WEBVTT - Cause and Effect on a Global Scale 0:00:02.400 --> 0:00:06.760 Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. 0:00:08.920 --> 0:00:12.880 This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on 0:00:13.119 --> 0:00:15.160 Bloomberg Radio. 0:00:16.680 --> 0:00:19.920 This week on the podcast, I have a fascinating guest. 0:00:19.960 --> 0:00:22.920 His name is Brian Klass. He teaches at the University 0:00:22.960 --> 0:00:26.239 College London, where he focuses on global politics, and he 0:00:26.280 --> 0:00:29.240 has written a book that I have just plowed through 0:00:29.320 --> 0:00:35.160 the first half of and found absolutely fascinating, Fluke, Chance, 0:00:35.280 --> 0:00:39.200 Chaos and Why Everything we do Matters. He just really 0:00:39.240 --> 0:00:44.559 explains why our understanding of cause and effect is so 0:00:44.760 --> 0:00:47.400 flawed that we think that A naturally leads to B, 0:00:47.560 --> 0:00:51.200 which leads to C, and instead the world is far 0:00:51.280 --> 0:00:56.600 more random and complex, and little things that happened years ago, 0:00:56.880 --> 0:01:01.160 sometimes thousands or millions of years ago, have a giant 0:01:01.400 --> 0:01:04.800 impact on what happens today. It really turns your view 0:01:04.840 --> 0:01:08.080 on causation upside down and it makes you rethink just 0:01:08.240 --> 0:01:12.040 how random everything is. I found the book fascinating and 0:01:12.080 --> 0:01:14.880 I found our conversation fascinating, and I think you will 0:01:14.920 --> 0:01:18.440 also with no further ado, my conversation with the author 0:01:18.480 --> 0:01:20.679 of Luke, Brian Klass. 0:01:21.000 --> 0:01:22.360 It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me 0:01:22.400 --> 0:01:22.839 on the show. 0:01:22.920 --> 0:01:27.320 So this book is nothing more than just all confirmation 0:01:27.400 --> 0:01:29.959 biased for me. We'll jump into this in a bit. 0:01:30.319 --> 0:01:34.160 I'm about halfway through it and really really enjoying it. 0:01:34.680 --> 0:01:38.480 But I have to start out with a story you 0:01:38.560 --> 0:01:41.880 tell in the introduction to the book. You're twenty years old. 0:01:41.959 --> 0:01:45.680 Your father pulls you aside, shows you a newspaper clipping 0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:50.680 from nineteen o five and the headline is terrible act 0:01:50.800 --> 0:01:58.160 of insane woman. Tell us about that woman, Clara Magdalene Jansen, 0:01:58.600 --> 0:01:59.440 and what she did. 0:02:00.160 --> 0:02:03.080 Yeah, so this story is from a place called Keeler, Wisconsin, 0:02:03.240 --> 0:02:06.520 a little rural farmhouse in nineteen oh five, and she's 0:02:06.560 --> 0:02:09.600 got four young children, and she probably has what we 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:12.280 would determine as postpart and depression, but of course they 0:02:12.280 --> 0:02:13.560 don't know what that is in nineteen oh five, and 0:02:13.560 --> 0:02:16.799 she has a mental breakdown, and so she ends up 0:02:17.120 --> 0:02:19.840 tragically killing all of her kids and then taking her 0:02:19.840 --> 0:02:23.120 own life. And her husband comes home to the farmhouse 0:02:23.160 --> 0:02:26.520 and finds his whole family dead, and you could just 0:02:26.560 --> 0:02:28.600 imagine the horror of this. And the reason I put 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:30.680 this in the introduction to Fluke is because this is 0:02:30.720 --> 0:02:34.600 my great grandfather's first wife, and so one of the 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:36.400 things that was really extraordinary for me was that I 0:02:36.440 --> 0:02:38.840 went through my first twenty odd years of life not 0:02:38.880 --> 0:02:41.680 knowing about this dark chapter in my family history. But 0:02:41.760 --> 0:02:43.880 after I saw this newspaper headline, you know, sort of 0:02:43.880 --> 0:02:46.600 get over the shock of knowing this about your own family. 