Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Jared not is the author of the international bestseller Tiny Blunders,
Speaker 2: Big Disasters thirty nine Tiny Mistakes That Change the World Forever,
Speaker 2: and the brand new one, Tiny Blunders, Big Disasters Book two,
Speaker 2: The Many Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever. Jared
Speaker 2: was a decorated combat infantry officer in Vietnam in the
Speaker 2: first Air Cavalry Division. Jared, Welcome to Coast to Coast, AM.
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Richard. It's an honor to be here.
Speaker 2: It's a great concept for a book. How do you
Speaker 2: even begin researching something like this or do they just
Speaker 2: are there so many examples? It's more question of which
Speaker 2: ones don't you want to include in the book.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, it's amazing when you start digging into history,
Speaker 3: how many goof ups there are out there. People don't
Speaker 3: look at history that way. We kind of see history
Speaker 3: as a series of large, ponderous events. This invasion happened
Speaker 3: in such and such a date. This wark took place
Speaker 3: between these months and these years, and so on and
Speaker 3: so forth. But really, when you dig into it, it's
Speaker 3: this history. History is more of a mosaic of a
Speaker 3: lot of small, tiny events that compose those major events.
Speaker 3: And with some of those tiny events are mistakes, and
Speaker 3: some of them set off a domino effect that can
Speaker 3: have a catastrophic results in the end. And that's what
Speaker 3: I do with my two books, is to turn history
Speaker 3: sideways and look at it from a unique perspective. And
Speaker 3: it's amazing how many Smike's Chinese mistakes, small mistakes, bunders,
Speaker 3: group ups have had horrible, horrible consequences of long term.
Speaker 2: I wish you taught history to me in high school.
Speaker 2: I mean, we learn names, we learn dates, we name
Speaker 2: we learn places and events, but don't we don't learn
Speaker 2: about the human aspect to historical events.
Speaker 3: Yes, I sort of say people magazine approach to telling history.
Speaker 3: Some people consider history to be kind of dull, and
Speaker 3: it can't be if it's pulled the wrong way. But
Speaker 3: when you look really kind of from the human perspective,
Speaker 3: from the personalities involved, the weakness strengths of the individuals
Speaker 3: making decisions, that gives it more of a personal perspective
Speaker 3: that you can relate to better and makes it a
Speaker 3: lot juicier, a lot more, a lot more fun to
Speaker 3: delve into.
Speaker 2: All right, I want to dive right in with a
Speaker 2: llallapalooza of a tiny blunder which led to well, it
Speaker 2: doesn't get much bigger in terms of an historical event
Speaker 2: than the collapse of the Roman Empire? Is it someone
Speaker 2: inadvertently forgot to lock a gate and that led to
Speaker 2: the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was the you might have to call it
Speaker 3: the vestige, the final vestige of the Roman Empire, which
Speaker 3: was the giant fortress at Constantinople. And it was a
Speaker 3: magnet deficitly designed fortress. It had like three different barricades,
Speaker 3: three different walls, and then it had a moat around
Speaker 3: it and it stood for over eleven hundred years. Have
Speaker 3: been attacked a number of times, have been successful. There's
Speaker 3: one brief period, but it was taken over for two years.
Speaker 3: I think it was. Except for that, it stood attack
Speaker 3: after attack hundreds of hundreds of years. So the two
Speaker 3: or three events that were changing its ability to stand unchallenged,
Speaker 3: and that was the development of cannon. I have begun
Speaker 3: its toloy. It was fourteen fifty three and the cannons
Speaker 3: had been developed. That was one factor. But then, yes,
Speaker 3: coming to the tiny mistake. Someone forgot to close and
Speaker 3: lock a gate on one of the main walls. And
Speaker 3: Helen musksinoat a cute funny cartoon about two and a
Speaker 3: half years ago and shows a soldier in bed with
Speaker 3: his helmet on at night with a kind of a
Speaker 3: bubble showing his thoughts, and it said, did I remember
Speaker 3: locked that gate last night? And no he did not,
Speaker 3: which allowed the enemy from the Ottoman Empire to get through.
