The Orthogonal Bet: : The Art of Cultivating Curiosity

Danny Crichton:
Hey, it's Danny Crichton here. If we take a break from our usual risk-giving programming to bring you another episode from our ongoing miniseries, the Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Lux scientist and resident Samuel Arbesman, the Orthogonal bet is an exploration of unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Take it away, Sam.

Samuel Arbesman:
Hello and welcome to the Orthogonal Bet. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. In this episode, I speak with Eliot Peper. Elliot is a science fiction novelist, an all-around delightful thinker. Eliot's books are thrilling tales of the near future, exploring so many delightful areas of the world and the frontiers of science and technology. In Elliot's most recent novel Foundry, he takes the reader on a journey through the world of semiconductors, from their geopolitical implications to their profoundly weird manufacturing processes. I wanted to talk to Eliot to explore this profound strangeness of the manufacturing of computer chips, but also use this as a jumping off point for something broader. How Eliot discovers these interesting topics and those wondrous worlds that are incorporated into his books. We spoke about the importance of curiosity as well as concrete ways to cultivate this useful kind of curiosity, which was fascinating. Eliot is a longtime friend of the podcast and I'm so pleased that I had a chance to speak with him about semiconductors, curiosity, how to be excited about the world, and so much more. Let's dive in.
Eliot, welcome back to the Lux podcast and welcome for the first time to our Orthogonal Bet Series. So I wanted to speak to you about the world of semiconductors. I guess there's lots of implications about this industry in terms of its geopolitical implications. I'll let Danny Crichton probably handle some of those kinds of things. But I wanted to talk about just the deeply strange process of construction, all the things. But I would say before we get into that, perhaps because it's also connected to your newest novel Foundry, let's maybe take a step back and you can talk about a little bit just about that book. The Story and its World, and what led you to actually write this novel.

Eliot Peper:
Well, in many ways for me those questions are one and the same. I grew up with the internet, and so my experience of computers has been so dominated by experiencing software. In many ways, I feel like my intuitions for computing are really built around the screen being in a window into something else, a dashboard, or whether that's a game or whether that's my email inbox or whether that's social media feed. It's almost like the computer itself is abstracted away and I'm just there for what's on the screen. A couple of years ago that changed. This actually happened later, but I think it's a useful analogy. I have a 14-month-old son. And one of the things that having a baby really made me aware of was looking at my phone. If the baby's in the room eventually he starts noticing that I'm looking at my phone, and I try to be cognizant of that. And I don't want to be looking at my phone all the time when he's in the room. But when I imagine him looking at me looking at my phone, it's really fun.
It's like, why are you looking at this metallic rectangle all the time? Because from his perspective, that's what I'm doing. It's just like an artifact. It's an object. And that actually got me thinking about the rectangle, really thinking about the hardware that's behind the software that has dominated my experience of computing my whole life. And so I just started getting curious about it. I started trying to learn about chips, basically the brains behind all of what computers can do for us. It's really astonishing, just basically the idea that chips are basically sand plus lightning.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that.

Eliot Peper:
And that humans have put sand and lightning together to do all of the things to make this conversation. It's really astonishing. And something I didn't realize before, sort of digging in and starting to learn more about how chips are made, that just sort of rough history of how they've come to be and sort the role that they play in society today. Semiconductor manufacturing is basically the most technically advanced fields on earth today. It's almost like what the Manhattan Project was during the time of the Manhattan Project. That level of science and engineering is behind the fabrication of the chips we make today. It's just amazing. My favorite example is, I'm sure you Sam know this, but listeners may or may not be familiar with ASML, which is a famous Dutch technology company that makes critical equipment that is part of the semiconductor manufacturing process that are called EUV lithography machines. And these machines cost hundreds of millions of dollars a piece, and you have to use them if you want make advanced chips.
ASML has a monopoly on this technology, but just the way that they work is totally insane. When you buy one of these machines that's about the size of a room, the way that they draw circuits on the silicon chip, when I learned about it it just blew my mind because as probably all of your listeners know, over many years engineers have tried to create smaller and smaller circuits on every chip. That's how computers basically get faster if we really oversimplify. And so we've pushed the limits on how small can we make these circuits on these chips, and we've actually pushed the limits where quite a while ago, we draw circuits so small on blank silicon wafers that the circuits are actually smaller than the wavelengths of light that survive in Earth's atmosphere. So you have each interval circuit disk. So if you-

Samuel Arbesman:
That is an amazing sentence by the way, just to kind of sit with that for a beat of like, okay, we're dealing with things that cannot exist on this planet any longer.

