 I'm David Kirkpatrick. I'm an author and journalist myself and I wrote a book about Facebook and I have a little company called Techonomy which puts on events related to technology and society. And I'm really happy to be here with Jim Glick who's one of the world's great public intellectuals and has been for an extremely long time. He first kind of got on the big picture map with a book called Chaos that really defined this concept of chaos and really put that term and an understanding of it into the public dialogue intellectually on a global level. And what year was that, by the way? Chaos. In the 80s. Yeah, so then just get this guy. When the internet comes along he started one of the first ISPs in New York called the Pipeline, an internet service provider. So he became an entrepreneur after having been an author and it was very successful and he later sold it and then he went back to writing books. I guess he had written another book called Genius about Richard Feynman before getting to Pipeline. Then he wrote a book about Isaac Newton and the order may be wrong but he wrote another book called Faster which is I think definitely a predecessor and related to this one. The subtitle was The Acceleration of Just About Everything. So most recently he's written a book called The Information and what's the subtitle of that now? A History, A Theory, A Flood. Yeah. So what do you mean by a history, a theory, a flood? I didn't think of the subtitle. I didn't come up to the subtitle until well into the book and then I realized that there really were sort of not three sections but three pieces to the story I was trying to tell. It was odd writing a book about information. You've been very kind in listing all those other books. When you're writing a book about Isaac Newton or you're writing a book about Facebook and people ask you what you're writing about, it's pretty, it's easy enough to tell. Not hard to explain. They say, okay, I get it but when I said I was writing a book about information people would either not politely or say, what does that even mean? How can you write a book about information? And yet it felt like the most obvious, the most inevitable of all the topics I've picked because it's such a cliche, it's probably been a cliche since the first of these Davos conferences that we are living in the information age. We all know that. We know that information is valuable. We know that the devices in our pockets that we've all been instructed to turn off are about information fundamentally. And yet in a way I feel that as a species we're a little like fish who have suddenly discovered water. Information has always been our universe and it still is but it's partly invisible to us. And well, so the driving conceit of my book is that it begins with the science that's called information theory and it's a branch of mathematics and engineering as you know that started at a very exact time and place. It started in 1948 with the work of Claude Shannon and American mathematician and engineer. And information theory is where science begins to treat information as a thing. As a thing that you can measure that has a kind of substance, not physical substance, but it's worth studying scientifically. Before that, you know, information was just a vague word. It was stuff. When you have an interesting thing you do where you analogize it to words like energy, which didn't mean anything like the way we think of them until, like, who was the energy guy? Isaac Newton. That's exactly right. Had to redefine the language in order to create a new set of theories. Right. And when I wrote about Isaac Newton I was struck by that. I was a little obsessed by that. That the words, his essential vocabulary, mass, force, these were even gravity. Gravity was an English word that meant something like seriousness. There was no vocabulary for the stuff that he needed to talk about. And as you say, it's the same with energy. Energy just meant something vague and then physicists had to mathematicize it. That happened to information in the middle of the 20th century and our world depends on it. Biology is now an information science. It's a subject of instructions and messages and code. Our body, our bodies are information processors. Memory resides in every cell, not just in our brains. To understand the body, you have to understand signaling by electricity and by chemistry, by chemicals. The quintessential information molecule is the gene. For a four-letter alphabet, six billion bits to form a human being. And it's not an accident. This is part of the story that my book tries to tell, that genetics bloomed in the decade after information theory, even though it wasn't, there was no direct connection between the mathematicians and engineers and the geneticists. The language filtered through. So in other words, the language that had been created for information science helped facilitate the creation of the science of genetics. Absolutely. We think of Watson and Crick making their great discovery of the double helix and if we think of that as discovering a chemical structure, the famous spiral that was on the cover of the news magazines, we're missing the point because what they really discovered was a code. And in the decade after they discovered the double helix, all of the work of this new revolutionary science of molecular biology was