Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have a fascinating guest.
Speaker 1: His name is Brian Klass. He teaches at the University
Speaker 1: College London, where he focuses on global politics, and he
Speaker 1: has written a book that I have just plowed through
Speaker 1: the first half of and found absolutely fascinating, Fluke, Chance,
Speaker 1: Chaos and Why Everything we do Matters. He just really
Speaker 1: explains why our understanding of cause and effect is so
Speaker 1: flawed that we think that A naturally leads to B,
Speaker 1: which leads to C, and instead the world is far
Speaker 1: more random and complex, and little things that happened years ago,
Speaker 1: sometimes thousands or millions of years ago, have a giant
Speaker 1: impact on what happens today. It really turns your view
Speaker 1: on causation upside down and it makes you rethink just
Speaker 1: how random everything is. I found the book fascinating and
Speaker 1: I found our conversation fascinating, and I think you will
Speaker 1: also with no further ado, my conversation with the author
Speaker 1: of Luke, Brian Klass.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 1: So this book is nothing more than just all confirmation
Speaker 1: biased for me. We'll jump into this in a bit.
Speaker 1: I'm about halfway through it and really really enjoying it.
Speaker 1: But I have to start out with a story you
Speaker 1: tell in the introduction to the book. You're twenty years old.
Speaker 1: Your father pulls you aside, shows you a newspaper clipping
Speaker 1: from nineteen o five and the headline is terrible act
Speaker 1: of insane woman. Tell us about that woman, Clara Magdalene Jansen,
Speaker 1: and what she did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this story is from a place called Keeler, Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: a little rural farmhouse in nineteen oh five, and she's
Speaker 2: got four young children, and she probably has what we
Speaker 2: would determine as postpart and depression, but of course they
Speaker 2: don't know what that is in nineteen oh five, and
Speaker 2: she has a mental breakdown, and so she ends up
Speaker 2: tragically killing all of her kids and then taking her
Speaker 2: own life. And her husband comes home to the farmhouse
Speaker 2: and finds his whole family dead, and you could just
Speaker 2: imagine the horror of this. And the reason I put
Speaker 2: this in the introduction to Fluke is because this is
Speaker 2: my great grandfather's first wife, and so one of the
Speaker 2: things that was really extraordinary for me was that I
Speaker 2: went through my first twenty odd years of life not
Speaker 2: knowing about this dark chapter in my family history. But
Speaker 2: after I saw this newspaper headline, you know, sort of
Speaker 2: get over the shock of knowing this about your own family.
Speaker 2: But then you realize that you don't exist unless this
Speaker 2: had happened to me, right, so you wouldn't be listening
Speaker 2: to my voice unless these children had died.
Speaker 1: So following that tragedy, your grandfather moves on with his
Speaker 1: life exactly, eventually remarries the woman who becomes Greg, your
Speaker 1: great grandmother. So but for this random horrible events, we're
Speaker 1: not here having this conversation exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is where, you know, this is why I
Speaker 2: started getting interested in applying things like chaos theory to
Speaker 2: human society and also to our own lives, because, of course,
Speaker 2: you know, Clara, when she decided to do this horrible
Speaker 2: thing to her children and also take her own life,
Speaker 2: she had no way of knowing that one hundred and
Speaker 2: nineteen years later, you know, you and I would be
Speaker 2: talking on Bloomberg. But that's that's the way it is, right,
Speaker 2: That's the way the world works. And so I think
Speaker 2: this is the kind of stuff where we tend to
Speaker 2: imagine that there's just sort of these you know, big
Speaker 2: building blocks of life, like the really obvious variables that
Speaker 2: create outcomes. And the argument I'm making is, actually, you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's sort of heretical to the you know, look
Speaker 2: for the signal, not the noise, because I am a
Speaker 2: byproduct of the noise.
Speaker 1: So so the rational cause and effect A leads to
Speaker 1: be are. So that's one individual, and obviously one individual
Speaker 1: can change a future set of bloodlines. Let's take this
Speaker 1: a little bigger. Let's talk about mister and missus Stimpson
Speaker 1: who go on vacation in Coyota, Japan in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 1: How significant can that vacation? Possibly big?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is a couple, mister and missus hl Stimpson.
Speaker 2: They go to Kyoto, Japan on a holiday, on a
Speaker 2: vacation in nineteen twenty six, and they just fall in
Speaker 2: love with the city. It's an experience that a lot
Speaker 2: of us have where you go on vacation, you get
Speaker 2: a soft spot for wherever you've gone to relax and
Speaker 2: so on, and they just find it utterly charming. Now,
Speaker 2: nineteen years later, this turns out to matter quite a
Speaker 2: lot because the husband and the couple. Henry Stimpson ends
Speaker 2: up as America's Secretary of War and the Target Committee
Speaker 2: approaches him with their recommendations of where to drop the
Speaker 2: first atomic bomb in nineteen forty five, and top of
Speaker 2: the list unequivocal Kyoto.
Speaker 1: Now he's not Tokyo, which has already been demolished.
Speaker 2: Tokyo's basically been destroyed. There's an argument here that Kyoto's
Speaker 2: just opened up a warplane factory. It's a former imperial capital,
Speaker 2: so it has sort of propaganda value for, you know,
Speaker 2: reducing Japanese morales. So all the generals say, look, this
Speaker 2: is a good idea, this is where we should drop
Speaker 2: the bomb, and you know, Stimson basically springs to action
Speaker 2: because they the generals started calling it his pet city
Speaker 2: because he kept talking about it, and he twice met
Speaker 2: with President Truman in person, we have records of the
Speaker 2: meetings and so on, and basically said you have to
Speaker 2: take this off the list, and eventually Truman relents, and
Speaker 2: so the first bomb gets dropped on Hiroshima instead. Now
Speaker 2: the second bomb is supposed to go to a place
Speaker 2: called Kokura, and as the bomber gets to Kokura, there's
Speaker 2: briefly cloud cover, and they don't want to accidentally drop
Speaker 2: the bomb somewhere that's not the city, because of course
Speaker 2: that would not have the same effect. So they decide
Speaker 2: to go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki.
Speaker 1: They literally do a loop to see, hey, maybe it
Speaker 1: clears up, it doesn't, yeah, and onto Nagasak exactly.
Speaker 2: They actually, I think, do loops until they're running low
Speaker 2: on fuel and they're starting to think, okay, we're not
Speaker 2: going to make it to the secondary target, so they finally,
Speaker 2: you know, pull the plug on Kokura, dropped the bomb
Speaker 2: on Nagasaki. So hundreds of thousands of people live or
Speaker 2: die in these in these cities based on a nineteen
Speaker 2: year old vacation and a cloud. And the point that
Speaker 2: I think is important to realize here is that, you know,
Speaker 2: if you were modeling this, if you're trying to say, like,
Speaker 2: how is the US government going to determine where to
Speaker 2: drop the atomic bomb? You would not put in your
Speaker 2: model the vacation histories of American government officials or like
Speaker 2: cloud cover, right, you would come up with these very
Speaker 2: obvious big things like where are the places that have
Speaker 2: strategic importance or propaganda value, And if you did that,
Speaker 2: you probably would put Kyoto on top of the list,
Speaker 2: and you get the wrong answer. And you wouldn't get
Speaker 2: the wrong answer because you were stupid. You'd get the
Speaker 2: wrong answer because sometimes things that don't seem to be
Speaker 2: important actually end up being the most important factor in
Speaker 2: an outcome.
Speaker 1: And the Japanese actually have an expression Kokura's luck. Tell
Speaker 1: us what that means to the Japanese.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is a very useful thing to
Speaker 2: think about. It's Kokura's luck refers to when you unknowingly
Speaker 2: escape disaster. So it was a long time before the
Speaker 2: US government acknowledged that they were planning to drop the
Speaker 2: bomb on Kokura. So you know, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: people in that city had no idea there was an
Speaker 2: airplane over them that, but for a cloud, would have
Speaker 2: incinerated the entire city and killed most of them. And
Speaker 2: so I think this is the kind of thing where,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the ideas that is central to
Speaker 2: the argument in Fluke is that these sorts of things,
Speaker 2: this Kokura's luck, is happening to us all the time, right,
Speaker 2: we were completely oblivious to the diversions in our lives
Speaker 2: and our societies, the alternative possible history simply because we
Speaker 2: can only experience one reality. And what we do is
Speaker 2: we've then stitch a narrative back where it's A to B.
Speaker 2: This makes complete sense. Here are the five reasons why
Speaker 2: this happened. And in fact, I think this is a
Speaker 2: way that we end up deluding ourselves into a neater
Speaker 2: and tidier version of the real world.
Speaker 1: So you describe why we can't know what matters most
Speaker 1: because we can't see the alternative universes. I love this quote.
Speaker 1: We ignore the invisible pivots, the moments that we will
Speaker 1: never realize we're consequential, the near misses and near hits
Speaker 1: that are unknown to us because we've never seen and
Speaker 1: will never see, our alternative possible lives. That's really very
Speaker 1: chilling to know that we're just walking through life unaware
Speaker 1: that hey, atomic bomb over our head. Better hope the
Speaker 1: clouds don't clear up.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have this saying that I refer to a
Speaker 2: lot in the book, which is that we control nothing,
Speaker 2: but we influence everything. And this is when you think
Speaker 2: about this in our own lives. I think this is
Speaker 2: something where you realize that there are these diversions happening constantly.
Speaker 2: There's a film in the nineteen nineties with Gwyneth Peltrow
Speaker 2: called Sliding Doors, and it has this idea and I
Speaker 2: sort of riff on that with this concept I coined
Speaker 2: called the snooze button effect, where you imagine that you
Speaker 2: know it's Tuesday morning, you're a little bit groggy, you
Speaker 2: wake up, the snooze button beckons to you, you slap it,
Speaker 2: and you get delayed by five minutes. You imagine you're
Speaker 2: now your life rewinds by thirty seconds and you say,
Speaker 2: uh no, I won't hit the snooze button. I'll get
Speaker 2: out of bed. Now. I think that has changed your life. Now,
Speaker 2: the question is how much has it change your life?
Speaker 2: And under some short time scales, maybe things sort of
Speaker 2: get ironed out in the end. But you're gonna have
Speaker 2: different conversations that day, You're gonna talk to different people,
Speaker 2: you might get in a car accident in some days, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, these are the kinds of things that we
Speaker 2: sort of are oblivious to, and I think when you
Speaker 2: think about them. With social change, it's happening all the
Speaker 2: time too. I mean, there's just so many ways that
Speaker 2: the world could have unfolded differently, but for a few
Speaker 2: small changes. I mean, you know, you think about even
Speaker 2: like nine to eleven. We think about all the variables
Speaker 2: that go into nine to eleven. One of them that
Speaker 2: people don't talk about was the weather. It was an
Speaker 2: incredibly blue, blue sky day, Chris. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 2: had if you had a you know, very very cloudy
Speaker 2: day or storm, some of the planes wouldn't have taken
Speaker 2: off on time. They might have had a chance to
Speaker 2: foil some of the plots. Or if you had had
Speaker 2: a different slate of passengers on flight ninety three, So
Speaker 2: if it had gone September tenth or September twelfth, maybe
Speaker 2: those passengers don't take down the plane, Maybe the White
Speaker 2: House or the capital's destroyed, and then the world's different.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, can you imagine how it would
Speaker 2: change America or geopolitics if there was no White House anymore?
Speaker 2: So I think these are the kinds of things where,
Speaker 2: you know, you just imagine that there's this straight line
Speaker 2: of cause and effect, and of course when we experience
Speaker 2: the world, we then explain it. But you know, these
Speaker 2: small changes could really reshape the future. Some of them
Speaker 2: are going to be more consequential, like that Kyoto story,
Speaker 2: others are going to, you know, be a little bit
Speaker 2: less consequential, at least on human time scales. But the
Speaker 2: point is we can't know, and I think that's something
Speaker 2: that is bewildering to think about.
