1. John Paulos, Mathematician, Temple University
01:19:18 Share

Book Talk Conversations. I'm Christopher G. Moore. I'd like to invite you to join me on Book Talk Conversations, where I turn back the clock, asking an original thinker to discuss their childhood reading. I dig deep into the guest's early books. Follow me down the rabbit hole with a distinguished guest from various fields in the arts and sciences.

I'm super excited to launch this webcast with Professor John Paulus, who is an author, a popular public speaker, and former monthly correspondent for ABCNews.com, along with Scientific America and The Guardian.

Professor of Math at Temple University in Philadelphia, he earned his PhD in the subject from the University of Wisconsin. He's also received a number of very prestigious awards, including in 2003, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for promoting public understanding of science. In 2013, the Mathematics Communication Award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics.

In other words, Professor Paulus is a seasoned expert communicator. So we want to get into his mind to see how it was constructed to allow him these superpower communication skills.

Professor Paulus's books include "In Numeracy, Beyond Numeracy," "A Mathematician Reads a Newspaper," which by the way was on the New York Times for 18 weeks, "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market," "Irreligion," and lastly, an autobiography, "A Numerate Life." Welcome, John. I'm very pleased to have you on the show today and to start with your reading history from the beginning.

Those books that came to you that ignited a fire for learning, for reading, and for understanding, and one that obviously has been there your entire life. So if you could maybe just, before we get to the specific books, start a little bit about the context in which the young John Paulus suddenly discovered the world of words.

Well, first, thanks for that very kind introduction, Christopher. As far as that, it's actually hard for me to say. I read, I thought, I don't know the exact words.

effect of books in general or a particular book. I mean, I, excuse me, I've listed a number of books that I remember reading and being impressed by. And I also was very, very, without the benefit of a book, I mean, a book might have triggered an idea or some phrase that someone

my father used or some friends of my parents used and I think about what that meant. But I always had a very skeptical frame of mind. I remember as a little kid, just being a very young kid, being amused by the fact that dog and God were permutation, the letters were just precluded. And I remember telling my parents and I thought it was a great discovery. But

In any case, that's one reason I was drawn to a number of the books I've listed. Even Montaigne was kind of a gentle skeptic, certainly Bertrand Russell was, and I've always kind of resonated with that. And also with kind of a natural tendency to debunk. I remember

I think I tell this story in a numeric life. I figured out that the earned run average of a pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves was 135. You don't have to know what that is, but it's very unusual. He got one batter out and he allowed five earned runs. And I remember telling that to my teacher,

fourth grade, third grade teacher during a discussion of sports. And he was a martinet, big guy, bulbous nose, drank a lot. And he said, it's impossible. I can only have an earn-run average of 27. He told me to sit down. And I was a little, I was very shy. My face got red. My voice quavered. My hands shook.

But anyway, at the end of the season, the Milwaukee Journal published statistics for every player during the year of this particular pitcher and everything back. So his earn-run average for the year was 135. And I remember bringing it in, bringing the newspaper in and showing it to my teacher. And he looked at it and told me to sit down. But I remember that...

I hit the look on his face. He knew I was right. I knew I was right. And it imparted a kind of lesson to me that with a little logic, a little bit of arithmetic, you could vanquish a blowhard no matter how shy you were. And that, I think, informed some of my work and numeracy and mathematician reason newspaper, some of my columns.

So, one of the reasons I listed Bertrand Russell is a very important influence on the views that I have. So, really, the reading then, I'm kind of interested in, did you grow up in a reading culture or was it more kind of an independent thing that came to you through some other source?

It wasn't particularly a reading culture. I mean, my father was interested in such things, but we didn't have a lot of books in the house. But I found books. I found Montaigne, for example, at my grandmother's house on my uncle's bookshelf.

And I remember being just shocked that you could just write things in a very informal way about your everyday experiences and have it be conversational and humorous and funny.

skeptical, reasonable. And that struck me. You could do that. In a way, looking back, remember, I mean, the Seinfeld show, people characterized it as being about nothing. It was not

And in a way, Montaigne was kind of a 16th century Seinfeld because it was about nothing and every day, just everyday things. And I remember, you know, wanting to do that. I wrote up some, what I had to do to listen to Milwaukee Braves baseball games when I was visiting my grandparents during the summers in Denver. And I would lie down next to this radio as big as a,

a refrigerator and was very staticky. And I would write out where to sit and what snacks to get, grapes or candy of one sort or another, cookies. And just the directions. I mean, they'd close the door so my brothers didn't come in and bother me.

And it was my very early imitation of Montaigne's essay. It wasn't very good. You can probably tell from the summary I just gave you of it. But it nevertheless did have that impact on me that you could just, you know, write about anything. And I mean, the details of the story aren't, you know, don't stick with me. But a lot of times just the feeling tone and the general story

approach does have an impact. You know, one of the things that's always impressed me about you, John, is the fluency of language and mathematical talent and skill.