Speaker 3: It was one of the factors that led to the
Speaker 3: fall of constantineble with again the last remnant of the
Speaker 3: Roman Empire. It's a little more complicated than that that
Speaker 3: the big cannons were a factor. And there was one
Speaker 3: great big cannon like twenty seven feet long, a bronze cannon,
Speaker 3: and which she was what they call a bombard, which
Speaker 3: means that shot a great, big, giant rock as opposed
Speaker 3: to a lead projectile. And it was a very effective
Speaker 3: and battering down the walls. But it also it blew
Speaker 3: up at one point and it killed the engineer who
Speaker 3: designed it, plus the workers that were with him. So
Speaker 3: effected for a while. But after a while, of course
Speaker 3: that the backpart, so to speak, and it was very
Speaker 3: extremely loud by the way as you might imagine, and
Speaker 3: no have some of those cannons in museums are about
Speaker 3: five hundred years old, which is kind of an interesting
Speaker 3: development in itself. But yes, there was somebody who got
Speaker 3: to close and lock the gate that led to the
Speaker 3: fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, that is so fascinating. How does that
Speaker 2: come down to us in history? I mean, was the
Speaker 2: night watchman keeping a log and he said, bill forgot
Speaker 2: to close the gate.
Speaker 3: I don't know the Of course, the umpires had those
Speaker 3: river bands they put around their fingers, so keep track
Speaker 3: of the downs when we went two and three and
Speaker 3: four and so on. Like I guess, somebody didn't have
Speaker 3: a a sisto and he got distracted and they had
Speaker 3: to go there back. It was just the wrong time.
Speaker 3: But somehow that mistake took place, that tiny quote unquote
Speaker 3: tiny mistake, which was pivotal in the fall of the
Speaker 3: last fortress of the Roman Empire and after being in
Speaker 3: existence for well over one thousand years. So it was
Speaker 3: one of those in one of those human eras that
Speaker 3: had horrible consequences.
Speaker 2: And is there a common threat you see connecting these
Speaker 2: tiny mistakes is a human error is it over confidence,
Speaker 2: maybe something deeper in our psyche.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a kind of you can say, is attention
Speaker 3: to detail. You mentioned in the introduction the butterfly effect,
Speaker 3: and that was actually developed by a gentleman, the doctor
Speaker 3: Lorenz And he was a leading mathematician back in the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties, and he was dealing with a number back
Speaker 3: then that had it was a number a decimale and
Speaker 3: eighteen small numbers behind it. Of course, he was smaller
Speaker 3: and smaller the further and further to the rights to advance.
Speaker 3: And he was working with the computers of the day,
Speaker 3: and it was taking a long long time. There was
Speaker 3: a weather prediction, the type formula, and he was taking
Speaker 3: a long time to finally run the full extent of
Speaker 3: the required per formulation, which he was these little tiny numbers,
Speaker 3: so some of these low ball six of them at
Speaker 3: the end, and that won't make much difference, you know.
Speaker 3: He just said, he's saved me a lot of time.
Speaker 3: But he was amazed when he did analysis of how
Speaker 3: those six numbers had a huge, huge multiplier effect at
Speaker 3: the end. It's a little bit analogous to saying you're
Speaker 3: starting off in San Francisco heading East, and you're going
Speaker 3: to try to go to London. Okay, but your asthmauth,
Speaker 3: your cousin, your compass reading is off just a degree
Speaker 3: and a half or or two degrees or something like that. Well,
Speaker 3: by the time you get to London, you're actually down
Speaker 3: in Lisbon, or you're a north or something like that.