0:02:47.240 --> 0:02:50.640 But then you realize that you don't exist unless this 0:02:50.720 --> 0:02:52.880 had happened to me, right, so you wouldn't be listening 0:02:52.880 --> 0:02:55.800 to my voice unless these children had died. 0:02:56.080 --> 0:02:59.760 So following that tragedy, your grandfather moves on with his 0:02:59.800 --> 0:03:03.560 life exactly, eventually remarries the woman who becomes Greg, your 0:03:03.600 --> 0:03:07.960 great grandmother. So but for this random horrible events, we're 0:03:08.000 --> 0:03:09.600 not here having this conversation exactly. 0:03:09.639 --> 0:03:10.959 And this is where, you know, this is why I 0:03:11.000 --> 0:03:13.720 started getting interested in applying things like chaos theory to 0:03:14.160 --> 0:03:17.600 human society and also to our own lives, because, of course, 0:03:17.680 --> 0:03:19.880 you know, Clara, when she decided to do this horrible 0:03:20.000 --> 0:03:21.880 thing to her children and also take her own life, 0:03:22.720 --> 0:03:24.239 she had no way of knowing that one hundred and 0:03:24.320 --> 0:03:26.079 nineteen years later, you know, you and I would be 0:03:26.120 --> 0:03:29.000 talking on Bloomberg. But that's that's the way it is, right, 0:03:29.000 --> 0:03:30.600 That's the way the world works. And so I think 0:03:30.639 --> 0:03:32.960 this is the kind of stuff where we tend to 0:03:33.040 --> 0:03:35.600 imagine that there's just sort of these you know, big 0:03:35.680 --> 0:03:38.560 building blocks of life, like the really obvious variables that 0:03:38.600 --> 0:03:42.080 create outcomes. And the argument I'm making is, actually, you know, 0:03:42.240 --> 0:03:45.160 it's it's sort of heretical to the you know, look 0:03:45.200 --> 0:03:46.920 for the signal, not the noise, because I am a 0:03:46.960 --> 0:03:48.000 byproduct of the noise. 0:03:48.360 --> 0:03:52.040 So so the rational cause and effect A leads to 0:03:52.080 --> 0:03:56.360 be are. So that's one individual, and obviously one individual 0:03:56.400 --> 0:04:00.720 can change a future set of bloodlines. Let's take this 0:04:00.800 --> 0:04:04.600 a little bigger. Let's talk about mister and missus Stimpson 0:04:05.120 --> 0:04:08.680 who go on vacation in Coyota, Japan in nineteen twenty six. 0:04:09.480 --> 0:04:13.880 How significant can that vacation? Possibly big? 0:04:14.200 --> 0:04:16.839 Yeah, So this is a couple, mister and missus hl Stimpson. 0:04:16.880 --> 0:04:18.880 They go to Kyoto, Japan on a holiday, on a 0:04:18.920 --> 0:04:21.279 vacation in nineteen twenty six, and they just fall in 0:04:21.279 --> 0:04:23.160 love with the city. It's an experience that a lot 0:04:23.160 --> 0:04:24.480 of us have where you go on vacation, you get 0:04:24.480 --> 0:04:28.240 a soft spot for wherever you've gone to relax and 0:04:28.240 --> 0:04:30.920 so on, and they just find it utterly charming. Now, 0:04:31.400 --> 0:04:33.520 nineteen years later, this turns out to matter quite a 0:04:33.520 --> 0:04:36.880 lot because the husband and the couple. Henry Stimpson ends 0:04:36.920 --> 0:04:40.400 up as America's Secretary of War and the Target Committee 0:04:40.480 --> 0:04:43.040 approaches him with their recommendations of where to drop the 0:04:43.040 --> 0:04:45.440 first atomic bomb in nineteen forty five, and top of 0:04:45.440 --> 0:04:47.560 the list unequivocal Kyoto. 0:04:48.200 --> 0:04:51.680 Now he's not Tokyo, which has already been demolished. 0:04:51.720 --> 0:04:55.240 Tokyo's basically been destroyed. There's an argument here that Kyoto's 0:04:55.279 --> 0:04:59.760 just opened up a warplane factory. It's a former imperial capital, 0:05:00.040 --> 0:05:02.320 so it has sort of propaganda value for, you know, 0:05:02.440 --> 0:05:04.880 reducing Japanese morales. So all the generals say, look, this 0:05:04.920 --> 0:05:06.600 is a good idea, this is where we should drop 0:05:06.600 --> 0:05:10.520 the bomb, and you know, Stimson basically springs to action 0:05:10.600 --> 0:05:13.400 because they the generals started calling it his pet city 0:05:13.440 --> 0:05:16.320 because he kept talking about it, and he twice met 0:05:16.320 --> 0:05:18.359 with President Truman in person, we have records of the 0:05:18.360 --> 0:05:20.919 meetings and so on, and basically said you have to 0:05:20.920 --> 0:05:23.719 take this off the list, and eventually Truman relents, and 