new sources of error, and as I say too, hopefully remain humble. We have been speaking with author James Glick, most recently writing Time Travel a History on Twitter. You're at James Glick spelled g L E I c k at James Glick. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and stick around for the podcast extras, where the tape will continue to

roll as we discuss all things time travel related. Be sure and check out my daily column on Bloomberg View dot com or follow me on Twitter at Riholts. I'm Barry Riholts. You've and listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch. Seeing what others have seen, but uncovering what others may not. Global Research that helps You Harness disruption. Voted top global research firm five years running. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Finner and

Smith Incorporated. Welcome to the podcast, James, thank you so much for doing this. I have been a fan of yours for quite a while, and i've I've enjoyed your books, Um, and I remember not just plowing through Chaos, which for a recovering physics want was a delight, but The Information was one of those books that was I can't complimented enough. It's a tour de force of information theory and human

technological development. It's almost as if information theory is an overlay across every single technology that we've developed, more or less from sharp and Stones forward. Is that an overstatement or no? I think you got that. I think you've got that exactly right, Mary, And you know we're pretty well aware of that. These days, we hear a lot about information. We know this is the information age. It's been the information age now for more than fifty years.

So it's it's interesting too to stop and explore that and figure out how information became a thing and and how we can make it a useful part of our lives without letting it overwhelm us. So I I went through Chaos, I reviewed UM the Information I revisited faster. UM. I didn't go through Isaac Newton or or Feynman, Although I've listened to his lecture, so I'm kind of more or less up to speed with that. And I started time travel recently, and I'm I'm pretty much halfway through.

So I have some questions for you about it that I find fascinating, many of which you allude to in the beginning, And hopefully I'm not going to ask you stuff that you resolve later in the book. But one of the questions that comes up over and over again philosophically in the book is time real? Does time actually exist? Or is it just an allusion to us pathetic humans? And isn't that kind of Isn't it funny that we even ask a question like that, because and physicists do

ask it. Physicists even have they have symposia on the question of whether time is real? Well, what does that mean? Because if time isn't real, what have we been talking about for all of these millennia. It's one of the oldest concepts in the book. It is, I believe, in English, the noun most frequently used in the language time time. That's quite fascinating. Well, the the counter argument is, there's

only the presence you going from. We'll start with the big bang and end up with universal entropy and the heat death trillion years in the future. And we can conceptualize the future, we can recall our own distorted perspective of the past, but really there's only the here and now, and what might be or what might have come before

is just that progression along. Well, there's there's what you you might call the kind of naive person in the street view of time, and before before that sounds too condescending, I should say, that's that's my view of time. That is I'm going to endorse the naive view. And and that view is is this. It's that the only thing that's real is the present. What's happening now, that's real, this instant, this instant, I'm looking at you, you're looking at me. Here we are. But I said that a

few seconds ago, and now it's gone. It's the past and it was real, but it's not real. We have lost access to it. We have a memory of it, we have records, we have artifacts, we have ruins. But the past is gone and the future isn't real because it doesn't exist yet. We can imagine it, we can think about it, we can worry about it, we can fear it. But it's not real the way the present is. And so if you believe that, then you have what I consider to be a kind of reasonable view of

how time works. Um, why do you say that's the naive man in the street view? Because physicists have developed a more complicated view of the universe, which which we're also familiar with, in which time is like a fourth dimension of space, and time and space together have an independent reality that we call space time. And you can imagine all of creation, all of existence, as a four

dimensional space time continuum. And if you imagine this thing as a big block, then the past is there, and the future is there, and there's a point that our consciousness happens to be moving through and we call that the present. But it's an illusion to think that only that part is real. All the rest is real too, and you can make calculations about them using the equations of physics. So along those lines, I think the phrase

in the book is the pink worm. Basically, somebody's life's lifespan as existing through four dimensions, and you're seeing them. They start out crawling, they end up on two legs, and ultimately end up on on on three legs with the cane. Isn't that just an abstract conception as well? Or does physics say, well, if you really make the fourth dimension real, that that is its own existence as well? Well?

That that pink worm that comes from a science fiction story by Robert Heinlin, And we can we can imagine that. You can wrap your heads around that. If you imagine the human being that you are now as a three dimensional object, what's the four dimensional version? It starts with you as a baby, and it ends with you dead, and along the way you could, you know, construct a well along pink worm. But that's you know, that's a match.