based on trying to decipher the code. We might casually think that code is a metaphor, is just an analogy, but it's not. Genes are literally a code. They encode the formation of proteins and they encode various kinds of functions. I was at a terrific session yesterday called Deciphering Data, an ideas lab here that had a geneticist that was sponsored by Brown University. Were any of you here? And an archeologist and other scientists and they had a commonality of interest in the problem of deciphering big data, of being overwhelmed by masses of data because the machines now they're used in molecular biology to crack the gene to do genetic sequencing or producing volumes of data and they have to figure out what's important. Well, that's exactly what we're trying to do as individuals. So have you sort of, was your self-definition as a writer, is that how you think of yourself? Is that the essence? People say, what do you do? Do you say I'm a writer? Yes. And were you defining yourself that way even before the book Chaos? Well, I was a journalist. Yeah, I was a journalist. That is a writer, of course. That's right. We're journalists. I worked for the New York Times. I still spent a while since I practiced any actual journalism, but I still think of myself more as a journalist than any other kind of writer. The reason I ask is that you do spend a lot of time in the book, especially at the beginning, talking about the words that evolved and how they evolved in order to describe these things and that the words themselves became foundational, not just in information theory, but in several other fields of scientific progress over the course of many, many centuries. And I wonder if it's your sort of, you seem kind of obsessed with words, which is very healthy in my opinion as a writer. I think writers tend to be quite interested in words. And do you think that might be what got you into this particular topic in part? Because it's certainly very smooth transition between an obsession with words, which are symbols for information, and then this whole idea of the bit and all the consequences that flow from that. Well, you're right that I have a kind of obsession with words. And there's a chapter in the book called Two Dictionaries that's about the two dictionaries are the Oxford English Dictionary at the modern extreme, which is now an enterprise of cyberspace. It has exploded past the boundaries of the physical book. And the first English dictionary, which was a Robert Caudry's Table Alphabetical of 1604, which had I think 2,000 words in it. The idea of a world before there were dictionaries is the thing that really struck me. I think in part it's because to understand this story of information, I've been trying to put myself back into the mindset of people who didn't have all the stuff that we have, not just the devices, not just email. Although I did when I was writing about Newton, I was constantly thinking, gee, what if Newton had email as a former email provider? Anyway, but not only didn't he have email, but he didn't have he didn't have dictionaries. I mean, there were technically a few dictionaries by then. He barely had clocks. He just he was in a world that suddenly had glass for the first time. We sometimes worry about whether Shakespeare was a lousy speller, or people sometimes say he you know, he didn't care that much about spelling. The point that we miss is that there was no such thing as correct spelling in Shakespeare's time. There's like transliterating Chinese or something like words were fleeting. They were oral. They emerged from our mouths and vanished into the ether. That's an exaggeration because the written word had been around for thousands of years, but but it's not so much of an exaggeration. And so I felt if I was going to tell the story of information, I wanted to understand not just our modern predicament, but also how different the world was before we had these pivotal information technologies. So what would you say is the central message of the book? What's the prime the most essential takeaway you want people to have when they read? Well, I never finished answering your first question about the subject. Just as long as you've come to this one, you can do it. Well, you've brought me back to it. Okay, because the end of the subtitle is flood. Right. That's the thing I think we're most worried about today. That's that was part of certainly part of the thing everybody was worrying about it at decoding data yesterday. And it's, you know, we're all worried about the overwhelming massive information that bombards us. It's true if we're geneticists and it's true if we're Twitter users. You know, maybe I think probably most of us in this room are Twitter users. I certainly I certainly am. And and there's already a paradox there. It's a paradox that you've explored a little bit in connection with Facebook. It's what all of these great enterprises, it's the problem all these great enterprises are trying to solve. On the one hand, we love information, we live for it almost literally. How can something that is so valuable to us and central to our existence start to overwhelm us? How can there be such a thing as too much information? And yet there is too much information is a source of stress, it's a source of confusion, we worry about separating what's true from what's false. If we sign up