Why Small Events Matter More Than You Think - Brian Klaas

what is the chance story of the atomic bombs targeting well this story starts in 1926 and it's where a couple goes on vacation to Kyoto Japan and Kyoto is an incredibly Charming City it's a a place where this couple sort of you know looked around they recorded a beautiful day of sight scene in the in the man's diary and 19 years later this man from this couple turns out to be America's Secretary of War his name is Henry Stimson and he has a decision to make which is where to drop the first atomic bomb and the US government has basically decided on a Target because they have something called the target committee which is full of soldiers and scientists and all of them agree that Kyoto was the top pick now Stimson does not want Kyoto to be bumped so he Springs into action and meets with President Truman twice he sends a whole bunch of cables trying to convince people to take Kyoto off the list and eventually uh Stimson gets his way and so the first bomb is not dropped on Kyoto it's dropped on Hiroshima and the second bomb is supposed to go to a place called kokura but when the b29 bomber takes off and and and flies to what is supposed to be a clear sky uh it Encounters this unexpected cloud and they can't see the bomb site so because they're running low on fuel they go to the secondary Target which is Nagasaki and the reason I opened my book with this is because it's this alarming but true aspect of our history that the 20th century and the future of modern Japan Jaan and all of these things and whether 200,000 people lived or died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to kiyoto and kokura hinged on one couple's vacation 19 years earlier and a passing cloud and so I'm trying to take seriously the way that the world actually works which is swayed constantly by these sort of random and small and seemingly meaningless details speaking about a attack occurring in the opposite direction 9/11 I I didn't realize this I think I was only maybe 12 or 13 years old at the time uh but there was a storm the night before and baseball games finished early and and trains were available or times had been changed or people went to bed and then because there was a storm the night before it was a particularly clear day the next morning which me you know there's this crazy list of things just on that other event as well yeah so there's a few things to think about with 911 right so one of the aspects of this is how timing matters in a huge way and the the most macro level way thinking about this is that if it had been a storm on September 11th instead of September 10th maybe some of the planes wouldn't have taken off on time right and and the whole idea was a surprise attack so if some of them had been delayed then maybe you have this terrorist cell that just doesn't succeed and Only Hits one Tower or whatever it is right that's part of the story the other part of the story that I I I researched when I was working on on on my own work and then I ended up meeting this guy actually after I published fluke and it was an amazing media it was it was this guy who was flying into New York on September 10th and he was supposed to meet his colleague Elaine and uh they were going to have dinner together to prep for their conference you know standard sort of thing you do in a business conference but because he was delayed they postponed it to the morning his shirt was all wrinkled from you know 10 hours of travel That was supposed to be three hours of travel and so on and so they meet the next morning and she gives him a gift that she was planning to give him that night uh the previous night and the gift was a impressionist tie a tie of a Monae painting and so uh in the in the moment he's so moved by this because he knows that uh he has told her he really loves these sorts of ties and she's gone out of her way to get her one get him one that he decides to put it on and he says I'm goingon to wear this for the presentation but because his white shirt was wrinkled on the Storm day all he's got left and what he's wearing is this pastel green shirt right so he's like okay I'm gonna put it on and she says you can't wear that like you'll look ridiculous with this green shirt and this Monae tie so he says don't worry I'll go back to my hotel room and I will iron the shirt and and then I'll I'll meet you up there and so he goes back to the room and he starts ironing the white shirt and as he's doing this uh the first plane hits the World Trade Center which is where the conference was and his colleague Elaine is killed in in the explosion and so it's this incredibly bizarre moment where the Confluence of a million factors I mean he stopped to look at an art museum a decade earlier and that's why he developed this love for impressionist ties and this kind act by this colleague and the conference being put in this place and so on all of this added up to this split-second moment where you know being in the right place at the wrong time meant survival and being in the wrong place at the wrong time meant death and you know what was really striking to me that I I didn't include in my writing because um I didn't know I hadn't met him at the time was what he said to me was he said the most annoying thing that anyone ever said to him after this happened and it was you know a really traumatic experience for him and it really upset you know it it it messed his life up in a huge way to have gone through the survivors guilt was he said everyone said everything happens for a reason to me right like this this is the way that I'm supposed to make sense of this and he said that is the single worst thing to say to someone in that situation because it suggests that the world meant that Elaine was supposed to die and that he was supposed to live and the pressure that puts on a Survivor who's just the byproduct of a random accident uh is is immense right so so I think it's all of these sort of stories about nature of how the world works also have philosophical imp interpretations for how we make sense of good or bad things happening to us and that's why I think that story is so profound but it's also one where as you say the storm on 911 had it been a different day you know maybe the Twin Towers wouldn't have would have uh been hit so if everything doesn't happen for a reason does anything happen for a reason yes so this is this this is one of those very uh difficult questions to answer because so much comfort in the world is derived from the idea that there's a greater purpose to suffering right and I don't believe that so I don't think that anything does happen for a specific reason or some Grand purpose I don't think my life has a cosmic purpose so where do I derive Comfort right and and the way I derive Comfort is that I think that you're sort of in this incredibly improbable thing that we call existence where we have a tremendous amount of influence on the world right so one of the things I argue is that so much of our world is predicated on the idea that happiness is derived from control right that you like if you control things you will be in charge and therefore that will allow you to feel happy and content and I don't think we control anything I think that in this interconnected World in which you know getting a tie gifted to you can determine whether you live or die in a moment uh your your control is really limited but our influence is unlimited right and so I have this phrase I come back to over and over which is that we control nothing but we influence everything and this is a phrase that I've I've sort of riffed off of from from a guy named Scott paage a complex systems theorist and you know I I I think that this way of thinking about the world is actually really liberating because it doesn't mean that there's always this Hidden Hand that's sort of directing our lives that we have to sort of uncover it's instead saying that every moment is producing Ripple effects that we may not understand or that we may never see but that they're meaningful and so to me you know you can still have an a tremendous amount of comfort from a world of unlimited influence even if it's very very limited control and I think that's flipping the sort of way that we're supposed to think about the world on its head but for me it's enough for me it's enough to think that what I do is going to influence the way that other people's lives unfold you know people listening this podcast their brains will Al be altered slightly by what we talk about it will affect their trajectory through life sometimes in a big way sometimes in a small way and I can't control that but I like that we have that influence and I think that's the the way that I grapple with the the what I believe is a scientific truth there is not a grander purpose to everything that happens to us yeah there's an interesting analogy that you use talking about how even if you plant a tree and 100 years later some small child falls out of it and breaks their arm that doesn't mean you shouldn't plant a tree because you're unable to have the Clairvoyance to know all of the potentially positive and negative externalities Downstream exactly I mean I still live probabilistically even though I know that there are things that I can't ENT right I mean you didn't plant a uranium bomb or something yeah and and like of course like you know Elaine did the right thing by giving a gift of a tie but it turned out to produce this catastrophic uh you know impact for her where she was in the wrong place and she saved his life and she didn't anticipate that in the 911 example I mean the other thing I should say and this is something that you know it comes up very early in my writing but it's um it's a story from 1905 about uh a woman in in uh Wisconsin and she has a mental breakdown after having four young children in sort of Rapid Fire succession the oldest I think is four years old in 1905 so sort of every year she has a kid and she has this mental breakdown and we don't know exactly why it happens but she ends up deciding to murder her children and then uh commit suicide and her husband came home and found you know all these all these kids uh dead and his wife dead as well and the reason I put this in and I talk about it a lot is because this is my great-grandfather's first wife it's her name's Clara mlin Jansen and my great-grandfather um ended up you know remarrying later on about a decade later after he dealt with the trauma um to what became my great-grandmother and so you know I was told this when I was 20 25 years old I don't remember the exact period when I was told it but it was in my 20s and I had no idea right and all of a sudden you get this information where it's like first off this is like a really disturbing part of your family history there's this mass murder that like you didn't know happened but then the second thing you think about is like I wouldn't exist if those kids didn't die right and and and it's quite literally true I mean this is not something that's a you know sort of an analogy or anything it's literally true that the happiest moments of my life are inextricably intertwined with their deaths so like you know a baby dies and that is part of the causal chain of events that leads to me having the best moment in my life and so you know a lot of people don't have to think about that because they don't have such incredibly incredibly grotesque and maob parts of their family history that they they they contemplate all the time but it really throws into relief what all of us are dealing with which is that all the worst things that happened in the past that led to us are part of our story and what I always you know I whenever I talk about this with people I always say you know you've been