Cause and Effect on a Global Scale

Chaos and Why Everything we do Matters. He just really explains why our understanding of cause and effect is so flawed that we think that A naturally leads to B, which leads to C, and instead the world is far more random and complex, and little things that happened years ago, sometimes thousands or millions of years ago, have a giant impact on what happens today. It really turns your view on causation upside down and it makes you rethink just

how random everything is. I found the book fascinating and I found our conversation fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado, my conversation with the author of Luke, Brian Klass.

imagine the horror of this. And the reason I put this in the introduction to Fluke is because this is my great grandfather's first wife, and so one of the things that was really extraordinary for me was that I went through my first twenty odd years of life not knowing about this dark chapter in my family history. But after I saw this newspaper headline, you know, sort of get over the shock of knowing this about your own family.

But then you realize that you don't exist unless this had happened to me, right, so you wouldn't be listening to my voice unless these children had died.

That's the way the world works. And so I think this is the kind of stuff where we tend to imagine that there's just sort of these you know, big building blocks of life, like the really obvious variables that create outcomes. And the argument I'm making is, actually, you know, it's it's sort of heretical to the you know, look for the signal, not the noise, because I am a byproduct of the noise.

lot because the husband and the couple. Henry Stimpson ends up as America's Secretary of War and the Target Committee approaches him with their recommendations of where to drop the first atomic bomb in nineteen forty five, and top of the list unequivocal Kyoto.

reducing Japanese morales. So all the generals say, look, this is a good idea, this is where we should drop the bomb, and you know, Stimson basically springs to action because they the generals started calling it his pet city because he kept talking about it, and he twice met with President Truman in person, we have records of the meetings and so on, and basically said you have to take this off the list, and eventually Truman relents, and

so the first bomb gets dropped on Hiroshima instead. Now the second bomb is supposed to go to a place called Kokura, and as the bomber gets to Kokura, there's briefly cloud cover, and they don't want to accidentally drop the bomb somewhere that's not the city, because of course that would not have the same effect. So they decide to go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki.

year old vacation and a cloud. And the point that I think is important to realize here is that, you know, if you were modeling this, if you're trying to say, like, how is the US government going to determine where to

drop the atomic bomb? You would not put in your model the vacation histories of American government officials or like cloud cover, right, you would come up with these very obvious big things like where are the places that have strategic importance or propaganda value, And if you did that, you probably would put Kyoto on top of the list, and you get the wrong answer. And you wouldn't get

the wrong answer because you were stupid. You'd get the wrong answer because sometimes things that don't seem to be important actually end up being the most important factor in an outcome.

incinerated the entire city and killed most of them. And so I think this is the kind of thing where, you know, one of the ideas that is central to the argument in Fluke is that these sorts of things, this Kokura's luck, is happening to us all the time, right, we were completely oblivious to the diversions in our lives and our societies, the alternative possible history simply because we can only experience one reality. And what we do is we've then stitch a narrative back where it's A to B.

This makes complete sense. Here are the five reasons why this happened. And in fact, I think this is a way that we end up deluding ourselves into a neater and tidier version of the real world.

There's a film in the nineteen nineties with Gwyneth Peltrow called Sliding Doors, and it has this idea and I sort of riff on that with this concept I coined called the snooze button effect, where you imagine that you know it's Tuesday morning, you're a little bit groggy, you wake up, the snooze button beckons to you, you slap it, and you get delayed by five minutes. You imagine you're now your life rewinds by thirty seconds and you say, uh no, I won't hit the snooze button. I'll get

out of bed. Now. I think that has changed your life. Now, the question is how much has it change your life? And under some short time scales, maybe things sort of get ironed out in the end. But you're gonna have different conversations that day, You're gonna talk to different people, you might get in a car accident in some days, right. I mean, these are the kinds of things that we sort of are oblivious to, and I think when you think about them. With social change, it's happening all the

time too. I mean, there's just so many ways that the world could have unfolded differently, but for a few small changes. I mean, you know, you think about even like nine to eleven. We think about all the variables that go into nine to eleven. One of them that people don't talk about was the weather. It was an incredibly blue, blue sky day, Chris. Yeah, and if you had if you had a you know, very very cloudy day or storm, some of the planes wouldn't have taken

off on time. They might have had a chance to foil some of the plots. Or if you had had a different slate of passengers on flight ninety three, So if it had gone September tenth or September twelfth, maybe those passengers don't take down the plane, Maybe the White House or the capital's destroyed, and then the world's different. I mean, you know, can you imagine how it would change America or geopolitics if there was no White House anymore?

