BRIAN KLAAS: My name is Brian Klaas. I'm an associate professor in global politics at University College, London. And I'm the author of "Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters."

- [Interviewer] The smallest moments have the largest impacts, with Brian Klaas. Part one, understanding flukes. What is the core argument of your book, "Fluke."

- My book is about chaos theory, chance, randomness, and how arbitrary and accidental forces divert and change our lives and our societies much more than we imagine. And I think we tend to believe that there's this neat and tidy story for why things happen in the world, that everything happens for a reason. But when you peer a little bit closer at the world, you actually find that that's not true, and that we're constantly being diverted by these seemingly random forces. So "Fluke" investigates this and tries to flip our traditional worldview on its head, and argue that the arbitrary, the accidental, the chaos of life matters a lot more than we imagine. So a fluke is often seen by people as a lucky or a chance event that changes the world. I use it in a broader sense for anything that is what's called contingent. Not exactly a term that rolls off the tongue, but it is one thing that basically refers to the idea that a small change can have a profound impact. And so it's sort of like a forking path, right? This idea that, you know, but one small change, and all of a sudden you go down a different road. Now, what chaos theory tells us, and this is something that usually applies to the world of hard science rather than social science and our own lives. But what chaos theory tells us is that there is what's called sensitivity to initial conditions, fancy way of saying that if any small change happens, that over time it can lead to very big effects. And all of us intuitively understand this because this is the reason why we can't predict the weather beyond 7 to 10 days. If there's even a slight change in the temperature, or the wind speed, or anything in the model, the outcome of that model becomes radically different. And that's why we don't even bother, we don't even imagine we can. And so what this is telling us is that these small changes over time can add up. Now, I personally am the byproduct of an extreme fluke, quite a dark one I must say, but it is one where the story goes back to 1905 in Wisconsin, this little farmhouse just outside of a place called Kieler, Wisconsin. And a woman has what we would probably call a postpartum depression mental breakdown. She has four young children. They wouldn't have called it that back in those days. They didn't know it existed. But they, she had a mental break. And tragically she decided to take the lives of her four young children, I think the oldest was five years old, and then also take her own life. Her husband came home, and then one of the most horrific things a person can possibly experience, and finds his entire family dead. Now, the reason this is in the introduction to "Fluke" is because this is my great-grandfather's first wife. And he comes home and discovers his whole family wiped out. And a couple years later, he remarries to my great-grandmother. Now, the astonishing bit about this is that I realized this only when I was in my mid-20s. My dad sat me down and showed me a newspaper headline from 1905. And all of a sudden I realized that my existence was quite literally predicated on a mass murder of children. And if it had not happened, I would not exist. But this has ripple effects everywhere because anyone watching this would not be listening to my voice, but for a mass murder of children in Wisconsin in 1905. And that's how flukes work. Of course she had no idea that her tragic decision would lead to us talking now. But it did, right? And this unbroken chain of causes and effects is something where the ripple effects of our decision making in the future can have profound consequences that we don't anticipate. And so the flukes of life are things that reshape our world, and yet we often write them out of the models or the imaginations we have when we tell the stories of why things happen. So there's a question that you might imagine when you think about flukes, which is, wait a minute, if everything is so contingent and all these little tiny changes matter so much, then why are worlds so regular, right? I mean, we can commute to work, and it's roughly the same amount of time. We can go to various coffee shops, and it's sort of unchanging year to year, right? So we obviously have some regularity, some orders, some patterns in our lives. Now, the reason that exists is because I think that the nature of change is what I call contingent convergence. So this means that you have this sort of idea where a small fluke might actually divert the trajectory, but once you've changed the path, then the order of life does take hold a bit. So, you know, solutions that work tend to win, right? And this is the kind of stuff where when you imagine you get on a highway, for example, you know, there's a certain order to it. It's not like everybody is driving at different speeds. It's not like everybody is constantly crashing their car and every single twitch of your hand is, you know, fundamentally causing you to die. It's that there is order within this. Now, occasionally a contingent event causes a car accident, and then the life path for that person is radically changed. So I think that the right way to think about change in our lives and our societies is contingent convergence, where we have these moments that may seem consequential, may seem completely invisible to us, that do change our path, but then once we're on that path, there are forces of order that do constrain the way that change unfolds.

- [Interviewer] What is a concrete example of a fluke?