0:05:23.800 --> 0:05:26.760 so the first bomb gets dropped on Hiroshima instead. Now 0:05:26.800 --> 0:05:28.360 the second bomb is supposed to go to a place 0:05:28.400 --> 0:05:31.680 called Kokura, and as the bomber gets to Kokura, there's 0:05:31.720 --> 0:05:34.279 briefly cloud cover, and they don't want to accidentally drop 0:05:34.320 --> 0:05:36.680 the bomb somewhere that's not the city, because of course 0:05:36.720 --> 0:05:39.480 that would not have the same effect. So they decide 0:05:39.520 --> 0:05:41.320 to go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki. 0:05:41.480 --> 0:05:43.919 They literally do a loop to see, hey, maybe it 0:05:43.960 --> 0:05:47.440 clears up, it doesn't, yeah, and onto Nagasak exactly. 0:05:47.600 --> 0:05:50.680 They actually, I think, do loops until they're running low 0:05:50.680 --> 0:05:52.560 on fuel and they're starting to think, okay, we're not 0:05:52.600 --> 0:05:54.960 going to make it to the secondary target, so they finally, 0:05:55.040 --> 0:05:57.440 you know, pull the plug on Kokura, dropped the bomb 0:05:57.440 --> 0:05:59.960 on Nagasaki. So hundreds of thousands of people live or 0:06:00.120 --> 0:06:02.679 die in these in these cities based on a nineteen 0:06:02.760 --> 0:06:05.520 year old vacation and a cloud. And the point that 0:06:05.600 --> 0:06:08.240 I think is important to realize here is that, you know, 0:06:08.279 --> 0:06:10.120 if you were modeling this, if you're trying to say, like, 0:06:10.160 --> 0:06:12.120 how is the US government going to determine where to 0:06:12.160 --> 0:06:14.640 drop the atomic bomb? You would not put in your 0:06:14.640 --> 0:06:18.279 model the vacation histories of American government officials or like 0:06:18.360 --> 0:06:20.320 cloud cover, right, you would come up with these very 0:06:20.360 --> 0:06:23.320 obvious big things like where are the places that have 0:06:23.440 --> 0:06:26.080 strategic importance or propaganda value, And if you did that, 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:28.000 you probably would put Kyoto on top of the list, 0:06:28.240 --> 0:06:30.160 and you get the wrong answer. And you wouldn't get 0:06:30.160 --> 0:06:31.840 the wrong answer because you were stupid. You'd get the 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:35.279 wrong answer because sometimes things that don't seem to be 0:06:35.279 --> 0:06:38.279 important actually end up being the most important factor in 0:06:38.360 --> 0:06:38.840 an outcome. 0:06:39.240 --> 0:06:43.160 And the Japanese actually have an expression Kokura's luck. Tell 0:06:43.240 --> 0:06:45.159 us what that means to the Japanese. 0:06:45.279 --> 0:06:47.000 Yeah, I think this is a very useful thing to 0:06:47.000 --> 0:06:49.599 think about. It's Kokura's luck refers to when you unknowingly 0:06:49.720 --> 0:06:52.520 escape disaster. So it was a long time before the 0:06:52.600 --> 0:06:55.120 US government acknowledged that they were planning to drop the 0:06:55.120 --> 0:06:57.400 bomb on Kokura. So you know, hundreds of thousands of 0:06:57.400 --> 0:06:59.279 people in that city had no idea there was an 0:06:59.320 --> 0:07:01.839 airplane over them that, but for a cloud, would have 0:07:01.839 --> 0:07:05.120 incinerated the entire city and killed most of them. And 0:07:05.200 --> 0:07:06.799 so I think this is the kind of thing where, 0:07:06.839 --> 0:07:08.760 you know, one of the ideas that is central to 0:07:09.040 --> 0:07:11.400 the argument in Fluke is that these sorts of things, 0:07:11.400 --> 0:07:13.560 this Kokura's luck, is happening to us all the time, right, 0:07:13.600 --> 0:07:17.040 we were completely oblivious to the diversions in our lives 0:07:17.080 --> 0:07:20.880 and our societies, the alternative possible history simply because we 0:07:20.920 --> 0:07:23.280 can only experience one reality. And what we do is 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:26.520 we've then stitch a narrative back where it's A to B. 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:28.840 This makes complete sense. Here are the five reasons why 0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:31.000 this happened. And in fact, I think this is a 0:07:31.000 --> 0:07:33.120 way that we end up deluding ourselves into a neater 0:07:33.400 --> 0:07:35.080 and tidier version of the real world. 