YouSaid · the spoken record

James Gleick

lines on the record: 62
first: 2016-11-30
most recent: 2016-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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, how am I going to do this time?”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I got two pieces of advice. The first one is don't take too much advice from. People much older than yourself? And the second is just right. The only way to learn how to write is to write. And reading about writing isn't going to help. Going to school to learn how to write isn't going to help you. You just have to write. And if you need to find somebody to give you orders, then try to work for a newspaper.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does anybody do? I don't know. I go to movies, I listen to music, I go to plays. Occasionally it's hard as it may be to believe I actually just sit quietly.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 put the book down for a second and rush over to the keyboard.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, aha, I can steal that. Meaning it's a”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, well, just because I just finished reading it, Anne Patchett's new novel, Commonwealth, which is nothing, 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. Commonwealth”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last book that I wrote about in Time Travel is the most recent book by William Gibson, a science fiction writer who really... Is 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 redolent of our world of cyberspace, which is appropriate because William Gibson invented cyberspace.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can check this and go back and edit it. But yes, I'm a great fan of hers. She is just a great spirit as well as a great writer.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, well, you know, favorite books is so arbitrary and changes week by week. So I feel entitled to name a couple of books that I talk about in time travel because they're time travel books. But they aren't necessarily obvious time travel books. Okay. So one of them is By the great Ursula K Leguin, 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. Well, hilarity ensues. I don't want to give the book away. It's an imaginative tour de force.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that kind of writing. And so the other half of my answer to your question is. I read fiction. I don't read very much nonfiction myself because the writers I admire most tend to be fiction writers.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You wouldn't just do an interview where you're talking to your subject, but you would be eavesdropping on the conversations that your subject is having as he or she went through daily life.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, also, let me say two contradictory things. One is I write a kind of nonfiction. That 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 Talise. He's known for his books now. I don't know how well known he'll be to our listeners, but he wrote 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 a 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 achieve something close to omniscience and you could write about your subject the way a novelist would. You wouldn't...”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I had mentors because I started out as a journalist. I was a reporter. I was an editor. 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 revered him and still revere him. But I can't say that he had all that much time for me.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great blue British London police box travels through time and through space, and so it gets to go wherever the doctor wants to send it.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little hocus pocus. So HG Wells, when he wrote The Time Machine, didn't worry about that. Right. 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. Nowadays, you can do whatever you want if you want to construct a science fiction story. And everybody who watches Doctor Who knows that the TARDIS”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not here. Well, we're really getting into the weeds here, Barry, 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 send out the invitation again.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he, like other physicists, like to have fun with time travel because it's such an exciting idea. One person I ran into said 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unrolled and up to. Of course. And we're talking about Stephen Hawking's famous invitation to time travelers. He printed up an invitation and said, dear time travelers from the future, you're invited to this party, which took place last week.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've got an interesting theory. So in your theory, time travel is possible to the past, but not to the future beyond.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that pinkworm, that comes from a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein. And 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 construct a, well, a long pink worm. You know, that's a match, that's a fantasy, right? I mean, we're still here. We're just the three-dimensional blobs that we are, and we are. Changing from one form to another.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because physicists have developed a more complicated view of the universe, 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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...”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's what you might call the kind of naive person in the street view of time. Before that sounds too condescending, I should say that's my view of time. I'm going to endorse the naive view. And that view is this. It's that The only thing that's real is the present, what's happening now. That's real.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And isn't that kind of 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 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 50 years. So it's interesting to. To stop and explore that and figure out how information became a thing and how we can make it a useful part of our lives without letting it overwhelm us.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, 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 something that's healthy, that we have tremendous powers. We have what would have looked to our grandparents like the magical abilities to access one another 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 new sources of knowledge and we have new reasons to worry about Attention deficit disorder to worry about new sources of error. And as I say, to hopefully remain humble.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, isn't it? Every time we get a new social network or a new device, some people worry that it's just going to drain us of humanity. That we're going to maybe gain some kinds of knowledge and then lose some other skills. And that's always been true. I mean, 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and with the best of intentions, we can't ever be absolutely certain that we have a claim to the truth. And so another thing I guess we've learned from Wikipedia or maybe from the internet in general is to 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course, there are other problems too besides obvious errors. There's opinion and their points of view. And we seem to be living through an election. 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 what's actually true.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of protected now, but could look up most of what's on Wikipedia and just change it”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 admit it. And it's astoundingly good when you think about it”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes or no. 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, it 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 tried to apply chaos 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one part of the globe, at one instant can actually affect 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 a 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 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 definite technical sense that it's so unstable and so subject to small perturbations that the flapping of a butterfly's wings”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, right, it's kind of familiar now. People now, for example, have seen Jurassic Park and they watch Jeff Goldblum explain chaos, mansplain chaos theory, in fact. 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 esoteric of theoretical physics. It was a very, I felt a very human kind of science. And 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...”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 HGLs, 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 if you take a clock and you put it in motion at high speed. Does anything change? All of these things were happening at once.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a really good question, Barry, because you're right. 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, if they were...”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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... 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 19th 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know eight-year-olds who get up in the morning and start arguing about the paradoxes 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 1920s to literary writers like James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, also in the early 20th century, and scientists, beginning with Einstein, all toying with ideas of time in very imaginative 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 really fun to watch the ideas transform.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 1895, 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.”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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,”
2016-11-30 · Masters in Business · Interview With James Gleick: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source