Speaker 1: So can we actually identify cause and effect? We tell
Speaker 1: ourselves stories. We have not only narrative fallacy in everything
Speaker 1: we do because we love a good plot line, but
Speaker 1: there's also hindsight by us where we imagine, oh, I
Speaker 1: knew this was coming all along, and you know, can
Speaker 1: we really truly know the impact of what how a
Speaker 1: leads to be or how something that we think is
Speaker 1: completely meaningless actually has deep significance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I very much subscribe to this view that
Speaker 2: all models are wrong, but some are useful. I don't
Speaker 2: think X yes exactly, But I think that one of
Speaker 2: the things that has been lost on us is I
Speaker 2: think there's so much of the world that runs on
Speaker 2: models that we sometimes forget that they are extremely simplified
Speaker 2: abstractions of reality and that we actually don't understand how
Speaker 2: the causation works. And I think that creates hubrist that's dangerous. So,
Speaker 2: you know, when you think about why the atomic bomb
Speaker 2: ended up getting dropped on Hiroshima. There are an infinite
Speaker 2: number of causes, and they're things that we would not
Speaker 2: think about. Right. Geological forces for gen uranium millions of
Speaker 2: years ago is part of that story. Einstein being born
Speaker 2: is part of that story. The Battle of Midway pivoting
Speaker 2: on a fluke event where the US wins because they
Speaker 2: just happen to stumble upon the Japanese fleet at the
Speaker 2: right moment, right. I mean, if any of these things
Speaker 2: have been different, there's like there's an almost infinite number
Speaker 2: of them where little tweak would have been different, a
Speaker 2: different outcome would have happened. Now, for the useful navigation
Speaker 2: of society, we have to simplify reality because we can't
Speaker 2: build a model that has nine hundred thousand variables, right,
Speaker 2: So what you instead do is you sort of say, Okay,
Speaker 2: this is a crude version of reality. And I think, like,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that is really useful
Speaker 2: about some models, like Google Maps, for example, we know
Speaker 2: that's not the world, right, we know the map is
Speaker 2: not the territory. You look at Google Maps and you're
Speaker 2: not like, oh, well, I imagine that that's what the
Speaker 2: real world looks like. It's a clear abstraction. I think
Speaker 2: when we start to get into forecasting and other modeling
Speaker 2: of social ties change, I think we lose sight of
Speaker 2: the fact that we have a Google Maps distortion and
Speaker 2: that we're actually looking at something that is potentially useful
Speaker 2: to navigate but is very, very different from the real world.
Speaker 1: Huh. Really interesting. So let's talk about the way different
Speaker 1: schools of thought perceive and manage these philosophical differences. You
Speaker 1: point out Eastern and Western thinking have a very different
Speaker 1: set of precepts because of just the nature of each society.
Speaker 1: In the Bible, in Genesis, God proclaims, let us make
Speaker 1: man in our image after our likeness, and let them
Speaker 1: have dominion over the fishes, the foul of the cattle, etc.
Speaker 1: Eastern culture takes a whole lot more of a collectivist approach,
Speaker 1: where you're part of a group, not you were made
Speaker 1: in God's images. Tell us a little bit about how
Speaker 1: this schism developed and what is the relationship of chaos
Speaker 1: theory to.
Speaker 2: Each Yeah, so this is a speculative theory, but it's
Speaker 2: a theory that suggests that the reason why Eastern cultures
Speaker 2: have much more relational concepts of interconnectivity between humans and
Speaker 2: the rest of the world and human society as well,
Speaker 2: is derived from the differences or proximity, rather that humans
Speaker 2: have to primates, for example, in their own cultures. So
Speaker 2: there's lots of monkey gods and so on, and there's
Speaker 2: also course lots of monkeys in many of these cultures
Speaker 2: that are developing. And the idea is that the hypothesis
Speaker 2: is that this meant that people could not avoid the
Speaker 2: commonality that we have with the rest of the world. Right,
Speaker 2: whereas if you think about like biblical societies, if you
Speaker 2: look at animals and you see camels, you think like, hey,
Speaker 2: we are super different. We are separate from the rest
Speaker 2: of the world. So the argument is that over the
Speaker 2: long stretch of civilization that this created a slightly different
Speaker 2: mentality that then manifests in what was called relational versus
Speaker 2: atomistic thinking, and Western society is atomistic thinking on steroids,
Speaker 2: which is to say, you know, I mean the American
Speaker 2: dream is very atomistic individualist. It's like, you know, if
Speaker 2: you just want to succeed, then you have to do everything,
Speaker 2: whereas the relational concepts are much more about the interconnections
Speaker 2: that people have. And so I think that also tells
Speaker 2: you how you think about society right. Social change is
Speaker 2: either driven by individuals or's driven by systems. And I
Speaker 2: think that there is a way in which Western culture,
Speaker 2: I think, can learn to actually appreciate some of the
Speaker 2: complexity of social change more with a healthy, increased dose
Speaker 2: of relational thinking.
Speaker 1: And you kind of bring the Eastern and Western philosophies
Speaker 1: together where you discuss the overview effects. And it really
Speaker 1: begins with the United States. Western society sends astronauts to
Speaker 1: the moon, sends astronauts around around the Earth. And these
Speaker 1: astronauts are chosen out of off and out of the military,
Speaker 1: out of the Air Force. They're pilots, their logical they're
Speaker 1: unfeel they're supposed to be essentially soldiers, and yet all
Speaker 1: of them have this impact when they see the blue,
Speaker 1: green Earth in its entirety from space. They all describe
Speaker 1: it as being overwhelmed by a life shattering epiphany on
Speaker 1: the interconnection of everything. That doesn't sound very Western, that
Speaker 1: sounds more like an Eastern philosophy. But this has been
Speaker 1: time and time again. Lots of astronauts have had this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's you know, there's funny because there's been like
Speaker 2: nine five hundred generations of modern humans, and four hundred
Speaker 2: and ninety seven of them have not seen the earth, right,
Speaker 2: So when people do see the earth, they have this
Speaker 2: profound epiphany. And as you say, you know, they're worried
Speaker 2: about sending up you know, philosophers and poets, because they
Speaker 2: figured they'd be overwhelmed by the sort of existential awe
Speaker 2: and like, you know, would forget to hit the right
Speaker 2: buttons or whatever. So they pick these people who are
Speaker 2: supposed to be robots effectively in their personality, and all
Speaker 2: of them still have this incredible sort of epiphany about
Speaker 2: the interconnection of the world because you look at the
Speaker 2: single planet and you think, okay, this is one structure.
Speaker 2: This is not something where I'm this distinct bit. You're like,
Speaker 2: this is all together right now. I think what's really
Speaker 2: striking about that is that those world views do shape
Speaker 2: your thinking around social change. And I think when you
Speaker 2: start to think that you are in control rather than
Speaker 2: an agent of influence, you have a different worldview. When
Speaker 2: you start to think that you're individual rather relational, you
Speaker 2: have a different worldview. And all these things feed into
Speaker 2: the ways that we set up models that we sort
Speaker 2: of interact with our conceptions of social change. And so on,
Speaker 2: and also the degree to which we have hubris that
Speaker 2: we can control things. And I think this is where
Speaker 2: the danger comes in. Right, It's not that you shouldn't model,
Speaker 2: It's not that you shouldn't have abstractions of systems. It's
Speaker 2: that when you start to get hubristic about it and
Speaker 2: think you have top down individualists control, you start to
Speaker 2: get overconfident in ways that you try to tame something
Speaker 2: that I think is untamable. And this is where we
Speaker 2: get shocks more often, because you try to impose this
Speaker 2: sort of control on a system that is so complex
Speaker 2: that it resists control. And so you know, there's some
Speaker 2: of these things where I think the insights the flawosophy
Speaker 2: behind this it's it's sort of lurking there invisibly, where
Speaker 2: no one says this when they build a model, but
Speaker 2: it's it's obviously shaping the way they think about it
Speaker 2: and their sort of assumptions before they go into trying
Speaker 2: to determine how to navigate risk and uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Along those lines, you have a great quote in the book.
Speaker 1: God may have created the clock, but it was Newton's
Speaker 1: laws that kept it ticking. So so how do you
Speaker 1: resolve that inherent tension between big forces driving things or
Speaker 1: random elements affecting it, or is there no resolving them.
Speaker 1: They both matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I think it's a question of time scales,
Speaker 2: and I think one of the big one of the
Speaker 2: big problems. And this is something that I you know,
Speaker 2: it's always it's it's such a nuanced concept that it's
Speaker 2: sometimes difficult to explain. But I think there's a really
Speaker 2: important point about whether ideas that happen for a long
Speaker 2: time seem to be validated by what goes on the
Speaker 2: patterns that we see, right, whether you can actually falsify
Speaker 2: a theory when you're talking about social change. So my
Speaker 2: favorite example of this is the Arab Spring in political science,
Speaker 2: my own realm, there is a lot of stuff written
Speaker 2: in sort of two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: even into twenty ten that says, here's why Middle Eastern
Speaker 2: dictatorships are extremely resilient, and there's all this data showing
Speaker 2: this the longevity, et cetera, et cetera, and then like
Speaker 2: within six months of some of these books coming out,
Speaker 2: you know, all of them are on fire. I mean,
Speaker 2: I saw a political risk map when I was in
Speaker 2: grad school where like every single country that was on
Speaker 2: fire was green on the political risk map from the
Speaker 2: previous year. Right now, There's two ways of thinking about that.
Speaker 2: The first way is to say the theory has been falsified.
Speaker 2: They were wrong, right. The second way of thinking about is,
Speaker 2: hold on, maybe the world changed, Maybe the patterns of
Speaker 2: cause and effect have actually shifted, right. And I think
Speaker 2: this is something that people don't appreciate that much, is
Speaker 2: they assume that the patterns of the past are going
Speaker 2: to be predictive of the patterns of the future. I mean,
Speaker 2: David Hume came up with this idea hundreds of years ago,
Speaker 2: but it is something that I think is particularly important
Speaker 2: for our world because the patterns of the past being
Speaker 2: indicative of the patterns of the future has ever before
Speaker 2: been as flawed of an assumption, because our world is
Speaker 2: changing faster than ever before. So I think one of
Speaker 2: the issues that we have is when we think about
Speaker 2: these sort of clockwork models where we say, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: you know, these are the ways that things have worked
Speaker 2: in the past. Our world is very very different year
Speaker 2: to year, and that didn't used to happen. I mean
Speaker 2: I was talking before about these you know, nine thou
Speaker 2: five hundred generations of humans. If you think about the
Speaker 2: sort of entirety of human history as a twenty four
Speaker 2: hour day, twenty three hours and like ten minutes is
Speaker 2: hunter gatherer period, right, and then you get into farming,
Speaker 2: which is another like thirty minutes, and then you've got,
Speaker 2: you know, a few minutes for the industrial revolution, and
Speaker 2: you get to the information age, which we're in now,
Speaker 2: which is like eleven seconds right in this in this
Speaker 2: one day o'clock. And I think the point that's important
Speaker 2: here is that if we base almost all of our
Speaker 2: decision making and almost all of our models on causal
Speaker 2: inference from past patterns of behavior, but the world is
Speaker 2: changing year to year, then the assumptions we're making are
Speaker 2: becoming more and more short lived. And I think that's
Speaker 2: where we're embedding risk into are thinking, because we have
Speaker 2: no other way of inferring cause and effect other than
Speaker 2: past patterns. There's no alternative. That's what Hume says. He's like,
Speaker 2: this is the only way we can understand the world
Speaker 2: is to look at what happened in the past. We
Speaker 2: can't look into the future. So I think this is
Speaker 2: something that I do worry about when I see a
Speaker 2: lot of decision making built on this sort of mentality
Speaker 2: of the clockwork model that like, oh, yes, well, it's
Speaker 2: just going to keep ticking along. And you know, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of very smart thinkers who have thought about
Speaker 2: black swans and so on. I just think that we've
Speaker 2: made a system where the black swans are actually going
Speaker 2: to be more frequent. I think we've designed a system
Speaker 2: that's more prone to systemic risks than before.