Eliot Peper:
Right. So the equivalent would be if you imagine that you have a pen and that pen has a point that is the width of a wavelength of visible light in this room, impossibly small to imagine. And if you were to hand draw one of these circuits, it would be trying to hand write a letter to someone with a charcoal brick because it's too broad. It's too large. And so in order to overcome this problem... This is what I find funny, I feel like if I was the engineer in charge of this program and I was like, you know what? We've run up against the wavelength of light being the smallest thing that we can use to draw a silicon wafer. I'd be like, I think we're good.

Samuel Arbesman:
We've had a good run. Let's call it a day. This has been amazing.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, this is great. Yeah, it was long, we went on for quite a while, I'd say just wash your hands on this, move on to something else. But of course, the people actually doing this work just take that as a new challenge. And so they actually developed a special kind of metal alloy that when you create a vacuum, because you can't have atmosphere in there, it'll block any other wavelength of light, when you drop a molten drop of this alloy into a vacuum and you vaporize it with a laser, the light released by the vaporizing drop of molten metal releases a wavelength of light so short that it can only survive naturally in outer space. And so it releases that wavelength of light and then you bounce it off a whole bunch of mirrors, and some of the mirrors basically have shapes on them that create the shape of the circuit you then want to draw on the wafer.
So you bounce it off a series of mirrors onto a wafer and that draws the circuit. That's how advanced chips are fabricated today, or that's one key part of the process. And not only do you have to do what I just described, you have to do it perfectly 50,000 times a second.

Samuel Arbesman:
That's amazing.

Eliot Peper:
That's how these machines work. So when I was reading about this I was like, this is so crazy. This is-

Samuel Arbesman:
It is science fiction, yes.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, it's like far more science fiction than most science fiction books or shows you could watch.

Samuel Arbesman:
Yeah. How do you want to write and scribe on a chip? I'm going to vaporize metal and then use the resulting bits of light as a way of writing. That seems like a normal thing.

Eliot Peper:
But that's one example, there are a whole host of them. The other really interesting part about how people make chips today, if you imagine the level of technical complexity in what I just described, there is a similar level of complexity in how chip manufacturing is integrated into the global economy, and as you mentioned geopolitics. There are all of these complexities and all of these different angles on this weird thing, which are these tiny little chips that have become just absolutely foundational to modern society. Now it's not just that we're talking via laptops or that all of us have a phone in our pocket. Basically everything you interact with today, every modern manufactured product is a computer. Your car is a computer you're driving, your house is a computer you live in. So-