Normally, those two things don't coalesce inside one brain. For some reason, they seem to coalesce. Well, you have become one of the premier communicators of the mathematical language to a world which is basically innumerate. And as a result, have been able to create a bridge. Now, you've created a language bridge already.

to two language bridges. One language is mathematics, one language is in words. So really today, I'm really interested in how that

reading of language have assisted you in becoming this excellent communicator of original ways of looking at mathematical problems, of problem solving, and puzzles. Because I know you're a big fan of puzzles and how to figure them out. Well, I was always interested in writing as well as in

I was good at math, but I enjoyed writing. I mean, in college, I ultimately got a PhD in mathematics, but as an undergraduate, I majored in a number of things. I always came back to math. I majored in philosophy for a while, in English. I went to college.

write and physics and I kept coming back to math, but I always enjoyed writing and I enjoyed humor and writing jokes or hearing jokes, which are a kind of puzzle.

In fact, I wrote a book, Mathematics and Humor, which looks at the similarities between mathematics and humor, which are quite extensive, actually. But they're both forms of intellectual play, combinatorics, reversals, ingenuity, cleverness, logic, pattern are essential to both. Reductio ad absurdum plays a role in math as well as in humor.

for different ways. Brevity is important. I think brevity is essential, not just in humor, but in mathematics. I mean, it's one difference between mathematics and literature. Somebody writes an extensive article

treatment of proofs, for example, or whatever that's 400 pages long. And if somebody else writes one that's 600 pages long, the latter one is deemed better. Whereas in mathematics, if somebody has a proof that's

six pages long of some theorem and somebody else has one that's two pages long, the shorter one is better. There's an all-known quote attributed to various people, including Pascal, where he tells his interlocutor that he apologizes for writing a long letter. He says he didn't have time to write a short one.

And I think brevity has also always appealed to me. And puzzles always result in a kind of aha moment. And it's like a punchline to a joke. Yeah, I'm wondering, Guy, just pause there for a second, that there's an interesting connection between the mathematical world and the world of literature. Both have a mission of trying to make sense

predictions about how you would solve a puzzle, how you would do a particular thing in a particular order and predict the outcome of that. So that you obviously have learned to be a super powered predictor. And the mathematician on the stock market, for example, is your exploration of

using those skills in terms of prediction ability. Now, we also have those skills from literature, from books. We try to predict the motives and intentions and behavior of other people. And I think that's one of the reasons that people who have extraordinary minds, original minds, are better predictors.

Perhaps. I think I'm not a particularly good predictor of the stock market. I don't think anybody is.

But I know what you mean. I wouldn't sign on necessarily to the word prediction, though. But I mean, actually, my approach to the popular books I have written in mathematics uses little stories, vignettes, jokes, parables to explain mathematical ideas, the gist of them, rather than formulas or equations. And often you can get across

just an idea more effectively by appropriately constructed a little parable or vignette. And that's what I tried to do often in my columns. Sometimes it's not possible, but often it is. And Martin Gardner is a master of that. And his books were one of the...

were influential on me when, had an influence on me as I was growing up. He's probably been more responsible for math PhDs than any 10 math departments in the country. And I've- Let's, John, let's, sorry to interrupt, but I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier, the short and long

essay, Brevity in Writing. This takes back to Michel Montag, which is the first on your list of books that you list. And I know he's done essays on sadness and sorrow, of consciousness, of smells.

One of his quotations is, marriage is like a cage. One sees the birds outside desperate to get in and those on the inside desperate to get out. So I can see these kind of pithy phrases out of Montauk would have had a certain appeal to you. Tell us a little bit about the context in which you came to these essays and the kind of influence that they've had on you.

I found the book in my uncle's bookshelf. He was 12 years older than I am. And...

I just read it. I had never heard of Montaigne, but as I said, I was just kind of shocked that someone could write about, in a sense, nothing all that profound, but yet be very intriguing and provide a bit of kind of compelling insight to friendship or loss or

being presumptuous or whatever. And again, the details escape me now, but I remember reading through most of the book and just being impressed that somebody could do that. And in addition to the little thing I wrote about listening to a baseball game under the radio as big as a refrigerator, I wrote little pieces that...

I generally threw away, but it did inspire me to play around with writing, I mean, outside of school and play around with the notion of an essay. In a sense, Montaigne invented what we call an essay today. Yes.

Yes, he did. It's interesting because he's also known for someone who valued example and experience over abstract knowledge. And I think that's probably a reasonable description of your approach to the books you've written. I don't know. I value abstract knowledge too. It's just that I think you can communicate it via stories.

I mean, Russell said that mathematics had a beauty cold and austere. That's true, but it develops out of much warmer, more visceral ingredients. I mean, you learn about geometry by putting, you know, some generalized sense, putting sticks together. You learn about arithmetic by adding and subtracting elements.

You learn about probability by noticing things happen often or not. And so you kind of abstract from these everyday visceral activities to construct mathematics. So mathematics does have this beauty that's cold and austere, as Russell claimed, but it comes from much muddier visceral everyday stuff.

- So in a sense then, what you're adding to the discussion is that these examples do bring to life the abstract principles and knowledge that are being conveyed. In which you read and you write in order to see the example list

And from that, you start to have a better idea of how that overall context is working. I think that's fair to say, yes.

I mean, my background was kind of anomalous for a mathematician because I majored for a while in English and philosophy and so on. And I always had a kind of perhaps broader conception of mathematics and didn't focus the way many very good mathematicians do on some particular aspect of some topic in algebraic topology or whatever. But

Again, Russell was an influence because not only was he a logician, but he also engaged with the topics of the times. He was a philosopher, of course, but also involved in social issues of various sorts and was a conscientious objector in World War I and later on got involved in politics.