roped into this now because you're listening to my voice because those children died you know I wouldn't be on your podcast if those kids hadn't died and so all of this stuff you know I I I think the main idea that I'm trying to suggest is that Chaos Theory which is a scientific theory about how tiny changes can have profound effects in the world also applies to our lives and it's much better if we just accept that than pretending we can write out the little noise bits that we say are unimportant because quite literally this podcast was through a very very complex chain of events produced by a mass murder in in 1905 wild I was on tour uh November and December last year and one of the guys I was on tour with basically did a forking paths experiment in front of us and he checked us all in so there's four of us here we were staying in Chicago at this nice hotel and he got all four cards out and said it's so strange said uh you know that depending on which one of these cards I give to which one of you this could change the entirety of your life everything could change because of me doing this to you and when you actually start to drill into that it sort of breaks your brain it kind of makes me go into sort of like de bug mode and I you I control all delete myself yeah well I I think the problem is it it has to break your brain because it's true and I and I think this is the thing where um the way I try to always explain this to people because a lot of people are skeptical of this right they sort of say well you know it doesn't really matter like uh if I turn left versus right and so on you know it'll all sort of get washed out and what I always say to them is you know whenever we watch science fiction films or or read science fiction books that involve time travel you completely agree with me whenever there's time travel involved because when we travel back in the past we are always told in the the premise of these books or these films or whatever like don't touch anything because if you squish a bug a million years ago or if you you know talk to your parents a hundred years you know 50 years ago whatever it was then you will delete yourself from history you might even delete Humanity right like if you squish a bug in the prehistoric past like maybe you'll you'll end up making it so humans don't exist and all of us are sort of like yeah that makes complete sense like these little changes can add up over time and what I always say is why would that possibly differ between past and present it's not like cause and effect has two modes right cause and effect has one mode and it's exactly the same in the past as is in the present and what that means is that when we squish a bug now we are affecting a million years into the future when we are going to have a conversation with someone now we're affecting the people who might be born in the future and and I think the thing is that when I you know the third part of the subtitle of my book is why everything we do matters and I'm bringing it up simply because I think when I say that the first time to people they say oh it's like this turn of phrase that like you could you know put on a self-help pillow or something like that I mean it as a scientific truth I mean it that there's literally nothing that we do that has no ripple effect and so when you get those cards yes it's changing your life but so is everything so is every word you say because there's no part of our existence that doesn't have an action that affects other people or the trajectory of Our Lives or even at a basic level are neurons right I mean eating a ham sandwich as opposed to a cheese sandwich your brain is slightly different now will we notice that maybe not right we we can never see how the world might have been but in aggregate you know this is something that does add up and the Ironclad logic that I've never heard anyone argue against is you know without going into the details of of of of a child being conceived in in graphic detail the exact instant that that happens if it's a microsc different a different baby's born right because you're going to change a little tiny thing and all of a sudden a different sperm cell is going to produce the child and that means that that day if you pause to have a sip of coffee or if you send a text or don't send a text all of a sudden you've slightly adjusted the timing of that moment of conception but that's literally true for every part of your life just in case Brian just in case there were some guys listening that don't have enough performance anxiety already they're now thinking like oh my God like should be this thrust or should it be the next thrust Brian that guy on the podcast told me but it's going to change the CH future this There It Is Well I appreciate that normally I said I'm not going to go into graphic detail but yes it is true that which thrust it is uh will affect which child it is performance and I think you know like I find to to be honest though the flip side of the performance anxiety because this is like there is something that's like crippling anxiety for people with this like the idea that everything they do is affecting their life I think it's exactly the opposite though right I mean um you know you had Oliver burkman on your show and and he talks about this sort of aspect of giving up control and so on and I think there's something really profound about accepting the limits of our control but also about understanding that every moment counts right and and I think there's something about the modern world that does create anxiety males depression Etc which makes us feel somewhat interch interchangeable right like these what does it matter if I go to work like my company's just going to replace me anyway I'm just a cog in the machine and that that Viewpoint which I think is producing lots of really poor Mental Health people the scientific antidote to that is that every moment of your life is affecting the trajectory of the universe and whether that's in a huge way that you can see or in a small way it is changing things and I think there's something really empowering to me about that where us thinking we're just sort of interchangeable dust is just scientifically totally wrong it's not it's not the case it's not the way the world works so you know yes okay maybe you'll have some performance anxiety about when you're trying to conceive a baby but it's also something where it's profound to me it's profoundly beautiful anyway I read I've read a number of really great articles from you before I read the book actually one of them was about this uh great series of micro petri dish things I want to talk about that but you have this gorgeous um like taxonomy thing like breakdown where you say uh shortterm uh like short-term blowup risk and long-term unpredictability ancestrally versus sort of what we have now can you just explain that cuz I think that's a really important frame yeah so I think one of the reasons why we underestimate the role of chance and Randomness and flukes in the world is because we have something that nobody else has had in the history of humanity which is extremely stable day-to-day lives so we've basically flipped the Dynamics from every human that came that came before us minus you know the last two generations or three generations or so so what I mean by that is that if you think about like what happened in a prehistoric human you know the early Homo sapiens lives they couldn't know what was going to happen to them dayto day I mean one day they might get eaten by a going to work for like a 100,000 years so you can have generation after generation after generation that is basically inhabiting a very unstable day-to-day world but a very stable macro world and we have exactly the opposite of that so what we have is a world I I have this line where I say you know we we've sort of engineered a world where Starbucks never changes but Rivers dry up and democracies collapse and what I mean is that you know if you click order on Amazon you'll get a package at a sort of pre-arranged time you'll go to Starbucks anywhere in the country and you'll get the same coffee all these things have been sort of constrained in ways that make them highly highly predictable and this gives us what I call the illusion of control this imagination that like everything is in this sort of clockwork way really really table and at the same time the world itself is changing not just like generation to generation but year to year I mean you know generative models with large language models like chat GPT didn't exist a couple years ago I mean the pandemic hit a couple years ago we had you know I can rattle off you know the this the Iraq War 911 the Arab Spring financial crisis I mean all these sort of massive upheavals happening in short periods of time and so we basically have a world in which parents are learning from their children as opposed to the other way around and that's never happened before so I think it's what's caused us to systematically Discount the role of chance and Randomness is because our lived experience is extremely stable and free from flukes whereas our our actual structure of the world is consistently being swayed by say a mutation of a single virus in Wuhan or you know a a small part of one part of the American economy having to meltdown and that causing a financial crisis so it's a fundamentally different Dynamic from every other period in in human history I think there is an illusion of control that we have if we can predict what the weather is going to be tomorrow in San Antonio Texas why can't I it's it also I think feeds into why we get so frustrated when things occur seemingly outside of our control God how can people get ill why am I sick why is the traffic why is there a traffic jam look at all of the seeming degrees of control that we do have but I think you're right I it's I'm still not sure how empowering versus disempowering it is for me but uh I do think that you're right the further the blast radius is from whatever the present moment is now you just start to realize this so you mentioned there a number of sort of Black Swan blowup kind of catastrophic risk things there's a very famous um analysis done of headlines during the 1920s before the Great Depression uh looking at how many people predicted that there was going to be a Great Depression zero none none zero no one no one absolutely no one predicted that go back to uh 2018 early 2019 how many people predicted that there was actually going to be a big pandemic like handful of people that kind of are just scattergun this probabilistic oh well if you play about with gain of function research and if we have desktop bios synthesizers and blah blah blah uh basically no one so using that um sandpile model what what have what did you learn about the um way that large crazy events are sort of contributed to from very small things yeah so I think I think we basically think about these problems in exactly the wrong way so we always describe them with a word that is constantly used and I think is wrong which is shocks so we always imagine that there's this sort of lightning bolt that hits us right it's like oh my gosh we don't know where it came from but all of a sudden this massive shock occurred and I think a better way of thinking about this is that you can create systems that are more or less fragile and more or less resilient and then the the the seeming Black Swan events that sort of you know wall up us and and ruin our lives and so on they are the byproduct of fragile systems so they're not out of the blue they're they're systems that have been stretched to the Limit that become more likely to have these shocks as as we conceptualize them occur so the sand pile model is basically this way it's it's