Speaker 3: It's a progressive type thing. It shows up more and
Speaker 3: more and more and more and more. But anyway, he
Speaker 3: made a presentation back in the late nineteen fifties explaining that,
Speaker 3: and he said that would mean in terms of whether
Speaker 3: that's a butterfly we're flapping its wings down in Brazil,
Speaker 3: that would set off a chain effect that could lead
Speaker 3: to a cyclone in Texas a year and a half later.
Speaker 3: And that was the birth of the concept of the
Speaker 3: butterfly effect. And what we're doing course of the book
Speaker 3: is we're looking at the butterfly effect in history. How
Speaker 3: this whole tiny mistake multiplied into this next incident, multiplied, multiplied, domino, domino,
Speaker 3: and then at the end of the progression, boom, here's
Speaker 3: this horrible, horrible disaster.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the most conspicuous examples of the butterfly
Speaker 2: effect in human history and I'm going to go back
Speaker 2: to your first volume, Tiny Blunders, Big Disasters, thirty nine
Speaker 2: Tiny Mistakes to Change the World Forever. The Titanic. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, the bottom of the ocean, two miles down
Speaker 2: beneath the surface of the ocean, off the coast of
Speaker 2: Nova Scotia. If it weren't a single key that someone
Speaker 2: was supposed to hand off to somebody else, it may
Speaker 2: may never have happened. Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yes, they were. I had one gentleman that was assigned
Speaker 3: to be the second officer of the Titanic. But they
Speaker 3: say last minute is to a day before the voyage
Speaker 3: was to take place. It changed officers in some places.
Speaker 3: In that exchange. The key to a locker was now
Speaker 3: passed along, and inside that locker were what they call
Speaker 3: it glasses or binoculars. And the people out there in
Speaker 3: the crow's nest were used in binoculars, especially at night,
Speaker 3: to look for icebergs. And there they were, they and
Speaker 3: then they didn't have the key, They did not have
Speaker 3: the glasses that they have the binoculars, and there they
Speaker 3: were in the middle of the night, and they were
Speaker 3: looking for icebergs just with the naked eye. But they
Speaker 3: had the binoculars and one of the gentlemen that was there,
Speaker 3: and of course they survived the sinking of the Titanic,
Speaker 3: and there was a big investigation in New York as
Speaker 3: to what the cause of the sinking was. And he
Speaker 3: was saying that they had had the glasses several days before,
Speaker 3: but they did not have the binoculars that particular night.
Speaker 3: And they asked him what differences that have made to
Speaker 3: what we've been able to see the Uh, it was
Speaker 3: what they call it black iceberg. It was not a
Speaker 3: white one. It was a little kind of a darker one.
Speaker 3: And they said they've been able to see it much sooner.
Speaker 3: How much of a difference that have made? Well, they're
Speaker 3: given us, but it's ended in time to be able
Speaker 3: to get out of the way. So they said that
Speaker 3: if they had the binoculars and they've been able to
Speaker 3: scan the horizon, they could have seen the iceberg. And
Speaker 3: they called down there to the engine room. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: turned to port please so many degrees. But then they did,
Speaker 3: but just another minute or two, maybe even a half
Speaker 3: a minute, that would have made all the difference. The
Speaker 3: iceberg scraped down the right side of the starboard side
Speaker 3: of the ship and it split open UH the rivets
Speaker 3: that were along a strip that This is another interesting thing,
Speaker 3: is that they had the UH. It was divided into
Speaker 3: several different compartments. And they called the Titanic unthinkable because
Speaker 3: it could survive the flooding of any two of the
Speaker 3: compartments and not sink. And they thought the worst disaster
Speaker 3: anybody I could think I was a ship hitting it
Speaker 3: right at the juncture of those two compartments and both
Speaker 3: of them would flood, and they could survive that well.