So, in that sense, he was an idol of mine for many reasons. Yeah, I mean, Bertrand Russell was a towering figure for the kind of first half of the 20th century in terms of a thought leader, an original thinker, authored 70 books, several thousand essays.

and had his views on "Why I'm Not a Christian," which is an essay, I think one of the book's essays that you pointed out that may have had some influence on your own book, "Irreligion." Maybe you'd like to draw a parallel there. Right. I think "Why I'm Not a Christian" also, I mean,

talks about the arguments for God and shows where they fall short and has a kind of very polemical conclusion to the book that I always liked. And, yeah, of course, influenced that and many other books that influenced my book, Your Religion, which looks at the most common arguments for the existence of God and points out the Latina that exists in all of them.

And so... Apparently, when Russell died, there were a number of obituaries that included a quote that he had written long before about his three passions in life. First was a longing for love. Second was the search for knowledge. And third, an unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

And I'm wondering whether it's these principles that attracted you to Russell's writings and have influenced your own writings subsequently? Sometimes, too. He also wrote, you know, the world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage. And I think there's something to be said for that. Knowledge, of course, and unfortunately it's kind of...

has been devalued in recent times here in this country. Kindliness doesn't exist too much on Twitter at least and not in the broader body politic. And courage is certainly lacking in the US Congress. So we're deficient in knowledge, kindness, and courage. And hopefully,

That's a deficiency that will be remedied to some extent, but it's always going to be a problem. John, tell us about when you were 10 years old and you had a correspondence with Bertrand Russell. Tell us that story. Actually, I was older. I was in high school. Okay. And I had read a history of Western philosophy. And there was Russell...

hated the obfuscation that he said was typical of Hegel, that it was muddy, turgid, and so on. And there were some clear philosophical arguments in Hegel, one of which was for a kind of monism. And so I wrote him when I was in high school, a junior or senior in high school, I wrote him.

and saying what was wrong, I mean, the nub of what's wrong with Hagel's argument. And he wrote back, much to my surprise, and you might have been flattered, he was very old at the time, and he gets this kind of fan letter from a kid in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But anyway, he answered me, and he said, you know, it had to do with...

Hegel thinking all sentences were of a subject, predicate, variety, and that relations weren't real. I mean, it's kind of a technical point. But I was so flattered that he answered me. But the next year, I was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the third volume of his autobiography had come out. And I noticed there was a pile of them, and one of them was open.

to the very page where he answered me. He included the answer, the letter he wrote to me in the third volume of his autobiography.

which was one, it was surprising that he wrote me, and two, surprising he put his answer to me in his autobiography. And the mention of me is sandwiched between such 20th century luminaries as Wittgenstein and Nehru and a whole host of others, so it seemed particularly flattering. But it was also very mysterious, like why should the book be open to that very page?

And perhaps somebody knew me, but I was a freshman and I doubt anybody at the bookstore would know me. I think it was just a coincidence, but nevertheless. Would you encourage others to write authors with questions like that?

In other words, to connect with the people who are actually writing the book that is having some influence on you. It's much easier to do today than it would have been when you were in junior high school. Yeah, I would. Especially with email, it's not all that intrusive.

If an author doesn't like it, it's easy enough to delete. But yeah, I think most authors would appreciate letters from younger people in particular. And you have nothing to lose. I mean, I wrote a number of letters. I wrote a letter to John Updike. I remember he wrote it after I read his Reddit series books. And he wrote a very nice note back. And I've written others as well.

And I remember Saul Bellows' novel Herzog, which the main characters writes letters, half the book writing letters to people as he was kind of floundering. And I remember being impressed by that. So in a sense, the letter writing is an extension of the reading experience. You're reaching out to someone who's written something that's

had some impact on you and there's either a clarification or you just wish to express gratitude for what you learned from their book. I'm certain that you must get a fair number of letters from young people who are readers of your books so that the tradition continues.

I do, and I'm always touched by them and always write back too. I mean, it's easy enough on email. You're a well-known super author as well. You must receive letters about your Calvino creation as well as other books and columns you've written. Do you write back?

Yes, of course, I do. Because it seems to me anytime someone can immerse themselves in a world that you've created, in my case, fictional world, and take that world to be real and tangible and have an impact on their actual analog life, I take that as someone who is a serious reader, who is reaching out, who's trying to explore, who's trying to understand better.

And I think that's the process in which we grow intellectually and emotionally. We have a better sense of who we are, a better theory of mind. I have a better theory of mind of my readers. And I'm certain it must be a similar process for you as well. Why don't we turn to David Hume, a very famous 18th century Scottish writer, again, who had a

incredible amount of impact at the flowering of the Enlightenment in Britain as well as in Europe. And I know that he's had an impact on you and your writing, and maybe you'd like to tell us a little bit about how David Hume fits into the matrix of your original thinking.