drying from physics but it's basically this this idea that if you add a grain of sand over and over and over to a pile eventually the pile will be so tall and so fragile that a single grain of sand can cause an avalanche whereas if this if the pile is much shorter if it's much smaller it's less likely to any grain of sand will cause an avalanche and the way I think about this in Social systems the easiest analogy is the Arab Spring to me because in in late 2010 this guy named Muhammad Bui lit himself on fire in central Tunisia and this leads to the collapse of multiple dictatorships it leads to the Syrian Civil War with hundreds of thousands of deaths it leads to this huge Calamity in the Middle East right now if somebody lights themselves on fire God forbid in in Norway or Finland tomorrow it will not cause a Civil War I can predict that with high levels of confidence and that's because the social sand pile in Norway is low whereas in the Middle Eastern dictatorships the the people were stretched to their absolute limit so the sand pile was really really tall and so we think about the Arab Spring as this shock but it's like no we actually allowed this very very tall sand pile to just sort of fester there for a long time should we be surprised when a single grain of sand can cause the Avalanche and so you know I think this is the kind of way where you have to think about resilience and systems much more and most of our economic and political models are not about this right quarter three profits are all about short-term gains elections are all about short-term performance resilience is about long-term planning and so a lot of our economic and political reward systems basically discount resilience and amplify fragility and it's it's why I think we have sand piles that are pushed to the absolute limit and why it shouldn't be surprising that these seeming shocks are happening with greater regularity than they than they were before for isn't it interesting that you can have a sand piley event in the opposite direction moving towards something that almost everybody regards as a universal good maybe like a Rosa Parks situation uh you know you have this sort of burbling sense below the surface you have something that occurs and then that's the uh match that begins a movement toward a a better future but I guess I mean you've got an interesting idea about whether or not you'd kill Baby Hitler uh why is that that a useful model yeah but by the way I love the point you just made which no one has ever made to me but is actually is absolutely true which is that the sand pile doesn't have to be bad if it collapses right if a system of Oppression real science here yes uh but if a system of Oppression is pushed to its limit then yes a single person can can can bring it down which is actually a very empowering idea given the amount of Oppression in the world now when it comes to to Baby Hitler this is the classic like intro to philosophy thought experiment that lots of people have contemplated where it's if you could travel back in time and you're sitting in a room and Baby Hitler is sitting there would you kill him right and what's what it's usually used to to sort of highlight is whether you are a utilitarian or a contian when it comes to ethics so do you think about the consequences in which case you would kill Hitler because you'd want to save six million people plus the you know the World War II Etc uh or would you say no it's wrong to kill babies therefore I couldn't kill him until he committed you know horrible atrocities and so on but what this question is really about is about causality because what you don't know is would killing Baby Hitler actually produce an aversion of World War II or could it actually be worse sometimes and this is what step fry he's got a a novel that not many people have read but he has a really interesting novel that imagines traveling back in time to make Hitler's dad infertile it's not the exact same as killing Baby Hitler but the same sort of idea and in that novel uh a more disciplined Nazi emerges becomes the leader of the Third Reich and wins World War II because they they get the atomic bomb sooner and so it actually produces a worse outcome and and this is the kind of stuff where I think you know when you understand these unanticipated Ripple effects of of actions questions about morality are also questions about causality why do things happen and if you think you're certain that killing Baby Hitler would be a net positive you don't know because there's Decades of intervening time and and you might produce unintended consequences that could actually make the world worse talk to me about the difference between contingency and convergence then yeah so this is this is a framework you know I try to be a bit of a sponge from other smart thinkers and these are smart thinkers in the field of evolutionary biology who are trying to understand why species rise or fall and they have two basic Frameworks for it that I think are incredibly useful for how humans should think about their own lives and how we should think about our societies as well contingency in a nutshell is the [ __ ] happens version of reality I think I call it the stuff happens in the text but you know you we can be a little bit less uh less PC here so the [ __ ] happens version of science where things just sort of happen right and the uh the convergence idea is is sort of the everything happens for a reason version of science there sort of like order and predictability and so on and my favorite examples of this very briefly uh contingency the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs it was flung from the or cloud in the distant reaches of space it hit the earth in exactly the worst place for the dinosaurs because it had this gypsum Rich rock which basically produced a toxic gas tell me more about that I didn't know about this yes so so basically when you look at the uh the sort of origin story of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs uh there is a the best scientific theor suggest that there was an oscillation in this place called the ort cloud and the or Cloud flung this rock towards the Earth and it hit the Earth off the ucatan peninsula 66 million years ago now if it had hit most other places on the planet the dinosaurs probably would have been partially wiped out but probably wouldn't have gone extinct the reason they went extinct is because there's this really gypsum Rich rock uh in this in the shallow Seas off the yukatan peninsula that when it was vaporized produced a toxic gas so the initial die off happens from the heat which is you know it's 500 Degrees incredibly incredibly hot but some of the animals would have survived and then the second die off is from this toxic gas cloud and it's much deadlier so what this means is sort of two things one is that the only things that survived could either dig or Swim so basically all life uh all animal life that exists today was either descended from a digger or a swimmer 66 million years ago and then the other thing that's really bewildering is that if the if the asteroid had been delayed by a second or had been sped up by a second Dinosaurs probably wouldn't have all died and then you know maybe something else would have gotten them but the story of humanity is the story of dinosaurs dying mammals rising and then eventually Evolution producing us so you have this very strange contingency which is that if this space Rock had been a second faster or slower none of us exist um so that's the ultimate [ __ ] happens version of science right um the convergence version you know my my favorite example of it is the um the eye of an octopus and the eye of a human are basically exactly the same so there's slight differences and so on but the structure is very very similar and this is extremely weird because H what became humans and what became octopuses diverged on the Tree of Life 600 million years ago before any Optical sensing Machinery existed in either of those branches exactly so in totally separate terms right totally separate lineages they solve the same problem twice and that you know obviously they're not learning from each other or anything like that it's just it's just Evolution solve the same problem twice and so what it's basically telling us is that sometimes things work and when they work they might happen more than once and so there are structures and rules and patterns to the world so you know convergence is sort of like this idea that you know maybe you were always destined to end up going to a certain University and convergence would say okay no matter what you sort of do in your childhood you're going to end up at this place uh contingency would would say that you know maybe if you have if hit the snooze button on a certain day you don't meet your spouse because you don't bump into them or you don't get you don't meet the person who introduces you or you don't swipe on the app whatever it is so this is the kind of stuff where I think both of them are constantly happening there's basically contingency and convergence that are both structuring our world but I think they're really really good Frameworks for thinking about change because contingent moments divert our trajectories forever and convergent moments sort of push us towards an outcome that is more like because it's going to work in the same way that the eye is helpful at at helping us survive it's very interesting to think about what are the it's not an inevitability nothing is necessarily an inevitability but what are the things that are closer to inevitable in our future uh How likely or unlikely was it for me to end up in Texas for you to write your book you know I yeah and and we never know the answer to that I mean that's that's I think the fundamental thing that people don't think about enough is that there are an infinite number of possible worlds and that we only see one so everything that happens to us makes sense because it's the only thing that's happened so we stitch it together in this story I mean and we and we will never know so like if you end up meeting your spouse or if you end up at a certain University that could have been a one in a 100 probability or it could have been a 99 in 100 probability and it would look identical to you because it's the only thing that happened so you have no way of knowing whether this was a rare and and and unpredictable Oddball event or whether it was basically inevitable there's just absolutely no way to do this because you can't rerun the world so fun what do you mean when you say that our brains distort reality yeah so this is drawing on neuroscience and sort of evolutionary principles of how we you know have cognition and how we process reality our our brains are not a objective neutral computer right they are an evolved organ that has been shaped by forces that basically reward things that help humans or our predecessors survive long enough to have children so Evolution has shaped our brain in a way that helps us survive and navigate the world and one of the ways that it does that is by overd detecting patterns and what I mean by that is like you know let's let's imagine we're 200,000 years in the past and there's some Predator that might eat us and we hear this like uh rustling in the grass nearby well if we imagine that it's probably the predator and we run away all that happens if it turns out to be nothing is we've wasted a little bit of energy but if it turns out to be something and we ignore it we will die because the Predator will eat us right so it's there's this sort of asymmetry which rewards pattern detection and it's basically much much worse to under detect patterns for survival than it is to overd detect patterns and so our brain as an evolved