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Jared not is the author of the international bestseller Tiny Blunders, Big Disasters thirty nine Tiny Mistakes That Change the World Forever, and the brand new one, Tiny Blunders, Big Disasters Book two, The Many Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever. Jared was a decorated combat infantry officer in Vietnam in the first Air Cavalry Division. Jared, Welcome to Coast to Coast, AM. How are you?
Thank you very much, Richard. It's an honor to be here.
It's a great concept for a book. How do you even begin researching something like this or do they just are there so many examples? It's more question of which ones don't you want to include in the book.
Oh yes, it's amazing when you start digging into history, how many goof ups there are out there. People don't look at history that way. We kind of see history as a series of large, ponderous events. This invasion happened in such and such a date. This wark took place between these months and these years, and so on and so forth. But really, when you dig into it, it's this history. History is more of a mosaic of a lot of small, tiny events that compose those major events.
And with some of those tiny events are mistakes, and some of them set off a domino effect that can have a catastrophic results in the end. And that's what I do with my two books, is to turn history sideways and look at it from a unique perspective. And it's amazing how many Smike's Chinese mistakes, small mistakes, bunders, group ups have had horrible, horrible consequences of long term.
I wish you taught history to me in high school. I mean, we learn names, we learn dates, we name we learn places and events, but don't we don't learn about the human aspect to historical events.
Yes, I sort of say people magazine approach to telling history. Some people consider history to be kind of dull, and it can't be if it's pulled the wrong way. But when you look really kind of from the human perspective, from the personalities involved, the weakness strengths of the individuals making decisions, that gives it more of a personal perspective that you can relate to better and makes it a lot juicier, a lot more, a lot more fun to delve into.
All right, I want to dive right in with a llallapalooza of a tiny blunder which led to well, it doesn't get much bigger in terms of an historical event than the collapse of the Roman Empire? Is it someone inadvertently forgot to lock a gate and that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Yes, it was the you might have to call it the vestige, the final vestige of the Roman Empire, which was the giant fortress at Constantinople. And it was a magnet deficitly designed fortress. It had like three different barricades, three different walls, and then it had a moat around it and it stood for over eleven hundred years. Have been attacked a number of times, have been successful. There's one brief period, but it was taken over for two years.
I think it was. Except for that, it stood attack after attack hundreds of hundreds of years. So the two or three events that were changing its ability to stand unchallenged, and that was the development of cannon. I have begun its toloy. It was fourteen fifty three and the cannons had been developed. That was one factor. But then, yes, coming to the tiny mistake. Someone forgot to close and
lock a gate on one of the main walls. And Helen musksinoat a cute funny cartoon about two and a half years ago and shows a soldier in bed with his helmet on at night with a kind of a bubble showing his thoughts, and it said, did I remember locked that gate last night? And no he did not, which allowed the enemy from the Ottoman Empire to get through. It was one of the factors that led to the fall of constantineble with again the last remnant of the
Roman Empire. It's a little more complicated than that that the big cannons were a factor. And there was one great big cannon like twenty seven feet long, a bronze cannon, and which she was what they call a bombard, which means that shot a great, big, giant rock as opposed to a lead projectile. And it was a very effective and battering down the walls. But it also it blew up at one point and it killed the engineer who designed it, plus the workers that were with him. So
effected for a while. But after a while, of course that the backpart, so to speak, and it was very extremely loud by the way as you might imagine, and no have some of those cannons in museums are about five hundred years old, which is kind of an interesting development in itself. But yes, there was somebody who got to close and lock the gate that led to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Oh my gosh, that is so fascinating. How does that come down to us in history? I mean, was the night watchman keeping a log and he said, bill forgot to close the gate.
I don't know the Of course, the umpires had those river bands they put around their fingers, so keep track of the downs when we went two and three and four and so on. Like I guess, somebody didn't have a a sisto and he got distracted and they had to go there back. It was just the wrong time. But somehow that mistake took place, that tiny quote unquote tiny mistake, which was pivotal in the fall of the last fortress of the Roman Empire and after being in
existence for well over one thousand years. So it was one of those in one of those human eras that had horrible consequences.
And is there a common threat you see connecting these tiny mistakes is a human error is it over confidence, maybe something deeper in our psyche.
Well, there's a kind of you can say, is attention to detail. You mentioned in the introduction the butterfly effect, and that was actually developed by a gentleman, the doctor Lorenz And he was a leading mathematician back in the nineteen fifties, and he was dealing with a number back then that had it was a number a decimale and eighteen small numbers behind it. Of course, he was smaller and smaller the further and further to the rights to advance.
And he was working with the computers of the day, and it was taking a long long time. There was a weather prediction, the type formula, and he was taking a long time to finally run the full extent of the required per formulation, which he was these little tiny numbers, so some of these low ball six of them at the end, and that won't make much difference, you know. He just said, he's saved me a lot of time.
But he was amazed when he did analysis of how those six numbers had a huge, huge multiplier effect at the end. It's a little bit analogous to saying you're starting off in San Francisco heading East, and you're going to try to go to London. Okay, but your asthmauth, your cousin, your compass reading is off just a degree and a half or or two degrees or something like that. Well, by the time you get to London, you're actually down in Lisbon, or you're a north or something like that.