0:07:35.160 --> 0:07:39.200 So you describe why we can't know what matters most 0:07:39.280 --> 0:07:43.200 because we can't see the alternative universes. I love this quote. 0:07:43.560 --> 0:07:47.440 We ignore the invisible pivots, the moments that we will 0:07:47.480 --> 0:07:51.200 never realize we're consequential, the near misses and near hits 0:07:51.240 --> 0:07:54.280 that are unknown to us because we've never seen and 0:07:54.360 --> 0:07:59.520 will never see, our alternative possible lives. That's really very 0:07:59.640 --> 0:08:03.160 chilling to know that we're just walking through life unaware 0:08:03.320 --> 0:08:06.880 that hey, atomic bomb over our head. Better hope the 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:08.040 clouds don't clear up. 0:08:08.360 --> 0:08:10.000 Yeah. I have this saying that I refer to a 0:08:10.000 --> 0:08:12.440 lot in the book, which is that we control nothing, 0:08:12.480 --> 0:08:14.600 but we influence everything. And this is when you think 0:08:14.600 --> 0:08:16.960 about this in our own lives. I think this is 0:08:16.960 --> 0:08:20.040 something where you realize that there are these diversions happening constantly. 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:22.120 There's a film in the nineteen nineties with Gwyneth Peltrow 0:08:22.120 --> 0:08:24.960 called Sliding Doors, and it has this idea and I 0:08:25.040 --> 0:08:27.600 sort of riff on that with this concept I coined 0:08:27.640 --> 0:08:30.600 called the snooze button effect, where you imagine that you 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:32.480 know it's Tuesday morning, you're a little bit groggy, you 0:08:32.520 --> 0:08:35.360 wake up, the snooze button beckons to you, you slap it, 0:08:35.440 --> 0:08:37.959 and you get delayed by five minutes. You imagine you're 0:08:38.000 --> 0:08:40.640 now your life rewinds by thirty seconds and you say, 0:08:40.720 --> 0:08:42.440 uh no, I won't hit the snooze button. I'll get 0:08:42.440 --> 0:08:45.760 out of bed. Now. I think that has changed your life. Now, 0:08:45.800 --> 0:08:47.600 the question is how much has it change your life? 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:49.959 And under some short time scales, maybe things sort of 0:08:49.960 --> 0:08:52.240 get ironed out in the end. But you're gonna have 0:08:52.280 --> 0:08:54.640 different conversations that day, You're gonna talk to different people, 0:08:54.679 --> 0:08:56.600 you might get in a car accident in some days, right. 0:08:56.760 --> 0:08:58.120 I mean, these are the kinds of things that we 0:08:58.200 --> 0:09:00.880 sort of are oblivious to, and I think when you 0:09:00.920 --> 0:09:03.040 think about them. With social change, it's happening all the 0:09:03.040 --> 0:09:05.440 time too. I mean, there's just so many ways that 0:09:05.480 --> 0:09:07.640 the world could have unfolded differently, but for a few 0:09:07.640 --> 0:09:09.960 small changes. I mean, you know, you think about even 0:09:10.000 --> 0:09:12.760 like nine to eleven. We think about all the variables 0:09:12.760 --> 0:09:14.200 that go into nine to eleven. One of them that 0:09:14.200 --> 0:09:16.280 people don't talk about was the weather. It was an 0:09:16.280 --> 0:09:19.440 incredibly blue, blue sky day, Chris. Yeah, and if you 0:09:19.520 --> 0:09:22.760 had if you had a you know, very very cloudy 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:24.600 day or storm, some of the planes wouldn't have taken 0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:26.040 off on time. They might have had a chance to 0:09:26.040 --> 0:09:28.080 foil some of the plots. Or if you had had 0:09:28.120 --> 0:09:30.520 a different slate of passengers on flight ninety three, So 0:09:30.559 --> 0:09:33.640 if it had gone September tenth or September twelfth, maybe 0:09:33.640 --> 0:09:36.200 those passengers don't take down the plane, Maybe the White 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:39.240 House or the capital's destroyed, and then the world's different. 