organ has basically rewarded pattern detection and you know I like one of the examples that's very easy to sort of show people is if I say I'm going to say six words and I would guess that 95 plus percent of listeners will have the same image in their head so I say a tiger a hunter a tiger right and if if I say that it's you know most of us are not imagining that I'm talking about two tigers on different parts of the planet right like we're not we're not imagining that there's like you know a tiger in 1950 and a tiger in 2024 like we we stitch together in narrative automatically because there's supposed to be an underlying pattern and so you know this is something where we have a tool in our heads that's very very effective for helping us survive but it over infers patterns and under infers Randomness and this is why I think we basically discount things that are chance random fluky things because our brain rewards us when we do that and and it also helps us survive I mean I think it is something that's very important where um you know pattern detection is is useful in the modern world there are problems with this and one of them is conspiracy theories because pattern detection is extremely seductive and when someone says to you hey look at this set of pieces of evidence that are seemingly unconnected and now I'm going to show you how you can stitch them together our brain is just latching onto that you know it's it's the same reason why mystery novels are so compelling because you have all these pieces of seemingly unconnected data and then in the last 10 pages the detective says aha it all fits right and and so our brains you know our our literature our brains Etc all of them are fitting together in this way that basically uh rewards pattern detection that is very interesting I've never thought about that before the fact that uh if you're reading some true crime Thriller thing and you get to this moment and the that emotion that realization that you get I read um was the which was one the silent p paent by Andrew micheles highly recommended if people need a bedtime Liston um there's a big twist nearly at the end of the book and that emotion it's kind of shock it is it is there's a good bit of sort of shock in there there's a little bit of fear but there's this weird sense of satisfaction right ah there it is this sort of unshapely object you know when you were talking about um sort of the predictability of pattern I was playing pickle ball yesterday and I was thinking about the fact that the ball is very predictable I know exactly where it's going to bounce I and I can reliably see that unless there's a something if there's a little stone or something on the court and it deviates that's something that's irritating very few sports with the exception of um rugby and American football are played with a ball which does not bounce reliably and the only reason that that's the case is that they don't require it to bounce off the ground it's that's actually a feature rather than a bug um but if you I was to play pickle ball with one of those dog toys that's got all nobbly bits on it and you throw it you have no idea it's just chaotic how much less satisfying would the game of pickle ball be well way less satisfying because all of the predictability that I want in the system that gives me the satisfaction of knowing where the ball's going to go and knowing where I'm going to hit it and ah control control control I have control over this system uh all of that would be lost well I'll give you uh so you're you're completely right about this in pickle ball terms when it comes to the first few bounces but one of things that this research paper blew my mind in physics were they were looking at billiard balls which you know I mean very it's very round very regular it's not a dog toy but what they found is that you can predict very very clearly for the first several bounces right but it was I think it was after either seven or eight bounces that the the detail in the initial conditions of the strike or the room or whatever it was would start to matter after eight bounces so much so that literally the gravitational force by the people in the room could affect where the ball would end up after haing me so these are the kinds of things where the it's a perfect actually I'm really glad you brought this up because it's a perfect analogy for how we make sense of the world the first few bounces are the things that are most meaningful to us in pickle ball because you're not going to worry about it after 20 you know 25 bounces later you've already lost the points or whatever where whereas in uh in in you know in in the actual underlying nature of reality the further you go out the more that these tiny little changes will affect the trajectory and I think that's how our lives unfold where it's like you know the day-to-day stuff seems to not matter but in aggregate it really really does matter and these tiny little details can affect the trajectory both of of billiard balls and and of Our Lives I watched as maybe a lot of people did um some breakdowns of the three body problem science on YouTube and I forget the name of this uh particular uh way of representing a physical system um but it's a imagine a a lever that's hanging and and sort of swinging like this but halfway down the lever there is a hinge so it's basically two sticks attached together that can completely rotate through each other and this first one here is pivoted so it does that but it also has this chaotic movement where the end of it is able to spin back on itself and they show the tiniest tiniest amount of change in the initial conditions and they trace how Wild the sort of little spirograph thing ends up being and it's berserk and that the three body problem has to you must have thought about this you must have thought about the three body problem in relation to your work yeah I mean it's it's it's a it's a classic example of a chaotic system and it's one where I think what what happens when you talk about this with people is you sort of say like you know Chaos Theory applied to humans is what I'm basically researching here and they say oh you know I may have heard about this in Jurassic Park where there's this line about Chaos Theory whatever you know some people read this book called chaos in 1987 by James Glick so they've had little little glimpses of it but we all live it all the time right because the weather system is the perfect example of this where if you are off by an infinitesimal measurement in a weather system that's a model the weather will be totally different 10 to 12 Days in the future than it is now even with the best supercomputers and it's exactly what you're describing with these tiny little details this is what chaos theory basically means the the big takeaway for people is that it means that in chaotic systems the tiniest I mean you know one tenth of a millionth of a you know like this tiny little thing will forever affect the trajectory of the system and the three body problem is basically you know it's it's riffing on this the Netflix show is riffing on this idea that there's you know the the sort of imagined worlds they have in their simulation are any tiny change means that you can't predict the future and so these people constantly get wiped out because they can't control things and so you know it's it's it's it's upending what is effectiv the certainty that seemed to exist after the Scientific Revolution when you know Newton gave us all these equations that were supped to make sense to the world things like the three body problem and quantum mechanics and so on throw a little bit of a wrench in that what was that cow that was related to World War II oh this is this is the cow that could start World War II World War I sorry yes so uh I I came across this you know whenever you work on something you sort of you just remember the things that have you've come across earlier in your life and I read this book in when I was 18 years old and it was basically around the Millennium of uh it was talking about something happening around the Millennium of you know the year 2000 where this group of people in Israel believed that the arrival of a sacred Red Cow was an essential part of rebuilding uh the temple in in Jerusalem and this is something that is it comes from The Book of Numbers there's a sort of Prophecy that talks about how you know the only way to purify someone in order to allow them to build the temple is to basically burn the body of a purely red red cow a red heer and that that the Ash will then be used to purify these people and then they can build the Temple and so in 1997 uh which is a crucial date because the cow was supposed to be 3 years old when it was sacrificed right in 1997 this cow Nam melody was born in Israel and it was purely red and so they were looking at it and and sort of saying like oh my God like you know three years before the Millennium this red cow has appeared let's start preparing and it's particularly dangerous because some of these groups have extremist links and there was one faction that in the 1980s thought about trying to blow up uh the Temple Mount uh sections that had for example some of the holiest sites in Islam on them so this could have started a very serious International conflict if you if you can imagine you know a group of extremists blowing up some of the holiest sites in Islam it would not have turned out well and so what was bizarre about this was they they were very diligent in actually following the scripture to its words so they sent these people with like magnifying glasses to look at hair follicles to see if it's like fully fully red and I think it was like a year and a half or two years into Melody the Cow's Life there was a white hair and so were basically you know rather than sort of fudging it like taking a tweezers and being like no no one saw this uh they said oh it's not the cow and they they just decided that wasn't the right one and they they didn't do anything further with Melody but what's crazy about this and this is something that I think is an underappreciated story is that there's there are attempts to breed red cows now in Texas uh in in coordination with groups in Israel and they are trying to bring them and they've brought some recently um I think there's been two two batch if I'm not mistaken that have been brought and you know they're talking about this in in in these um you know sort of Fringe radio broadcasts for these groups I reached out to the groups they didn't want anything to do with me they don't want to talk to me obviously because they're they're doing this sort of in the shadows but there's an there's an effort to to basically engineer a red heer that can then be used to sacrifice to purify workers who can then effectively blow up these holy sites in Islam and replace them with the with the rebuilding of the temple and yeah I mean the reason I I I sort of think about this is because it is lucky that Melody had a white hair but you can imagine that this you know the sort of trajectory of the 21st century could have been really different if it had started with a holy war uh triggered by a single red cow that happened to be fully red dude how insane I love these stories I think these these stories that you found are phenomenal one of the other things you know the the reverse of the Baby Hitler uh story is the singl man Theory very influential individual look the the right place the right time the right man how much truth do you think is in that by your Reckoning so far everything matters there is a lot of chaos therefore a person presumably who has very outlier characteristics if you were to run many many many iterations of this the the more non-typical that the influential person is the