Well, I was attracted, of course, to his skepticism. And he was like the 18th century Bertrand Russell, well, in many ways. But, I mean, his writing on miracles, for example, I remember a quote of his, something like, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony is...

is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact itself. So, I mean, two things happen. I mean, Jesus walked on water, or the scriptural reports of the event are false, which is the greater miracle. I think the greater miracle is that he walked on water, so therefore we reject that.

But, I mean, you know, so his writings about miracles and how you could dismiss them and you always look for the greater probability. His notion is kind of quasi-Buddhist notions of self. Self is just a collection of...

properties, a bundle of properties, and there's nothing more to it. The self is, most people conceive it as kind of a chimera. There is no self. It's a collection, and it's kind of always struck me as kind of, as I say, quasi-Buddhist, and

And his notion of cause is just being constant conjunction and so on. So, I mean, his kind of demolition of traditional notions, whether cause, miracles, self, appealed to me. And I've always admired his skepticism. And he was also involved in...

in the world, he wrote some well-known histories, as well as engaged in some political discussions and affairs. So he, in some sense, was very loosely speaking, a kind of 18th century Russell. Have Hume and Russell, again, both of them seem to be linked with their

skepticism about how you approach certain issues, that the skeptic would look at the notion of having a designer, a supreme being, and mysticism and superstition in a particular way. What extent do we find, or do you find, that Hume, as well as Russell, continue to have relevance and importance in a modern technological world?

where it seems that skepticism is kind of consigned to one group of people but not widely accepted? Or is it that we are now in the ultimate skeptical age? Which is it? Are we too skeptical or not skeptical enough?

I don't know. It's hard to say. Probably it's kind of a dodge, but probably both. Many people aren't skeptical enough, hence the popularity of QAnon. Actually, there was an article in the New York Times today. It was very uncritically accepting of astrology, which I think the Times should be embarrassed to have it published at.

So in any case, there's a lot of gullibility. I mean, look at the 70 million people who looked at everything Trump did for the last four years and they say, yep, he's our man. And that's unfortunate. On the other hand, there are some people who are, you know, you can be too skeptical, too snarky, too ready to dismiss almost anything.

Would you see Hume or Russell, or both of them, as being good teachers of skepticism that can be used today by, say, young people, students or ordinary people who want to see kind of a framework of how you can be skeptical without being snarky?

Perhaps, yeah. I think there's a lot of philosophers, skeptical writers in general. I mean, look at Daniel Bennett, Richard Dawkins, a whole host of so-called new atheists. So, I mean, they're out there, but you have to be open to it. And

I mean, the United States is a very, I mean, a huge fraction of the United States are evangelicals. I don't think that they're open to entertaining this. I mean, marginally relevant. Sorry, I'm sorry to say, one quote that I always liked, I mean, it's marginally relevant to this issue, but also related ones. Let me see if I can get it right. It's something like,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And I think that's still the case. I mean, people always get very aroused and angry, and usually they're

They don't know what they're talking about and the people who do are always tentative and say, well, maybe, and I'm not sure yet. And unfortunately, you have that kind of division. I mean, the best people are naturally tentative. Science is tentative. But that doesn't mean that, you know, it's not the source of most of what we know, whereas the people who don't know anything are always talk sure of everything.

Sure. Yeah, there is a difference between those who put air bars around what they are thinking to be real and those who assume that there are no air bars if you have faith and belief in a particular ideology or religion. Well, yeah, I think so. Let's look at Martin Gardner, many puzzled books.

What I like about this guy is he published over an 80-year career. I mean, that's a long, long career. Title says, as 12 tricks with a borrowed deck, mathematics, magic, and mystery, logic, machines, and diagrams. And my favorite, never make fun of a turtle, my son. So how did Martin Gardner, who seemed to have...

an enormous amount of respect and admiration by generations of mathematicians come into your life. I came across a couple of his books and then I went and bought as many of them as I could find, which was, as you indicated, a large number.

And now I like the fact that it was mathematical, that it was funny, that there were jokes, little physics problems, card tricks, and riddles of various forms. And as I say, I like to always, I mean, I always know the connection between mathematics and humor, which seems...

strange to many people's ears, but as I indicated before, there are lots of similarities. It's economical, there's logic, patterns, structure, cleverness, and so on. Taking things literally is a habit that most mathematicians have.

and make a lot of jokes by digging things literally. I remember last summer I was watching Three Stooges, which I loved as a kid with two of my grandsons, and I was pleased to see that they found the same things I found hilarious a long time ago. I remember they were laughing their heads off when Larry asked Moe

Moe asked Larry, what does your clock say? I don't know what time it is. What does your clock say? And Larry goes, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It's stupid, but he liked it. I guess what I'm hearing you say, John, is that in a way, Martin Gardner was a kind of a mentor.

to you in terms of how you approach your mathematics through puzzles, through humor, through example. And again, that

is from the world of books. In other words, you found someone who on the written page could become a real life mentor for you and allowed you a portal into the mathematical world that was absolutely suited emotionally and intellectually for your skills.

I think so. Actually, I mentioned earlier writing letters to celebrities or well-known people. I wrote Martin Gardner a few times and then we had this correspondence.

dealing with dirty jokes. He had a whole collection of dirty jokes. I mean, they weren't offensive, at least not to me. And he sent me some of his best ones. He was a good guy. Glad he lived to a ripe old age. Yeah, he was kind of a mentor.