That's a fantasy, right, I mean, we're still here are We're just the three dimensional blobs that we are, and and we are changing from one form to another. What about Stephen hawkings um time travel party. I found that to be kind of amusing, although I think he made a small error in his in his calculus. What's the error? So my naive view of time travel, assuming it exists, which is a giant assumption. Um, you could go back in time, and you could go so there's time that

has not yet unrolled yet. Picture the manaphor is a film camera. You can you can shoot a movie and you can always go back and rewind and look at anything you've shot, and you could go forward to where you currently are, but you can't see anything that has not yet been filmed. So you can travel back in time, and you could travel up to the present, but no further than that. Um, so you can't go into the future that has not yet uh unrolled. So the first

time Stephen Hawkins does that the future hasn't occurred. There are no time travelers to come back. It's only at some future date in an alternative lot timeline that travelers can come back to the future. And so this is that's how we know, Stephen Hawkins taught us. This is the first go through. We're not really living an alternative time. Well, you've got an interesting theory, so in in your theory as possible to the pet as possible, to the past,

but not to the future beyond where it's unrolled. And we're talking about Stephen Hawkings famous invitation to time travelers. He printed up an invitation and said, dear dear time travelers from the future, you're invited to this party, which took place last week. And then he said, well, nobody showed up. Therefore, I have proved that time travel doesn't exist. There are no time travelers from the future among us. He should know better because he created the paradox, had he,

and he was right this go around. But if there is time travel that's evented a thousand years hence, then in the alternative timeline where they come back and visit his party, won't he be surprised? Well, I think Hawking was. It was partly putting that out there with his tongue in his cheek, just to touch and then he, like like other physicists, like to have fun with time travel

because it's such an exciting idea. Um. One person I ran into said he had he had yet another theory of for why we aren't seeing the time travelers in our midst and it's that they're afraid of disease. There you go, they don't have an immune system the way settlers on a new continent catch diseases that they aren't prepared for. And so what we should do is create quarantine areas and then sound send out the infantition. Again. There you go. That that makes a lot of sense.

Or they could be similarly fearful of the butterfly effect and not wanting to change future history. I'm early in the book you talk about something I've always wondered, which isn't the time aspect of it, but it's the physical space aspect of it. We have we have the Earth um rotating, revolving, we have the Sun and moving around the entire galaxy. The galaxy is expanding from from the point of of the Big Bang. How do you physically end up given all this motion in those three dimensions?

When you so the Earth today, if you go into a time machine right here and you want to go back a thousand years, you're that taught three dimensional, those three coordinates. It is not here, it's it's we're really getting into the weeds here, Barry. And And it's true that this is the kind of thing that if you're going to construct a science fiction story, you have to worry about, or if you don't want to worry about it, you have to you know, a little a little hocus focus,

a little hocus focus. So H. G. Wells, when he wrote The Time Machine, didn't worry about that. You know, it didn't occur to him, or if it occurred to him, he decided his readers weren't going to think about it, so his time machine just advances through space and he ignores the fact that the whole Earth is going to be in a different place. You know, um, nowadays you can do whatever you want if you if you want

to construct a science fiction story. And everybody who watches Doctor Who knows that the tardest, the Great Blue British London Police block box travels through time and through space and so it gets to go wherever the Doctor wants to ascended. So I know, I only have you for a finite amount of time, and I have a million questions for you. Let me jump right to my favorite few questions I asked all my guests. Um, So, as

a writer, who are some of your early mentors? I don't think I had mentors because I started out as a as a journalist. I was a reporter. I was an editor. My my first boss at the New York Times was the great Sydney Schanberg, who was a magnificent foreign correspondent who was Metropolitan editor when I started working at the New York Times, and I I revered him and still still revere him. But I can't say that

he had all that much time for me. Um, So let's talk about other writers and editors who might have influenced your approach to writing. Who who do you feel has been a um an influence on on your work? Well? Also, let me say two contradictory things. One is I write a kind of nonfiction that is has journalism at its root, even though I haven't really been a journalist for a while. And one person, one writer I admired very much when I was starting out, was Gay to Leaves, who, um

you know his he's known for his books now. I don't know how well known he'll he'll be to our listeners, but um, he wrote in Back in the Dark Ages

profiles for Esquire magazine that were absolutely magnificent. They were a kind of writing that I really aspired to that involved no first person, nothing about him, just kind of intensively reported kind of work where you knew so much, you spent so much time with your subject and knew so much about your subject that you could that you could achieve something close to omniscience, and you could write about your subject the way a novelist would you. You wouldn't.