Samuel Arbesman:
Right. Refrigerators have Linux or whatever. Yeah, it's like everything. These are all computers.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, everything is a computer. And so sort of in the way that electricity has just become background infrastructure that we don't think about. We just switch on the light, just so computing is now embedded our entire world. And the fact that our entire world is just this crazy, crazy amazing sort of modern Marvel was a really fascinating discovery for me because again, as a typical just user of computers that was always invisible. And whenever I find some invisible system that raises these kinds of interesting questions, it's always good material for a novel. And so that's how Foundry was born.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. No, I love that kind of this idea of these invisible systems that when revealed teach you so many different things. And I feel like also not only do semiconductor industry teach you about these wildly thrilling and wondrously strange methods of manufacturing, as well as the geopolitical implications and how it touches every aspects of logistics and supply chains and things like that. It also just draws on so many different areas of knowledge. In order to understand these things or manufacture them, you need to understand things around logistics, but also chemistry and physics and certain things around lasers and the idea of lithography, which is the process of etching these things that was inspired by certain things within the world of art and printing. There are all these amazing connections. And so I guess related to that, it's one of these questions that maybe can't even be answered. I was going to say, how many of these invisible systems are there which in the absence of revealing them we don't actually know?
But it feels like there must be so many of these, that most of us just kind of go about our day in a state of ignorance about the wonder of these systems that are necessary. And I remember this is maybe several years ago reading some article about the ways in which laser printers work. And it was shockingly complicated in a way that just blew my mind and kind of revealed this wonder. And I feel like yeah, the semiconductor industry is the same kind of thing of like it's this thing that is part of just the air that we breathe to a certain degree because as you mentioned, compute in the same way that electricity is almost this utility, computing has become the same way but it is dependent on so much else. And so I wonder what other systems. I don't know if there's any others that you've come across that feel the same level of complexity or maybe this is the one.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, so I actually think there are many. This actually brings me to a way that I think about the kinds of novels I write. So if you imagine early Star Trek, how the crew would always visit these new planets. And there was always some little fun twist of what's really going on this new planet that they'd have to figure out. And every episode it's a new adventure. They land on a new planet, they discover a new alien race or whatever. And I think that we actually live on a world that is made up of many, many, many, many worlds. There are so many intersecting weird planets that happen to already be on earth, it's just you have to find out about them. I think that what we just described, semiconductors is a good example. There's an entire world's worth of depth and nuance and subtlety there that connects to our day-to-day lives and we don't even realize it.
Right before we started recording, you were telling me about how there are entire Reddit threads of people who are obsessed with specific roller coasters in the Midwest. And they have all these ideas about nicknames for all these different roller coasters and they wear the right T-shirt when they go to see the roller coasters. And cross the country in order to go to the right ones, I don't even know. That's a whole world. There's a whole world there that I had literally never heard of until 15 minutes ago. And so what I'm always sort of have my eye out for is when you wander through a city and there's an unmarked door that's below street level, and there's no sign but people are coming in and out of it, I will take a few steps down the stairs and take a peek in.
The world is just full of them. The world is a city full of alleyways with those kinds of doors everywhere, and it's really easy to not peek in. You can just keep living your life and be in your world and not discover there are other people. And I think that there are many versions of this you can access through physical travel. What if you went to a country where you don't speak the language, you really don't have any knowledge of the culture before arriving. That's one way to access a different world. But there are so many other ways, including the fact that your friends might be working on weird projects. What is behind that? And so I'm always on the lookout for those clues and I try to pay a lot of attention just to my own curiosity to say, "Okay, what's the door where I really want to just go deeper?" And eventually that turns into a novel.
Part of what I seek to do in a novel, probably like those screenwriters on Star Trek were trying to do when they would set up the next episode, is to invite new people into that world. Where if you haven't gone down that particular alley, if you haven't peeked through that door yet by reading a story that you might come to just because it's a story. Not because you explicitly wanted to learn about semiconductor manufacturing or roller coasters in the Midwest, that suddenly you realize that there is a whole other world here. That it has a surprising amount of fascinating detail, and that there are all these dots that sort of connect to your life in ways you wouldn't have expected. And I think that that can really unlock. I know that as a reader, when I encounter a book that does that for me it can unlock a lot for me because then maybe I want to learn more about that.
So then I go in and listen to podcasts or read non-fiction books about the subject, or maybe it even changes decisions I make in my life and I work on related projects or something along those lines. And that's what I seek to do for my readers. It's to say, okay, come for the story and you're going to discover all of these other weird worlds that I happen to have wandered through.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. I love this idea, like novel as an away mission, kind of inviting someone on an away mission like let's teach you about this world. No, and I agree there are all these undiscovered subcultures and ideas and systems of the world that like well, yeah, unless you stumble across a subreddit or some other thing, you just don't know about that richness. Even just the world of nerdish obsessiveness, that is not a uniform thing. There are many people who are focusing on certain things around comic books or certain things around certain types of science fiction or whatever it is. They're all different. You mentioned travel as one mode or reading some of these books like novels that kind of invite the reader into these worlds. You mentioned that part of your creative processes, being attuned and curious to some of these kinds of things. Are there things that people should be doing on a daily basis to make themselves more attuned?
And is it the kind of thing where it's like, just be more curious and allow your curiosity to guide you? And if you're omnivorously curious, you are going to be more likely to be led to this thing, which will of course then lead to something else and so on and so forth. And eventually you'll find lots of these different things. Or are there specific ways and procedures almost that maybe you would advocate as to allow this to happen in a more systematic fashion?

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, totally. Okay, so I think you're right that part of the answer is just be curious, but that is the most annoying thing to hear from anyone. It's sort of like, oh, can you give me some advice about doing X? Yes, be better.

Samuel Arbesman:
Right.

Eliot Peper:
It's like completely useless.

Samuel Arbesman:
Well, it's also because being curious or having good taste, once you're at the end point of those things, then it works really well. But there are many ways. If you don't have good taste of what to be curious about, it's not going to work nearly as well.