So I think these are the kinds of things where, you know, you just imagine that there's this straight line of cause and effect, and of course when we experience the world, we then explain it. But you know, these small changes could really reshape the future. Some of them are going to be more consequential, like that Kyoto story, others are going to, you know, be a little bit

less consequential, at least on human time scales. But the point is we can't know, and I think that's something that is bewildering to think about.

ended up getting dropped on Hiroshima. There are an infinite number of causes, and they're things that we would not think about. Right. Geological forces for gen uranium millions of years ago is part of that story. Einstein being born is part of that story. The Battle of Midway pivoting on a fluke event where the US wins because they just happen to stumble upon the Japanese fleet at the

right moment, right. I mean, if any of these things have been different, there's like there's an almost infinite number of them where little tweak would have been different, a different outcome would have happened. Now, for the useful navigation of society, we have to simplify reality because we can't build a model that has nine hundred thousand variables, right, So what you instead do is you sort of say, Okay,

this is a crude version of reality. And I think, like, you know, one of the things that is really useful about some models, like Google Maps, for example, we know that's not the world, right, we know the map is not the territory. You look at Google Maps and you're not like, oh, well, I imagine that that's what the

real world looks like. It's a clear abstraction. I think when we start to get into forecasting and other modeling of social ties change, I think we lose sight of the fact that we have a Google Maps distortion and that we're actually looking at something that is potentially useful to navigate but is very, very different from the real world.

In the Bible, in Genesis, God proclaims, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fishes, the foul of the cattle, etc. Eastern culture takes a whole lot more of a collectivist approach, where you're part of a group, not you were made in God's images. Tell us a little bit about how this schism developed and what is the relationship of chaos theory to.

that are developing. And the idea is that the hypothesis is that this meant that people could not avoid the commonality that we have with the rest of the world. Right, whereas if you think about like biblical societies, if you look at animals and you see camels, you think like, hey, we are super different. We are separate from the rest

of the world. So the argument is that over the long stretch of civilization that this created a slightly different mentality that then manifests in what was called relational versus atomistic thinking, and Western society is atomistic thinking on steroids, which is to say, you know, I mean the American dream is very atomistic individualist. It's like, you know, if you just want to succeed, then you have to do everything, whereas the relational concepts are much more about the interconnections

that people have. And so I think that also tells you how you think about society right. Social change is either driven by individuals or's driven by systems. And I think that there is a way in which Western culture, I think, can learn to actually appreciate some of the complexity of social change more with a healthy, increased dose of relational thinking.

green Earth in its entirety from space. They all describe it as being overwhelmed by a life shattering epiphany on the interconnection of everything. That doesn't sound very Western, that sounds more like an Eastern philosophy. But this has been time and time again. Lots of astronauts have had this.

buttons or whatever. So they pick these people who are supposed to be robots effectively in their personality, and all of them still have this incredible sort of epiphany about the interconnection of the world because you look at the single planet and you think, okay, this is one structure. This is not something where I'm this distinct bit. You're like, this is all together right now. I think what's really striking about that is that those world views do shape

your thinking around social change. And I think when you start to think that you are in control rather than an agent of influence, you have a different worldview. When you start to think that you're individual rather relational, you have a different worldview. And all these things feed into the ways that we set up models that we sort of interact with our conceptions of social change. And so on, and also the degree to which we have hubris that we can control things. And I think this is where

the danger comes in. Right, It's not that you shouldn't model, It's not that you shouldn't have abstractions of systems. It's that when you start to get hubristic about it and think you have top down individualists control, you start to get overconfident in ways that you try to tame something that I think is untamable. And this is where we get shocks more often, because you try to impose this sort of control on a system that is so complex

that it resists control. And so you know, there's some of these things where I think the insights the flawosophy behind this it's it's sort of lurking there invisibly, where no one says this when they build a model, but it's it's obviously shaping the way they think about it and their sort of assumptions before they go into trying to determine how to navigate risk and uncertainty.

a theory when you're talking about social change. So my favorite example of this is the Arab Spring in political science, my own realm, there is a lot of stuff written in sort of two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, even into twenty ten that says, here's why Middle Eastern dictatorships are extremely resilient, and there's all this data showing this the longevity, et cetera, et cetera, and then like within six months of some of these books coming out,

you know, all of them are on fire. I mean, I saw a political risk map when I was in grad school where like every single country that was on fire was green on the political risk map from the previous year. Right now, There's two ways of thinking about that. The first way is to say the theory has been falsified. They were wrong, right. The second way of thinking about is, hold on, maybe the world changed, Maybe the patterns of

cause and effect have actually shifted, right. And I think this is something that people don't appreciate that much, is they assume that the patterns of the past are going

to be predictive of the patterns of the future. I mean, David Hume came up with this idea hundreds of years ago, but it is something that I think is particularly important for our world because the patterns of the past being indicative of the patterns of the future has ever before been as flawed of an assumption, because our world is

changing faster than ever before. So I think one of the issues that we have is when we think about these sort of clockwork models where we say, oh, yes, you know, these are the ways that things have worked in the past. Our world is very very different year to year, and that didn't used to happen. I mean I was talking before about these you know, nine thou

five hundred generations of humans. If you think about the sort of entirety of human history as a twenty four hour day, twenty three hours and like ten minutes is hunter gatherer period, right, and then you get into farming, which is another like thirty minutes, and then you've got, you know, a few minutes for the industrial revolution, and you get to the information age, which we're in now, which is like eleven seconds right in this in this

one day o'clock. And I think the point that's important here is that if we base almost all of our decision making and almost all of our models on causal inference from past patterns of behavior, but the world is changing year to year, then the assumptions we're making are becoming more and more short lived. And I think that's where we're embedding risk into are thinking, because we have no other way of inferring cause and effect other than

past patterns. There's no alternative. That's what Hume says. He's like, this is the only way we can understand the world is to look at what happened in the past. We can't look into the future. So I think this is something that I do worry about when I see a lot of decision making built on this sort of mentality of the clockwork model that like, oh, yes, well, it's just going to keep ticking along. And you know, there's a lot of very smart thinkers who have thought about

black swans and so on. I just think that we've made a system where the black swans are actually going to be more frequent. I think we've designed a system that's more prone to systemic risks than before.