Speaker 3: But what happened was when they hit the iceberg, the
Speaker 3: scraped it down the side and it opened up like
Speaker 3: four of the compartments at one time, popping the rivets
Speaker 3: up off all the way down. And so all four
Speaker 3: compartments were sinking. And so they began to nose down
Speaker 3: a little by little, and they saw what was happening,
Speaker 3: and they realized that there was nothing much they could do,
Speaker 3: and it was going to it was going to sink in.
Speaker 3: And Captain Smith it was his name, may have survived
Speaker 3: the initial sinking, and they said that he was. They
Speaker 3: was swimming towards one of the lifeboats in the water,
Speaker 3: and then as he got closed he turned around and
Speaker 3: just swam away, according to one or two of the witnesses.
Speaker 3: So maybe he said he didn't want to maybe wanted
Speaker 3: to go down with the ship. And I don't have
Speaker 3: to face the inquiry in New York or whatever, But
Speaker 3: that's what happened. If somebody had passed the key along
Speaker 3: that went tiny mistake, they would have had the binoculars,
Speaker 3: they would seeing the iceberg, and the whole thing might
Speaker 3: have been avoided.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm just trying to let this akin. How much
Speaker 2: of a world do you think fate or chance plays
Speaker 2: in these worlds altering moments versus the idea that history
Speaker 2: is simply the result of human decisions however small, Well, i'll.
Speaker 3: Leave that to the psychics that you interview. They might
Speaker 3: have a better answer than I do. That it gets
Speaker 3: into the metaphysics. And I don't doubt there's course the
Speaker 3: whole question of human will or the decision being made
Speaker 3: by the lord that the old quotation from Clint Eastwood,
Speaker 3: A man must know his limitations, and that that's one,
Speaker 3: and so I don't have the complete answer to so
Speaker 3: I don't know that I do.
Speaker 2: Fair enough, Yeah, fair enough? Do you see parallels between
Speaker 2: the tiny blunders that you cover, and moments in our
Speaker 2: in our personal lives where let's say, minor decisions or
Speaker 2: accidents conspiral into larger consequences.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, yes, of course, in everyday life, there's automobile accident,
Speaker 3: somebody drops their keys, somebody drops their phone inside the
Speaker 3: car that reached them to pick it up. They tragically
Speaker 3: hit someone from the rear, they hit a pedestrian. There's
Speaker 3: a many, many examples where tiny mistakes I remember done
Speaker 3: in Pinsacola, Florida, where I lived for a number of years,
Speaker 3: there was a captain who was pushing a barge to
Speaker 3: underneath the bridge and he somehow made a mistake and
Speaker 3: he hit the bridge and they disabled it. It was
Speaker 3: like a year and a half for it to be
Speaker 3: repaired where it could function normally again, so and so forth.
Speaker 3: Where there's just a countless examples of automobile accidents, of
Speaker 3: a plane in accidents, of the train accidents that leads
Speaker 3: to their tragedy walls of life. So that happens at
Speaker 3: that level, and then of course it also happened happens
Speaker 3: a political level, where military mistakes of political mistakes have
Speaker 3: horrible quant consequences for and epic proportions for an entire
Speaker 3: nation and entire people. So yes, the tiny mistakes are
Speaker 3: with us, and they are a major part of our life.
Speaker 3: And one of the main things I'm doing in the
Speaker 3: book is especially for young people, is to convey the
Speaker 3: message that the devil is in the details. You need
Speaker 3: to make sure that everything is just exactly right, that
Speaker 3: settings are done correctly. I am preparing for operations and
Speaker 3: preparing for airplane flights, et cetera. Cover navigational mistakes also
Speaker 3: in the second book. So those little tiny mistakes, they
Speaker 3: can destroy your life. They can cost the life your
Speaker 3: life and the lives of many people around us. That's
Speaker 3: one of the main messages in the book, the whole
Speaker 3: section there and the importance of checklists. I won't explain
Speaker 3: all the details right now, but in the operating room
Speaker 3: that was a major program to major development in that
Speaker 3: area as well.
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