It's a progressive type thing. It shows up more and more and more and more and more. But anyway, he made a presentation back in the late nineteen fifties explaining that, and he said that would mean in terms of whether that's a butterfly we're flapping its wings down in Brazil, that would set off a chain effect that could lead to a cyclone in Texas a year and a half later. And that was the birth of the concept of the butterfly effect. And what we're doing course of the book
is we're looking at the butterfly effect in history. How this whole tiny mistake multiplied into this next incident, multiplied, multiplied, domino, domino, and then at the end of the progression, boom, here's this horrible, horrible disaster.
Well, one of the most conspicuous examples of the butterfly effect in human history and I'm going to go back to your first volume, Tiny Blunders, Big Disasters, thirty nine Tiny Mistakes to Change the World Forever. The Titanic. Yeah, you know, the bottom of the ocean, two miles down beneath the surface of the ocean, off the coast of Nova Scotia. If it weren't a single key that someone was supposed to hand off to somebody else, it may may never have happened. Tell us about that.
Yes, they were. I had one gentleman that was assigned to be the second officer of the Titanic. But they say last minute is to a day before the voyage was to take place. It changed officers in some places. In that exchange. The key to a locker was now passed along, and inside that locker were what they call it glasses or binoculars. And the people out there in the crow's nest were used in binoculars, especially at night,
to look for icebergs. And there they were, they and then they didn't have the key, They did not have the glasses that they have the binoculars, and there they were in the middle of the night, and they were looking for icebergs just with the naked eye. But they had the binoculars and one of the gentlemen that was there, and of course they survived the sinking of the Titanic, and there was a big investigation in New York as
to what the cause of the sinking was. And he was saying that they had had the glasses several days before, but they did not have the binoculars that particular night. And they asked him what differences that have made to what we've been able to see the Uh, it was what they call it black iceberg. It was not a white one. It was a little kind of a darker one. And they said they've been able to see it much sooner.
How much of a difference that have made? Well, they're given us, but it's ended in time to be able to get out of the way. So they said that if they had the binoculars and they've been able to scan the horizon, they could have seen the iceberg. And they called down there to the engine room. Uh, you know, turned to port please so many degrees. But then they did, but just another minute or two, maybe even a half
a minute, that would have made all the difference. The iceberg scraped down the right side of the starboard side of the ship and it split open UH the rivets that were along a strip that This is another interesting thing, is that they had the UH. It was divided into several different compartments. And they called the Titanic unthinkable because it could survive the flooding of any two of the
compartments and not sink. And they thought the worst disaster anybody I could think I was a ship hitting it right at the juncture of those two compartments and both of them would flood, and they could survive that well. But what happened was when they hit the iceberg, the scraped it down the side and it opened up like four of the compartments at one time, popping the rivets up off all the way down. And so all four
compartments were sinking. And so they began to nose down a little by little, and they saw what was happening, and they realized that there was nothing much they could do, and it was going to it was going to sink in. And Captain Smith it was his name, may have survived the initial sinking, and they said that he was. They was swimming towards one of the lifeboats in the water, and then as he got closed he turned around and just swam away, according to one or two of the witnesses.
So maybe he said he didn't want to maybe wanted to go down with the ship. And I don't have to face the inquiry in New York or whatever, But that's what happened. If somebody had passed the key along that went tiny mistake, they would have had the binoculars, they would seeing the iceberg, and the whole thing might have been avoided.
Wow, I'm just trying to let this akin. How much of a world do you think fate or chance plays in these worlds altering moments versus the idea that history is simply the result of human decisions however small, Well, i'll.
Leave that to the psychics that you interview. They might have a better answer than I do. That it gets into the metaphysics. And I don't doubt there's course the whole question of human will or the decision being made by the lord that the old quotation from Clint Eastwood, A man must know his limitations, and that that's one, and so I don't have the complete answer to so I don't know that I do.
Fair enough, Yeah, fair enough? Do you see parallels between the tiny blunders that you cover, and moments in our in our personal lives where let's say, minor decisions or accidents conspiral into larger consequences.
Oh sure, yes, of course, in everyday life, there's automobile accident, somebody drops their keys, somebody drops their phone inside the car that reached them to pick it up. They tragically hit someone from the rear, they hit a pedestrian. There's a many, many examples where tiny mistakes I remember done in Pinsacola, Florida, where I lived for a number of years, there was a captain who was pushing a barge to underneath the bridge and he somehow made a mistake and
he hit the bridge and they disabled it. It was like a year and a half for it to be repaired where it could function normally again, so and so forth. Where there's just a countless examples of automobile accidents, of a plane in accidents, of the train accidents that leads
to their tragedy walls of life. So that happens at that level, and then of course it also happened happens a political level, where military mistakes of political mistakes have horrible quant consequences for and epic proportions for an entire nation and entire people. So yes, the tiny mistakes are with us, and they are a major part of our life. And one of the main things I'm doing in the book is especially for young people, is to convey the
message that the devil is in the details. You need to make sure that everything is just exactly right, that settings are done correctly. I am preparing for operations and preparing for airplane flights, et cetera. Cover navigational mistakes also in the second book. So those little tiny mistakes, they can destroy your life. They can cost the life your life and the lives of many people around us. That's one of the main messages in the book, the whole
section there and the importance of checklists. I won't explain all the details right now, but in the operating room that was a major program to major development in that area as well.
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