Speaker 1: Especially given not only does information move fast than ever,
Speaker 1: but we're more interconnected, we're more related, and it becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to figure out what are
Speaker 1: the unanticipated results, consequences, side effects of anything that we do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is you know, this is one of
Speaker 2: those things where I think there's some there's some pretty
Speaker 2: good examples from history of when somebody tries to control
Speaker 2: a system that is uncontrollable and it backfires catastrophically. And
Speaker 2: my favorite example is ihouldn't say favorite is horrible tragedy.
Speaker 2: But the best illustration of this is Mao has this
Speaker 2: idea in communist China. He has this idea. He says,
Speaker 2: I'm we're gonna eradicate disease, and the way we're gonna do.
Speaker 2: This is massive four pests campaigns, so we're gonna kill
Speaker 2: all these pests. So he basically tells everyone just go
Speaker 2: out and you know, kill all these various things that
Speaker 2: potentially are vectors of disease. And what it ultimately does,
Speaker 2: it leads to one of the worst famines in human
Speaker 2: history because they've disrupted the ecosystem, and they figure, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, as long as we just get rid of
Speaker 2: these pests, it will be fine. What they actually have
Speaker 2: done is they've made it to the crops fail and
Speaker 2: so you know, this is the kind of stuff where
Speaker 2: I think that's the it's the parable that warns us of,
Speaker 2: you know, assuming that simply because we have either have
Speaker 2: had some success in the past, or because our model
Speaker 2: seems to guide us in this way, that we can
Speaker 2: therefore insert ourselves into a system and not worry about
Speaker 2: the unintended consequences. I think that's the kind of thing where,
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of the people who are the
Speaker 2: dumers in AI are talking about this. There are some
Speaker 2: things where you know, when you have AI based decision making,
Speaker 2: it is you know, the training data is the past.
Speaker 2: So there are some things that I think are are
Speaker 2: getting worse in this front, and we are also, as
Speaker 2: you said, the interconnectivity. I mean, one of my favorite
Speaker 2: examples of this is the Suez Canal boat. That the
Speaker 2: infamous Suez Canal boat, right. I mean, you have a
Speaker 2: gust of wind that hits a boat and twists its sideways,
Speaker 2: it gets lodged in the canal, and the best estimate
Speaker 2: I've seen is that it created fifty four billion dollars
Speaker 2: of economic damage. And they said it was you know,
Speaker 2: something like point two to point four percent of global
Speaker 2: GDP could have been wiped off by this this one boat.
Speaker 2: Now the question is is there ever another moment in
Speaker 2: human history where one boat could do that? Right? And
Speaker 2: I think the answer is quite clearly no. So the
Speaker 2: I mean maybe the one that brought the plague, right, right,
Speaker 2: But I mean this is the kind of stuff where
Speaker 2: I think one of the one of the lessons that
Speaker 2: I think is important is that there's a trade off
Speaker 2: very often between optimization and resilience. And I think, you know,
Speaker 2: we're told all the time efficiency and optimization are are,
Speaker 2: you know, the guiding principles of so many of our systems,
Speaker 2: but they come at a cost. They do create less resilience,
Speaker 2: and I think there are some things where the long
Speaker 2: term planning that we can do is to put a
Speaker 2: little bit more into resilience and a little bit less
Speaker 2: in optimization. It will cost us money in the short term,
Speaker 2: but it will probably save us a hell of a
Speaker 2: lot of money in the long term. Huh.
Speaker 1: Really really interesting. So I found the book fascinating and
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed where you go down the evolutionary biology
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, starting with convergence is the everything happens for
Speaker 1: a reason school of evolutionary biology. Contingency is the the
Speaker 1: g rated version is stuff happens theory. Explain the difference
Speaker 1: between the two.
Speaker 2: Yes, So I think that evolutionary biology has a lot
Speaker 2: to teach us about understanding change. It's a historical science
Speaker 2: and they're trying to understand, you know, the origin story
Speaker 2: of species, and they're thinking about cause and effect, just
Speaker 2: as people in economics and politics are as well. And
Speaker 2: so these two ideas they're very simple to understand with
Speaker 2: two examples. The first example of contingency is the asteroid
Speaker 2: that wipes out the dinosaurs. Now, if this asteroid, which
Speaker 2: was by the way, was produced by an oscillation in
Speaker 2: a place called the ort cloud in the distant reaches
Speaker 2: of space.
Speaker 1: Absolute outer ring of assorted Detrius that surrounds the entire
Speaker 1: Solar System beyond Pluto.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this oscillation flings this space rock towards Earth
Speaker 2: and it hits in the most destructive way possible. It
Speaker 2: hits in the ocean in a way that brings up
Speaker 2: a lot of toxic gas and effectively incinerates the dinosaurs
Speaker 2: because the surface temperature went up to about the same
Speaker 2: level as a broiled chicken. I mean, it was deadly
Speaker 2: right now. The reason this is important is because if
Speaker 2: it had hit a slightly different place on the Earth,
Speaker 2: the dinosaurs probably went to died out.
Speaker 1: And let me just point out, and you mentioned this
Speaker 1: in the book. It's not like if it hits a
Speaker 1: different continent five seconds earlier, five seconds later, it completely
Speaker 1: misses that sulfur rich if miss at the in the
Speaker 1: Yucatan Peninsula.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, you know, this is the kind
Speaker 2: of stuff where you think about it and it is
Speaker 2: very unsettling because you can imagine everything that humans have done, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, you have a second difference in this asteroid.
Speaker 2: There's no humans because the extinction of the dinosaurs is
Speaker 2: what led to the rise of mammals and eventually the
Speaker 2: evolution of us. And so this is contingency. It's where
Speaker 2: this small change could radically reshape the future. Now, convergence
Speaker 2: is the alternative hypothesis, and they both exist, right, the
Speaker 2: sort of order and disorder and convergence says, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of fluctuations
Speaker 2: and flukes, but eventually things that work win, right. So
Speaker 2: my favorite example of this is that if you look
Speaker 2: at if you were to take out a human eye
Speaker 2: and you were to look at it and you were
Speaker 2: to compare it next to an octopus's eye, they're actually
Speaker 2: extremely similar, which is bizarre because there's about six hundred
Speaker 2: million years of separate evolutionary pathways for the two branches
Speaker 2: of life. And the reason this happened isn't because you know,
Speaker 2: we just got super lucky. It's because solution came up
Speaker 2: with a strategy by random experimentation that simply worked. It
Speaker 2: made the species navigate the world effectively long enough to
Speaker 2: survive to have offspring, which is the engine of evolution. Right.
Speaker 2: So this is the kind of stuff where yeah, there
Speaker 2: was like a lot of very profound differences. I mean,
Speaker 2: we do not look like octopus, thank goodness, but it's
Speaker 2: something where as a result of that, the I is
Speaker 2: basically the same. And so the question here, I think
Speaker 2: is can we apply these frameworks to our own change,
Speaker 2: right in our own societies? And so what I try
Speaker 2: to say is, Okay, there's some stuff that is ordered.
Speaker 2: There's lots of regularity, there's lots of patterns in our lives.
Speaker 2: That's the convergence stuff. At some point, you know, you
Speaker 2: go on the highway, there might be an accident sometimes,
Speaker 2: but like most of the time, you know, the cars
Speaker 2: drive around the same speed, they have space between them
Speaker 2: that's about the same distance, right, And like there's all
Speaker 2: these patterns, but every so often there's a car accident,
Speaker 2: and that's contingency. Right. So this is the kind of
Speaker 2: stuff where what I say is that the way that
Speaker 2: social change happens and also our lives unfold is what
Speaker 2: I call contingent convergence. Not the most beautiful phrase, but
Speaker 2: it's I think very accurate and saying, okay, so there's
Speaker 2: these contingencies that change the path you're on, and then
Speaker 2: once you're on that path, the sort of forces of
Speaker 2: order do constrain the outcomes that are possible. They say, look,
Speaker 2: this stuff's gonna work. That stuff's not gonna work, and
Speaker 2: the sort of survivors bias produces the stuff that does work.
Speaker 2: So I think this is a useful framework that I'm
Speaker 2: borrowing from evolutionary biology to help us better understand social change.
Speaker 1: So before I get to contingent convergence, I wanna stay
Speaker 1: with the difference between contingents, which is the meteor killing
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs and allowing the mammals derive to rise, and convergence.
Speaker 1: A couple of other examples that you give in the
Speaker 1: Book of Convergence. Crab like bodies keep evolving time and
Speaker 1: again there are five separate instances that that shape somehow
Speaker 1: seems to provide a useful adaptive way to navigating the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is I mean, this is one of
Speaker 2: those things where evolutionary biologists joke about that and they
Speaker 2: always say, you know, eventually we're gonna have pincers, like
Speaker 2: we're all gonna end up as crabs because like evolution,
Speaker 2: if you know, and some of them say, if there
Speaker 2: is a god, he really likes crabs.
Speaker 1: And this is there is actually I actually heard that
Speaker 1: about beetles, but there's actually a word for this. Carsonization
Speaker 1: is the process of evolving towards a crab like shape.
Speaker 1: Similarly flight. I never thought about this until I read
Speaker 1: it in the book Flight Evolve four separate times. It's insects,
Speaker 1: it's bats, it's birds, and it's terosaurs. That that's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is the stuff where you know,
Speaker 2: evolution is the It's a really powerful lesson of the
Speaker 2: value of undirected experimentation because every strange thing that we
Speaker 2: see around us, every you know, organism, every plant, et cetera,
Speaker 2: is just the byproduct of this undirected experimentation navigating uncertainty, right,
Speaker 2: I mean that the world is changing all the time.
Speaker 2: It's different concentrations of oxygen. They sometimes have to be
Speaker 2: in the ocean, sometimes I have to be on land,
Speaker 2: and you know, this sort of diverse array of life
Speaker 2: is just undirected experimentation. But the thing is that these
Speaker 2: do these these forces do end up constraining the possibilities.
Speaker 2: Now when we talk about carsonization, is really interesting thing
Speaker 2: that I don't go into much depth in the book,
Speaker 2: but it's called the Burgess shale up in Canada, and
Speaker 2: the Canadian Rockies, And it's basically like this, this like
Speaker 2: fossilized museum of all these really wild body plans that
Speaker 2: used to exist hundreds of millions of years ago before
Speaker 2: a mass extinction event, and what happened is they all
Speaker 2: got obliterated. So you can't have any sort of convergence
Speaker 2: from those body plans because they don't exist anymore, whereas
Speaker 2: the ones that survived all of us are derived from them. Right,
Speaker 2: So the contingency is like, okay, which body plans exist,
Speaker 2: which which sort of ways could you set up life,
Speaker 2: you know, with spines or not spines, whatever it is.