Eliot Peper:
Okay. So I have a couple of very practical things that have helped me that may or may not help you, you plural, like anyone who's with us right now. Okay, so one is... I feel like this was especially after I got out of college or something, I unconsciously judged myself getting interested or reading things or learning about things that didn't feel quote unquote, "serious". If it wasn't somehow related to my career or something that felt important, I would sort of treat it as a second tier thing. Like, oh, I should read the important thing first and then I should indulge myself later. I have over time learned to flip that where basically just indulge whatever interests you. Use that immediate spark that you feel for like, oh, that's a weird thing. Even if it feels very unrelated to anything else in your life that seems quote unquote, "important", indulge it and that's how you go deeper.
I think that's one thing is indulge your curiosity and don't just think that you need to be more curious. Second thing, it's great to read books. One thing that I would recommend whether you're reading blog posts or books, is I read very widely so I will start almost any book. If someone recommends me a book in a way that I find compelling because either I trust their judgment or they have a really interesting description of it or whatever, or I come across it for any reason, I just see a cool cover in a used bookstore, whatever it is, I will start reading almost any book on any subject, any genre, whatever. But then I ruthlessly quit books. So if I read the first sentence or the first paragraph and it's not grabbing, I don't want to keep going, I just quit. I don't try to finish a chapter, let alone finish the book.
And I used to have this puritan idea that if I started a book or an article, I should finish the thing. And now I'm the opposite, I will quit as fast as I can if the piece of writing does not make me want to find out what happens next. Read very widely, but quit very quickly. And you'll suddenly discover the many things you otherwise wouldn't have because you don't have to be as thoughtful on the front end of filtering things. But then once you're in them, you filter them really, really strongly. The next thing that's very practical, books are great but maybe the best way to discover these other worlds is through just people. The thing I would recommend is when you're at a dinner party and maybe there's a mix of people and people you don't know, it's always easier to chat with the people you know. And often the conversation revolves around life updates. Like we moved, whatever, you trade life updates, and basically by the time you've traded updates and asked a few follow-up questions like the dinner's over, you go home.
So next time you're at a dinner or you meet some random person at work or in any situation, ask yourself, this person assuredly knows something I would find really, really interesting. And my job as a detective is to get to whatever it is that they know about the world that I would find fascinating as quickly as possible. Rather than doing the standard small talk, how can you engage that person and find a way into the thing that they know that you don't that would be the super fascinating? So it's really practice. It's a really good prompt when you're with new people to be like, okay, maybe I don't immediately vibe with this person, but they've got something and we're going to get there together. So I think that's a really useful and practical thing that people can do. And then the last one is literally where we started with travel. I feel like especially today, when in some ways the internet makes the world feel super small that you can WhatsApp with people anywhere. The fact that you can doesn't mean you actually connect with any of them.

Samuel Arbesman:
Or even if you connect in certain ways, it's not giving you this wormhole to that entire culture or whatever it is.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah. And I think that there are really obvious ways that you can do that, like fly to a country where you don't know the language. I genuinely think that's a really good idea for everyone. But even if you can't afford an international plane ticket, there are many worlds with... I live in coastal California, it is extremely different than rural Arizona and that's not that far of a drive. Going to really, really different places than where you are that have different subcultures than where you are, is a really eye-opening experience and not always comfortable. And part of that discomfort is what makes it useful because that's where you find out the gaps in how you look at the world and how others look at it differently. And so those would be the practical tips that have helped me go deeper on this stuff that I otherwise would've.

Samuel Arbesman:
When we began our conversation around semiconductor industry and how for a long time you had thought about computing as the world of software, and then slowly realized okay, there is this deep physicality to everything. And one of the things when I think about deeply physical computing is the fact that oftentimes you only notice how deeply physical it is when a failure happens. When I don't know, like rain happens or some wire is broken and then you're like, oh, wait, these things are actually much more physical. And it made me realize that another way of thinking about how to build your curiosity or find some of these things, is in the same way that technologists and scientists operate by focusing on the things that don't make sense or the glitches and failures. It's like a bug is actually a really good way of noticing the gap between how you thought a system worked and actually how it does work with scientists.
And there's this well-known phrase that I think is often attributed to Isaac Asimov where he says, the most exciting phrase in science is not Eureka, but that's funny because it's like, oh, something doesn't make sense. And most people have the tendency when there's a failure or something like that to kind of sweep it under the rug or be like, oh, this doesn't quite fit into our theory and ignore it. Related to what you're seeing of indulging your curiosity and not shutting down this need for interesting things even if they don't feel serious, I feel like there's a similar kind of thing. And maybe it's like the scientific mindset or whatever it is of saying, no, this thing doesn't make sense and I'm going to get to the bottom of it. And maybe it's a fact that you hear that doesn't quite accord to your worldview or some other bit of information that doesn't quite fit.
And then dig deeper on that kind of thing, because I feel like there is this whether it's the detective mode at a dinner party or the indulging curiosity and being passionate about certain things, or being a scientist and actually kind of hunting down why this one little thing doesn't make sense. There's an active component to curiosity where you have to really not just cultivate it, search why these things are going to be interesting and then hopefully discover some of these kinds of things.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, that makes me think of two things, it's sort of like nobody thinks about plumbing until the toilet clogs.