0:09:39.280 --> 0:09:41.000 I mean, you know, can you imagine how it would 0:09:41.040 --> 0:09:44.320 change America or geopolitics if there was no White House anymore? 0:09:44.520 --> 0:09:46.079 So I think these are the kinds of things where, 0:09:46.440 --> 0:09:49.920 you know, you just imagine that there's this straight line 0:09:49.960 --> 0:09:52.119 of cause and effect, and of course when we experience 0:09:52.160 --> 0:09:55.480 the world, we then explain it. But you know, these 0:09:55.520 --> 0:09:58.360 small changes could really reshape the future. Some of them 0:09:58.360 --> 0:10:00.880 are going to be more consequential, like that Kyoto story, 0:10:01.360 --> 0:10:02.920 others are going to, you know, be a little bit 0:10:02.960 --> 0:10:05.600 less consequential, at least on human time scales. But the 0:10:05.600 --> 0:10:07.679 point is we can't know, and I think that's something 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:09.160 that is bewildering to think about. 0:10:09.559 --> 0:10:13.480 So can we actually identify cause and effect? We tell 0:10:13.520 --> 0:10:18.680 ourselves stories. We have not only narrative fallacy in everything 0:10:18.720 --> 0:10:21.600 we do because we love a good plot line, but 0:10:21.640 --> 0:10:24.880 there's also hindsight by us where we imagine, oh, I 0:10:24.960 --> 0:10:28.480 knew this was coming all along, and you know, can 0:10:28.559 --> 0:10:32.880 we really truly know the impact of what how a 0:10:33.160 --> 0:10:35.920 leads to be or how something that we think is 0:10:35.960 --> 0:10:39.880 completely meaningless actually has deep significance. 0:10:40.200 --> 0:10:42.120 Yeah, So I very much subscribe to this view that 0:10:42.160 --> 0:10:44.120 all models are wrong, but some are useful. I don't 0:10:44.120 --> 0:10:45.959 think X yes exactly, But I think that one of 0:10:46.000 --> 0:10:48.120 the things that has been lost on us is I 0:10:48.120 --> 0:10:50.040 think there's so much of the world that runs on 0:10:50.120 --> 0:10:54.439 models that we sometimes forget that they are extremely simplified 0:10:54.480 --> 0:10:57.280 abstractions of reality and that we actually don't understand how 0:10:57.280 --> 0:11:00.800 the causation works. And I think that creates hubrist that's dangerous. So, 0:11:01.480 --> 0:11:03.480 you know, when you think about why the atomic bomb 0:11:03.520 --> 0:11:05.600 ended up getting dropped on Hiroshima. There are an infinite 0:11:05.679 --> 0:11:07.440 number of causes, and they're things that we would not 0:11:07.480 --> 0:11:10.959 think about. Right. Geological forces for gen uranium millions of 0:11:11.040 --> 0:11:13.640 years ago is part of that story. Einstein being born 0:11:13.720 --> 0:11:15.640 is part of that story. The Battle of Midway pivoting 0:11:15.720 --> 0:11:19.040 on a fluke event where the US wins because they 0:11:19.080 --> 0:11:21.439 just happen to stumble upon the Japanese fleet at the 0:11:21.480 --> 0:11:23.400 right moment, right. I mean, if any of these things 0:11:23.440 --> 0:11:25.600 have been different, there's like there's an almost infinite number 0:11:25.600 --> 0:11:27.440 of them where little tweak would have been different, a 0:11:27.440 --> 0:11:30.520 different outcome would have happened. Now, for the useful navigation 0:11:30.600 --> 0:11:32.960 of society, we have to simplify reality because we can't 0:11:32.960 --> 0:11:36.040 build a model that has nine hundred thousand variables, right, 0:11:36.520 --> 0:11:39.120 So what you instead do is you sort of say, Okay, 0:11:39.160 --> 0:11:42.160 this is a crude version of reality. And I think, like, 0:11:42.200 --> 0:11:44.320 you know, one of the things that is really useful 0:11:44.360 --> 0:11:47.320 about some models, like Google Maps, for example, we know 0:11:47.440 --> 0:11:49.240 that's not the world, right, we know the map is 0:11:49.280 --> 0:11:51.040 not the territory. You look at Google Maps and you're 0:11:51.080 --> 0:11:53.160 not like, oh, well, I imagine that that's what the 0:11:53.200 --> 0:11:55.520 real world looks like. It's a clear abstraction. I think 0:11:55.520 --> 0:11:59.280 when we start to get into forecasting and other modeling 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:01.880 of social ties change, I think we lose sight of 0:12:01.920 --> 0:12:04.840 the fact that we have a Google Maps distortion and 0:12:04.840 --> 0:12:07.520 that we're actually looking at something that is potentially useful 0:12:07.559 --> 0:12:10.400 to navigate but is very, very different from the real world. 