Speaker 2: And then once you have that contingent event where there's
Speaker 2: the extinction within that, there's this sort of constrained evolution
Speaker 2: that is, okay, well, when this happens, the animal dies,
Speaker 2: so it doesn't exist very long. And when this happens,
Speaker 2: the animal survives, so it does exist. And this is
Speaker 2: where arsonization, you know, you need to have a term
Speaker 2: because the crabs are very much survivors.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that unless you were on the
Speaker 1: other side of the planet from where the meteor hit,
Speaker 1: if you're a borrower, if you get underground, you could
Speaker 1: survive that those fires in that heat and then come
Speaker 1: out and continue the evolutionary process. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the thing I find this really
Speaker 2: fascinating to think about, but also unsettling, is that you know,
Speaker 2: all all the life that exists now is basically offspring
Speaker 2: of either something that could dig when the asteroid hit
Speaker 2: or that lived in the ocean, and that's it, right,
Speaker 2: because everything else died now. The really strange thing to
Speaker 2: think about as well is that, you know, I told
Speaker 2: the story about my great grandfather's first wife, and then
Speaker 2: there's this murder and so on. But you keep tracing
Speaker 2: these things back, right, So my great grandfather's ancestors had
Speaker 2: to meet in just the right way and their great grandfather,
Speaker 2: you know, they had to meet. But you go back
Speaker 2: then six million years, this chimpanzee like creature had to
Speaker 2: meet another chimpanzee like creature, and the two of them
Speaker 2: mating is part of the story of human existence. You
Speaker 2: go back further, you know, there's a worm like creature
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions of years ago, it dies, we probably
Speaker 2: don't exist. Or my favorite example I think in the
Speaker 2: book is, and this is a finding from modern science
Speaker 2: about a year ago, was they found out that the
Speaker 2: reason why mammals don't lay eggs, right, why we don't
Speaker 2: have eggs and we instead have live births, is they believed,
Speaker 2: based on genetic testing, that a single shrew like creature
Speaker 2: got infected by a virus one hundred million years ago,
Speaker 2: which caused a mutation, which led to placenta and the
Speaker 2: rise of mammals. And you think of I mean, to me,
Speaker 2: that is just so utterly bizarre to imagine that our existence,
Speaker 2: like everything in humans, you know, ancient Rome, all this stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, Donald Trump, whatever it is, all of it
Speaker 2: is completely contingent on a shrew like creature one hundred
Speaker 2: million years ago getting sick. He's like, when you think
Speaker 2: about this stuff, I think evolutionary biology tell you know,
Speaker 2: they have encountered black swans throughout hundreds of millions of years.
Speaker 2: It's basically the origin story of complex life.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about one of those black swans and
Speaker 1: the specific concept of contingent convergence. I love the example
Speaker 1: you use of the long term evolution experiment using E
Speaker 1: coli twelve identical flasks of ecoli and in separate separate environment.
Speaker 1: Separate but identical environments run ten million years worth of
Speaker 1: human evolution through it. What's the results of that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one, this one. Making ecoli sexy in a
Speaker 2: book is pretty hard, I must say, but I think
Speaker 2: this is such a powerful lesson for change, so I
Speaker 2: had to include it. I flew out to Michigan State
Speaker 2: to meet with the people running the Long term Evolution Experiment,
Speaker 2: and the simple idea they had, the genius idea, was
Speaker 2: they said, let's see what happens if we take twelve
Speaker 2: identical populations of ecoli, so they're genetically identical, we put
Speaker 2: them in twelve flasks, and we just evolve them for decades. Right,
Speaker 2: And because ecoi life cycles are so short, it's basically
Speaker 2: the equivalent of millions of years of human evolution.
Speaker 1: Like multiple life spans a day exactly, general per day exactly.
Speaker 2: So it's like it's the equivalent of it if you
Speaker 2: went through like great great great grandparents each day. Right now,
Speaker 2: the beauty of the experiment is they controlled everything. So
Speaker 2: there's nothing in these flasks except for a glucose and
Speaker 2: citrate mix because the glucose is food for the ecoi
Speaker 2: and the citrate is like a stabilizer. Okay, now what
Speaker 2: happens is. They figured, okay, let's test contingents to your convergence.
Speaker 2: And for like the first fifteen years or so of
Speaker 2: the experiment, the lesson was, okay, it's it's convergence. Because
Speaker 2: all twelve of the lines were evolving in slightly different ways.
Speaker 2: There's noise, right, there's little differences. The genome is not
Speaker 2: the same. But they're basically all getting fitter at eating glucose,
Speaker 2: so they're getting better at surviving. And then one day
Speaker 2: a researcher comes in and one of the flasks is cloudy,
Speaker 2: and this is not supposed to be the way it is.
Speaker 2: It looks like a little bit of milk has been
Speaker 2: dropped into it instead of this really clear substance that
Speaker 2: the rest of the other eleven are. So they sort
Speaker 2: of think, oh, this is a mistake. Can they throw
Speaker 2: it out? They restart because they frozen the equali so
Speaker 2: they can restart.
Speaker 1: Raise it like the equivalent of every five hundred years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they could reset the clock anytime they want, exactly
Speaker 1: twelve flass.
Speaker 2: Yes, so they're all frozen. They all this sort of
Speaker 2: fossil record. They can restart it at any point, So
Speaker 2: they restart the experiment in this flask, just backing up
Speaker 2: a little bit, and about two weeks later, I think
Speaker 2: it is something like that, the flask trends cloudy again,
Speaker 2: and like, okay, this was not an accident. There's something
Speaker 2: going on here. So they actually pay to sequence the genome.
Speaker 2: Very expensive at the time, a lot cheaper today, but
Speaker 2: they paid a sequence it and the amazing finding. And
Speaker 2: this is the thing. When I read this, I was like,
Speaker 2: this is a central way of capturing. My idea is
Speaker 2: that when they looked at the genome, there were four
Speaker 2: totally random mutations that did not matter at all for
Speaker 2: the survivability of the ecoli that proceeded in just the
Speaker 2: right chain. That when the fifth mutation happened, all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, that population could now eat the citrate, which
Speaker 2: was not supposed to happen, right. It was supposed to
Speaker 2: only eat the glucose. The citrate was there as a stabilizer.
Speaker 2: But as a result of this, they became way more fit,
Speaker 2: way more survivable than the other populations because they could
Speaker 2: eat something the others couldn't. Right, And what happened then
Speaker 2: is that since then, this has now been going on
Speaker 2: for twenty plus years or so, since then, the citrate
Speaker 2: population has an advantage over all of the other eleven,
Speaker 2: and none of the others have developed that mutation because
Speaker 2: it's sort of like a house of cards. You had
Speaker 2: to have these exact four accidents in exactly the right order.
Speaker 2: If they'd reach if they changed the order, it once't
Speaker 2: have happened. And then they had to find me. On
Speaker 2: top of that those four accidents, they had to have
Speaker 2: the fifth accident, which gives them the ability to eat sitratee.
Speaker 2: And so this is the idea of contingent convergence. Right.
Speaker 2: It's like for that population that evolved the ability to
Speaker 2: eat sitrade, that one mutation has changed everything forever. It
Speaker 2: will never go back to eating glucose the same way
Speaker 2: as the others. But for the others that didn't develop
Speaker 2: that change, they are all still evolving in relatively predictable ways.
Speaker 2: So I think this is the capturing of the of
Speaker 2: the sort of paradox of our lives is that we
Speaker 2: exist somewhere between order and disorder. Complete disorder would destroy humans,
Speaker 2: we couldn't exist to our society's confunction. Complete order also
Speaker 2: wouldn't work because there'd be no change, there'd be no innovation,
Speaker 2: and so on and so I think this is where
Speaker 2: contingent convergence really really shines. But I will admit that
Speaker 2: trying to do a sound bite version of the long
Speaker 2: term evolution experiment is something that in writing the book
Speaker 2: was probably the greatest challenge of making something about bacteria interesting.
Speaker 1: But it's really fascinating because if you stop and think
Speaker 1: about that, first of all, the genius of doing this
Speaker 1: over twenty years when you have no idea what the
Speaker 1: outcome is, and hey, maybe we're wasting our lives in
Speaker 1: our career doing this number one, but number two, you
Speaker 1: come out and you see that it's cloudy, is it?
Speaker 1: I'm assuming it's cloudy coast. They're reproducing in greater numbers,
Speaker 1: they're processing the citrate, a whole bunch of different stuff
Speaker 1: is going on than the other eleven environments. And one
Speaker 1: has to imagine that if this wasn't taking place in
Speaker 1: an experiment, but this was a big natural scenario, the
Speaker 1: citrate consuming E. Coli would eventually take over the population
Speaker 1: because they have twice as much food available, were more
Speaker 1: than just the plain old glucose eating equal life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is I mean when I was talking
Speaker 2: to so one of the one of the researchers named
Speaker 2: Richard Lensky, the other one Zach Blount, and I was
Speaker 2: talking to them about this and they said, look, we
Speaker 2: tried to control everything. We tried to control every single
Speaker 2: you know, you pipett the exact same amount of solution
Speaker 2: into the you know, into the beakers each day and
Speaker 2: so on. But what they said was that, you know,
Speaker 2: well what if one day, you know, when we were
Speaker 2: washing the flask, just a tiny microscopic amount of soap
Speaker 2: stayed on there, right, that could affect the evolution. And
Speaker 2: so there's no I mean, even even in this experiment,
Speaker 2: there's contingency they couldn't control, which is I mean, it's
Speaker 2: the most controlled evolutionary experiment that's ever been done, but
Speaker 2: it's still like, you know, these little tiny bits. If
Speaker 2: you just have you know, a microscopic bit of soap,
Speaker 2: well that's going to kill some of the bacteria, and
Speaker 2: then the evolutionary pathway is going to be slightly changed.
Speaker 2: And I think this is the stuff where, you know,
Speaker 2: had they been a different researcher, had a grant run out,
Speaker 2: they might have just said, okay, we've solved it. It's
Speaker 2: all convergence. Because they could have shut down the experiment
Speaker 2: after fifteen years. So there's just all these things that
Speaker 2: are like layered on top of each other. And I think,
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of scientists, especially in the world
Speaker 2: of evolutionary biology, understands that this is something that we
Speaker 2: really have to take seriously. And I think the way
Speaker 2: that we are set up in human society is to
Speaker 2: ignore the contingency because those are not useful things to
Speaker 2: think about. They're the noise, They're the aberrations of the outliers,
Speaker 2: you know, you delete them from the data whatever. And
Speaker 2: I think this is the kind of stuff where the
Speaker 2: lesson here is that those are actually central to the
Speaker 2: question of how change happens.
Speaker 1: I love this quote from the book. I began to
Speaker 1: wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless
Speaker 1: but feudal struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto
Speaker 1: a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think this is where I became
Speaker 2: a bit of a disillusioned social scientist, to be honest,
Speaker 2: was that I think that the way that I was
Speaker 2: taught to present change to people was to come up
Speaker 2: with a really elegant model, you know, a really beautiful
Speaker 2: equation and that has statistical significance and has like the
Speaker 2: smallest number of variables possible to explain the entire world.
Speaker 2: And the reason that I ended up, you know, having
Speaker 2: that mentality that I think we're trying to cram complexity
Speaker 2: into these neat and tidy, sort of straight jack models
Speaker 2: is because my PhD dissertation so on, I was looking
Speaker 2: at the origin story of coups and civil wars. That
Speaker 2: was part of my research. And these are black Swan events.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's only a few coup attempts
Speaker 2: that happen every year, and they're so hard to predict.
Speaker 2: I mean because you know, one of the coup plots
Speaker 2: that I studied was where this guy, you know, who's
Speaker 2: a sort of mid level officer in the army, just
Speaker 2: on a whim, decides to try to overthrow the government.
Speaker 2: And he's got like fifty guys in his command. This
Speaker 2: is in nineteen ninety seven in Zambia, and you know,
Speaker 2: his plan is to kidnap the army commander and force
Speaker 2: the army commander to announce the coup on the radio.