less likely that the outcome Downstream from that would be how do you think about this yeah so I I completely believe that people individual people matter and I think that there's a problem in how social science sort of thinks about this because you know political science when we're trying to make sense of things we're trying to derive patterns so idiosyncratic personalities are not amenable to modeling right you can't just sort of say like here's what happen happens in a model if we like stick this personality into a Quantum you know into a Quantified equation and then outomes the right number and so it's not seemingly scientific and this has caused us I think to downplay the role of individuals I came to this from the complete opposite perspective because my my PhD research was looking at dictatorships and my god do dictators matter I mean they completely shape the fates of their countries I mean there's a the former dictator of turkistan um you know he banned smoking at one point because he wanted to quit himself so he banned country um you know I mean it's like it's stuff like this where you're like yeah like that's the reason the policy exists like this guy just sort of wanted to do it and like he tried to rename the days of the of the month uh after his mom and like sorry the month he named one of them after his mom and he also I mean he did this other crazy thing where like he um he wanted everyone to come to ashcat the capital city to see this white Marble City that he had constructed red and so he banned rural hospitals because he said if they are sick they should come and see the wonderful Capital I've made and then they'll be better right when like loads of people died because of course like it's important how quickly you get treated for you know when you have an emergency or whatever and so like if you think about a person in Turkmenistan and they're given some political science equation that's like oh yes well here's like generally how this works they would say our lives are completely directed by this man and so I think what you can say is that systems have more or less proness to being swayed by individual idiosyncratic you know Behavior but the idea that individuals are unimportant and and interchangeable is totally wrong uh and so I think so that do you think do you think about the um s the distribution of power is kind of building resilience into the system like you were saying earlier on yeah I mean obviously it's the case but but even within so even within systems you're you're right absolutely that like having distributed power makes it so any individual matters a little bit less it doesn't that individuals don't matter but like in a democracy an individual is less likely to be able to just ban smoking on a whim right because there's constraints there's things like that at the same time though like I would say that Donald Trump's personality has played a bigger role in American politics than say George W Bush's personality right and so I think that like even within the same system the idiosyncratic Behavior or character of an individual can matter more or less depending on how assertive they are in having their personality Drive policy or whatever it is so you I don't think there's like some you know strict divide I I just think that this idea there's there used to be this idea called the great man Theory which was that you know history's you know gears are are turned by great men and that was it and then what happened was people said wait a minute there's this other part of the story which is like Ordinary People or like technology or innovation and so the great man Theory got thrown out as like simplistic and I think the pendulum basically swung too far I think it's both I think like obviously trends aggregations of individuals technology all sorts of things matter but like individual leaders individual uh you know people who produce pivot Points in history they're important and if it was somebody else I mean if Donald Trump had not been born American politics today would be profoundly profoundly different so and I think that's where like political science sort of got a real wakeup call is that a lot of the models around the presidency were like oh the institution is what matters and like it's all about the rules and the Constitution it's like well I don't know like plan for the Donald throw the Donald in the ktic system what's that link between Trump and the dinosaurs this is one of those ones where you sort of I mean this is true uh but it does Boggle your mind so basically when the when the dinosaurs existed so this is before the asteroid I was talking about wipe them out um there was an inland sea in the United States right so you sort of Imagine like much of the middle part of the country's got this ocean in it and this the coastline of the ocean is basically like the southeast United States basically Alabama Mississippi and Georgia and there's sort of this swoop where the coastline is so you can sort of Imagine The swoop up the middle part of Alabama Mississippi Georgia now when the uh Inland Sea basically uh was was in existence all these little plankton uh died and settled on the coastline and the reason this is important is because it produced this really really rich soil over millions and millions of years so when slavery existed the the place that they decided to grow cotton was in this soil that was extremely rich for cotton groin which was exactly where the swoop was okay so if you map where the Inland sea Coastline was and you overlay the plantations in the Southern United States during the times of slavery it is a perfect match now the reason this matters for us today is that if you look at the 2020 election returns in Georgia one of the most important states which didn't just potentially tip the election to Joe Biden but also uh determined the control of the US Senate the returns where you see the Democrats run up the score is also in this swoop because it's where a lot of the descendants of the people who worked on the plantations this the the the enslaved people who worked on the plantations settled so you have if you look at county level election results and I you can Google this it's it's it's really easy to find if you look at county level election results in the southeast United States you will see the pattern of the in Inland Seas Coast it's exactly where it was and so this is the kind of stuff where geography you know continues to affect our societies and yeah of course like it's sort of unchanging over time the soil has always been Rich for quite a long time but it is astonishing to look at the Inland sea the plantation map and then the election results in 2020 and presumably in 2024 and you can see the coastline uh in in the voting patterns so you know we're in an election yeah uh pollsters everywhere what do we think's going to happen in November how can we predict everybody's trying you know the the pattern detection system is just at overdrive now and distributed among lots of people trying to combine their patent detection systems and now we've got um like manifold markets and and those sort of better it's like half betting uh websites where they're making predictions and they seem to be pretty good but they're still obviously not 100% accurate or even really anything per accurate how do you think about people that try to predict social system Futures given this inevitable chaotic unpredictable blowup risk single man multiple normal people thing yeah so I I get asked this all the time I'm a political science in my day political scientist in my day job so like I think about this a lot and I think there's just a fundamental error in how people interpret polling because polling first off polling might be flawed right I mean there's been plenty of examples where polls have gotten things wrong so first you have to have that caveat to begin with but secondly polling is not asking the question of who is going to win in November it is asking the question of who would you vote for right now and those are different questions right so what I always say is that the only answer to who is going to win between Trump and Biden is I don't know and it's the only defense answer what I can say is it's likely to be close right I mean I think that we can assume that there's going to be certain stable patterns in some vote you know we can predict that California is going to vote for Biden we can predict that Alabama is going to vote for Trump and so on but beyond that you know I can I can sort of have a pretty informed guess about which states are going to matter but the reason I don't know who's going to win the election is because of what's called non-stationarity which is I think the most important idea that we never talk about which is that it it's basically referring to the idea that causal Dynamics are changing over time in other words you're trying to measure something like what's going to happen and the underlying Dynamics are shifting as you're measuring it and that's because the race is different right I mean this is so obvious to us if we think about 2020 so in in February of 2020 there were polls who's going to win between Trump and Biden they did not know that the pandemic was about to hit and so all the polling in February 2020 was made useless a month later because the world fundamentally changed and I will tell you the world is going to change between now and when people vote how much I don't know which direction I don't know so you know I'm asked this question all the time you know what would you do if you're a betting person I mean I have a hunch about what might happen but it's purely based on speculation and I always say you know the most defensible answer is I don't know because you don't and and I think this is something where I actually think is very important for people who are in the press and in punditry and in expert roles and so on to be honest about this because the false sense of certainty causes people to make mistakes and so you know when I when I do go on television to talk about us politics like you have this really strong pressure to not say I don't know right it's like it's super unset like if you if you turn on the TV and like the expert being interviewed is like I don't know well it's like well the why did you get the [ __ ] expert I could have said that exactly I mean this but this is this is the kind of stuff where what it does in that you know we were talking about pattern detection is it sort of over amplifies certainty because the pundits go on and they make a living and you know this is I'm in this category where I you know go on I don't get paid to do this ever but I I go on to TV sometimes to talk about um you know us politics and it's like you can't say I don't know you can't talk about Chaos Theory you can't say that this is extremely complicated and it's impossible for us to forecast but I actually think sometimes it's important to acknowledge that and like I I think it would be better off if more people in the public eye said I don't know more often because the world is really uncertain and yet whenever we tune into people who are supposed to know things they always have an answer so it gives us this sort of idea that like oh things are under control and then you're like wait a minute why is there like every why is everything screwed up all the time why are these like massive disasters constantly happening and the answer is because we don't know but we have this illusion we talked about before because you know reflected back at us are a whole bunch of people in the public eye telling you we understand this and I will tell you I have no idea who's going to win the 2024 election I I I I could bet but I have no idea because it's it's some it's something that's