This is massive four pests campaigns, so we're gonna kill all these pests. So he basically tells everyone just go out and you know, kill all these various things that potentially are vectors of disease. And what it ultimately does, it leads to one of the worst famines in human history because they've disrupted the ecosystem, and they figure, oh, you know, as long as we just get rid of

these pests, it will be fine. What they actually have done is they've made it to the crops fail and so you know, this is the kind of stuff where I think that's the it's the parable that warns us of, you know, assuming that simply because we have either have had some success in the past, or because our model seems to guide us in this way, that we can therefore insert ourselves into a system and not worry about

the unintended consequences. I think that's the kind of thing where, you know, a lot of the people who are the dumers in AI are talking about this. There are some things where you know, when you have AI based decision making, it is you know, the training data is the past. So there are some things that I think are are getting worse in this front, and we are also, as you said, the interconnectivity. I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is the Suez Canal boat. That the

infamous Suez Canal boat, right. I mean, you have a gust of wind that hits a boat and twists its sideways, it gets lodged in the canal, and the best estimate I've seen is that it created fifty four billion dollars of economic damage. And they said it was you know, something like point two to point four percent of global GDP could have been wiped off by this this one boat. Now the question is is there ever another moment in

human history where one boat could do that? Right? And I think the answer is quite clearly no. So the I mean maybe the one that brought the plague, right, right, But I mean this is the kind of stuff where I think one of the one of the lessons that I think is important is that there's a trade off very often between optimization and resilience. And I think, you know, we're told all the time efficiency and optimization are are, you know, the guiding principles of so many of our systems,

but they come at a cost. They do create less resilience, and I think there are some things where the long term planning that we can do is to put a little bit more into resilience and a little bit less in optimization. It will cost us money in the short term, but it will probably save us a hell of a lot of money in the long term. Huh.

that wipes out the dinosaurs. Now, if this asteroid, which was by the way, was produced by an oscillation in a place called the ort cloud in the distant reaches of space.

this small change could radically reshape the future. Now, convergence is the alternative hypothesis, and they both exist, right, the sort of order and disorder and convergence says, Okay, yeah, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of fluctuations

and flukes, but eventually things that work win, right. So my favorite example of this is that if you look at if you were to take out a human eye and you were to look at it and you were to compare it next to an octopus's eye, they're actually extremely similar, which is bizarre because there's about six hundred million years of separate evolutionary pathways for the two branches of life. And the reason this happened isn't because you know, we just got super lucky. It's because solution came up

with a strategy by random experimentation that simply worked. It made the species navigate the world effectively long enough to survive to have offspring, which is the engine of evolution. Right. So this is the kind of stuff where yeah, there was like a lot of very profound differences. I mean, we do not look like octopus, thank goodness, but it's something where as a result of that, the I is

basically the same. And so the question here, I think is can we apply these frameworks to our own change, right in our own societies? And so what I try to say is, Okay, there's some stuff that is ordered. There's lots of regularity, there's lots of patterns in our lives.

That's the convergence stuff. At some point, you know, you go on the highway, there might be an accident sometimes, but like most of the time, you know, the cars drive around the same speed, they have space between them that's about the same distance, right, And like there's all these patterns, but every so often there's a car accident, and that's contingency. Right. So this is the kind of stuff where what I say is that the way that social change happens and also our lives unfold is what

I call contingent convergence. Not the most beautiful phrase, but it's I think very accurate and saying, okay, so there's these contingencies that change the path you're on, and then once you're on that path, the sort of forces of order do constrain the outcomes that are possible. They say, look, this stuff's gonna work. That stuff's not gonna work, and the sort of survivors bias produces the stuff that does work.

So I think this is a useful framework that I'm borrowing from evolutionary biology to help us better understand social change.

It's different concentrations of oxygen. They sometimes have to be in the ocean, sometimes I have to be on land, and you know, this sort of diverse array of life is just undirected experimentation. But the thing is that these do these these forces do end up constraining the possibilities.

Now when we talk about carsonization, is really interesting thing that I don't go into much depth in the book, but it's called the Burgess shale up in Canada, and the Canadian Rockies, And it's basically like this, this like fossilized museum of all these really wild body plans that used to exist hundreds of millions of years ago before a mass extinction event, and what happened is they all

got obliterated. So you can't have any sort of convergence from those body plans because they don't exist anymore, whereas the ones that survived all of us are derived from them. Right, So the contingency is like, okay, which body plans exist, which which sort of ways could you set up life, you know, with spines or not spines, whatever it is.