Samuel Arbesman:
Exactly, yes.

Eliot Peper:
And I think that is 100% the case, if you treat those kinds of things as an invitation rather than as an annoyance or both-

Samuel Arbesman:
Right. It can definitely be something to solve, but then also something to learn a little bit more about.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, the amount of tools we have today to do... The fact that you can just go on YouTube and figure out how to fix your toilet and why that works is actually amazing. It's incredible. So I think that there are more opportunities than ever to do what you just said, to follow that, not eureka moment. The eureka moment of, oh, that's weird, and scratch the itch and keep going. The other thing that makes me think about is actually the reverse, how as a novelist I use that to write about speculative technologies that don't exist for the reader yet. I'll give you an example. I have a trilogy called the Analog Trilogy and it takes place a couple of decades out. And in this future there is something called the feed, which is sort of like if you put the entire internet, every software product plus every AI product together times 1000 and have great sensors everywhere, that's the feed all stitched together.
It's like that the digital world has become an indistinguishable membrane between humans and their physical lives and physical environment. But that raises a challenge as a writer of fiction, if I'm writing from a character's perspective who lives in this future, to them all of this is normal. How do I reveal what the feed is and what it means and why it matters in this future to a reader in the present? Because when I drive to the grocery store, I am never thinking about how my EVs internal hardware works or how an internal combustion engine functions. And there's a bit of this trope in science fiction where sometimes you'll read a story and then the author goes on a long digression being like, by the way, this is how the spaceship works.

Samuel Arbesman:
Right. Here's the info dump. And to be honest, I love info dumps, but I agree, but only when done very well, and in a way that feels natural to the story sometimes because oftentimes it can be jarring. Well, like if I go to the supermarket. Not only that, I'm not narrating while I'm going to the supermarket like, oh, here's how things are organized or here's how a self-checkout line works. That doesn't make sense.

Eliot Peper:
Right. And so a lot of it comes down to perspective. There are so many ways to solve this problem.

Samuel Arbesman:
Where you can have a surrogate for the reader who's coming from an outside world or whatever, and then is learning about it. Oh, yeah.

Eliot Peper:
Sure, you can do that. Or you can even as an author, you can have the voice of the narrator be different than the perspective of the characters of the story where they can set up that context and then that's fine and it works fine. But for this particular book I was writing from the character's point of view. And so what I did was I created a social club in this future called Analog. Basically when you enter the club, it has all this jamming and so the feed doesn't exist inside the special building. That's the appeal of this social club. It's completely off grid in a future that is completely on grid. And so when characters enter the club, all the feed drops away and you see how disoriented they are by the lack of the technology that they depend on. And that was a really fun way. It was like, okay, how do I reveal this invisible system I break?

Samuel Arbesman:
Yes, I love that. Are there any subcultures or hidden systems that you're currently exploring right now? And whether or not for a specific novel or just because you're curious? I imagine there's many where you're just exploring lots of different things and they either don't become the basis for an entire novel. Maybe they become just the basis for some even one fun little throwaway line, or even just they never end up resolving into some of your writing but they are just worthwhile because that is part of your curiosity process. Are there any things you're playing with right now and exploring?