fundamentally going to change between now and November in quite consequential ways well as a professional uninformed person on pretty much everything I managed to make a career out of being the most stupid person in every conversation um that that this is clearly not true you've already you've already given me on the sandpile model something that I had not thought about at all so okay I'm glad that you're throwing me some scraps of aul off the bottom of this huge steak dinner that you prepared I'm like the child that's moving the steering wheel and bipping the pretend horn in the back seat of the car but my point being that if more people say that they don't know that's going to reduce the Delta between uh my actual uninformed and their sort of like humble intellectual humbleness I'm I'm all for bringing bringing other people down to my level of not knowing things um one of the things that I was thinking about there you had this really fantastic point that I've never thought of before around um percentage certainty um pole sort of delivery um which is that if you give any kind of a percentage it's actually no one's ever going to stress test it because they not going to run this thing 5,000 times and then get to say well distributed across the 5,000 versions of this occurring didn't actually happen 87% of the time so you say I think 87% certainty that we're going to have a trump presidency come November and then Biden wins and you go well that's the 133% so built into every percentage prediction system is just contingency which basically makes it [ __ ] pointless yeah I mean this is so like you know with with with all due respect to Nate Silver's forecasting and so on who who's Nate Silva sorry so he's the sort of American politics forecaster who um has made a name out of Statistics forecasting and so on and he has this site 538 that he used to run and um he's someone who in in US politics circles has sort of been viewed as the statistical Guru because he had some very good results predicting previous the Michael bur of the politics world yes yeah so um so so Nate Nate silver though he had this model that had you know a certain percentage 70 odd percent that uh that Clinton was going to win and then she lost and he said well it wasn't 100% And it's like yeah but that's always true like that's literally unless you have a 100% forecast you will always have an out so you can never be wrong which is I mean good for you for designing a system where you can never be wrong but it's something that we have to think about more carefully so like one way I try to describe this to people and it is like a a difficult thing to wrap your head around is like 911 happened right and it was successful like they they success in terms of carrying out the terrorist attack they sought to carry out it could have been that they had a 5% chance of success it could have been that they had a 99% chance of success we will never know because they succeeded so all we have is 100% outcome and we don't know whether it was a really really lucky occurrence or whether it was almost certain to succeed because the TSA sucked and they had you know all sorts of you know really good plans and backup plans and all this stuff so the problem is when you have one reality you can't run coin flips like what we the way we derive probability that makes most sense to people is you know if I say heads and tals is a 50-50 probability I cannot predict what the next flip will be but if I do 10,000 flips I can tell you that roughly 50% of them will be heads and 50% will be tails with politics with elections we have one right because the 2024 election is not the same as the 2020 election it's the world has changed so you can never say that we have these sort of coin flips with politics or anything like that all you have is what happened and then trying to make probabilistic inferences on things that are extremely rare events like an election happening every four years is inevitably going to be flawed so you know to me if you have something that is unfalsifiable in other words you can never prove it wrong if Nate silver says that Trump has a 55% chance of winning what does that mean I mean if he loses is he wrong well no because 45% of the time that's what he predicted so you sort of have to think about probabilities this way that when you're talking about oneoff events like one shot deals a probability might not be the most useful tool and instead you should sort of talk about why do you think this will happen and then you have logic and you have inference and you have you know sort of basian probabilities you can sort of talk about what you think might happen and so on but like yeah I I think that a lot of people when they hear a probability they think scientific and it's a huge mistake right because there's a lot of BS that comes out of probabilities and it's very difficult for an ordinary person to discern what is a good statement of probability versus what is completely you know basically BS and and sort of being misused in a certain way what's that story about us independence and Tall Trees yeah so uh this is this is one of those ones where you sort of think you know how the world affects our history in ways that we are completely blind to so effectively there was uh a shortage of trees in England and Britain in general uh around the time of the War uh the American Revolution in the late 1700s and the reason for that is because all of the tall trees in Britain were basically cut down to make the Royal Navy which was a dominant player at the time they cut down a huge amount of trees and millions of trees to make the ships that made the British Empire and as a result they needed new trees and the US had a lot right so one of the things that happened was they tried to basically co-opt all of the trees in New England the British government basically said we own the king owns these forests and so it created this sort of elicit trade in trees and created this backlash where there was something called the pine tree Riot which really got under the skin of a lot of the American colon a lot of the American residents who were pissed off that the King was trying to take their trees to to make the ships and so on and the pine tree Riot ends up being the Catalyst for eventually the Boston Tea Party and the trigger of the American Revolution so you have the thing that's really odd about this story is that when you think about why the American Revolution happened we always make reasons that are tied to humans right so like it's it's about choices so a king taxes tea and then a bunch of people get angry that their tea is being taxed they dump it into the harbor and now they rebel against the government but there's also this aspect of like it also matters that the forest of New England had tall trees and this has nothing to do with anyone it's not it's not there was no choice it just happened happed to be a fact about the world they inhabited and those tall trees became precious because of timing where they had basically deforested lots of England at the time so the tall trees mattered and so on there's also this really weird wrinkle I think I took this out of the book but I but I I love this little bit where the uh the king made this rule that any like uh any bit of lumber that was 24 inches in diameter was the king's property right so like if it was a big enough tree like the king owns it so what happened was this trade sprung up where people started cutting their floorboards to 23 in and and so but the thing it's amazing about this like this is this is like an amazing thing about modern America is that if you go into really old houses in like Boston or anywhere in New England the floorboards are 23 inches wide and it's because of this crazy moment where they were all trying to basically stop the king from taking the wood that was in their land so the Rebellion is not just the tea party it's also uh tied the pine tree Riot and the the flag of the American Navy the original flag is a single Tall Pine Tree set against a white background because of the idea that the Navy was going to use these trees to to fight back against the crown what a middle finger it could have just been a it could have just been that couldn't it it didn't need to be the tree yeah it could have been a middle finger as a tree what was there about cigars and the revolution wasn't that something similar yes this this this is about the American Civil War so this is one of my favorite stories like I I'm a total history nerd because of this kind of stuff where it's just like unbelievably improbable events that totally shape the way the world unfolds so so basically what happens is this Confederate guy so from the southern Army in the US Civil War in 1862 uh is riding around with these secret orders of where the Army is supposed to go it's like the marching orders for the Army and he's got in his Satchel uh the orders wrapped around these three cigars and as he's riding the Satchel you must have opened and the cigars fall out and they end up you know coming to rest next to this hedro now by complete chance the Union Army the northern army takes a break and one of these soldiers sits down next to the hedro and sees this paper and is like oh my God a cigar this is wonderful right because he's obviously happy about being able to smoke it but he unwraps the the paper uh and it's like okay this is special orders 1 191 and it's the entire orders for the the enemy forces right like he stumbled across this incredibly valuable people piece of intelligence so what he does is he goes and takes it to the nearest official right to sort of say like look I found this thing and the general is in this Camp you know with his tent and so on and so the guy he hands the cigars to is this sort of clerk right like a guy who works for the general now the problem is they need to figure out whether these orders are genuine because of course like maybe it's a fake maybe it's a decoy whatever it is and it turns out that the person who looks at the signature on the piece of paper is the only person this guy who's outside the tent he's the only person in the Union Army who could definitively verify that the signature was genuine and the reason that was the case was because the person who signed the orders used to work in Detroit Michigan as did the person outside the tent and the person outside the tent would uh worked at a bank and he was a bank teller basically and so this guy who signed the orders used to sign Pac lips like checks to soldiers and so this person uh the teller had seen this signature like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times so he looks at it at the paper that's you know that was around the cigars and instantly he's like this is genuine this is the guy's signature I guarantee it's the guy's signature and as a result of this person being in the right place at the right time seeing the orders verifying the signature the Union Army quickly moves because they know where the Confederate Army is about to go and this leads the Battle of antium which is the single most bloody day in American history I mean tens of thousands of people were were were casualties on that day and this changes the trajectory of the American Civil War because it basically stops the Confederate momentum shortly after it Lincoln decides to emancipate the slaves so the the victory in antium is a trigger for that and additionally the British government was thinking about recognizing the South because they were providing cotton to the British uh you know population and they stopped doing that after the battle of antium because they got cold feet they thought maybe they're going to lose and then we're going to have to deal with the fact that we have now recognized the