And then once you have that contingent event where there's the extinction within that, there's this sort of constrained evolution that is, okay, well, when this happens, the animal dies, so it doesn't exist very long. And when this happens, the animal survives, so it does exist. And this is where arsonization, you know, you need to have a term because the crabs are very much survivors.

there's this murder and so on. But you keep tracing these things back, right, So my great grandfather's ancestors had to meet in just the right way and their great grandfather, you know, they had to meet. But you go back then six million years, this chimpanzee like creature had to meet another chimpanzee like creature, and the two of them

mating is part of the story of human existence. You go back further, you know, there's a worm like creature hundreds of millions of years ago, it dies, we probably

don't exist. Or my favorite example I think in the book is, and this is a finding from modern science about a year ago, was they found out that the reason why mammals don't lay eggs, right, why we don't have eggs and we instead have live births, is they believed, based on genetic testing, that a single shrew like creature got infected by a virus one hundred million years ago, which caused a mutation, which led to placenta and the

rise of mammals. And you think of I mean, to me, that is just so utterly bizarre to imagine that our existence, like everything in humans, you know, ancient Rome, all this stuff, you know, Donald Trump, whatever it is, all of it is completely contingent on a shrew like creature one hundred million years ago getting sick. He's like, when you think about this stuff, I think evolutionary biology tell you know, they have encountered black swans throughout hundreds of millions of years.

It's basically the origin story of complex life.

them in twelve flasks, and we just evolve them for decades. Right, And because ecoi life cycles are so short, it's basically the equivalent of millions of years of human evolution.

the experiment, the lesson was, okay, it's it's convergence. Because all twelve of the lines were evolving in slightly different ways. There's noise, right, there's little differences. The genome is not the same. But they're basically all getting fitter at eating glucose, so they're getting better at surviving. And then one day a researcher comes in and one of the flasks is cloudy, and this is not supposed to be the way it is.

It looks like a little bit of milk has been dropped into it instead of this really clear substance that the rest of the other eleven are. So they sort of think, oh, this is a mistake. Can they throw it out? They restart because they frozen the equali so they can restart.

this is the thing. When I read this, I was like, this is a central way of capturing. My idea is that when they looked at the genome, there were four totally random mutations that did not matter at all for the survivability of the ecoli that proceeded in just the right chain. That when the fifth mutation happened, all of a sudden, that population could now eat the citrate, which was not supposed to happen, right. It was supposed to only eat the glucose. The citrate was there as a stabilizer.

But as a result of this, they became way more fit, way more survivable than the other populations because they could eat something the others couldn't. Right, And what happened then is that since then, this has now been going on for twenty plus years or so, since then, the citrate population has an advantage over all of the other eleven, and none of the others have developed that mutation because

it's sort of like a house of cards. You had to have these exact four accidents in exactly the right order. If they'd reach if they changed the order, it once't have happened. And then they had to find me. On top of that those four accidents, they had to have the fifth accident, which gives them the ability to eat sitratee. And so this is the idea of contingent convergence. Right. It's like for that population that evolved the ability to

eat sitrade, that one mutation has changed everything forever. It will never go back to eating glucose the same way as the others. But for the others that didn't develop that change, they are all still evolving in relatively predictable ways. So I think this is the capturing of the of the sort of paradox of our lives is that we exist somewhere between order and disorder. Complete disorder would destroy humans,

we couldn't exist to our society's confunction. Complete order also wouldn't work because there'd be no change, there'd be no innovation, and so on and so I think this is where contingent convergence really really shines. But I will admit that trying to do a sound bite version of the long term evolution experiment is something that in writing the book was probably the greatest challenge of making something about bacteria interesting.

is going on than the other eleven environments. And one has to imagine that if this wasn't taking place in an experiment, but this was a big natural scenario, the citrate consuming E. Coli would eventually take over the population because they have twice as much food available, were more than just the plain old glucose eating equal life.

so on. But what they said was that, you know, well what if one day, you know, when we were washing the flask, just a tiny microscopic amount of soap stayed on there, right, that could affect the evolution. And so there's no I mean, even even in this experiment, there's contingency they couldn't control, which is I mean, it's the most controlled evolutionary experiment that's ever been done, but

it's still like, you know, these little tiny bits. If you just have you know, a microscopic bit of soap, well that's going to kill some of the bacteria, and then the evolutionary pathway is going to be slightly changed. And I think this is the stuff where, you know, had they been a different researcher, had a grant run out, they might have just said, okay, we've solved it. It's all convergence. Because they could have shut down the experiment

after fifteen years. So there's just all these things that are like layered on top of each other. And I think, you know, a lot of scientists, especially in the world of evolutionary biology, understands that this is something that we really have to take seriously. And I think the way that we are set up in human society is to ignore the contingency because those are not useful things to think about. They're the noise, They're the aberrations of the outliers,

you know, you delete them from the data whatever. And I think this is the kind of stuff where the lesson here is that those are actually central to the question of how change happens.

And the reason that I ended up, you know, having that mentality that I think we're trying to cram complexity into these neat and tidy, sort of straight jack models is because my PhD dissertation so on, I was looking at the origin story of coups and civil wars. That was part of my research. And these are black Swan events. I mean, you know, there's only a few coup attempts that happen every year, and they're so hard to predict.

I mean because you know, one of the coup plots that I studied was where this guy, you know, who's a sort of mid level officer in the army, just on a whim, decides to try to overthrow the government. And he's got like fifty guys in his command. This is in nineteen ninety seven in Zambia, and you know, his plan is to kidnap the army commander and force the army commander to announce the coup on the radio.

