MLODINOW How happy I would be in Kentucky or Georgia or Minnesota, maybe, though you don’t know. One thing I learned from Gilbert’s book is you don’t necessarily know really what would make you happy. My German girlfriend at the time was telling me that, too: “Right now you think you need to be in a big city, but you may find other things in life later, your family, that you focus on.” Certainly I’m here and I’m very focused on my kids but still what do we like to do? We like to into the Chinese parts of town and explore restaurants or the Mexican neighborhoods and look around or Vietnamese Town. We’ve got a lot of it here in Los Angeles and we like to go and find a new noodle shop.
ROBERTS Yes, I’m exactly like you. I love doing that sort of thing.
MLODINOW Yes, that’s why we’re friends.
ROBERTS I admire you; I’m glad that you’re willing to be friends with me. What were you doing at the World Trade Center on 9/11? Speaking of living in cities.
MLODINOW My kids went to school at the schools that were a block or two away from the World Trade Center and I would take the subway right at the World Trade Center back to Uptown, a few minutes Uptown to where I work, which was just on the border of the Village on Broadway and I happened to be standing under the building and saw the first plane come in, fly over me and fly into the building. It’s a long story what happened after that. I was hit with debris and injured. It’s a long story because my ex-wife was living two blocks below the Trade Center and just had surgery, my son was at the school there and I was trying to find them, get together, and I got caught in the collapse and trapped and it’s a long story, but that’s a book in itself.
ROBERTS It led to your leaving New York, right?
MLODINOW It did, because, in the end, without going into the details, my son–who was in kindergarten–saw the whole thing, saw people jumping off the building, had to actually flee for his life when the Trade Center collapsed and went for about five or six hours thinking that I was dead because the last place I was seen was standing under the World Trade Center building and we didn’t find each other until about 2:00 in the afternoon. That just caused psychological difficulties for him to live in the City as we were. I had shared custody with my ex-wife and I wanted to move into the suburbs and she didn’t want to do that and our compromise, since we continued to share custody, was to move back out here to California just to get him away from the City. And it was a great move because his problems diminished dramatically in just a week after we got here, or two weeks, I don’t remember, but just very shortly. Maybe it was a month.
ROBERTS How old was he?
MLODINOW I think 9/11 was his third day of kindergarten, something like that.
ROBERTS By then you’d already written Euclid’s Window?
MLODINOW I had written Euclid’s Window, so it wasn’t just, ’Oh, I’m going to go out and write, it’s pie in the sky,’ I had written Euclid’s Window and I think had written Feynman’s Rainbow but it wasn’t out yet, if I remember. The first book I wrote when I came here was the book with Hawking, A Briefer History of Time. I had stuff I knew I could do and it’s all worked out very well and I’m much happier so that shows you that if you are a high paid executive somewhere maybe you’ll have an even happier life if you would be not a high paid executive somewhere else and you just don’t realize it.
ROBERTS Well, it’s kind of amazing that this happened to you–this 9/11 thing happened to you–and in your book at the end, the last chapter is about the effects of random events on people’s life stories. But you don’t tell the story about yourself.
MLODINOW I had many stories I could have told about myself in the book, about how random events impact you, how things that you think are going to be good turn out later in hindsight not to have been so good or things that you think are going to be bad turn out in hindsight to have been good. How things that you think make a big effect on you have very little effect and how things that you hardly imagine would have an effect on you, like having an extra sip of a cup of coffee in the morning, can have a big effect on you, because, let’s say you’re three seconds past where the big crash was–the car crash on your way to work–or something like that, that you could have been hit if you hadn’t had that coffee, or whatever. I have many ironic situations I can pinpoint in my life that I could have told them about but what I decided instead to do–I don’t think I’m that interesting–was to find very famous people, Bruce Willis, Bill Gates and people everyone knows and a lot of people care about, and talk about how these events changed their lives. I thought that would be more interesting.. I tried to minimize the stories from my life although I picked a few dramatic events, I think maybe three or four that I do talk about–I’m not afraid to talk about it, it’s just that in many cases unless the event itself is very interesting. If it’s a mundane, small thing that happened that caused a big change in my life, I think it’s more interesting. If it’s a mundane, small thing that happened to Bruce Willis that caused a big change in his life, it made him a star, so that’s why I chose those examples.