Speaker 2: It's not a stupid plan, it's actually it probably would
Speaker 2: have worked, but the group of so soldiers that were
Speaker 2: dispatched to the house. I interviewed some of them when
Speaker 2: I went to Zambia, and they said, look, you know
Speaker 2: we ran in the army commanders in his pajamas. He
Speaker 2: runs out the back because he sees these soldiers coming
Speaker 2: to kidnap him, and he climbs up the compound wall
Speaker 2: and you know, it's like in a film where like
Speaker 2: they grab his pant leg he's pulling up, they're pulling down,
Speaker 2: and they just he slips through their fingers and he
Speaker 2: then goes to the government HQ and announces that there's
Speaker 2: a coup under a coup plot underway, and so the
Speaker 2: soldiers go to the radio station. They capture the coup
Speaker 2: ring leader, who's at this point literally hiding in a
Speaker 2: trash can. Okay, three hours after the coup plot has
Speaker 2: been hashed. Now, the problem is, I was reading all
Speaker 2: this stuff about like Zambia's democracy, and it was oh,
Speaker 2: Zambia is a resilient democracy. It's one of the beacons
Speaker 2: of African democracy in the nineteen nineties. And I'm trying
Speaker 2: to reconcile this with the fact that in my own research,
Speaker 2: I'm finding this story where the soldier says like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think if I was like one second faster, I
Speaker 2: probably would have gotten the government overthrown. And on top
Speaker 2: of this, the other contingency was they didn't chase him.
Speaker 2: And I said, why didn't you chase them? We said, well,
Speaker 2: the army commander's wife was really attractive and we wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to her. And also we opened the fridge
Speaker 2: and there's Namibian import beer in the fridge and we
Speaker 2: hadn't had Namibian beer for a long time, so we said,
Speaker 2: you know, screw this, We're gonna We're gonna drink some
Speaker 2: beer and talk to the wife. And I'm thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: like like how do I put this in my model?
Speaker 2: Like you know, I mean, like like what is my
Speaker 2: quantitative analysis going to show me about this? And I
Speaker 2: think that's the stuff where those little pivot points and
Speaker 2: studying really rare events that are highly consequential makes you
Speaker 2: think differently about the nature of social change. And I
Speaker 2: would go to these like political science conferences and I
Speaker 2: was just like, I don't I don't believe this is
Speaker 2: how the world works. I think there are times where
Speaker 2: these can be useful models, but I don't think we're
Speaker 2: capturing reality accurately, and that's where, you know, some of
Speaker 2: the origin story professionally of the book comes from you.
Speaker 1: Have to build in attractive women and imported beer exactly
Speaker 1: into your models, or or more accurately, just completely random
Speaker 1: events there. There's a research note in the book from
Speaker 1: an evolutionary biologists seventy eight percent of new species were
Speaker 1: triggered by a single event, typically a random mistake or
Speaker 1: genetic error.
Speaker 2: Yeah. My favorite example this is something called the bottleneck effect,
Speaker 2: and it's actually I think it's actually an important idea
Speaker 2: for economics as well. So I'll start with the biology.
Speaker 2: The bottleneck is where a population arbitrarily gets reduced to
Speaker 2: a very small number. And the number of people in
Speaker 2: that population could be you know, it could be ten,
Speaker 2: it could be one hundred, whatever it is. But who
Speaker 2: those ten or one hundred people are really really matters.
Speaker 2: So there's one island, for example, where half the population
Speaker 2: as asthma because it was populated initially by this bottleneck
Speaker 2: of a very small number of people who disproportionately had
Speaker 2: more asthma than the rest of the population. There's elephant seals,
Speaker 2: for example, who got whittled down through hunting and so
Speaker 2: on to something like I think it's fifty breeding pairs
Speaker 2: or something like that, but which exact seals lived or
Speaker 2: died completely changed the trajectory of that species. Now, I
Speaker 2: sort of say this because human society has had bottlenecks
Speaker 2: at various times. We don't know exactly how small they've been,
Speaker 2: but the hypothesis is perhaps that it may have been
Speaker 2: as few as a few thousand humans at one point,
Speaker 2: and which humans were in that group that determined everything
Speaker 2: for who's allowed now, right, So if you swap out,
Speaker 2: you know, one person for a different person, you've changed
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the species.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I think this is also true when you think about economics,
Speaker 2: you think about innovation. Every so often shocks go through
Speaker 2: industries and they whittle down the competition, and who survives
Speaker 2: in that moment is potentially somewhat arbitrary. It could be
Speaker 2: based on some pressures, it could be a smart CEO,
Speaker 2: whatever it is, But the sort of survivors in that bottleneck,
Speaker 2: then we'll dictate how the industry might unfold in the future.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Apple has this outsized effect on
Speaker 2: the tech industry, but you know, maybe the time means
Speaker 2: a little bit different in Apple dice.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not implausible, but for Microsoft giving them
Speaker 1: alone and what was it ninety eight eighty, but for
Speaker 1: any trust case which gave Microsoft an incentive to have
Speaker 1: another survival ble operating system.
Speaker 2: Who knows. Yeah, And so this you know, when you
Speaker 2: think about I think bottlenecks are a useful way of
Speaker 2: thinking about this, partly because they affect trajectories very very profoundly,
Speaker 2: but also because they can be arbitrary. And I think
Speaker 2: this is something where what we do in human society
Speaker 2: is we write history backwards, so we look at who
Speaker 2: is successful and we say, I mean hindsight bias. You
Speaker 2: know many people, I'm sure I've talked to you about this,
Speaker 2: but it's very important to underline that, like when these
Speaker 2: arbitrary things happen, if you then infer causality, that's a
Speaker 2: neat and tidy story, you actually are learning exactly the
Speaker 2: wrong lesson. I mean, the reason these particular elephant seals
Speaker 2: survived is probably arbitrary. It just happened to depend on
Speaker 2: who the people who are proaching them, you know, happen
Speaker 2: to stumble upon. And then of course the evolutionary history
Speaker 2: of that animal is completely changed. So I think that
Speaker 2: lesson is that, you know, sometimes when bottlenecks happen, it
Speaker 2: reshapes the trajectory of the future, but it also is
Speaker 2: inescapably arbitrary at times, and we don't like that. I mean,
Speaker 2: the entire world of self help and the entire world
Speaker 2: of sort of business advice is, oh, these people were successful,
Speaker 2: here's how you replicate it. And the replication is always
Speaker 2: just do what they did, right. But I mean, of
Speaker 2: course the world's different now. I mean, if you do
Speaker 2: what they did, you're just making something that's not truly innovative. Right.
Speaker 1: You can't invent an iPhone today exactly. So it's fascinating
Speaker 1: when you talk about bottlenecks. I read a book some
Speaker 1: years ago called Last Ape stand In, and it talks
Speaker 1: about all the various proto human species, from Chromagnum to
Speaker 1: Neanderthal to Homo sapiens. And the theory is that in
Speaker 1: the last ice Age, maybe it's twenty or forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, we were down to a few thousand humans.
Speaker 1: But for the Ice Age ending when it did another
Speaker 1: year again, we may not be having this conversation. There
Speaker 1: may be no humans around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is the This is the stuff
Speaker 2: also where I think that the sort of predictable patterns
Speaker 2: that people try to impose on the world are also
Speaker 2: subject to whims of timing. Right, And your example is
Speaker 2: completely apt, and I think it's a very important one.
Speaker 2: And I think it also speaks to the question when
Speaker 2: you say when the ice age ends, right, the timing
Speaker 2: issue is so important. Now, one of my you know,
Speaker 2: examples of this that I think is so fascinating is
Speaker 2: you think about, like our daily lives, and our daily
Speaker 2: lives are you know, basically set up in groups of seven. Okay,
Speaker 2: we've got a seven day week. Why is that? So
Speaker 2: I start looking into this and effectively what happens is
Speaker 2: there's this period in ancient Rome where they have this
Speaker 2: superstition that says the planets are really important for being
Speaker 2: you know, auspicious and so on, and they can see
Speaker 2: because they don't have telescopes, five planets with the naked
Speaker 2: eye and the Sun and the moon. You add them up,
Speaker 2: that's seven. They set up a seven day week because
Speaker 2: of that. That's why we divide our lives in seven.
Speaker 2: And it's because of this lock, this this this thing
Speaker 2: that I also talk about in Fluke, which is this
Speaker 2: concept of lock in where an arbitrary thing can happen
Speaker 2: and then sometimes it persists and sometimes it doesn't, and
Speaker 2: that's often very random. So my other example of this
Speaker 2: is everything that we write, everything that we say, is
Speaker 2: derived from English being locked in when the printing press
Speaker 2: was invented. If the printing press had been invented, you know,
Speaker 2: six decades earlier, six decades later, there'd be a different
Speaker 2: language because the language was in flux, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden it became really important to have a standardized system.
Speaker 2: So a lot of people used to write the word
Speaker 2: had hadd Now that was expensive because they figured, okay,
Speaker 2: we've got a typeset this with a bunch of letters.
Speaker 2: Why don't we just do had and I'll boom, all
Speaker 2: of a sudden the language changes. Right, So there's a
Speaker 2: series of things that happen really really quickly, but they
Speaker 2: basically produce modern English. And so I think this sort
Speaker 2: of concept of the arbitrary experimentation and you know, superstition
Speaker 2: of the Romans and then getting locked in and the
Speaker 2: empire sort of sets it up and then it spreads
Speaker 2: and all that, and then you think, okay, why do
Speaker 2: we have a five day working way. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: partly tied to, you know, this superstition about the auspicious
Speaker 2: nature of the visible planets, which themselves are an arbitrary
Speaker 2: byproduct of how our eyes evolved. So I mean, it's
Speaker 2: just sort of an everything you think about has got
Speaker 2: these sort of tentacles where they could have been slightly
Speaker 2: different and then our lives would be radically changed.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's so fascinating with us as
Speaker 1: narrative storytellers, Right, we think about, Okay, we've had the
Speaker 1: spoken language for tens of thousands of years, maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years, and we think about the cuneiform and
Speaker 1: the written language going back to the Egyptians and the Greeks.
Speaker 1: But that's history, and ninety nine percent of the people
Speaker 1: who lived during that period were illiterate. In fact, species
Speaker 1: wide literacy, which we arguably still don't have but are
Speaker 1: closer to. This is like a century old, like for
Speaker 1: a hundred years people could read and write and meaning
Speaker 1: most people, but go back beyond the century, and the
Speaker 1: vast majority of people either couldn't read, couldn't write, never
Speaker 1: went to school. They had to get up and work
Speaker 1: in the land. They didn't have time to mess around
Speaker 1: with this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of things
Speaker 2: where we are blinded to the fact that we have
Speaker 2: lives that are unlike any humans who have come before us, right,
Speaker 2: And I think there's some really big superstructure events that
Speaker 2: are related to this that that really do affect our lives.
Speaker 2: So my favorite way of thinking about this is that
Speaker 2: I think that every human who came before the modern period,
Speaker 2: most you know, at least you know, maybe the last
Speaker 2: two hundred years or so, what they experienced was uncertainty
Speaker 2: in their day to day life. There was almost no regularity,
Speaker 2: no patterns in their day to day life. They didn't
Speaker 2: know where their next meal would come from. They didn't know,
Speaker 2: you know, whether they would get eaten by an animal,
Speaker 2: et cetera, the crops might fail, you know, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But they had what I call global stability, which is
Speaker 2: to say, like the parents and the children lived in
Speaker 2: the same kind of world. You're a hunter gather, your
Speaker 2: kids a hunter gather, you know, And this means that
Speaker 2: the parents teach the kids how to use technology. There's
Speaker 2: basically regularity from generation to generation.
Speaker 1: For thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have flipped that right. So what we have
Speaker 2: is local stability and global instability. So we have extreme
Speaker 2: regularity like no human has ever experienced before, where we
Speaker 2: can know to almost the minute when something we order
Speaker 2: off the internet is going to arrive at our house,
Speaker 2: and we go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and
Speaker 2: we can have the same drink and it's going to
Speaker 2: taste basically the same thing, and we're really angry if
Speaker 2: somebody messes up, you know, in order, because that that
Speaker 2: expectation of regularity is so high. But we have global instability.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I grew up in a world
Speaker 2: where the Internet didn't exist really for ordinary people, and
Speaker 2: now it's impossible to live without it. You know. You
Speaker 2: think about the ways that children teach parents how to
Speaker 2: use technology that's never been possible before. And on top
Speaker 2: of this, you have the sort of AI you know,
Speaker 2: rise where the world's going to profoundly change in a
Speaker 2: very short period of time. There has never been a
Speaker 2: generation of our species. We're not just the global dynamics
Speaker 2: have changed generation to generation, but within generations. I mean,
Speaker 2: we're going to live in a world where, you know,
Speaker 2: the way that we understand and navigate systems and our
Speaker 2: lives is going to change multiple times in one lifetime.