enemy of our other Ally right so the British government holds off on recognizing the Confederacy all of these things happen in a Cascade because of one discarded cigar in a hro discovered by the right place at the right time and so you know I don't know whether the US Civil War would have unfolded completely differently maybe the north still wins but at this really pivotal moment uh the North had a huge tactical Advantage because of a discovered cigar that was that basically fell off a horse I have no idea why people listen to this and get immediately Frozen and think God I I don't want to move if I don't move then then that means but God if I don't move that's also doing something there's no such thing as in action um so you know I think one of the takeaways is that everything that we do matters um but it if there's basically no distinction between signal and noise because all noise in some form ultimately does have an impact which makes it signal functionally for us humans that are going to try and absorb what you're teaching us there needs to be some kind of triage we have to be able to make a distinction between signal and noise or else we're just going to be stuck analyzing [ __ ] yeah so I think there's a few things I would say first off is that you can still have signal over the short term right so like the fact that the fact that this um this this Mass murderess killed her family in 1905 and now I exist I mean that was the noise my existence is part of the noise of her life story of course What mattered most was what happened in her immediate family and so on so like over the long period the little stuff matters it doesn't always matter over the short period right and we can't always know the difference because we can't you know forecast the future perfectly but in terms of how we navigate the world there's sort of two takeaways that I tend to tell people one of them is that if you if you think that the world is perfectly well understood and certain and controllable you will experiment a lot less because you already understand it why would you experiment right so what I'm saying is that if the small stuff matters if it diverts our trajectories if it produces Ripple effects in that uncertain World experimentation is the smartest strategy there is and there's loads of examples where this is is is the case where it shows that sort of a little bit of experimentation even forced experimentation where you go outside your comfort zone makes us more more uh successful makes us happier it does all sorts of things for us because you're navigating uncertainty so you're trying things whereas if you falsely believe the world is understood and certain you won't and then you'll end up stuck in ruts and you'll keep making the same mistakes over and over so experimentation is one lesson the other one is resilience right so I think so much of what we're told in whether it's economics or in selfhelp is about optimizing our our existence and it's all about this idea that you sort of you know the last 3% of efficiency is the enemy of your happiness if you get if you just get rid of that then your company will be on the you know the up and up and also your life will be on the up and up and I think it's a really bad piece of advice because over optimized systems are fragile whereas slightly less optimized not not like inefficient but slightly less optimized systems are able to adapt to new realities to new environments and they create resilience so I think the the big takeaways of a world that is more more swayed by flukes or by Randomness than we tend to believe is experiment more in that world and build resilience more into your strategies for how you live and then you know even when those fluky things happen you can basically weather the storm and that's that that's the sort of takeaway in terms of how I have Incorporated this into my life as opposed to you know just sort of continuing to to sort of race towards an optimal goal that ultimately might actually make us less happy and and more fragile tactically strategically how have you built resilience into you yeah so this is one where I you know I sort of it's it's somewhat cliche but I had you know lots of people during the pandemic had this experience I had this as well and it was Amplified a millionfold because I was writing a book about you know extremely improbable disasters happening and so on but um I sort of I I I thought about what I could always have right like no one could take it away from me I mean of course if I have a health disaster if I die yes okay fine but like if I lose my job or if something goes wrong in my personal life or whatever I can still go for a walk I can still hang out with my dog I can still hang out with people who I love and who who love me back and so you know that's the kind of resilience in my day-to-day life that I've put more stock in um it doesn't mean that I don't care about my career it doesn't mean I don't care about my ambitions all that stuff matters right but it's building part of your identity into things that are truly truly resilient um that's one of the things and experimentation how I've tried to do that more is I try to explore more I mean I think that um Google Maps is one of the best tools that that exists I mean it's incredibly incredibly useful so I'm not trying to sort of say don't use Google Maps but that thing that we used to do which was just sort of driving places or walking places it's often where you discover stuff that you didn't anticipate whereas Google Maps is always going to give you the same route over and over and over and I think that's a parable for how we think about these sorts of things with you know a bit more um Serendipity a bit more experimentation along with sort of focusing on the things that are truly resilient that are meaningful to you uh as I said I know it's a bit cliche but it is something that it's the biggest change in my life is like I I was over optimizing my schedule in like you know February of 2020 I look at my Google Calendar and it's just like full of stuff I didn't want to do like just stuff I really did not want to do but I was doing for some unknown goal and I just I don't as often I spend more time doing things that I enjoy and um I think mortality and sort of contemplating mortality actually helps us clarify that you know we we we can't control everything and so we do have to sort of uh focus on what we can control which is the stuff that is most resilient in our in our lives James Clear says that a person's calendar is a better judge of their wealth than their bank account and I think that this is true like and you can also have the same as the person with a fantastic job in a terrible marriage is having an awful time person with a terrible job in a fantastic marriage is having a good time uh I think that this is the sort of thing which is much more egalitarian and kind of people have access to it obviously if you are struggling to make rent you need to work hard blah blah blah but I do think that there is a uh a lot of degrees of freedom where people can take back a little bit of control where am I investing my sense of selfworth is it in something that I have more control over or less where am I investing the things that I concern myself with and I I place my efforts are they on things that are contingent on other people or are they on things that I am largely in control of how much am I spinning up the uh efficiency in in my system I mean how how many billions of dollars did that Freer that got stuck in the Suez Canal called $50 billion do or something because of one ship um to give you probably the largest single day uh your system is too tightly defined example for me I ruptured my achilles playing Cricket about three and a half years ago the end of uh August in 2020 and um I my dad was there watching me play this is the first time I've played in a decade decade and a half probably I'm having a great time the sun's beating down it's lovely beautiful British Saturday afternoon uh and then Achilles goes because I'm whatever 32 or something and I'm doing a big athletic sport under high pressure for the first time in a decade so anyway drive to the rvi which is the local A&E thing and a doctor comes over after we've waited for a little while squeezes it and goes yeah that's that's that's gone we'll Buck you in for surgery in two weeks time all right fair enough um that weekend I had constructed and this was kind of typical like just this permanent deck of cards that were ever ever ever higher I had a bunch of pro I still have a bunch of properties in the UK that I let and I had some people moving in a week and a day later a week and two days later so the Ikea stuff that I bought was in my car and the ground that we were playing at was near the house so my intention was to finish the game drive to the house drop the Ikea stuff off put the key somewhere that the Ikea man that was building it could find it but I also needed to go to the supermarket to collect a TV so I say to my dad I'm like I know that I've just gone through what is physically the most sort of serious injury that I've ever had in my entire life but first first we need to go to the supermarket and then secondly we need to go to the house and then ah I really could do with my car my car needs to be back so I'll left remember I did my right foot I left foot drove home from my own Achilles rupture via the supermarket with my dad to then go back and then I had to get up the next day and I'm on crutches and I had to go up the stairs on crutches to explain to the IKEA guy the next morning I was like this one thing which is a large thing you know like any sort of big physical injuries not as small but it just showed this down extreme sort of total domino effect of oh my system is so tightly tuned it's spun up so hard that even a tiny little sort of curveball or a very large curveball ruins everything I thought when you were telling that story I thought you meant that you built a literal house of cards I was like wow that's amazing and I built a house of cards yeah yeah yeah no figuratively I continue to do it to myself in in in my um life yeah but I think that you know I think that's how like a lot of people feel all the time right that they're like one mistake away from everything falling apart and it feels great when everything sort of runs like this this like really well-oiled machine but on the on the flip side you're you're setting yourself up for disaster and I I do think that like the happiest people have some slack in their lives I don't think that there are people who have life hacked the the sort of schedule to death to the point where it's like everything is optimized I think there're actually people who are able to breathe a little bit and sort of have that resilience as part of their lives and you know of course you need to have you know ambition and you want to chase things I mean humans strive for things and it's good that we do but I also think there's some people who have got a little bit out of whack where it's like the only way I can be happy is if I hit this goal and then the next goal comes and that's the only way I'll be happy and it's just sort of like it's the honic treadmill where it just you never get happy because you're constantly running and chasing things that are are are moving targets so yeah I love that story that you told because I think it is exactly the way that social systems are designed I think that this is basically what happens where um you know one bad thing happens like in the housing market in the United States and then the financial crisis brings everything down um it is a house of cards that we've designed in lots of the systems that we rely on the most anxiety uncertainty doubt fear of the future