Would you recommend his books now to young people who are in school? Yeah, I would. I think the mathematics that's taught in schools should definitely be supplemented by...

all kinds of popular science writing, get ideas across. And yeah, I think it's important to... I mean, it's a little bit like... I mean, if you don't do that and you just stick to solving equations and formulas with fixed algorithms, it's a little bit like teaching English and only talking about...

grammar and diagramming sentences and never reading a work of literature. I mean, if that's the case, you won't have too keen an appreciation of literature when you get to college. But something analogous to that is in many places, fortunately fewer than in the past, in many places still just focuses on algorithms, very simple algorithms and how to invert a matrix or

how to do this or that, and ignores the analog of literature and mathematics, which is unfortunate. And one way to get part of that literature is Martin Gardner, but there are all kinds of popular books on chaos theory and probability and everyday life and topology and so on.

And I think that those, you know, for students who's interested in mathematics, those should be read to supplement school mathematics. Let's move on to the next.

I'm not quite certain how to characterize this, but Mad Magazine, the comic books, which were published 67 years between 1952 and 2018. Over 550 regular magazine issues and countless special issues published.

And it's been said that Mad Magazine really shaped the mental processes of a whole generation and is responsible for a number of the aspects of the 1960s,

where suddenly people were seeing that there were a lot of phonies around, that the teachers weren't telling the truth, the government wasn't telling the truth, that we were in a cold war, toothpaste ads were propaganda, and that nothing could be trusted from authority.

Now, clearly this resonates, I think, with you, John, and maybe go back a little bit to the beginning when you first started reading Matt Magazine and how that experience influenced you.

Well, yeah, you got it right there. The irreverent sensibility of Mad Magazine, I liked a lot. And I guess I was in some sense, at least not in all senses, a child of the 60s. And I liked it. And

Not just that, but comic books I like. I mean, they're kind of not great literature, as everybody knows, but Superman, superheroes, even Archie, Jughead, Reggie, and so on. You know, I think there's something to the value. I mean, nobody reads comic books anymore. I'm not even sure they're being produced.

But superheroes, some are. But yeah, Mad Magazine, comic books. I mean, and there's a kind of a continuum between such things and real literature. I remember there was a television program in the late 50s, Cisco Kid. And that made me, it got me to read Don Quixote, at least a simplified version of it that was available at my library.

local library. But, you know, Cisco kid, kind of, you know, run of the mill, but funny, a television show, introduced me to the Doc Diodi. So, I mean, there's a continuum. I don't think we should be too dismissive or too snarky or snide about comic books or Mad Magazine or any written stuff that's not great literature.

Is Mad Magazine something that you can go back, say as a young person today, and read it and have the same kind of relationship between those messages? I'm thinking of our technology. We're so much of the discourse about false fronts, fake news, deceptions, booby traps, ambushes are now...

batted back and forth in seconds amongst total strangers. That is not the Mad Magazine world. Yeah, no, I don't think it would have the same appeal today. It's from a more innocent time. I don't think kids today would respond to it in the same way.

I mean, just as you look at old television shows that were popular and they seemed so dated, and many of them, not all of them, but it's so dated. And the wisecracks and the jokes come much less frequently. Every few minutes somebody says something, whereas now people are used to much snappier, faster-paced sitcoms.

And people are more cynical than they were in the 50s and 60s. So I think you're... But I'm seeing a little bit of a trend here, John, on Russell, Hume, and now Matt Magazine. And it's basically looking at the origin of your original mind. It really is a deep dive into the world of skepticism.

that is reflected with different voices, different authors at different times. Is that fair? I think so, yeah. Yeah. In fact, I remember as a kid, I don't really have a religious role in my body. I never understood religion. But just running around saying what would be being sacrilegious things, running around in the playground, I don't know. But...

Yeah, but skepticism in general. I mean, whether it be of anyone. Yeah, I think skepticism... So would you say you're reading history that a major source of developing this sense of skepticism came from your reading? I think so, probably. I mean, I was naturally disposed to resonate with such ideas.

And I didn't come from a religious household. My father was an agnostic. My mother occasionally went to church, but I think just for other reasons. And even that I didn't understand. But yeah, I think I had an actual disposition to it. And that disposition was nourished and flourished in large part because of what I've read.

Now to something that's quite different, which is not the world of skepticism, but the world of war. Ted Lawson, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, which is the story of an eyewitness account who participated in the 1942 Doolittle raid over Tokyo, where 16 B-25 bombers hit industrial targets in Japan at close range. The mission was a success.

This is a book that others have said was a lifelong love affair with war novels and history. How does it fit into the way your mind works? In other words, you've chosen this book as being kind of a special influence. How did that work? It was just a very good story. I think I reread it three or four times.

And it's a very compelling story, sad story. Lawson, the author, lost his leg and many people died. It was a successful mission, but it's a very dramatic, compelling, real, true story. And it doesn't fit in particularly to my life.

skeptical framework. But I mean, it's interesting, though, how people change. I mean, I went into the Peace Corps to Kenya to avoid the draft. I went to Vietnam. And

In any case, when I was younger, I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed war movies. I had toy soldiers, which I used to recreate battle scenes. I made model airplanes and painted them very carefully and put on decals and had them fly over my...tack them to the ceiling above my bed.