0:12:10.760 --> 0:12:16.320 Huh. Really interesting. So let's talk about the way different 0:12:16.440 --> 0:12:23.120 schools of thought perceive and manage these philosophical differences. You 0:12:23.520 --> 0:12:29.000 point out Eastern and Western thinking have a very different 0:12:29.080 --> 0:12:34.000 set of precepts because of just the nature of each society. 0:12:34.960 --> 0:12:38.280 In the Bible, in Genesis, God proclaims, let us make 0:12:38.360 --> 0:12:42.560 man in our image after our likeness, and let them 0:12:42.559 --> 0:12:44.960 have dominion over the fishes, the foul of the cattle, etc. 0:12:45.600 --> 0:12:50.080 Eastern culture takes a whole lot more of a collectivist approach, 0:12:50.520 --> 0:12:53.680 where you're part of a group, not you were made 0:12:53.679 --> 0:12:57.120 in God's images. Tell us a little bit about how 0:12:57.160 --> 0:13:02.480 this schism developed and what is the relationship of chaos 0:13:02.520 --> 0:13:03.000 theory to. 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:06.439 Each Yeah, so this is a speculative theory, but it's 0:13:06.480 --> 0:13:09.400 a theory that suggests that the reason why Eastern cultures 0:13:09.400 --> 0:13:12.880 have much more relational concepts of interconnectivity between humans and 0:13:13.000 --> 0:13:15.920 the rest of the world and human society as well, 0:13:16.520 --> 0:13:21.040 is derived from the differences or proximity, rather that humans 0:13:21.080 --> 0:13:24.320 have to primates, for example, in their own cultures. So 0:13:24.360 --> 0:13:26.480 there's lots of monkey gods and so on, and there's 0:13:26.480 --> 0:13:28.680 also course lots of monkeys in many of these cultures 0:13:28.720 --> 0:13:32.439 that are developing. And the idea is that the hypothesis 0:13:33.000 --> 0:13:36.600 is that this meant that people could not avoid the 0:13:36.600 --> 0:13:39.480 commonality that we have with the rest of the world. Right, 0:13:39.720 --> 0:13:42.040 whereas if you think about like biblical societies, if you 0:13:42.200 --> 0:13:44.800 look at animals and you see camels, you think like, hey, 0:13:45.320 --> 0:13:47.280 we are super different. We are separate from the rest 0:13:47.280 --> 0:13:49.160 of the world. So the argument is that over the 0:13:49.200 --> 0:13:53.400 long stretch of civilization that this created a slightly different 0:13:53.400 --> 0:13:57.080 mentality that then manifests in what was called relational versus 0:13:57.160 --> 0:14:01.680 atomistic thinking, and Western society is atomistic thinking on steroids, 0:14:01.720 --> 0:14:04.120 which is to say, you know, I mean the American 0:14:04.200 --> 0:14:07.319 dream is very atomistic individualist. It's like, you know, if 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:10.120 you just want to succeed, then you have to do everything, 0:14:10.520 --> 0:14:14.080 whereas the relational concepts are much more about the interconnections 0:14:14.120 --> 0:14:16.280 that people have. And so I think that also tells 0:14:16.320 --> 0:14:18.320 you how you think about society right. Social change is 0:14:18.320 --> 0:14:21.480 either driven by individuals or's driven by systems. And I 0:14:21.480 --> 0:14:24.880 think that there is a way in which Western culture, 0:14:24.920 --> 0:14:27.520 I think, can learn to actually appreciate some of the 0:14:27.560 --> 0:14:31.200 complexity of social change more with a healthy, increased dose 0:14:31.280 --> 0:14:32.640 of relational thinking. 