Speaker 2: And you think about you know, Hunter gathers that the
Speaker 2: average human generations about twenty six point nine years. In
Speaker 2: the long stretch of our species, you can go twenty
Speaker 2: seven years over and over and over. It's pretty much
Speaker 2: the same world for pretty much the entirety of our
Speaker 2: species until I would say the last you know, maybe
Speaker 2: one hundred years or so. And that's the thing, you know,
Speaker 2: you think about this. The more you think about this,
Speaker 2: the more of these examples you find. I mean, one
Speaker 2: of them is, you know, jet leg I flew in
Speaker 2: from London and there's been three generations of people who
Speaker 2: could ever move fast enough to knock out their biology
Speaker 2: in a way that they have jet legs. So, I mean,
Speaker 2: there's just a million things that we experience as routine
Speaker 2: that no humans before us have ever brought.
Speaker 1: You can never outrun your circadian rhythms until you could
Speaker 1: travel at a few hundred miles an hour and go
Speaker 1: from from country to country change You couldn't even change
Speaker 1: time zones until what is it, seventy five years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's an amazing map. I don't know
Speaker 2: the exact name of it. I think it's an isochrome
Speaker 2: map or something like that, but it's a map of
Speaker 2: London from one hundred plus years ago, and it's showing
Speaker 2: the war based on how long it takes you to
Speaker 2: get anywhere. And you see that like western Europe is
Speaker 2: you know, the closest, and it's like five plus days
Speaker 2: or whatever. Right now, somebody made a renewed version of
Speaker 2: that map a couple of years ago, and the furthest
Speaker 2: reach you can go is like thirty six plus hours,
Speaker 2: where in the old map it was like three plus months.
Speaker 2: And you know that's the stuff as well, where we
Speaker 2: just we've sped up the world so much. And I
Speaker 2: think this is embedded a lot of the dynamics where
Speaker 2: flukes and sort of chance events become more common.
Speaker 1: Thirty six hours. I think you get to the moon
Speaker 1: in thirty six hours, right, It's true, And that's how
Speaker 1: much it's changed. Yeah, So let's let's play a little
Speaker 1: bit of a game called convergence or contingency. We talked
Speaker 1: before about sometimes hey, multiple evolutionary paths lead to flight
Speaker 1: in very different ways, and sometimes it's just a random
Speaker 1: meteor wiping out the dinosaurs. So once convergence. The other
Speaker 1: is contingency. And since you're in from London, Brexit was
Speaker 1: that a function of random elements or was that a
Speaker 1: convergence that was a long time in the make.
Speaker 2: Well, like most things, is both. I mean, I think
Speaker 2: there are factors around the Brexit vote that could have
Speaker 2: very quick clearly gone the other way. I mean, there
Speaker 2: are the timing of the vote could have been different,
Speaker 2: the ways that the polls were presented could have been different.
Speaker 2: And also I think some of the dynamics of how
Speaker 2: the EU behave could have been slightly different. So I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: anytime you have a close outcome, it produces you know,
Speaker 2: I think contingency where it could have it could have
Speaker 2: gone the other way. But there are trends as well, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, there's these are the things where I'm even
Speaker 2: though I believe that Flukes changed the world profoundly regularly,
Speaker 2: I also completely accept the idea that there are sort
Speaker 2: of long term forces that yield something like Brexit. And
Speaker 2: there was a long sort of bubbling antagonism to immigration
Speaker 2: levels and anger at Brussels and all these sorts of
Speaker 2: things which politicians capitalized on and leads to Brexit. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that will be interesten
Speaker 2: about this, and perhaps the biggest convergence, is the conversation
Speaker 2: which David Cameron decided to hold the referendum. That would
Speaker 2: be the biggest con contingency for me because he thought,
Speaker 2: at least as has been reported, he thought that he
Speaker 2: was going to put to bed the challenge from the
Speaker 2: right in the Conservative Party by holding the referendum, that
Speaker 2: he would win and that he would have to stop
Speaker 2: dealing with questions about Brexit, and of course it backfired
Speaker 2: on him. He didn't really believe in Brexit, but he
Speaker 2: figured this was a political ploy that would know basically
Speaker 2: cut off the pivot to the right. So that's one
Speaker 2: of those things where you know, if a different set
Speaker 2: of people had been in the room with Cameron, then
Speaker 2: maybe they don't hold a referendum, and then that's a
Speaker 2: very different world we live in.
Speaker 1: Huh. So you're over in the UK looking at the
Speaker 1: United States as a political science, the election of Donald
Speaker 1: Trump in twenty sixteen by forty or fifty thousand votes
Speaker 1: in a handful of swing states. Fascinating question was that
Speaker 1: a random contingency or was the convergence and the art
Speaker 1: ark of history moving towards a populist in the United States.
Speaker 2: Yes, so there's sort of precursor factors that Trump tacked
Speaker 2: into and this is the convergence, right, this is the
Speaker 2: stuff that's the trends. I do think there's some pretty
Speaker 2: big contingencies around Trump. I mean, there's there's one hypothesis
Speaker 2: which I you know, I can't I don't know Donald
Speaker 2: Trump's thinking, but there's speculation by people who are close
Speaker 2: to him that the moment he decided he would definitely
Speaker 2: run for the twenty sixteen race was in twenty eleven
Speaker 2: when there was the White House Correspondence dinner and he
Speaker 2: was exactly and he was publicly humiliated by Barack Obama
Speaker 2: with a joke that basically said something to the effect of,
Speaker 2: I really sympathize with you, Donald because I couldn't handle
Speaker 2: the hard choices that you have to make on Celebrity Apprentice,
Speaker 2: whereas I, you know, have to make the easy choices
Speaker 2: in the situation room. And everyone's sort of laughing at
Speaker 2: Donald Trump and so on. And the question is, you know,
Speaker 2: if the joke writer had not come up with that
Speaker 2: idea or Obama said at let's just can that joke.
Speaker 2: Does Trump run? I mean, that's question one. Then there's
Speaker 2: the questions around the election, right, And this is something where,
Speaker 2: you know, without going into too much detail, the reopening
Speaker 2: of the FBI investigation, which happens because of a congressman
Speaker 2: in New York and his inability to sort of control himself.
Speaker 1: Right, you know that send naked genital pictures to underage women.
Speaker 2: Thank you for saying it for me. So there's a
Speaker 2: you know, this is the thing where this causes the
Speaker 2: reopening the FBI investigation. Did this cause a shift in
Speaker 2: votes in those three critical states? I don't know, but possibly,
Speaker 2: right could be. And on top of that, you have
Speaker 2: one of my things that I do talk about in
Speaker 2: the book. I have a chapter on called the Lottery
Speaker 2: of Earth. And this is the strangest example of US
Speaker 2: politics with a fluke. Around the time of the dinosaurs,
Speaker 2: there was an ancient inland sea in America and it
Speaker 2: basically had a coastline that would if you were going
Speaker 2: to chart it today, it would be like a little
Speaker 2: crescent shape, a sort of swoop across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Speaker 2: Now what happens is on the coastline there's these fital
Speaker 2: plankton that live in this shallow sea and when they die,
Speaker 2: their bodies eventually get turned into these really, really rich
Speaker 2: soils when the sea ends. Now, I promise this makes
Speaker 2: sense for how it links to Trump. This produces extremely
Speaker 2: fertile soil and what's called the Black Belt. And when
Speaker 2: slavery was developed, the plantations are. You can map them
Speaker 2: exactly where the ancient in lan Sea was. That's where
Speaker 2: they go. So this means that there's all these enslaved
Speaker 2: people brought to the southern United States according to this
Speaker 2: ancient coastline, and a lot of the people who were
Speaker 2: freed then settled there. And so the demographics of those
Speaker 2: counties are overwhelming the African American And when you look
Speaker 2: at the election results for the twenty twenty election, where
Speaker 2: Georgia becomes this pivotal state and also is the reason
Speaker 2: why the Democrats hold onto the Senate, if you map
Speaker 2: the county level election results, you will see the swoop
Speaker 2: of the ancient inlan Sea and it's exactly where the
Speaker 2: Democrats carried the state because it's where the black population,
Speaker 2: which is disproportionately likely to vote for Democrats, lives. And
Speaker 2: so you know this is the kind of stuff where,
Speaker 2: of course this is the long stretch of history, but
Speaker 2: it's something where I think we don't think about geological
Speaker 2: or geographical forces, and they do affect our politics. It's
Speaker 2: just that we're completely oblivious to them, and they're not
Speaker 2: that changing from election to election, so we're not fixating
Speaker 2: them for punditry.
Speaker 1: So your book forced me, as I was prepping for this,
Speaker 1: to go back in time and rethink what's contingent, what's convergent.
Speaker 1: And as I was prepping this, I'm going to ask
Speaker 1: you about January sixth and Ukraine and Gaza. But before
Speaker 1: I get to those questions, I want to stay with
Speaker 1: Trump in twenty sixteen and Trump in twenty twenty. As
Speaker 1: I was reading your language about the long fabric of
Speaker 1: threads in history, the conversation unrelated had talked about Iraq
Speaker 1: in two thousand and three, and as I'm plowing through
Speaker 1: the book, it sort of dawns on me the changes
Speaker 1: that are put into place under the Bush administration with
Speaker 1: Dick Cheney after nine to eleven, which essentially comes out
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan. Iraq had nothing to do with this. The
Speaker 1: idea that we're going to use this to invade a
Speaker 1: country that's not related to nine to eleven and just
Speaker 1: the ginned up weapons of mass destruction and all the
Speaker 1: evidence that turned out to be no evidence at all.
Speaker 1: That was at the time felt like a radical change.
Speaker 1: That the government was not just lying to us about
Speaker 1: little things we weren't paying attention to. They were like
Speaker 1: clearly not telling the truth, which most of us either
Speaker 1: didn't believe or didn't want to believe at the time.
Speaker 1: Of course, there's got to be some reason to invade
Speaker 1: a country. The Government's not just gonna make that up.
Speaker 1: And I'm wondering if that is that a contingent. Is
Speaker 1: that a convergence, because following the Bush Cheney administration, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump was kind of radical. But for that, I think
Speaker 1: if the Iraq War doesn't happen, and if the presentation
Speaker 1: by Colin Powell at the UN doesn't happen and the
Speaker 1: whole thing turns out to be bs afterwards, I think
Speaker 1: that kind of made people a little cynical and Trump
Speaker 1: was a modest step from that, whereas if that doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: Trump is a radical leap from that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So the Iraq War is a great example
Speaker 2: of this because I would go back even further to
Speaker 2: the First Golf War as the as Lady ninety one. Yes, exactly, yes,
Speaker 2: And I think this is an important part of the
Speaker 2: story that leads to Bush Junior going into Iraq in
Speaker 2: two thousand and three. So when Saddam Hussein was thinking
Speaker 2: about invading Kuwait in the early nineteen nineties, the US
Speaker 2: government wanted to tell him that if they if he
Speaker 2: did this, they would attack him. But there were two
Speaker 2: messages sent through diplomatic channels. One was called the Gillespie
Speaker 2: Memo and the other one was a sort of official communicate,
Speaker 2: and one of them was a little bit more lenient
Speaker 2: than the other. It sort of sounded like, we will
Speaker 2: disapprove of this, but you know, we won't attack you.