It's not a stupid plan, it's actually it probably would have worked, but the group of so soldiers that were dispatched to the house. I interviewed some of them when I went to Zambia, and they said, look, you know

we ran in the army commanders in his pajamas. He runs out the back because he sees these soldiers coming to kidnap him, and he climbs up the compound wall and you know, it's like in a film where like they grab his pant leg he's pulling up, they're pulling down, and they just he slips through their fingers and he then goes to the government HQ and announces that there's a coup under a coup plot underway, and so the

soldiers go to the radio station. They capture the coup ring leader, who's at this point literally hiding in a trash can. Okay, three hours after the coup plot has been hashed. Now, the problem is, I was reading all this stuff about like Zambia's democracy, and it was oh, Zambia is a resilient democracy. It's one of the beacons

of African democracy in the nineteen nineties. And I'm trying to reconcile this with the fact that in my own research, I'm finding this story where the soldier says like, yeah, I think if I was like one second faster, I probably would have gotten the government overthrown. And on top of this, the other contingency was they didn't chase him. And I said, why didn't you chase them? We said, well, the army commander's wife was really attractive and we wanted

to talk to her. And also we opened the fridge and there's Namibian import beer in the fridge and we hadn't had Namibian beer for a long time, so we said, you know, screw this, We're gonna We're gonna drink some beer and talk to the wife. And I'm thinking, you know, like like how do I put this in my model? Like you know, I mean, like like what is my

quantitative analysis going to show me about this? And I think that's the stuff where those little pivot points and studying really rare events that are highly consequential makes you think differently about the nature of social change. And I would go to these like political science conferences and I was just like, I don't I don't believe this is

how the world works. I think there are times where these can be useful models, but I don't think we're capturing reality accurately, and that's where, you know, some of the origin story professionally of the book comes from you.

So there's one island, for example, where half the population as asthma because it was populated initially by this bottleneck of a very small number of people who disproportionately had more asthma than the rest of the population. There's elephant seals, for example, who got whittled down through hunting and so on to something like I think it's fifty breeding pairs or something like that, but which exact seals lived or

died completely changed the trajectory of that species. Now, I sort of say this because human society has had bottlenecks at various times. We don't know exactly how small they've been, but the hypothesis is perhaps that it may have been as few as a few thousand humans at one point, and which humans were in that group that determined everything for who's allowed now, right, So if you swap out, you know, one person for a different person, you've changed the trajectory of the species.

I mean, you know, Apple has this outsized effect on the tech industry, but you know, maybe the time means a little bit different in Apple dice.

is successful and we say, I mean hindsight bias. You know many people, I'm sure I've talked to you about this, but it's very important to underline that, like when these arbitrary things happen, if you then infer causality, that's a neat and tidy story, you actually are learning exactly the wrong lesson. I mean, the reason these particular elephant seals survived is probably arbitrary. It just happened to depend on who the people who are proaching them, you know, happen

to stumble upon. And then of course the evolutionary history of that animal is completely changed. So I think that lesson is that, you know, sometimes when bottlenecks happen, it reshapes the trajectory of the future, but it also is inescapably arbitrary at times, and we don't like that. I mean, the entire world of self help and the entire world of sort of business advice is, oh, these people were successful, here's how you replicate it. And the replication is always

just do what they did, right. But I mean, of course the world's different now. I mean, if you do what they did, you're just making something that's not truly innovative. Right.

year again, we may not be having this conversation. There may be no humans around.

issue is so important. Now, one of my you know, examples of this that I think is so fascinating is you think about, like our daily lives, and our daily lives are you know, basically set up in groups of seven. Okay,

we've got a seven day week. Why is that? So I start looking into this and effectively what happens is there's this period in ancient Rome where they have this superstition that says the planets are really important for being you know, auspicious and so on, and they can see because they don't have telescopes, five planets with the naked eye and the Sun and the moon. You add them up, that's seven. They set up a seven day week because of that. That's why we divide our lives in seven.

And it's because of this lock, this this this thing that I also talk about in Fluke, which is this concept of lock in where an arbitrary thing can happen and then sometimes it persists and sometimes it doesn't, and that's often very random. So my other example of this is everything that we write, everything that we say, is derived from English being locked in when the printing press

was invented. If the printing press had been invented, you know, six decades earlier, six decades later, there'd be a different language because the language was in flux, and all of a sudden it became really important to have a standardized system. So a lot of people used to write the word had hadd Now that was expensive because they figured, okay, we've got a typeset this with a bunch of letters. Why don't we just do had and I'll boom, all

of a sudden the language changes. Right, So there's a series of things that happen really really quickly, but they basically produce modern English. And so I think this sort of concept of the arbitrary experimentation and you know, superstition of the Romans and then getting locked in and the empire sort of sets it up and then it spreads and all that, and then you think, okay, why do

we have a five day working way. I mean, it's partly tied to, you know, this superstition about the auspicious nature of the visible planets, which themselves are an arbitrary byproduct of how our eyes evolved. So I mean, it's just sort of an everything you think about has got these sort of tentacles where they could have been slightly different and then our lives would be radically changed.

closer to. This is like a century old, like for a hundred years people could read and write and meaning most people, but go back beyond the century, and the vast majority of people either couldn't read, couldn't write, never went to school. They had to get up and work in the land. They didn't have time to mess around with this stuff.