0:14:33.120 --> 0:14:36.320 And you kind of bring the Eastern and Western philosophies 0:14:36.400 --> 0:14:41.120 together where you discuss the overview effects. And it really 0:14:41.160 --> 0:14:46.600 begins with the United States. Western society sends astronauts to 0:14:46.720 --> 0:14:51.480 the moon, sends astronauts around around the Earth. And these 0:14:51.520 --> 0:14:54.680 astronauts are chosen out of off and out of the military, 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:59.320 out of the Air Force. They're pilots, their logical they're 0:14:59.560 --> 0:15:05.000 unfeel they're supposed to be essentially soldiers, and yet all 0:15:05.040 --> 0:15:08.240 of them have this impact when they see the blue, 0:15:08.240 --> 0:15:12.560 green Earth in its entirety from space. They all describe 0:15:12.560 --> 0:15:17.880 it as being overwhelmed by a life shattering epiphany on 0:15:18.040 --> 0:15:22.720 the interconnection of everything. That doesn't sound very Western, that 0:15:22.800 --> 0:15:25.920 sounds more like an Eastern philosophy. But this has been 0:15:26.080 --> 0:15:28.520 time and time again. Lots of astronauts have had this. 0:15:28.800 --> 0:15:30.760 Yeah, there's you know, there's funny because there's been like 0:15:31.240 --> 0:15:36.400 nine five hundred generations of modern humans, and four hundred 0:15:36.440 --> 0:15:39.239 and ninety seven of them have not seen the earth, right, 0:15:39.560 --> 0:15:42.160 So when people do see the earth, they have this 0:15:42.200 --> 0:15:44.160 profound epiphany. And as you say, you know, they're worried 0:15:44.200 --> 0:15:47.120 about sending up you know, philosophers and poets, because they 0:15:47.120 --> 0:15:49.640 figured they'd be overwhelmed by the sort of existential awe 0:15:49.720 --> 0:15:51.200 and like, you know, would forget to hit the right 0:15:51.240 --> 0:15:52.840 buttons or whatever. So they pick these people who are 0:15:52.880 --> 0:15:55.680 supposed to be robots effectively in their personality, and all 0:15:55.680 --> 0:15:58.560 of them still have this incredible sort of epiphany about 0:15:58.560 --> 0:16:00.240 the interconnection of the world because you look at the 0:16:00.280 --> 0:16:03.160 single planet and you think, okay, this is one structure. 0:16:03.520 --> 0:16:06.080 This is not something where I'm this distinct bit. You're like, 0:16:06.160 --> 0:16:08.840 this is all together right now. I think what's really 0:16:08.840 --> 0:16:12.080 striking about that is that those world views do shape 0:16:12.120 --> 0:16:14.720 your thinking around social change. And I think when you 0:16:14.760 --> 0:16:17.240 start to think that you are in control rather than 0:16:17.240 --> 0:16:19.520 an agent of influence, you have a different worldview. When 0:16:19.560 --> 0:16:22.080 you start to think that you're individual rather relational, you 0:16:22.120 --> 0:16:24.080 have a different worldview. And all these things feed into 0:16:24.080 --> 0:16:25.960 the ways that we set up models that we sort 0:16:25.960 --> 0:16:29.640 of interact with our conceptions of social change. And so on, 0:16:29.920 --> 0:16:31.880 and also the degree to which we have hubris that 0:16:31.880 --> 0:16:33.880 we can control things. And I think this is where 0:16:33.880 --> 0:16:36.000 the danger comes in. Right, It's not that you shouldn't model, 0:16:36.040 --> 0:16:38.560 It's not that you shouldn't have abstractions of systems. It's 0:16:38.600 --> 0:16:40.520 that when you start to get hubristic about it and 0:16:40.600 --> 0:16:43.800 think you have top down individualists control, you start to 0:16:43.800 --> 0:16:47.040 get overconfident in ways that you try to tame something 0:16:47.040 --> 0:16:49.240 that I think is untamable. And this is where we 0:16:49.280 --> 0:16:51.600 get shocks more often, because you try to impose this 0:16:51.680 --> 0:16:55.160 sort of control on a system that is so complex 0:16:55.520 --> 0:16:57.800 that it resists control. And so you know, there's some 0:16:57.800 --> 0:17:00.320 of these things where I think the insights the flawosophy 0:17:00.400 --> 0:17:04.160 behind this it's it's sort of lurking there invisibly, where 0:17:04.240 --> 0:17:06.119 no one says this when they build a model, but 0:17:06.160 --> 0:17:08.679 it's it's obviously shaping the way they think about it 0:17:08.720 --> 0:17:11.200 and their sort of assumptions before they go into trying 0:17:11.240 --> 0:17:13.680 to determine how to navigate risk and uncertainty. 