- The opening story in "Fluke" is a story of a seemingly unimportant vacation that a husband and wife took to Kyoto Japan in 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H.M. Stimson. Now they came to Kyoto for about a week, and they stayed at the Miyako Hotel and did a bit of sight scene and fell in love with the city. And as they left, they sort of thought to themselves, "This is one of the best cities in the world." Now, of course, a vacation doesn't normally change history. But 19 years later, Mr. H. Stimson, Henry Stimson, ended up as America's Secretary of War. And so he was overseeing the decision of where to drop the first atomic bomb in 1945. And the target committee, which was largely comprised of generals, all of them said, "Kyoto is the obvious target. There's strategic value, there's a good reason to do it, and we all agree Kyoto should be destroyed." Now, Stimson gets this memo and he springs to action because he doesn't want to have what he called his pet city get destroyed. So he has to meet with President Truman twice to convince him to take Kyoto off the targeting list. And eventually Truman relents and agrees. So the first atomic bomb goes to Hiroshima instead of Kyoto because of a 19-year-old vacation. The second bomb is supposed to go to a place called Kokura. But when the bombers approach the city, there's briefly clouds that obscure their view, and they can't guarantee that they're going to hit the target. So instead they go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki. And it's a true fact, but a bizarre one, that the reason why hundreds of thousands of people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than Kyoto and Kokura, is because of a 19-year-old vacation and a passing cloud. Now, when you are going to imagine why the US dropped the atomic bomb where it did in the end, you would think of a few key variables. You know, what is the strategic target? What's the right place to destroy for the war effort? What you would not put on the list is the vacation history of American government officials or the weather patterns necessarily. And yet, those were the immediate causes of mass death in those two cities rather than another two cities. And indeed, to this day in Japan, they have a saying where they refer to Kokura's luck, which is this idea where a city or a person unknowingly escaped disaster because Kokura didn't know it was going to be incinerated until much later. Now, this is one of the key ideas in "Fluke," is that when we look back at our lives, when we look back at social change, we think about these big obvious pivot points, these moments where we can imagine that the world has shifted. You know, you pick which college you go to, you pick who you marry. Obviously that's going to change your life. What you don't think about are the invisible pivots, the future pathways that you don't know could have existed, because you're simply oblivious to those variables that have changed your life but were invisible to you. And for the people of Kokura, all of them almost got incinerated, but for a passing cloud. For the people of Kyoto, all of them almost got incinerated, but for two people who vacationed in their city 19 years previously. And so when we try to understand change in our lives and our societies, we just write these things out. You never have models that imagine the vacation history of a government official. But this is how the world shifts. And so the noise of life, the stuff we're told to ignore, is actually highly consequential. And that lesson was made very, very clear to hundreds of thousands of people, and of course their generational offspring who are alive today because of one couple's vacation and a single passing cloud. One of the things about the invisible pivot points in life is that we are completely oblivious to them until a major event makes it obvious that they were important. So there's a film from the 1990s staring Gwyneth Paltrow called "Sliding Doors." And the idea of it is very simple. It's where Gwyneth Paltrow is trying to get onto a subway train, a tube train. And in the first version of events, she misses the train very slightly because somebody gets in her way. So just by a split second, the doors close and she doesn't make it. The tape then rewinds, and the next version of events, she makes it on the train. The story of the film is then how her lives change depending on whether she makes that train or misses it. Now, it's totally obvious when we think about the nature of change, that this is a plausible pathway where something so small can change someone's life. But we just are completely oblivious to it because any individual only either experiences being on the train or missing the train. They don't get to see both versions of reality. Now, sometimes consequential events make us confront these in really upsetting and tragic ways. So there is a story that I write about in "Fluke" of a man named Joseph Lott. And Joseph Lott is someone who was going to a conference and was delayed in his flight to the conference. And so his shirt got really crinkled and he, you know, wasn't happy with how it looked. So he decided he would wear a pastel green shirt instead of the white shirt that he was planning to wear for his presentation. Now, the morning of the conference, he has breakfast with his colleague Elaine. And Elaine Greenberg is a very thoughtful person. So she knows that Joe really likes Monet ties, impressionist art ties. So a week before, she saw one in a shop, she bought it for him, and she presented it to him at this breakfast meeting. Now, Joe is incredibly touched that his colleague has been so kind. So he says, "You know what, I'm gonna put it on right now and I'm gonna wear it for the presentation." And she shoots back right away, not with that shirt, because the Monet tie is full of these bright colors, these oranges and so on. It clashes horrifically with his pastel green shirt. So what he does, he says, "Don't worry. I've got a white shirt. I just need to iron it. I'm gonna go back to the hotel. I'll see you up there in 10 minutes." So he goes back to his hotel. He starts to iron the shirt. And as he's ironing the shirt, Elaine who's up on the conference in the, I believe it's the 101st floor of the World Trade Center, Joe looks up and sees the plane hit the tower. And in that instant, Elaine dies and Joe survives. And it's a timing fluke. It's a question of a split second. It's a question of a random act of kindness that produces this unbelievable effect where, but for this tie, Joe would've died as well, because he would've joined her at the conference. He would've gone up the elevators and he would've met his end on 9/11 as well. And, you know, one of the things that was really striking when I met Joe was he said to me, the most annoying thing, the most upsetting thing about the experience was everybody told him everything happens for a reason. And that actually was really upsetting because it was like, "Well, they were supposed to die and I was supposed to live," right? And not only does that put so much pressure on an individual, but it also creates a statement where when people die in horrific random occurrences, it's somehow part of a broader plan. And that's not something that he wanted to accept. So, you know, I think there is something where when we see these moments, these sliding doors' moments, these snooze button effect moments, there is an arbitrary nature to our world. And it's not like the snooze button is good or bad. It's not like the sliding doors are good or bad. And it's not like the tie was something that Elaine shouldn't have done. It was incredibly generous of her. But our lives are constantly like this, and we're just blind to it. And I think this is the nature of change that is so profoundly moving when you think about it, is that your life is constantly at the whims of these chance events, these random occurrences, these chaotic forces. And only occasionally do people like Joe Lotts experience this and understand viscerally that, but for a single random act of kindness, they would not be here.