So my favorite way of thinking about this is that I think that every human who came before the modern period, most you know, at least you know, maybe the last two hundred years or so, what they experienced was uncertainty in their day to day life. There was almost no regularity, no patterns in their day to day life. They didn't know where their next meal would come from. They didn't know, you know, whether they would get eaten by an animal, et cetera, the crops might fail, you know, et cetera.

But they had what I call global stability, which is to say, like the parents and the children lived in the same kind of world. You're a hunter gather, your kids a hunter gather, you know, And this means that the parents teach the kids how to use technology. There's basically regularity from generation to generation.

expectation of regularity is so high. But we have global instability. I mean, you know, I grew up in a world where the Internet didn't exist really for ordinary people, and now it's impossible to live without it. You know. You think about the ways that children teach parents how to use technology that's never been possible before. And on top of this, you have the sort of AI you know, rise where the world's going to profoundly change in a very short period of time. There has never been a

generation of our species. We're not just the global dynamics have changed generation to generation, but within generations. I mean, we're going to live in a world where, you know, the way that we understand and navigate systems and our lives is going to change multiple times in one lifetime. And you think about you know, Hunter gathers that the average human generations about twenty six point nine years. In the long stretch of our species, you can go twenty

seven years over and over and over. It's pretty much the same world for pretty much the entirety of our species until I would say the last you know, maybe one hundred years or so. And that's the thing, you know, you think about this. The more you think about this, the more of these examples you find. I mean, one of them is, you know, jet leg I flew in from London and there's been three generations of people who could ever move fast enough to knock out their biology

in a way that they have jet legs. So, I mean, there's just a million things that we experience as routine that no humans before us have ever brought.

or whatever. Right now, somebody made a renewed version of that map a couple of years ago, and the furthest reach you can go is like thirty six plus hours, where in the old map it was like three plus months. And you know that's the stuff as well, where we just we've sped up the world so much. And I think this is embedded a lot of the dynamics where flukes and sort of chance events become more common.

is contingency. And since you're in from London, Brexit was that a function of random elements or was that a convergence that was a long time in the make.

gone the other way. But there are trends as well, right, I mean, there's these are the things where I'm even though I believe that Flukes changed the world profoundly regularly, I also completely accept the idea that there are sort of long term forces that yield something like Brexit. And there was a long sort of bubbling antagonism to immigration levels and anger at Brussels and all these sorts of

things which politicians capitalized on and leads to Brexit. I mean, I think one of the things that will be interesten about this, and perhaps the biggest convergence, is the conversation

which David Cameron decided to hold the referendum. That would be the biggest con contingency for me because he thought, at least as has been reported, he thought that he was going to put to bed the challenge from the right in the Conservative Party by holding the referendum, that he would win and that he would have to stop dealing with questions about Brexit, and of course it backfired on him. He didn't really believe in Brexit, but he figured this was a political ploy that would know basically

cut off the pivot to the right. So that's one of those things where you know, if a different set of people had been in the room with Cameron, then maybe they don't hold a referendum, and then that's a very different world we live in.

big contingencies around Trump. I mean, there's there's one hypothesis which I you know, I can't I don't know Donald Trump's thinking, but there's speculation by people who are close to him that the moment he decided he would definitely run for the twenty sixteen race was in twenty eleven when there was the White House Correspondence dinner and he was exactly and he was publicly humiliated by Barack Obama with a joke that basically said something to the effect of,

I really sympathize with you, Donald because I couldn't handle the hard choices that you have to make on Celebrity Apprentice, whereas I, you know, have to make the easy choices in the situation room. And everyone's sort of laughing at Donald Trump and so on. And the question is, you know, if the joke writer had not come up with that idea or Obama said at let's just can that joke.

Does Trump run? I mean, that's question one. Then there's the questions around the election, right, And this is something where, you know, without going into too much detail, the reopening of the FBI investigation, which happens because of a congressman in New York and his inability to sort of control himself.

politics with a fluke. Around the time of the dinosaurs, there was an ancient inland sea in America and it basically had a coastline that would if you were going to chart it today, it would be like a little crescent shape, a sort of swoop across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Now what happens is on the coastline there's these fital plankton that live in this shallow sea and when they die, their bodies eventually get turned into these really, really rich

soils when the sea ends. Now, I promise this makes sense for how it links to Trump. This produces extremely fertile soil and what's called the Black Belt. And when slavery was developed, the plantations are. You can map them exactly where the ancient in lan Sea was. That's where they go. So this means that there's all these enslaved people brought to the southern United States according to this ancient coastline, and a lot of the people who were

freed then settled there. And so the demographics of those counties are overwhelming the African American And when you look at the election results for the twenty twenty election, where Georgia becomes this pivotal state and also is the reason why the Democrats hold onto the Senate, if you map the county level election results, you will see the swoop of the ancient inlan Sea and it's exactly where the Democrats carried the state because it's where the black population,

which is disproportionately likely to vote for Democrats, lives. And so you know this is the kind of stuff where, of course this is the long stretch of history, but it's something where I think we don't think about geological or geographical forces, and they do affect our politics. It's just that we're completely oblivious to them, and they're not that changing from election to election, so we're not fixating them for punditry.