for Facebook or Twitter, suddenly there are a billion people more or less who we have some responsibility for being aware of if not following. How are we supposed to the cliche is find the signal in the noise? It's a cliche that I don't accept actually. I don't think in the in this world of cyberspace, there is any, any bright line between signal and noise. What is signal to me is going to be noise to most people and vice versa. Well, it is interesting that Facebook and Google learn two most successful companies of modern technology landscape are all about filtration in order to try to present you with what is most relevant right now for your exact needs at the moment. And Twitter, interestingly, has transformed itself and under its new leadership from being seen as a place you go to tweet, to being primarily a place you go to see the tweets of others to use it as a filter, because it's that's the way most people use it, but it wasn't positioned that way until recently. So clearly they have the same role. But so do you do you feel optimistic about our progress in dealing with this flood? I go back and forth between optimism and pessimism. You're absolutely right that filtration and search are the two tools that were that are most essential to us. And people think that Google is about search. But as you say, it's just as much about filtering. It's about, it's not just about showing us the top result or the top 10 results. It's about hiding the built the nine billion less interesting results. Well, that's what search is. I mean, we know that whatever we want is out there these days. It's just like, how do we find it? And that's what Google is supposed to do. And of course, that's already as soon as you recognize that you should I think have a bell should go off and you should start to be a little bit worried. What? Because somewhere in those nine billion unwanted results might be a jam. And mean we should not trust Google, you're saying? Of course not. Do we trust Google? Well, increasingly, we seem not to. But I think for other reasons, or maybe this is not, you know, to talk trash about Google, but don't hesitate. If Google itself is explicitly undergoing a kind of transition from being a search engine that that tried to give the best possible result in a platonic sense for any particular search when you search for university, well, what's the most interesting university? And then very quickly in the first few years, the top result for university, I haven't checked this, but I bet anything that the top result for university is the Wikipedia definition of university. God, if that's not true, it's going to be embarrassing, but it'll be that'll be up there. Now, though, they they feel a need to follow Facebook and personalize their results so that when you search for university, they can read your mind and recognize that you are a graduate of Brown University, or you are a teenager thinking of applying for university, or you are a professor worried about trends in tenure at university, and so on. Presumably, you're familiar with Eli Paris's book, The Filter Bubble, which really tackled this exact issue head on, arguing that sites like Google and Facebook are diminishing our common life by over personalizing our information experience. Do you agree with that criticism? No, no, I mean, yes and no. And because yes and no was also the answer to your previous question about whether I'm optimistic. Well, you're a slippery dude. Yes and no. Here's the here's the takeaway, I think. There is no perfect solution. We are we're making a mistake if we if we look for one. If we enter a search term in the little box and we expect Google or any other provider to come up with a perfect solution or or an ideal top ten list, we're kidding ourselves. And I think we're I think we're already smarter than that. What I mean is there's no perfect solution either at the extreme where you're thinking about people in general searching for a given thing. And there's also no perfect solution for me as an individual, even if Google could read my mind as they aspire to do. They still may not be able to produce the thing that I really need. But in the end, wouldn't both face me, I would assert that both Facebook and Google would say, look, we're not trying to be perfect. We just want to make your life a little bit better than it would be if you didn't have our tool. Do you question that? No, no, I don't. I think that's exactly right. All of these things are making our lives a little bit better. I think Twitter makes our lives a little bit better. I'm a happy Twitter user. But if I've heard people say Twitter needs to solve the problem to get to the next level of helping users really find the people they need to find. Helping users solve the problem of breaking through a billion potential follow-ease leaders. What do you call somebody you follow on? Followers? Well, you can't, they can't solve that problem, but they are, they are another tool. And whether they succeed in the long run, whether Facebook succeeds, whether Google succeeds, cyberspace is here to stay and there will be further tools and they will all be, I venture to say, partial successes. Right. Okay. Because in the end, I don't think we either can or we want to abdicate our personal responsibility for finding the stuff we're interested in. But how do we exercise that? On