And so, I mean, that's, you know, people change. But, you know, I was interested in, to some extent, still am in war movies. I mean, war is a very compelling subject, no matter what your age. One of the things I'm hearing you say, John, is that the reason you've gone back and reread this book a number of times is that there's something in the structure of the storytelling that compels your attention.

that you want to go back and be immersed in that world. Is that perhaps one of the reasons that reading is important is that it helps one conceptualize a structure for telling a story in a compelling emotional way? Yeah, of course. And on top of that, it was fascinating.

True, it was a real story. It was about World War II where there was very little gray. It was black and white. And so it was a war that, unlike, let's say, Afghanistan or Vietnam, where it's kind of vague where the lines are.

it was easier to be kind of gung-ho about World War II books and movies. I'd like to turn then to certainly one of my favorite authors and that's Georges-Louis Bourget, The Library of Babel, Bourget and I and Leibniz are

some of the essays of Borge that you have selected out. And I thought it would be interesting to find out how those have shaped your worldview, because Borge is one of those legendary writers who was very brief. Most of his stories are five, six pages. A lot of them are just two or three pages long. But what's packed inside of them is volumes.

I think the brevity of his stories was one of the reasons he never got a Nobel Prize in literature. I think the Nobel Committee doesn't value brevity as much as I do. But no, the themes of his books were ones I was interested in. Infinity, mirrors, identity, and

Metafiction, logic, and free will. The Library of Babel in particular, I like because he does a great job of painting the library, these hexagonal compartments, and every book in the world is there as well as the perversion of every book and random...

random symbols. I mean, it was, everything was there. So in effect, uh,

In a way, the library was useless because every true novel had 8, a zillion and 10 kind of perversions, permutations of the letters, just random letters. So there's so much information in a way that it was useless.

But yet the writing is compelling, not just in this story, but in other different stories. And the stories are a little bit like jokes in the sense that, you know, they're brief. He tells the thing and it carries a real punch at the end or even through the whole thing. Yeah, I could see where...

particularly the Library of Babel would appeal to you because of the brevity and also because of the kind of the paradox. In this infinitely large library, there's one volume that reveals the secret of the library, but there's no filing system. So no one can find that book. And through all eternity, all the people in this library are looking for a book that can never be found.

Right. But in addition to that book, our books, they give the wrong directions. So in a way, it's full of fake news. Yes. Yes. Superstition and cult-like behavior because everything is there. Anything you want to believe, confirmation bias, run wild.

So in that sense, it was useless. But yeah, no, I always liked his stories. I like Voorhees and I too, but because of the distinction between the public Voorhees and his personality, his private personality, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, to use Russell's term.

And that's short. That's 300 words. And it's a beautiful little essay. Yeah, it is amazing. And again, that seems to be fitting a pattern that we're discovering about your reading, John, is that these highly imaginative people

are creating worlds within a very few words, but are profoundly rich, textured, deep explorations of what it is to be a human being. Right. Yeah, I'm very impatient with novels that are too long. I mean, sometimes it's okay. I mean, there's some long novels that I really enjoy, but in general, I prefer brevity. Right.

Okay, anything else about Borgé? I mean, is Borgé being read these days? Should Borgé be read these days? He should be, but I don't know. I don't have a good feeling for whether he is or isn't. Again, every generation finds its own heroes, but our own whatever, but...

I don't know. My guess would be he's not being read that much right now, but he might be. I read part of some of his in Spanish. I can't speak Spanish. My accent is horrible. And if I say something correct, people get the illusion that I'm fluent and start babbling really rapidly.

But I can read Spanish, and I've read some of Jorge's in Spanish, which I enjoy even more, partly because I have to read it slowly and I have to savor every line in a way that I don't when I read English because I kind of zip through it. So, yeah.

Another point is that when you are reading in another language, the reading experience is different because perhaps you slow down. And the way you assimilate is going to be different because there's a different thought structure that goes with each language.

I think so, yeah. I think going slowly and having to go slowly, you have to think about what you're doing, especially since your language skills aren't, if you're not perfectly fluent, maybe the initial literal translation doesn't make sense. Think about it a little bit and say, oh,

Here's a more colloquial translation. Oh, that's a really insightful remark in a way that, as I say, you probably wouldn't in English. You might hurry by. You know, I worry a little bit about the intellectual development and reading history now because there is...

a premium on speed and what has happened in the last 24 hours. That our attention is now so overwhelmed with the absolute avalanche of information and knowledge that flows across the screen every day, that the question that viewers may have is, "I don't have time to read these old books. I can't keep up with what has happened in the last 24 hours on the planet."

How do you respond to that? I think that's true. It's a little bit like Borges Library. There's so much there, you can find what you want. One of the reasons for proliferation of fake news is one, the internet, and two is various biases.

And another is one particular bias, the conjunction fallacy. I mean, the probability of two or three events is going to be much smaller than the probability of one event, one of those three events, but it's often more plausible. So, I mean, if you tell a story, if you get a bunch of factoids from the Internet, you can weave them into a story.

And the probability of that story is probably very low because it's the probability of each of those components being true. So the probability of many things being true is much less than the probability of just one thing being true.