Speaker 2: That was the sort of subtext of it, whereas the
Speaker 2: other one was like, we will attack you. And what
Speaker 2: happened was because there were these two signals, Saddam Hussein
Speaker 2: picked the one that he thought was correct, and the
Speaker 2: one that he thought was correct was they're not going
Speaker 2: to do anything. So when you look at the reason
Speaker 2: why he invades and then gets wiped out, I mean
Speaker 2: you can look at the casualty numbers, it's like so ridiculously.
Speaker 2: It's probably the most lopsided conflict in modern history.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This origin story goes back to a misinterpretation of two
Speaker 2: conflicting signals that the US government basically miss He miscalculated based
Speaker 2: on a misinterpretation of a diplomatic signal. If that doesn't happen,
Speaker 2: you know, then you don't have the Bush connection to Iraq.
Speaker 2: You know, there's all these questions of what will happen now.
Speaker 2: I think there's there's a bigger point that I wanted
Speaker 2: to get into here, which I think is where I
Speaker 2: think about this differently from some other people. And I
Speaker 2: realized this when I was talking about the book. So
Speaker 2: I told a historian friend of mine the story of Kyoto, right,
Speaker 2: and how Kyoto doesn't get blown up in the atomic
Speaker 2: bomb from this vacation. And he says, okay, but hold on, like,
Speaker 2: the US is still going to win the war, right,
Speaker 2: Like it doesn't. Like, I mean, at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, if they drop the bomb on Kyoto, they'ld
Speaker 2: drop the bomb in Erosia, They're still going to win
Speaker 2: the war. I'm like, yes, that's true. The problem I
Speaker 2: think we make when we think about these things is
Speaker 2: we impose categories that don't really exist because there's a
Speaker 2: binary of whether you win the war or not. But
Speaker 2: the question is does Japan develop in the same way
Speaker 2: if you swap out Kyoto for Hiroshima. I don't think so, right,
Speaker 2: there's totally different people who live and die. And also
Speaker 2: one of the people who's one of the founding you know,
Speaker 2: scientists of modern meteorology was in Kyoto, so like he
Speaker 2: would have probably died. And this is a lot of
Speaker 2: the stuff that ends up helping us basically detect major storms.
Speaker 2: So you think there's I mean, even that's just a
Speaker 2: small ripple effect that we can imagine that. Okay, maybe
Speaker 2: mederology goes a little bit differently. So you know, what
Speaker 2: I think about with some of this stuff is like,
Speaker 2: you know, do we end up invading Iraq or not?
Speaker 2: Maybe we still do. Maybe that's the convergence. Maybe there's
Speaker 2: still a war, But the way it happens matters, And
Speaker 2: I think, you know, the way the conflict unfolds, the
Speaker 2: way that the losses accrue, the way that you know,
Speaker 2: the way the US had relationships with Osama bin Laden
Speaker 2: when he was a you know, a fighter in Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: and it I mean all this stuff matters, and I
Speaker 2: think the thing that we tend to do is we
Speaker 2: tend to just say, well, it would have been the same,
Speaker 2: because in our category, which is a fake construction and
Speaker 2: of the way we think about the world, it's the
Speaker 2: same binary outcome, Right, you win the war, you don't.
Speaker 2: But the way you win the war actually affects the future.
Speaker 2: And so that's the kind of stuff I think. I'm
Speaker 2: sure that people in business understand this as well, where
Speaker 2: it's like, you know, the way that a product launches, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a success, but if it's five percent more of
Speaker 2: a success, that might affect the way that you behave
Speaker 2: in your future investments, and then that's going to have
Speaker 2: ripple effects in the future.
Speaker 1: The way you win the war or not is the
Speaker 1: theme of liqud. A'mat's book Lords of Finance. The conditions
Speaker 1: that were imposed after World War One. Yep, pretty directly
Speaker 1: leads to Germany and World War Two. But for those
Speaker 1: very stringent conditions that lead to Germany being broken and
Speaker 1: then the rise of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republican
Speaker 1: that was a series of choices, and he very brilliantly
Speaker 1: tells the story of this was absolutely not convergent. It
Speaker 1: didn't have to happen that way.
Speaker 2: Well, the story that is famous about World War One
Speaker 2: is how Archiduke Franz ferdinance car breaks down right in
Speaker 2: front of the assassin who kills him. It's a complete accident, right.
Speaker 2: I actually found a different contingency that I think is
Speaker 2: even more bewildering, which is that Franz Ferda and the
Speaker 2: Archduke goes to England about I think several months before
Speaker 2: he's actually killed in Sarajevo, and he ends up on
Speaker 2: a hunting expedition at this place called Welbeck Abbey, and
Speaker 2: the person who's loading the shotguns slips because there's just
Speaker 2: been a snowstorm, and the gun goes off and a
Speaker 2: bullet goes right over the shoulder of the Archduke and
Speaker 2: misses him by like three inches. And you think to yourself, Okay,
Speaker 2: So if this guy slips in a slightly different way
Speaker 2: and hits him in the head and the trigger event
Speaker 2: of World War One is instead dead already in Wellbeck Abbey,
Speaker 2: does World War One happen? Now? This is a debate
Speaker 2: that historians really can't answer, and there's lots of people
Speaker 2: on both sides of the argument. And I think the
Speaker 2: point is maybe World War one still happens, but if
Speaker 2: it's not triggered by this assassination, the way the war
Speaker 2: is going to unfold is going to be different. Does
Speaker 2: it lead to Nazi Germany the same? I mean, these
Speaker 2: are the things where I think what we do is
Speaker 2: we just pretend these things don't matter that much because
Speaker 2: it's so overwhelming. I mean, if the idea that somebody
Speaker 2: slipping is the response, you know, is sort of the
Speaker 2: proximate cause of millions of deaths and then the rise
Speaker 2: of Nazism. I mean, this is the kind of stuff
Speaker 2: where it's just so overwhelming that you mnd blow in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me throw some more again your political science.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some some recent political actions that are
Speaker 1: kind of fascinating and ask the question, is this convergence
Speaker 1: or contingency the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think this is uh, it's they're
Speaker 2: always both. But the convergence of this is the sort
Speaker 2: of long standing humiliation of Russia that Vladimir Putin has
Speaker 2: a very big chip on his shoulder about, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of the fact that he has this predisposition to
Speaker 2: view Russia as a major global power because he was
Speaker 2: in the KGB and so on. You know that I
Speaker 2: think is a long term trend. And like Trump, sorry,
Speaker 2: Putin was always very very keen on reestablishing Russian dominance.
Speaker 2: But I think there was some stuff where there was
Speaker 2: some serious miscalculations going on, and this is where the
Speaker 2: contingencies I think could have cropped up. So I wrote
Speaker 2: a piece for The Atlantic in twenty twenty two right
Speaker 2: after the invasion happened, where it was like, look, what
Speaker 2: happens with dictators is they purge all the people who
Speaker 2: challenge them and tell them the truth, nothing but yes men, exactly.
Speaker 2: And this happens over decades. So the fact that Putin
Speaker 2: stayed in power for so long, he probably got some
Speaker 2: really bad information that told them, look, it's going to
Speaker 2: be three day war, and then he miscalculates based on this, and.
Speaker 1: Ill look back at the annexation of Crimea that kind
Speaker 1: of was a three day war exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is where I think the aspects of contingency
Speaker 2: are tied to the personality traits of leaders sometimes and
Speaker 2: if you have a different Russian president, maybe he doesn't
Speaker 2: do the same thing, right, And I think this is
Speaker 2: the kind of stuff where political science, you know, this
Speaker 2: is a little bit of inside baseball. Political science is
Speaker 2: obsessed with institutions. We tried to explain through institutions, and
Speaker 2: there was a long standing viewpoint. This speaks to, you know,
Speaker 2: January sixth and Trump and all these other things, that
Speaker 2: the institution of the president matters, not the president themselves.
Speaker 2: And I think Trump obliterated this mentality. Putin also obliterates
Speaker 2: this mentality. Nobody thinks the world would be the same
Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton had one in twenty.
Speaker 1: Sixteen, clearly very different, and you could say the same
Speaker 1: thing about Bush versus Gore completely. I think the world
Speaker 1: it feels like we took a different track following the
Speaker 1: two thousand election as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think this is where we make the mistake.
Speaker 2: I mean, contingency is obviously amplified for people in power.
Speaker 2: Hierarchies make contingency more more influential and on a shorter
Speaker 2: time scales. But everyone is affecting the world in some way, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, like we all have. As I say, we
Speaker 2: control nothing but influence everything. I mean that for ordinary people.
Speaker 1: Say that again, we control nothing but influence everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that what this means is that
Speaker 2: we cannot control anything. There's nothing that we have absolute
Speaker 2: control over, but everything that we do has ripple effects.
Speaker 2: Every single action we make has ripple effects. The question
Speaker 2: is on what timescale are those important and how much
Speaker 2: are they affecting people around the world. So when Joe
Speaker 2: Biden does something, the contingency of that is highly probable
Speaker 2: that it will affect lots and lots of people. Whereas
Speaker 2: if you're somebody who's a hermit living in the forest,
Speaker 2: it's not going to affect that many people right away.
Speaker 2: Is it going to affect nobody? No, because if that
Speaker 2: hermit went and met somebody else, they would have a baby,
Speaker 2: and that baby might you know, rise up to you know,
Speaker 2: change the world, and who knows. So I think the
Speaker 2: idea is that everyone is influencing the future all the time.
Speaker 2: The question is just on what timescale and how many
Speaker 2: people will be affected in a way that we think
Speaker 2: is consequential.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned January sixth, That feels more like it's
Speaker 1: a contingency. But you're implying a lot of these things
Speaker 1: are convergent and might have happened given all the events
Speaker 1: that took place beforehand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think the build up to January sixth
Speaker 2: was I think relatively predictable. I wrote a column actually
Speaker 2: about six months before it, where I said, look, I
Speaker 2: think there's going to be violence between the election and
Speaker 2: the inauguration, significant political violence between the election and the inauguration.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't like, it wasn't something that was completely
Speaker 2: out of left field. It was possible that these forces
Speaker 2: were amassing.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I think the contingency is there were a few of
Speaker 2: the people in the group that took over the capital
Speaker 2: that had zip tizze and were trying to kidnap politicians
Speaker 2: hang like Pennce. Yeah, and you know there are videos
Speaker 2: you can see in that in the in the CCTV
Speaker 2: where they were close, and you know, how does how
Speaker 2: does American politics unfold if somebody actually gets killed in that?
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there's a lot of things where you know,
Speaker 2: they kill a senior politician or something, and that's going
Speaker 2: to change the dynamics of the country. I think that
Speaker 2: if they had had a you know, if the if
Speaker 2: the outcome of January sixth had been worse in that regard,
Speaker 2: if there had been a senior politician murdered by somebody
Speaker 2: in the in the in the group. You know, that
Speaker 2: would have been harder for Trump to recover from Politically.
Speaker 1: I think I was surprised how quickly he recovered trust.
Speaker 1: What looked like, you know, from my perspective, the game
Speaker 1: theory was, Hey, I'm a conservative Republican and I'm against
Speaker 1: abortion and in favor of tax cuts. I got everything
Speaker 1: I want from Trump. Let's throw them under the bus
Speaker 1: and move on. We could retake our party. I was
Speaker 1: shocked at that a principle didn't permeate the Republican right
Speaker 1: because it looked like, in real time, Hey, you guys
Speaker 1: don't need this guy anymore. He just did you a
Speaker 1: huge favor.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and this is also where, you know, the
Speaker 2: dynamics of contingency play into this in a huge way,
Speaker 2: because part of the anger that I think exists on
Speaker 2: the political right is the backlash to policies during the
Speaker 2: pandemic and some of the information that people in the
Speaker 2: Republican Party share about the pandemic and so on, And
Speaker 2: that is a single person in China getting infected by
Speaker 2: a mutation of a virus, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: So like, you know, you think about the twenty twenty race.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is affected profoundly by one person getting sick.