Twitter, we exercise it by choosing an ongoing revolving cast of people who are our personal curators. And make sure that it is evolving. I mean, do you recommend we always be seeking to, I mean, seeking to be Google or Facebook for ourselves and constantly be upgrading the quality of our information and do that consciously, the quality of our sources? Yes. I mean, I was about to say I don't want to recommend anything, but... Well, please, recommend anything. But yes, isn't that what, isn't that what we all do? We, we choose people to follow. We choose, doesn't have to be on Twitter. We choose the bloggers that we like. My grandfather chose from a dozen New York Daily newspapers, the one he wanted to read on the subway to work in the morning and the one he wanted to read on the subway home in the afternoon. He was consciously or not, not choosing curators who were filtering the information about the day's current events. You know, it used to be, when I used to work at the New York Times, it was said there that what you were paying for was not the news that the Times printed. It was all the news that the Times chose not to print. That was a filtering device. And someone who buys a daily newspaper is choosing a surrogate. It's choosing a smart editor. If you choose an art museum to go to or a particular exhibit, you are relying on the skills of a curator, even if it's someone whose name you don't know. That's what we are all doing more consciously than ever before when we navigate cyberspace. So back to the big picture takeaway. You know, you, you reasserted this word flood. And yet you have many hundreds of pages, which is the intent to help people understand the roots of the problem. So they become more discriminating in their, you know, dealing with this flood. Is that kind of the way you think of it? You know, I'd like to be able to say that. But honestly, the intent was to tell a story. Yeah, which you're very good at. That's one thing that makes your books successful. I said that I admitted that my one word answer to the question of what I do as writer, I wanted to, I thought there was a story there that needed to be told because it's farmed to read and interesting to read and it shed some light on the world we live in. And you know that as writers, we only learn the story as we're telling it. Yeah. So no, it wasn't to help, it wasn't to help people. It would be nice to think that people could buy my book and live better lives. But I can't promise that. Okay. But what about you personally? How would you say doing this work and spending all these years reporting and writing this book changed the way you think and the way you behave? It's made this book in particular has certainly made me more aware of things that were just lurking at the periphery of my consciousness. For example, all of this, well, all these things about the centrality of information, information as a thing to be aware of a thing that about which we are making choices. We're making the choices whether they're conscious or not. And most of the time they're not most of the time we're making unconscious choices. We're, you know, surfing the internet can become a road thing or an automatic thing. But but the more we're aware of using our time of choosing particular curators of dividing our time between a search for breadth and a search for depth. This is another another key issue that comes that comes to the fore is that we're living in a world where suddenly we have access to a breadth of information that's that's unprecedented. Ask anyone a question, a factual question, anyone in this room can pull a device out of their pocket and give you a very good answer can access the the instantaneous global memory prosthetic that we have. But anyone in this room will also probably say that that doesn't automatically make us smarter or even more knowledgeable. And so what does that mean for how we choose to divide our time between getting a breadth of information and burrowing in deeply into one subject. I certainly have I've become more aware of that. And even in writing this book, there were some things in the book that are just gigantically broad in general. And there are other things in the book that are that just will seem to readers, maybe like going down a tunnel, a twisting narrow tunnel. But through a well told story, we hope anyway. Well, I hope it'll be a hope it'll be an illuminated tunnel at least. Do you think there's any prospect that we will in the rest of our lives, the people sitting in this room have less of a feeling of information overload and and being overwhelmed, which I think there's unquestionably no one in this room who doesn't feel that. Is this just the destiny for the rest of human existence? I think there's no prospect that that a time is going to come when people are not concerned about information overload. I think the best we can hope for is to have to use the cliche historical perspective. One of the one of the fun things I learned in writing the book with how long people have worried about information overload, even though they didn't call it that. You know, it's only in the last generation that it's become a cliche that people have talked about too much information and information fatigue. And that's because we are aware of this water in which we swim. But people have been complaining since, well, Leibniz