lots of people suffer with that how does your Viewpoint after writing this book how should the insights from your book uh impact people's anxiety and uncertainty and doubt about the future yeah I think there's there's sort of two things that work for me anyway I mean I can't speak to everyone else and I'm sure you know people who have crippling anxiety won't won't be comforted by anything that I say but um but I think there's sort of two things one is it's okay to give up a little bit of control and it's actually very healthy right it's it's it's okay to embrace the fact that you do not know how your life is going to unfold and you can't dictate it and the second that you have that mentality shift it liberates you in a way I think that that's something that's a really important mentality shift for a lot of people where um a lot of anxiety comes from the fact that you are chasing control in what is a fundamentally uncontrollable world and you're always going to be disappointed so you're better off just accepting that there are limits to your control and sort of riding the wave of life right the second thing that I would say is that if you take that idea that I said previously the sort of we control nothing but we influence everything then your life has meaning no matter what's happening right your life is changing the world and I think to me that's something that a lot of people don't actually understand they they they sort of think of themselves as interchangeable cogs when they're feeling really low and and it's not it's not true at all I mean your decisions the conversations you have you're affecting not just how the world unfolds but which people get born I mean every conversation you have at a coffee shop has Ripple effects it changes how the other person uh you know sort of feels about their day it can be more positive or more negative depending on how you behave so I think there's something really empowering about this sort of interconnected nature that chaos theory embeds in us which is that no moment is inconsequential and once you start to think that way yes okay it's it can create its own anxiety because everything you do is important but it also to me it's so empowering about life where uh there's no throwaway moment I think a lot of us sort of think that there's like the moments that are big and the moments that are meaningless and I'm I'm saying that Chaos Theory scientifically says there are no moments that are meaningless and that to me that gets me out of bed in the morning it's it's it's not something that is you know I don't know how every day is going to unfold I can't control it but every day matters and I think that's something that for people who are feeling self-doubt or or depression and so on that ability to shape and influence the world and the people around you is something that's really to me quite magical how do you balance these sorts of insights with agency that's the most important thing in my life uh being able to uh determine the direction of where things are going to go um is is something that I'm hugely hugely in favor of um and a lot of the people that are listening are as well do you feel like there's any contradiction or or conflict uh between the way that the world is and the way that we have a desire for agency yeah I mean so I I personally don't believe in Free Will for a variety of scientific reasons um that you know we don't need to go down down the rabbit hole right now because it doesn't really matter for agency anyway fre Free Will is a question about why things happen right so it's it's a question of are you independently causing the decisions in your brain and whether you are independently causing them or not you are actually producing the decisions right so in a way it's a semantic debate and so agency still exists in a world without Free Will basically individual actors still have the ability to shape events and what I would say is that you know you have to sort of accept the limitations of your control I think it's very healthy but I still even though I accept uncertainty I don't walk into traffic because I might get saved right like I I still think about these things probabilistically so you still want to make strategic decisions you still want to inform decisions based on whatever data you can have about the world and then you also and I think this is really really important is you have to accept that there are some things that you can never forecast so I can probably figure out if I have you know if if you get a a terrible diagnosis then the rates at which that leads to a recovery you know 95% chance of recovery very important data and it can help you understand how to behave and so on if I ask you what is the world going to be like in 2035 there is no data that exists literally no data in the world that can answer that question it's impossible and so I think there's there's stuff where we have to sort of separate out that which we can control and that which we can forecast from stuff that we fundamentally can't and then behave differently right so the probabilistic behavior the strategy is tied towards the stuff that follows regular patterns it's the stuff that follows some level of certainty and Order and control and you give up a little bit of control in the other Realms of your life like for example will you meet the right person for you will you you know there's only so much that you can do to control that is as much as you try you can't guarantee that that will happen no matter what you do so you know I think this is the kind of stuff where it's just it's a little bit about separating out the Realms and thinking a little bit differently about uh that nature of control and universal control by the way would be terrible if we could dictate the terms of Our Lives 100% I think it would be absolutely awful for humans I I think a little bit of uncertainty and Serendipity is very health uh very healthy and very helpful for um the way that we process you know our existence does Great Frame from aland Baton where he talks about how in a world that's a meritocracy uh if winners are worthy of their successes what does them make losers and he contrasts this with ancient Greece and the people that were Beggars on the streets were referred to as unfortunates lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them but if you think about what lady Fortuna is if you see what she's holding she's holding a set of scales the reason that she's holding a set of scales is that the Greeks believe that fortune it gives and it takes away I can't remember who it was that was locked up in a prison maybe sort of Sena or epic tetus is someone that was an adviser to somebody and uh maybe had his legs broken or already had them broken or whatever and um he's 50s something like that and one of his friends comes to visit him and says you know why are you not despondent why like why is this not sort of upsetting you more and he says well yeah sure lady fortun has taken all of this stuff away from me but look at what I had for the first 55 years of my life like look at all of these things that have been bestowed on me and I think that it's a delicate needle to thread and you know I'm really I've been very impacted by by your work I think it's very very important I think it's really cool and it's genuinely orthogonal to the way that lots of people see the world so it's novel in a way that it's like novely novel um I'm trying to think about how I integrate it but certainly thinking about that framing of like look if you believe that you can control the outcomes in your life if you have this illusion or belief in control it is the same as being in a meritocracy because any suboptimal outcome is laid at your feet if you're unhappy with your life that's exclusively because of you if you didn't perform in the way that you wanted that's exclusively because of you now as is everything it's like trying to balance on the top of some very very sharp point where you go where you fall off on one side and you end up in over optimization self flatulation super high performer anxiety hell or you fall off on the other side and you end up in nihilistic victimhood mentality despondency you're like okay I don't want to be on either of those and it is the game to balance these two things as far as I can see yeah I think I think you can synthes I think you're completely right about this but I think you can synthesize them in in a way where there are some things where our agency produces relatively predictable outcomes and there are some things where I have absolutely no control that are quite important so where I was born who my parents were when I was born right the fact that I wasn't born you know in prehistoric Earth uh Etc all of these things are really really important also like my brain structure which I you know if I'm an author it's something that is very important to me I had no say over that and these four things you know where I was born when I was born who my parents were and how my brain works I can't control them and yet they had a huge impact on the trajectory of my life and the way that I see this really clearly is I've done a lot of work in International Development and so on and I've gone to Madagascar for example many many times where the average person earns a150 a day and I see these people in rural Madagascar who don't have electricity and I think if that was me there's no way I'm on this podcast I could try everything I wanted to try but like there's just no way you can escape that it's impossible right so at the same time that that's true within the super structure of my life I still did control some stuff I had an agency to work hard in school I had agency to try to succeed and so on and those things do follow some predictable outcomes so there's there's a mix of them but I think that when you synthesize the two what you come up with is that agency and striving is important but every time you achieve success or anytime you achieve failure you have to dampen down the reaction to that yes I deserve some of that but also some of it's not up to me and and that's I think some of the the aspects that are really comforting because the worst moments of our life are also not totally our fault just as the best moments of our life are not totally something we've we've orchestrated it also produces by the way something I think that's really beautiful about failure uh if you connect the idea that my joyous moments in life are derived from the mass murder of children in this like horrible way right well it's also true then that the worst moments in my life when I felt lowest or most despondent or most depressed directly caused the happiest moments there's not there's not a break right they're literally causing each other because they're producing the trajectory of your life so I find really comforting when I feel terrible that without that feeling in that moment I would not be causing the future happiness in a way and I think that's also scientifically true and also philosophically comforting yeah when you're winning you're not as good as you think and when you're losing you're not as bad as you think it's probably that's a much better way of putting what I just said in about a million words so thank you Brian class ladies and gentlemen Brian this is really really great I'm genuinely genuinely impressed I think the book's fantastic I think everyone should go and buy it uh where do you want to send people on the internet well it's uh fluke is the book and uh I I write a newsletter about eclectic topics I I'm interested in called The Garden of forking paths so you can check that out as well hell yeah Brian I appreciate you thanks for having me on the show if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give my watch