Eliot Peper:
So here's one example, I have a friend who works very closely with Alice Waters who created chip and sort of kicked off California cuisine. And so through him, I've really learned about the whole world of regenerative agriculture and how farmers are setting up these systems to raise plants and animals in ways that really compliment each other and don't require the kind of external inputs that industrial farming uses. A friend who's a genetic engineer and has a biotech company, and he's looking at agriculture from what you could say is almost the polar opposite lens. Like how can we tweak genes to make plants more resilient, to make them more productive, to help advance human agriculture? And what's odd to me is that both of these two friends have the same goals. They're completely aligned in what their goals are, but their methods and the cultures of the people working on those respective methods, they see each other as antithetical.
It's like the sort of regenerative ag people look at the ag genetic engineers and are almost like, oh my God, you're breaking the planet. And then the genetic engineers look at the regenerative ag people and they're... I am being very unfair to everyone in this characterization, but they sort of look at it and they're like, that's a cute hobby. That can't scale. But what I find fascinating is that they have the same goals and if the cultures weren't opposed, you could easily see how the tools of both of these groups would work amazingly together. Like genetic engineering to help accelerate and expand the scope of using regenerative systems in agriculture, that's super exciting. To me that's one of those weird quirks. They're like, well, that's odd. These shouldn't be opposing cultures but they are. And so I find that to be fascinating, and that's also one of those things similar to chips where it's like when you buy a watermelon at the grocery store, it implies all of the systems behind it.
So both of these systems literally touch your life when you eat breakfast. I think that one of the joys of writing novels is that they are a really synthetic form. The story is what unites the material. And so you can bring in a lot of different ideas and possibilities and worlds and stick it, like basically attach it like Velcro to the story which is what's drawing people through. So I was just reading, is it Deb Chachra, her new book I think it's called How Infrastructure Works. And she points, I'd never thought about this, but fabric, both of our shirts right now are actually just flat knots.

Samuel Arbesman:
Oh, that an interesting way to write, that's a fun way to put it, yeah.

Eliot Peper:
Right. You never considered that. It's like oh, when you knit something you're actually just making a really specific kind of knot. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. And that's the kind of thing that sticks with me.

Samuel Arbesman:
That tiny shift in perspective is the thing that is very much worth pursuing and being like, oh, let's dive into that more, learn more about this. And whether it's the history of textiles or knots or whatever it is, there's mathematics and not theory. There's all these different things, all these different directions with which you can go. The same thing with semiconductors, just saying, okay, I want to understand this a little bit more leads you to exploding droplets of metal or whatever it is. That actually might be a great place to end in terms of just, I love this capacious sense of there's so many different possibilities. And as long as you kind of have this prepared and curious mind, which is not always easy to cultivate but I love the fact that you also provided these very practical approaches.

Eliot Peper:
You bet. And I'd add one in your beautiful summary right there, just give me one more practical tip to add to the list.

Samuel Arbesman:
Oh, fantastic.

Eliot Peper:
Which maybe is a good closing note. So when I was in college... I've always been a big reader. No surprise, I'm a writer. So I've always been a big reader and sometimes before exams, I'd have classmates and we'd study together before the exams. I realized after a while that the best way for me to learn the material was to teach the material to my friends, basically. So when we're preparing for the exams, I wanted to be the one answering the questions that we were in a little study group around and that would cement the knowledge in my mind. And so when I go down one of these rabbit holes or explore one of these new worlds, I actually think a critical step in the process is that I then write a novel about it. I'm not just learning the thing, I'm finding a way to put that knowledge to work on behalf of other people.
I'm a storyteller, so I think in narrative form, beginning, middle, end. I think that's the end of your arc of curiosity on something, is that if you really want to integrate it into your understanding of the world, you need to somehow put it into action. And I don't think that what the action is matters at all. When I learn about semiconductor manufacturing, it's actually very weird. What do I do with it? I write a novel about it, that is not what you would assume would be the outcome of learning a bunch about a subject. So Sam, I love your newsletter. It's one of the few newsletters that I read when it arrives.

Samuel Arbesman:
Thank you.

Eliot Peper:
And part of why I like it is because it often has that feel. It feels like Sam went really deep into a weird world and is reporting back to us. But I think the fact that you are reporting back that you've put a piece of that knowledge that you gained, you did the work to make something out of it that others can use, I think is really crucial to them going through that arc yourself of exploring that world. Or if your toilet breaks don't just watch the YouTube videos, actually fix it with the knowledge from the YouTube videos. And suddenly you'll find that your intuition for plumbing is so much more advanced than if you had watched 100 YouTube videos but not actually done the fix. And so I think that that's the last piece. When you start by indulging your curiosity and then you decide to go deeper on it, that you need to close the loop. And the way to close the loop is putting that knowledge into action.

Samuel Arbesman:
I love that. Oh, that is amazing. Only putting into action will you truly understand it and make it your own. So that is amazing. Thank you so much.

Eliot Peper:
Thank you. This has been a pleasure.

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