So you're less likely to be sure, but it's more plausible. I mean, if you want to lie, get the news, if you want to lie, put in a lot of details. And it makes your lie less likely to be true, but more plausible.

So if there are lots of details lying around in the library of Babel or in the internet, which is a present-day library of Babel, it's not going to be hard to construct them into whatever kind of beliefs you have. Let's turn to a moment to Franz Kafka, Metamorphis, The Trial, The Hunger Artist. Metamorphis in particular, this transformation

of a human being into a giant beetle and the kind of disgrace and outsider position that this person then faced. Again, fit this into the overall John Paulist reading universe of how this came into your life and what influence it's had.

Well, I don't know how I fit it in. I mean, I'm interested not only in skepticism, so it doesn't really fit in. It's a compelling story. It's very intriguing. It's very disturbing. It's open to all kinds of interpretation, whether religious, psychological, whether the father's...

the crucial, the sister is evil, there's passivity, there's enough there that you can interpret it like any good story, it's open to all kinds of interpretations.

And likewise with the trial. I mean, you know, my reaction to it was a standard one, a fear of bureaucracy and so on. But actually, I was reading this book on the so-called alignment problems.

artificial intelligence and machine learning. They teach machines, you know, you give them all kinds of data from newspapers to websites and so on. And the machines learn, but often what they learn does not align with the values of the

People assume I'm implicit in all that. Often they construct programs that are overtly racist or whatever. So you can have rules. Maybe the rules in the trial made sense, but it led to the problems, the dire dead ends that the protagonist ran into in the trial.

But I mean, that's another thing about stories. I mean, you can, when you read them, gives you a different, I mean, nobody who Kafka up until very recently related it to the so-called alignment problem. But that's a way to look at a small part of the story. Yeah, I think it's also an interesting way to look at Kafka as well is that

Metamorphosis really is a kind of an alienation story within a family where the trial is a larger alienation story in a political context where you have an authority that has this absolute control and power over you. It doesn't have to give explanations, doesn't have to give reasons.

can act in a way that asserts authority and power without having to account for what it's doing to an individual. So in a sense, the two have a connection in terms of the alienation from the world and how someone emotionally and intellectually deals with that

that non-alignment with what we believe should be the world and the way the world really is. Right. I agree totally. Yeah. Not to go too deep in the weeds on your AI argument, but I think it's a good one. I was reading the other day that one of the things about AI, a super intelligent AI, is that it would know every domain.

it would have access to all statistics, all of the data, all the information about every domain. So that its predictability would be, of what happens next, would be vastly richer

And easier than a human being. We stumble around. We are within, you know, usually one domain or maybe two or three domains. But even within those domains, there are gaps, big gaps in what we know and what we can know.

So that what we're looking at is, in terms of an AI intelligence, is that ability to reduce the size of those gaps. We do it through reading. AI does it through vast amounts of combing through data and information. Okay.

Okay. I'll go along with that. But, I mean, there is this connection. Right. Let's look at Yoko Ogawa, the housekeeper and the professor. I like

I like the premise of this book, and I could see why it would have an impact on you. It's the story of a mathematician who's said to be elderly when he's 64, who has a housekeeper, who finds that her new employer basically only has a short-term memory that's good for about 80 minutes, and after that he forgets.

So she has to introduce herself to him every day as if it is the first day. It's a little bit like Groundhog Day, I guess, in that way, at least from the perspective of the mathematician. So why did you choose this particular book to talk about?

Well, I read it at a later age, but partly because of the mathematician who was one of the protagonists, the other being the housekeeper. This mathematician was involved in a car accident, had suffered severe brain damage, but it did not affect his intelligence in the least. He was a brilliant mathematician, but his short-term memory was about an hour and a half.

And as you just said, the housekeeper hired, along with her son, and took care of them. And he would pin notes, she would pin notes on his suit to remind him, he would pin notes

And he would explain basic number theory to her son. And he was a very kindly, kindly guy. And his personality and his intelligence remained the same. And it...

It just struck me. He spent his time sharing in return for taking care of them. He shared the beauty of mathematics. He showed why they're infuriating clients or why they're this or that.

a number of theoretical facts held, and the son would appreciate it, and so would she, and they would take them out. It was a very, you know, kind of a little love story, a chaste love story between the housekeeper and the mathematician.

Yeah, I thought it was kind of an interesting choice as well because it showed someone who had this brilliant original mind, suffered from a major disability, and it somehow dealing with that disability humanized him and humanized the household. Right. It was. It's a very nice book. Have you read it?

I haven't read it, but I think after this interview I am going to go out and get a copy of it because that basic theme of what makes us human isn't so much of what we remember, but is who we are despite memory lapses.

And that the kind of patience that's required for people to have around someone who has a disability is a particular kind of gift. Some people have that and some people don't.

And this particular book, it seems to be a teaching lesson of how you accommodate your life to someone who has a missing aspect of what we take to be in a normal human relationship and how you find bridges to overcome those obstacles.

Right. It's full of little insights about them. Things you wouldn't realize that your fond memories last for longer than an hour and a half. But yeah, I recommend it highly. The other novelist that you have on your list is Saul Bellow. Her talk, The Adventures of Augie March, and...