Trump in twenty sixteen and Trump in twenty twenty. As I was reading your language about the long fabric of threads in history, the conversation unrelated had talked about Iraq in two thousand and three, and as I'm plowing through the book, it sort of dawns on me the changes that are put into place under the Bush administration with Dick Cheney after nine to eleven, which essentially comes out

of Afghanistan. Iraq had nothing to do with this. The idea that we're going to use this to invade a country that's not related to nine to eleven and just the ginned up weapons of mass destruction and all the evidence that turned out to be no evidence at all. That was at the time felt like a radical change. That the government was not just lying to us about

little things we weren't paying attention to. They were like clearly not telling the truth, which most of us either didn't believe or didn't want to believe at the time. Of course, there's got to be some reason to invade a country. The Government's not just gonna make that up. And I'm wondering if that is that a contingent. Is that a convergence, because following the Bush Cheney administration, Donald

Trump was kind of radical. But for that, I think if the Iraq War doesn't happen, and if the presentation by Colin Powell at the UN doesn't happen and the whole thing turns out to be bs afterwards, I think that kind of made people a little cynical and Trump was a modest step from that, whereas if that doesn't happen, Trump is a radical leap from that.

messages sent through diplomatic channels. One was called the Gillespie Memo and the other one was a sort of official communicate, and one of them was a little bit more lenient than the other. It sort of sounded like, we will disapprove of this, but you know, we won't attack you. That was the sort of subtext of it, whereas the

other one was like, we will attack you. And what happened was because there were these two signals, Saddam Hussein picked the one that he thought was correct, and the one that he thought was correct was they're not going to do anything. So when you look at the reason why he invades and then gets wiped out, I mean you can look at the casualty numbers, it's like so ridiculously. It's probably the most lopsided conflict in modern history.

realized this when I was talking about the book. So I told a historian friend of mine the story of Kyoto, right, and how Kyoto doesn't get blown up in the atomic bomb from this vacation. And he says, okay, but hold on, like, the US is still going to win the war, right, Like it doesn't. Like, I mean, at the end of the day, if they drop the bomb on Kyoto, they'ld drop the bomb in Erosia, They're still going to win

the war. I'm like, yes, that's true. The problem I think we make when we think about these things is we impose categories that don't really exist because there's a binary of whether you win the war or not. But the question is does Japan develop in the same way if you swap out Kyoto for Hiroshima. I don't think so, right, there's totally different people who live and die. And also one of the people who's one of the founding you know, scientists of modern meteorology was in Kyoto, so like he

would have probably died. And this is a lot of the stuff that ends up helping us basically detect major storms. So you think there's I mean, even that's just a small ripple effect that we can imagine that. Okay, maybe mederology goes a little bit differently. So you know, what I think about with some of this stuff is like, you know, do we end up invading Iraq or not?

Maybe we still do. Maybe that's the convergence. Maybe there's still a war, But the way it happens matters, And I think, you know, the way the conflict unfolds, the way that the losses accrue, the way that you know, the way the US had relationships with Osama bin Laden when he was a you know, a fighter in Afghanistan, and it I mean all this stuff matters, and I think the thing that we tend to do is we tend to just say, well, it would have been the same,

because in our category, which is a fake construction and of the way we think about the world, it's the same binary outcome, Right, you win the war, you don't. But the way you win the war actually affects the future.

And so that's the kind of stuff I think. I'm sure that people in business understand this as well, where it's like, you know, the way that a product launches, Yeah, it's a success, but if it's five percent more of a success, that might affect the way that you behave in your future investments, and then that's going to have ripple effects in the future.

I actually found a different contingency that I think is even more bewildering, which is that Franz Ferda and the Archduke goes to England about I think several months before he's actually killed in Sarajevo, and he ends up on a hunting expedition at this place called Welbeck Abbey, and the person who's loading the shotguns slips because there's just been a snowstorm, and the gun goes off and a bullet goes right over the shoulder of the Archduke and

misses him by like three inches. And you think to yourself, Okay, So if this guy slips in a slightly different way and hits him in the head and the trigger event of World War One is instead dead already in Wellbeck Abbey, does World War One happen? Now? This is a debate that historians really can't answer, and there's lots of people on both sides of the argument. And I think the point is maybe World War one still happens, but if it's not triggered by this assassination, the way the war

is going to unfold is going to be different. Does it lead to Nazi Germany the same? I mean, these are the things where I think what we do is we just pretend these things don't matter that much because it's so overwhelming. I mean, if the idea that somebody slipping is the response, you know, is sort of the proximate cause of millions of deaths and then the rise of Nazism. I mean, this is the kind of stuff where it's just so overwhelming that you mnd blow in.

But I think there was some stuff where there was some serious miscalculations going on, and this is where the contingencies I think could have cropped up. So I wrote a piece for The Atlantic in twenty twenty two right after the invasion happened, where it was like, look, what happens with dictators is they purge all the people who challenge them and tell them the truth, nothing but yes men, exactly.