You wouldn't just do an interview where you're talking to your subject but but you would be eavesdropping on the conversations that your subject is having as he or she went through daily life. Narrative nonfiction. I love that kind of writing. And so the other half of my answer to your question is I read fiction. It's it's I don't read very much nonfiction myself, because the writer's I admire most tend to be fiction writers. So let's talk

a little bit about your favorite books. Tell tell us some books that either recently or way back when, that that you've really enjoyed. All right, Well, you know, favorite books books is so arbitrary and changes week by week. So I feel entitled to name a couple of books that I talked about in time Travel because their time travel books, and but they aren't necessarily obvious time travel books. So one of them is um by the great Ursula k Legwin, a novel called The Lathe of Heaven, and

it's not exactly time travel. It involves a helpless man who discovers that when he dreams, he is reshaping the future. And well, hilarity ensues that I want to give the book away. It's a it's an imaginative tour to force someone just did a fantastic profile on her. I want to say it was either The Atlantic or Esquire New Yorker New Yorkers that just was out like two weeks ago. Actually I say that, and now I'm not a d percent sure, so they can check this and go back

and edit it. But yes, I'm a great fan of hers. She's she is just a great spirit as well as a great writer. Who else? Who else? Do you? What other books are you? Well? And the last book that I wrote about in time Travel is the most recent book by William Gibson, science science fiction writer who really is his visionary and transcends science fiction. And he had avoided time travel through his whole career, even though his books were set in the future. He for one reason

or another wasn't interested in time travel. And then suddenly in his latest book, The Peripheral, he invents a new kind of time travel that is very um redolent of our world of cyberspace, which is appropriate because William Gibson invented cyberspace. Neuromancer was mona Lisa overdrive, And so I'll recommend The Peripheral. The Peripheral give us a non time

travel book that you've enjoyed of recently. Um alright, well just um, because I just finished reading it and Patchett's new novel, Commonwealth, which is nothing that there's no science fiction or anything else. She's a beautiful writer. It's a family story that takes place over generations. And if you forced me to bring it back to the conversation, which you're not trying to do, I would say that she also is a master of using time and memory in

creative narrative ways. Sommon Wealth, so let me I'm gonna go or of script a moment. You're an accomplished writer. No. Three of your books nominated for Pulitzers. When you are reading something, are you just reading for escapist pleasure? Does the craft intrude on your ability to read? Are you sort of noticing little oh, I see what they did here? Are you noticing techniques? Or do you get definitely? But first of all, why escapist pleasure? Can't I just read

for you know, virtuous life, life enhancement. Well, but but that's how the criticism has always been about fiction versus nonfiction. I need for pleasure, and I don't feel guilty about that. But it's it's true that when I'm writing. In particular, there are times it often happens that I'm reading a book and suddenly I think, ah ha, I can steal that.

And I and I'm meaning a technique or meaning a technique or the way a sentence is constructed, or a rhythm or something I don't even know what it is, but something I'll need to I'll need to put the book down for a second and rush over to the keyboard. So so you, as you're reading, you are stealing. But by the way, the reason I ask every single guest

for some of their favorite books. I've had a dozen billionaires, I've had just as many Nobel laureates in the studio and other people of accomplishment, and pretty much every single one. When you get to the question, so what do you attribute your success to? The concept of constantly learning, constantly reading, being able to take advantage of the information that someone someone basically lives a lifetime and says, here, I'm gonna spend a year and spill out what I've learned over

fifty years. Have this to to ignore? That is a a tremendous waste and the idea of accessing books and knowledge and other people's experience comes up over and over. I wanted to ask you specifically what you get out of reading, because you're a professional writer and and you pretty much address the question the way I was hoping, But I always asked the question. And it's amazing how animated some people become about the books that are so significant to them. They really, um seem to have credited