Speaker 1: Right. My argument has long been that but for the
Speaker 1: mishandling of COVID, he would have easily cruised to reelection. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean of he was fine pre COVID, and people
Speaker 1: tend to vote their pocepo Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this is the stuff where I think we just
Speaker 2: can never know, but I I know. My point is
Speaker 2: that when you accept that these things are so fragile,
Speaker 2: the hubrist that comes with it is reduced because you
Speaker 2: start to think, Okay, A, this is not inevitable. B
Speaker 2: I didn't control this completely. And see, because it's so
Speaker 2: derived from contingency, maybe I shouldn't over confidently try to
Speaker 2: manipulate the system. I think these are the things where,
Speaker 2: like you know, some people will think will be listening
Speaker 2: to me and say, oh, this is a bit of
Speaker 2: a parlor game. These are all thought experiments, et cetera.
Speaker 2: I think the lesson, the important lesson, is that when
Speaker 2: you accept these strange happenstance events the way chaos theory
Speaker 2: actually works in social systems, you have an appreciation for
Speaker 2: the fact that you simply cannot control anything. And when
Speaker 2: you accept that you live in a world where you
Speaker 2: are more likely to focus on resilience and less likely
Speaker 2: to focus on optimization to the absolute work.
Speaker 1: So last two random examples I want to ask about. First.
Speaker 1: I love the example you give of Keith Jarrett live
Speaker 1: at the Opera House in Germany. He's supposed to come
Speaker 1: in and play on a beautiful, you know, concert piano.
Speaker 1: Instead he shows up, there's an old, rickety attitude piano,
Speaker 1: and he has to improvise around broken keys and attitude notes.
Speaker 1: This becomes the best selling solo jazz album in history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is the lesson of how sometimes forced
Speaker 2: experimentation can be really good for innovation. So you know,
Speaker 2: this guy, basically you know, plays a crappy piano and
Speaker 2: ends up producing something incredible. He never would have chosen
Speaker 2: to do that. It was forced on him, right, it
Speaker 2: was an accident. Now, one of my favorite studies that's
Speaker 2: around that section of the book is a study about
Speaker 2: a tube strike in London where they've geolocated all the
Speaker 2: data of the commuters and they look at these anonymous
Speaker 2: cell phone data pathways to work and everybody has to
Speaker 2: find a different way to work because the subway system
Speaker 2: has just been shut down by these drivers on strike.
Speaker 2: What they found is that five percent of the commuters
Speaker 2: stuck with the new pathway to work after the strike
Speaker 2: because they were forced to sort of try something new
Speaker 2: and they realized they've liked the new alternative. And I
Speaker 2: think this is something where because of optimization in our lives,
Speaker 2: you know, we're always looking for the trip Advisor quote
Speaker 2: or you know, the perfect way on maps, you experiment less.
Speaker 2: And when you experiment less, you actually find that you
Speaker 2: don't navigate uncertainty as well. And I think this is
Speaker 2: the lesson again. It brings us back to evolution. The
Speaker 2: wisdom of evolution is experimentation through uncertainty, and I think
Speaker 2: that's where humans, when they have hubris, experiment less and
Speaker 2: become less resilient. And I think it's a very important
Speaker 2: lesson for us.
Speaker 1: All Right, so now I'm gonna get super wonky on you,
Speaker 1: and you use the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. You
Speaker 1: have a demon that has perfect knowledge of every atom
Speaker 1: in the universe, but I and because of that precise detail,
Speaker 1: they know everything that's happened, they know everything that's going
Speaker 1: on right now, and they know that everything that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Let me throw a curveball at you. The latest findings
Speaker 1: from quantum research and physics is that, well, you can
Speaker 1: know everything. You could know the location of electron or
Speaker 1: its spin and handedness, but not both. So that kind
Speaker 1: of raises the question. Even Laplace's thought experiment with the demon,
Speaker 1: there's too much randomness to for even an all knowing
Speaker 1: demon to be able to predict the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're covering all the basis today. We got quantum mechanics. Now,
Speaker 2: so quantum mechanics, I mean, the thing is, it is
Speaker 2: absolutely the case that the scientific interpretation of highly verified
Speaker 2: experimental data is that probably the only genuinely random thing
Speaker 2: in the universe is quantum effects at the atomic and
Speaker 2: subatomic levels. Right now, the question is what does that mean?
Speaker 2: And so this is where things get very trippy, very quickly,
Speaker 2: because the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics where an
Speaker 2: infinite number of things that can happen do happen, and
Speaker 2: there's an infinite copy of you in infinite universes, right,
Speaker 2: that is still a deterministic universe where Laplace's demon could
Speaker 2: theoretically be true, right, because then you would know you
Speaker 2: just you wouldn't know which universe you were in, but
Speaker 2: it would be all the universes are happening all the time, right.
Speaker 2: Whereas if you take the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics
Speaker 2: DU to the Copenhagen interpretation, then yes, you have irreducible
Speaker 2: random indeterminism is correct, and therefore the plus's demon is nonsensical.
Speaker 2: So you know, I mean, there's lots of reasons why
Speaker 2: the plus's demon probably wouldn't work anyway that a lot
Speaker 2: of philosophers have objections to, but it is This is
Speaker 2: one of those fascinating questions I think, is that you know,
Speaker 2: we have this world where we believe we have more
Speaker 2: understanding than any you know, human ever alive, but the
Speaker 2: big questions are still completely uncertain to us. We don't
Speaker 2: understand consciousness, we have no idea what produces it, and
Speaker 2: we also don't understand anything about quantum mechanics in terms
Speaker 2: of what it actually means. And these are like the
Speaker 2: building blocks of our world, you know, I think that's
Speaker 2: pretty amazing to imagine that, and it gives us a
Speaker 2: healthy dose of sort of you know, a bit of
Speaker 2: humility because we just there's so much we still don't understand, but.
Speaker 1: Throw free will in that also, whether or not you
Speaker 1: right between the intersection of quantum mechanics and consciousness. You know,
Speaker 1: do we really control even our own agency? Forget the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. It's it's even more comp life.
Speaker 1: So I only have you for a handful of minutes,
Speaker 1: and I want to jump to my favorite questions that
Speaker 1: I ask all of my guests, starting with tell us, Uh,
Speaker 1: what you've been streaming these days? What are you watching
Speaker 1: or listening to? Yeah?
Speaker 2: My favorite show that I've been watching recently is called
Speaker 2: Slow Horses, the great TV Yeah, the great spy drama.
Speaker 2: And I've read all the books to which I highly
Speaker 2: recommend by Mick Herron. You know, I think there's uh
Speaker 2: in terms of in terms of podcasts if people are
Speaker 2: interested in some of the ideas that I've been talking about.
Speaker 2: There's a podcast called Mindscape by a physicist named Sean
Speaker 2: Carroll who's one of the main proponents of the many
Speaker 2: worlds hypothesis. It's nerdy. I'm not gonna lie you know
Speaker 2: this is it's a brainy podcast, but it's something where
Speaker 2: he brings on really smart people and ask them questions
Speaker 2: that only Sean Carroll could come up with as a
Speaker 2: highly highly informed quantum mechanics researcher, but about all sorts
Speaker 2: of things politics, economics, life, philosophy, et cetera. So I
Speaker 2: highly recommend the Mindscape podcast.
Speaker 1: Tell us about out your mentors who helped shape your career?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I mean I think my mom was
Speaker 2: one of them. She decided to run for school board
Speaker 2: and that's probably the reason why I ended up interested
Speaker 2: in politics when I was eight years old and she
Speaker 2: decided to run for the local school board. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of a lot of teachers I had.
Speaker 2: I think my main one, though, is my PhD advisor,
Speaker 2: Nick Cheeseman is his name. He's a professor previously at
Speaker 2: Oxford now at the University of Birmingham. We co wrote
Speaker 2: a book together called had to Rig An Election? And
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, what year was that. This came
Speaker 2: out in twenty eighteen, so it's all about election rigging
Speaker 2: around the world, but it's you know, he was one
Speaker 2: of these people who just like really taught me how
Speaker 2: to think about change in a very detailed and complex way.
Speaker 2: And I owe a lot of my career to him,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: And since you mentioned books, let's talk about what you're
Speaker 1: reading now and what are some of your favorites.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I read a lot of fiction and nonfiction both.
Speaker 2: There's a nonfiction book I highly recommend called Beyond Measure
Speaker 2: by James Vincent, and it really does dovetail with some
Speaker 2: of the ideas we've been talking about. It's a history
Speaker 2: of measurement, and this is a perfect example of what
Speaker 2: I talked about with Locke in because the sort of
Speaker 2: way that we subdivide the world is often completely arbitrary.
Speaker 2: So much of America, by the way, is arranged the
Speaker 2: way it is because of a thing called the Gunter's chain,
Speaker 2: which is why city blocks are arranged the way they are.
Speaker 2: It's this arbitrary measure to try to subdivide land in
Speaker 2: a way that was standardized. So yeah, Beyond Measures very good.
Speaker 2: I love Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist. He's book Cat's
Speaker 2: Cradle and Sirens of Titan are my two favorite novels,
Speaker 2: along with Douglas Adams's work, Hey Checker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Speaker 2: So I can't recommend all of those enough.
Speaker 1: It's funny because when you're talking about the various things
Speaker 1: that change history, I'm normally not a big fan of
Speaker 1: the revisionist history. But Man in the High Castle by
Speaker 1: Philip K. Dick, What happens if the US loses World
Speaker 1: War Two and Japan and Germany take over the world?
Speaker 1: Fascinating book, along Thost similar concepts, and our final two questions.
Speaker 1: What sort of advice would you give a recent college
Speaker 1: grad interested in a career in either political science or writing.
Speaker 2: It's fine. I do give advice to people who are
Speaker 2: about to graduate all the time, and what I always
Speaker 2: tell them is to try things out. I mean, the
Speaker 2: period of exploration in the twenties is one where I
Speaker 2: think people end up much happier if they sort of
Speaker 2: do a trial and error approach, realize what works for
Speaker 2: them what doesn't work for them. My brother always used
Speaker 2: to say that the most important internship he ever had
Speaker 2: was the one he hated the most, because he realized
Speaker 2: he thought he wanted to be a geneticist. He got
Speaker 2: this like plumb post as a researcher on fig wasps
Speaker 2: of all things, hated every minute of it. Now he's
Speaker 2: a doctor and loves it. But it was because he
Speaker 2: listened to that feedback in his own experience and said
Speaker 2: you know this is not for me, so you know,
Speaker 2: really go out try things and take notes about what
Speaker 2: you like and what you don't like, and then that
Speaker 2: will help you make better decison.
Speaker 1: And our final question, what do you know about the
Speaker 1: world of chaos, theory, causation, the butterfly effect today you
Speaker 1: wish you knew twenty or so years ago.
Speaker 2: Well, I like, you know, one of the things is
Speaker 2: that I'm derived from mass murder, because I didn't know
Speaker 2: that previously, but I will say that, you know, I
Speaker 2: think that navigating uncertainty is one of those things that
Speaker 2: I used to think was only something that we should
Speaker 2: try to slay and tame. What I like to appreciate now,
Speaker 2: and I write about some of the philosophy of this
Speaker 2: in fluke is. I actually think uncertainty can be a
Speaker 2: really wonderful thing, and you just have to sometimes accept
Speaker 2: it and then navigate based on the understanding that there
Speaker 2: is radical uncertainty that we can't eliminate, and that is
Speaker 2: where some of the best flukes in life come from.
Speaker 1: Really very fascinating. Thank you, Brian for being so generous
Speaker 1: with your time. We have been speaking with Brian Klass,
Speaker 1: Professor of Global Politics at University College London and author
Speaker 1: of the new book Fluke, Chance, Chaos and Why Everything
Speaker 1: We Do Matters. If you enjoy this conversation, well be
Speaker 1: sure and check out any of the five hundred previous
Speaker 1: discussions we've had over the past ten years. You can
Speaker 1: find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your
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