And this happens over decades. So the fact that Putin stayed in power for so long, he probably got some really bad information that told them, look, it's going to be three day war, and then he miscalculates based on this, and.

there was a long standing viewpoint. This speaks to, you know, January sixth and Trump and all these other things, that the institution of the president matters, not the president themselves. And I think Trump obliterated this mentality. Putin also obliterates this mentality. Nobody thinks the world would be the same Hillary Clinton had one in twenty.

that it will affect lots and lots of people. Whereas if you're somebody who's a hermit living in the forest, it's not going to affect that many people right away. Is it going to affect nobody? No, because if that hermit went and met somebody else, they would have a baby, and that baby might you know, rise up to you know, change the world, and who knows. So I think the idea is that everyone is influencing the future all the time.

The question is just on what timescale and how many people will be affected in a way that we think is consequential.

to change the dynamics of the country. I think that if they had had a you know, if the if the outcome of January sixth had been worse in that regard, if there had been a senior politician murdered by somebody in the in the in the group. You know, that would have been harder for Trump to recover from Politically.

I mean, it is affected profoundly by one person getting sick.

manipulate the system. I think these are the things where, like you know, some people will think will be listening to me and say, oh, this is a bit of a parlor game. These are all thought experiments, et cetera. I think the lesson, the important lesson, is that when you accept these strange happenstance events the way chaos theory actually works in social systems, you have an appreciation for

the fact that you simply cannot control anything. And when you accept that you live in a world where you are more likely to focus on resilience and less likely to focus on optimization to the absolute work.

was an accident. Now, one of my favorite studies that's around that section of the book is a study about a tube strike in London where they've geolocated all the data of the commuters and they look at these anonymous cell phone data pathways to work and everybody has to find a different way to work because the subway system has just been shut down by these drivers on strike.

What they found is that five percent of the commuters stuck with the new pathway to work after the strike because they were forced to sort of try something new and they realized they've liked the new alternative. And I think this is something where because of optimization in our lives, you know, we're always looking for the trip Advisor quote or you know, the perfect way on maps, you experiment less. And when you experiment less, you actually find that you

don't navigate uncertainty as well. And I think this is the lesson again. It brings us back to evolution. The wisdom of evolution is experimentation through uncertainty, and I think that's where humans, when they have hubris, experiment less and become less resilient. And I think it's a very important lesson for us.

know everything. You could know the location of electron or its spin and handedness, but not both. So that kind of raises the question. Even Laplace's thought experiment with the demon, there's too much randomness to for even an all knowing demon to be able to predict the future.

And so this is where things get very trippy, very quickly, because the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics where an infinite number of things that can happen do happen, and there's an infinite copy of you in infinite universes, right, that is still a deterministic universe where Laplace's demon could theoretically be true, right, because then you would know you just you wouldn't know which universe you were in, but it would be all the universes are happening all the time, right.

Whereas if you take the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics DU to the Copenhagen interpretation, then yes, you have irreducible random indeterminism is correct, and therefore the plus's demon is nonsensical.

So you know, I mean, there's lots of reasons why the plus's demon probably wouldn't work anyway that a lot of philosophers have objections to, but it is This is one of those fascinating questions I think, is that you know, we have this world where we believe we have more understanding than any you know, human ever alive, but the

big questions are still completely uncertain to us. We don't understand consciousness, we have no idea what produces it, and we also don't understand anything about quantum mechanics in terms of what it actually means. And these are like the building blocks of our world, you know, I think that's pretty amazing to imagine that, and it gives us a healthy dose of sort of you know, a bit of humility because we just there's so much we still don't understand, but.

worlds hypothesis. It's nerdy. I'm not gonna lie you know this is it's a brainy podcast, but it's something where he brings on really smart people and ask them questions that only Sean Carroll could come up with as a highly highly informed quantum mechanics researcher, but about all sorts of things politics, economics, life, philosophy, et cetera. So I highly recommend the Mindscape podcast.

a book together called had to Rig An Election? And you know, I mean, what year was that. This came out in twenty eighteen, so it's all about election rigging around the world, but it's you know, he was one of these people who just like really taught me how to think about change in a very detailed and complex way. And I owe a lot of my career to him, I think.

So much of America, by the way, is arranged the way it is because of a thing called the Gunter's chain, which is why city blocks are arranged the way they are. It's this arbitrary measure to try to subdivide land in a way that was standardized. So yeah, Beyond Measures very good. I love Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist. He's book Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan are my two favorite novels, along with Douglas Adams's work, Hey Checker's Guide to the Galaxy. So I can't recommend all of those enough.

he thought he wanted to be a geneticist. He got this like plumb post as a researcher on fig wasps of all things, hated every minute of it. Now he's a doctor and loves it. But it was because he listened to that feedback in his own experience and said you know this is not for me, so you know, really go out try things and take notes about what you like and what you don't like, and then that will help you make better decison.

in fluke is. I actually think uncertainty can be a really wonderful thing, and you just have to sometimes accept it and then navigate based on the understanding that there is radical uncertainty that we can't eliminate, and that is where some of the best flukes in life come from.

favorite podcast. Check out my new podcast at the Money once a week, a quick discussion with an expert on a subject that matters to investors. You can find those in the Masters of Business feed. Sign up for my daily reading list at ridults dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rit Alts. Follow the full family of Bloomberg podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did not thank the correct team that puts these conversations together

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