reading as as an enormous part of their development. So so that's why that that comes up. Um, So what do you do outside of writing for for pleasure? What do you do, uh to to keep yourself? Um, I'm gonna rephray, I'm gonna ask that again in a slightly different way. So outside of the office, outside of writing, what do you do to relax away from books? What does anybody do? I don't know. I go to movies, I listen to music, I go to place I occasionally it's hard, as as it may be to believe I

actually just sit quietly. Okay, that that's not hard to believe at all. And and now, um, by the way, that's a question that had come from listeners, and people always ask ask people what they do to relax outside of the office. And then my last it's kind of an interesting question. There's no office, you know, I mean there is an office. You have a computer somewhere. Are you have a desk? Right? So what do you when

you're away from the desk? That I I for the most part, I assume people are conceptualizing, um, a sort of grinding workload and what do people do outside of that? And these are not I can as someone who writes a daily column, I can tell there's an enormous amount of work and thought and activity and energy that goes into this. It's not There may not be a physical office, but there is clearly a defined workspace and a lot of labor goes into that. Is that a fair statement?

That's fair? Um? And there is an office, it's just in my house. Okay. Uh So, if a millennial or someone who graduated from college came up to you and said they were interested in a career as either a journalist or an author, what sort of advice would you

give them? Well? I got two pieces of advice. The first one is don't take too much advice from um, people much older than yourself, And the second is just um, right, the only way to the only way to learn how to write is to write, and um, reading about writing isn't going to help. Going to school to learn how to write isn't going to help. You just have to have to write. And um, if you need to find somebody to give you orders, then you know, try to work for a newspaper. So I like the paradox of

here's my advice, don't take my advice. I find that interesting. And finally, so you've been writing The Chaos came out in eighty seven, You've been writing thirty plus years. What is it that you know about the craft of writing today? You wish you knew thirty years ago? When you begin, the question implies that I know something about the craft of writing. And are you really going to fight me on that? I really am seriously, Ye, Pulitzer nominations, I

know this is embarrassing. Three National Book Awards. You clearly know a thing or two about writing. Maybe I don't know what I know that I feel each time I'm still figuring it out each time. Is that true you when you approach a new book. I do not lie to you, Barry. I do not sit down and think, Okay, here's I don't have a file of index cards of things I've learned. I think, oh my god, what am How am I going to do it this time? So each time you approach a new topic, a new subject,

a new book, you're starting from scratch. It's literally a blank page. Now what am I going to do with this? Oh, it's always it's always a blank page. It well, the page itself, but the approach how you I have to imagine that you have developed some skills and some techniques over, I must have some skills. But if you're accusing me of of withholding some some magic sand click, he's not sharing. You know. If if other people are giving you the secret,

I'd like I'd like to know what they are. But um, yeah, I'll tell you that when I write the book about this radio series. Here. Let me save people the three things that come up over and over and over again. It's hard work, it's reading, and it's a little bit of luck that has those three things have come up

from person to person to person. And I'm referring to people who are you know, by any measure of traditional wealth, professional accolades, whatever, awards, and you kind of nor when you hear the same things over, I'm fortunate that somehow I've talked this building into allowing me to do this and conning people like yourself into coming here. Um, and and that comes up over again. Well, I absolutely agree with all three of those. Oh, so there it is. I didn't mean to put words into your math. I

just wanted to share those three. We have been speaking with author James Glick, most recently. Um, he put out the book Time Travel of History. I also highly recommend the information. And if you have any sort of bend towards physics, I would tell you chaos is just a fascinating and by the way, it's held up very well, mostly because you don't make any declarations. Um, this is how it is, and this is how it's always going to be. It's a history of what took place in

chaos theory up to that point. And I think the book is the test of time. You're raising your eyebrows and now I'm I'm I'm thanking you for saying that. Okay, well, I'm not the only person who said that Time Travel of History. If you enjoy this conversation, be shure and check out the other hundred or so uh such chats on iTunes. Just look up an inch or down an inch and you can see the rest of them. I would be remiss if I did not think my booker,

Taylor Riggs. We love your comments and feedback. Be sure to write to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry rid Holts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch committed to bringing higher finance to lower carbon named the most innovative investment bank for climate change and sustainability by the Banker. That's the power of Global Connections. Bank of America North America member f D I C