- [Interviewer] Does everything happen for a reason?

- Throughout our lives, we are told that we're in control of our path through life, that we have this idea of we're the main character. And as long as we sort of make wise decisions, then everything will turn out all right. And when things don't turn out all right, the saying that we always hear is that everything happens for a reason. Now, both of those things are untrue. It is not true that we're in control. And, in fact, I think one of the key arguments in "Fluke" is that we control nothing but we influence everything. And also at the same time, this illusion of control that we have and this stitching together of this clear narrative where everything has a reason behind it causes us to misunderstand the world and make mistakes. A lot of things just happen. And when you look at the causal chain of events that produce outcomes, it is not neat and tidy. It's messy. We're told to ignore the noise and focus on the signal. It's a huge mistake. The noise is where many of the most important and consequential events in life take place. So one of the key ideas here is that when you start to accept that you have profound influence on the world, but very limited control, you start to see the world differently, you start to behave differently, and you start to accept the limits of what you can and cannot do. So when we imagine that everything happens for a reason, it causes us to make cognitive mistakes. And it also causes us to inscribe ideas behind the events of our lives that are fundamentally wrong. And so the scientific evidence shows us that everything does not happen for a reason, and therefore you need to have a philosophical change in how you think about the world if some things just happen arbitrarily, randomly, or as the byproduct of chaos theory that create the puppets that we all are of random events. So the history of ideas in the world, in my view, is basically a history of trying to cram the complexity and messiness of the world into a really neat and tidy story for why things happen. And this is partly derived from religion where people wanted to have elegant order from God, right? The idea that there's this sort of accidental nature to reality is completely at odds with the notion that everything is planned by a higher being. So throughout religious history, there's always this neat and tidy story, the everything happens for a reason aspect that's tied to the divine. Now, then as science unfolded and the scientific revolution, you know, developed and so on, you have another shift. It's not necessarily that it's all about God. It's all about these sort of clockwork models of physics. And they're very, very elegant, right? And this is the kind of stuff where you have to eliminate the noise, you have to eliminate the accidents, because everything is supposed to be an equation that is really beautiful. Whether it's Adam Smith talking about, you know, the hand that guides our economies or the ways that Isaac Newton presented change and these unbelievably powerful equations to explain the world, we have always tried to find the explanation that fits everything into an explanation that seems ordered and rational. Now, this is why I think there's so much resistance to this notion of contingent convergence, because it is irrational sometimes. You know, the fact that I can look at my own life and understand that I'm the byproduct of a mass murder, or that hundreds of thousands of people will die in one city because of a random vacation a couple took 19 years earlier, these things are not neat and tidy. They're not ordered. They're not elegant. But they're true. And I think one of the things about science is that a lot of really strange things exist. And it's better for us to just accept them and sort of stare into the face of this uncertainty, this complexity, and this randomness, than to simply pretend it doesn't work this way because it's somehow comforting to our pattern-obsessed brains. And so, you know, when you look at the intellectual history of the world, the randomness has systematically been written out. And I think it's a mistake. When we try to understand why stuff has happened to us in our lives, our brains have evolved to make sense of patterns. And that's because it's advantageous to survive to over-detect patterns. So if you can imagine that you're a prehistoric hunter-gatherer and you see a little bit of rustling of the grass, or you hear a sound, now maybe there's nothing there, or maybe there's a saber-toothed tiger that's waiting to eat you. Now if you imagine there's nothing there and it turns out to be a saber-toothed tiger, you die. But if you over-interpret the pattern and you say, "Okay, I think that might be something that I need to watch out for," even if there's nothing there, then you'll still survive. So through survival of the fittest and evolutionary patterns, our brains are hyper-attuned to pattern detection. Now, this means that when random or seemingly random things happen to us, we're allergic to the explanation that it was just arbitrary. And so we stitched together a neat and tidy story from A to B. Now, that's a problem because when stuff happens to you that you don't have control over and you ascribe this sort of intentionality to it, you've mislearned the lesson, right? And I think one of the things that's also very striking is that we understand this when we think about the past, but we don't understand this when we think about the present. So when we watch sci-fi films, for example, that imagine time travel, the warning that is always issued, which people fundamentally accept, is you shouldn't touch anything, you shouldn't talk to anyone because you might accidentally delete yourself from the future or fundamentally change the patterns that you'll then go back to when you return to your present time. So don't squish a bug. Don't talk to the wrong person. The problem is that when we think in the present, we never think that way. We never imagine that if we squish a bug or if we talk to someone, we're reshaping the future. But, of course, cause and effect patterns don't change whether they're in the past or the present. They operate the same all the time. And so I think the mentality we have towards the past is the correct one, that we are constantly reshaping the future, that what we do is important. And that idea is something that I think we are also somewhat allergic to because it's so overwhelming to imagine that every single act that we have has unforeseen ripple effects that will change the world and reshape our futures is bewildering, but it's also true. And one of the things that I think happens when you look closely at the nature of causality, reality, and existence is that things that are bewildering are happening all the time, and we just ignore them. And I think when you peer into them, you start to see a very different world and one that can be more fulfilling if you actually accept that some things don't happen for a reason and in fact that we have a life and a society that is diverted by chaos theory.