He's written many, many books. And I could understand why Herzog would appeal in The Great Sufferer, The Joker, The Mourner, The Charmer. He's also a teacher and a father. And he displays, this is from the book, the pride of the peacock, the lust of a goat, and the wrath of the lion.

I like Saul Bell, not just Herzog, but Augie March and The Dangling Man and so on. And Humboldt's gift. And he's an amazing writer. Even if you didn't like the story or didn't agree, he was a phenomenal wordsmith.

And just those snippets you read is evidence of that. And I also like the predicaments a lot of his characters are in, including in Herzog and Dangling Man, someone that, you know, just kind of dangling, trying to muddle through. And, you know, I like Philip Roth as well.

Yeah, I can understand the connection, certainly between Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and why you would be attracted to that. I'm curious as well to kind of explore a little bit the difference between entering that fiction world of imagination

and the world of the more abstract theoretical from the David Hume and the Bertrand Russell, that we take different things away from both worlds. What is it about the fiction that you've read over a lifetime that helped shape that kind of original way of dealing with people? Because in a sense, fiction is about our social relationships.

of how we behave with one another, what our expectations are, how we read the mind of other people? That's not clear. I don't know. I enjoyed the words, just the pure words of Melo, Philip Roth, John Updike.

And as well as the stories, I'm not – and perhaps they somehow deepen my understanding of people, but I don't really have any specific examples, but I suspect they have in a sense. I mean, that widens your range of acquaintances, friends in a sense. I mean, you can only be friends or acquaintances with –

relatively small number of people, so literature expands you in a circle of people that you know in some sense. And knowing is often in a sense more intimate than people that you actually do know in real life. I've always found Cabello kind of someone

hot with desire, a certain level of kind of aggression, of going into the world with certain preconceived ideas, of battering. It's full of conflict and as a result you come away with that

feeling a little emotionally exhausted, here is someone who really has gone 15 rounds and taken punches and thrown punches in each of those rounds. I hear what you mean. Yeah, I think that's true. I like Mordecai Rickler for the same reason. Some of his characters, and Barney's version in particular, are like fellow characters.

I don't know why he's Canadian. Yes, he is. But yeah, I think it does enrich you in hard to specify ways, which it doesn't mean that it doesn't. It's just at least I find it hard to say. But I feel like I know, you know, I'm not just bellowing. The more you read novels, the more people you know in some sense.

Would you consider yourself a lifelong reader? Are you still reading daily books or are you being pulled into the world of social media? I'm being pulled into the world of social media, but I still read. I'm reading a book now, The Japanese Lover by Isabella Allende. And again, I'm reading it in Spanish.

And so I'm still reading, although less than I did when I was younger because of the energy sink that social media, Twitter in particular, are. But hopefully my involvement, at least on Twitter, will diminish once Trump is gone. I don't know if you might have...

If you might have a message for young people watching this, and old people as well, is how important is it to continue to integrate book reading into your life and into the life of children around you? I think it's very important, but I think it's more difficult than it has been. It's not a reading culture anymore.

I mean, because of the appeal, the temptation to just sit back, watch television. There's some amazing series on television, just watching The Crown. I mean, it's full of personal stories and historical events. And it's a different modality. I mean, in a sense, you're reading, it's just that...

you're watching television. I mean, of course you could watch junk too, but it's not a reading culture anymore, which isn't necessarily a cause for despair or pessimism because there's an amazing wealth of material, a series on television, some really amazing stuff. But I think books will always be around and we shouldn't forget about them and we

I think people should continue to read, even with the temptation for social media and the alternative modality of television and movies. But what works for that?

I think one of the things with the explosion of Netflix and other providers of high quality TV is having an impact on how our imaginations are being formed. When you read a book, particularly read a novel, you're recreating that environment, those relationships, those expressions and gestures.

In your own mind. In other words, you are making the movie of the book as you're reading the book. When you're watching a TV series, it's prepackaged for you. Your imagination is boxed within the screen that someone else has shot and edited and scored. That's definitely the case.

connects with the point I made earlier about reading novels in Spanish. I have to spend more time and I have to recreate it. There's a greater element of recreation because I'm reading it so slowly and kind of putting it together. So I think that's true. And books require that. Even the best television series does not.

So it's a more passive undertaking to watch television than it is to read a book. So do you have a message for the future? Let's direct this to 30 years from now. It's now 2050. What would you want to say to people in 2050 about the importance of reading in order to train people?

the mine to create that mine from the 400 gram beginning to the 1.5 kilo end uh I I won't be so presumptuous I think that I can probably say anything of value to someone living in 2050. I mean uh yeah we open up um I'm sure the people or androids who's ever around then will uh

come up with their own ways for coping. But I don't have any particular prediction or words of advice. I have hopes, but that's different.

Well, what we're going to do, John, is we're going to put your books plus a list of books that you have given me that we didn't have a chance to discuss. And we'll put that in a time bottle for 2050. And in 2050, people will be able to look at this interview, look at this list of books, which will be in the show notes, and to say, this was how one original creative mind in the head of John Paulus came about.

I want to thank you very much for being on the show and for having this conversation about books. Thank you. I enjoyed it immensely as I usually do when I speak with you. You take care now, John, and hope to connect with you again very soon. You as well. Stay safe.