0:17:13.960 --> 0:17:17.000 Along those lines, you have a great quote in the book. 0:17:17.200 --> 0:17:20.400 God may have created the clock, but it was Newton's 0:17:20.440 --> 0:17:23.760 laws that kept it ticking. So so how do you 0:17:25.080 --> 0:17:32.000 resolve that inherent tension between big forces driving things or 0:17:32.080 --> 0:17:36.880 random elements affecting it, or is there no resolving them. 0:17:36.920 --> 0:17:37.680 They both matter. 0:17:38.520 --> 0:17:40.480 Yeah, So I think it's a question of time scales, 0:17:41.080 --> 0:17:42.399 and I think one of the big one of the 0:17:42.400 --> 0:17:44.280 big problems. And this is something that I you know, 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:46.679 it's always it's it's such a nuanced concept that it's 0:17:46.720 --> 0:17:48.520 sometimes difficult to explain. But I think there's a really 0:17:48.520 --> 0:17:53.680 important point about whether ideas that happen for a long 0:17:53.720 --> 0:17:55.760 time seem to be validated by what goes on the 0:17:55.800 --> 0:17:58.920 patterns that we see, right, whether you can actually falsify 0:17:58.920 --> 0:18:01.040 a theory when you're talking about social change. So my 0:18:01.080 --> 0:18:05.399 favorite example of this is the Arab Spring in political science, 0:18:05.440 --> 0:18:07.800 my own realm, there is a lot of stuff written 0:18:07.920 --> 0:18:09.720 in sort of two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, 0:18:09.880 --> 0:18:13.240 even into twenty ten that says, here's why Middle Eastern 0:18:13.280 --> 0:18:16.320 dictatorships are extremely resilient, and there's all this data showing 0:18:16.359 --> 0:18:18.639 this the longevity, et cetera, et cetera, and then like 0:18:18.680 --> 0:18:20.520 within six months of some of these books coming out, 0:18:20.840 --> 0:18:22.360 you know, all of them are on fire. I mean, 0:18:22.560 --> 0:18:24.359 I saw a political risk map when I was in 0:18:24.400 --> 0:18:26.879 grad school where like every single country that was on 0:18:26.920 --> 0:18:28.879 fire was green on the political risk map from the 0:18:28.880 --> 0:18:32.040 previous year. Right now, There's two ways of thinking about that. 0:18:32.080 --> 0:18:35.240 The first way is to say the theory has been falsified. 0:18:35.440 --> 0:18:38.119 They were wrong, right. The second way of thinking about is, 0:18:38.160 --> 0:18:40.679 hold on, maybe the world changed, Maybe the patterns of 0:18:40.720 --> 0:18:43.400 cause and effect have actually shifted, right. And I think 0:18:43.440 --> 0:18:45.760 this is something that people don't appreciate that much, is 0:18:45.760 --> 0:18:48.160 they assume that the patterns of the past are going 0:18:48.200 --> 0:18:50.000 to be predictive of the patterns of the future. I mean, 0:18:50.040 --> 0:18:52.280 David Hume came up with this idea hundreds of years ago, 0:18:52.600 --> 0:18:55.080 but it is something that I think is particularly important 0:18:55.080 --> 0:18:58.280 for our world because the patterns of the past being 0:18:58.359 --> 0:19:01.000 indicative of the patterns of the future has ever before 0:19:01.200 --> 0:19:04.240 been as flawed of an assumption, because our world is 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:06.600 changing faster than ever before. So I think one of 0:19:06.680 --> 0:19:08.400 the issues that we have is when we think about 0:19:08.400 --> 0:19:10.520 these sort of clockwork models where we say, oh, yes, 0:19:10.680 --> 0:19:12.280 you know, these are the ways that things have worked 0:19:12.280 --> 0:19:15.520 in the past. Our world is very very different year 0:19:15.520 --> 0:19:17.200 to year, and that didn't used to happen. I mean 0:19:17.440 --> 0:19:19.200 I was talking before about these you know, nine thou 0:19:19.359 --> 0:19:22.920 five hundred generations of humans. If you think about the 0:19:23.000 --> 0:19:26.480 sort of entirety of human history as a twenty four 0:19:26.520 --> 0:19:29.359 hour day, twenty three hours and like ten minutes is 0:19:29.440 --> 0:19:32.359 hunter gatherer period, right, and then you get into farming, 0:19:32.359 --> 0:19:34.239