complained in the 17th century that that this new fangled technology, the printing press was flooding Europe with a horrible mass of books that threatened to return mankind to a state of barbarism. Because no one could keep up anymore. But now you're heading back toward optimism because if it's been forever thus, it's good to understand how it's happening now. But maybe we shouldn't be too worried, right? Well, that's right. We shouldn't be too worried but we shouldn't be complacent. Well, I can tell you the tech industries by no means complacent. They see this as the most fertile field for innovation that they can imagine. And there's just infinite, innovative ideas emerging all over the world for better and more creative ways of combining information sources and presenting them in more simple interfaces in order to allow people to get more effective things done faster, to entertain themselves more effectively, etc. Absolutely. And they either are or are not aware that in so doing they're contributing to the flood. I mean, after all, we used to just have Google, then we also have Facebook. We used to just have Facebook now. We also have Twitter and so on. Again, back through history, the emergence of one of the reasons for my interest in dictionaries was the dictionaries themselves were meant to be a solution to a problem of too much information. There are all these words. Now we need some help in understanding where they come from and what they mean. There were encyclopedias, then there were card catalogs and file folders. All of these are technologies that on the one hand were meant to help people address the problem of too much information and on the other hand contributed in their own ways to the flood. What do you think about the most successful innovation in this arena, which is Facebook, and the fact that it has chosen to use this means of your personal network as a filtration device? Do you find that intriguing as a point of progress? Does it help you personally deal with this? I'm actually, to be honest, I'm not a Facebook user. Not at all. Well, I have an account, but I haven't checked it in a long time. What do you think about that as a theoretical approach, since it's not practically explored in your case? As a theoretical approach, I think it's key. That is social networking is a general thing, is an extent is a step on the path that I've been talking about on the path of using our connections, our individual connections to sort through information, as opposed to thinking of the world of information as just a giant ocean, that can be sifted algorithmically. This is to increase. Do you find that slightly progressive? Progressive in the sense of better than just algorithms, people might be. I think it's a return to finding balance. I mean, every every new information technology throws out of whack the balance between the individual and the mass. You know, the invention of the radio suddenly created a world in which a single voice could be heard by millions. Bertolt Brecht was obsessed with this at the time and and worried about a world and you know how many speakers will there be? How many listeners? That's just that is surely echoed by what's happening now before Facebook and after Facebook. People worry about the inverse now that too many people have a voice and it's too chaotic. And certainly, you know, Putin or or Mubarak worry about things like that. Well, exactly. And that's why whether or not I will advocate Facebook or Google or any particular enterprise, I am fundamentally a believer in cyberspace as as a medium for human communication that's not going to go away. You know, one of the big ideas and maybe this is may have to be the last question, depending on how long winded your answer is and feel free to go on. But, you know, McLuhan had this whole idea of the global brain and that's something that a lot of people do still assert is happening that, you know, and even in my book at the end, I talk about how people there are people who talk about Facebook as moving towards this sort of interconnected network of human humans that sort of becomes a collective brain. Peter Thiel, one of the investors in Facebook talks about it that way. Is that an idiotic idea or do you see some reason to think that a version of that could really be happening over time? I think it's happening now. It's far from being an idiotic idea. It's this is the world we live in. We are, whether we're aware of it or not, we are increasingly part of a global brain. We are making our decisions often collectively. We do and we don't believe in the wisdom of crowds. I mean, we worry about groupthink and we should. And we're also aware of the dangers of mass hysterias. You know, suddenly everybody believes that at the exact second that the millennium turns, all of the world's computers are going to crash and there's a kind of mass panic about it and then a day later it's forgotten. And yet I am to some extent a believer in, to a great extent, a believer in our ability as a species to share wisdom collectively. What's the next book? I can't I can't even tell you what the next book is. I'm at that awkward writer stage where I'm in between and noodling with ideas and well, trying to avoid feeling unemployed. I'm sure it'll be interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. Great conversation. Really enjoying.