- [Interviewer] What is the delusion of individualism?

- Western modernity has an obsession with what I call the delusion of individualism. And it is comforting to a lot of people to think that they're in control of their own lives so that they are the ones who are driving change, and that it's not really up to other people, that your life unfolds the way you want it to, or if you're a politician, that you can control the way the economy is going to work out or the way the election is going to turn out. Now, the problem with this, of course, is that there's a lot of different ways about thinking of the world, and one of them is Eastern philosophy, which thinks a lot more about the intersections between people and the relational idea of how we're all connected. Now, I think this is scientific fact. I think we are all connected, and we pretend otherwise. And there's a story that's sort of a strange story that I saw in the press while I was researching "Fluke," about a person who went swimming off the coast of Greece, a man named Ivan. And Ivan goes out into the sea, and he is not the best swimmer, and a riptide basically sucks him out into the ocean. Now, his friends are pretty upset about this because he disappears from sight and they can't find him. And there's about 24 hours where Ivan is missing at sea. And we all know how these stories turn out when someone is missing at sea for 24 hours, except for in this story, right as Ivan is about to slip beneath the waves and drown, he spots a soccer ball bobbing on the surface of the ocean. Now, that's already extraordinary enough. You have this moment where he just is saved by this passing soccer ball that's floating, and he clings to it and is eventually rescued. But the more extraordinary part of the story is that when this news made the Greek television, you know, reports, there was a woman who was watching the news. And I sort of imagined her, you know, dropping her cup of coffee or whatever as they see the soccer ball on the screen, because she recognized the ball. And she knew that her children had been playing with that exact same ball and had accidentally kicked it off a cliff 80 miles away from where Ivan eventually intersected with the trajectory of that ball bobbing on the sea 10 days later. And the point is that, you know, the kids would look at this and they would think, "Oh no, we kicked the ball off the cliff. Let's buy another ball." They would've no idea. But it turned out that kick is what saved the life of another person who was about to drown. Now, when you think that way, it's extremely obvious that there's an interconnection between those lives. The problem is that there's not some magic that Ivan had. It's that everybody is actually unfolding in this way where we're constantly being affected by the actions of people we will never see and never meet. And the extremely obvious way that we can understand this as well is the pandemic from the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 where you have a single person get infected with a virus in Wuhan China and the lives of eight billion people change for many, many years. And the trajectories of our lives are irrevocably changed. All of us are different because of this pandemic. And it's from one virus infecting one person potentially thousands of miles away from where you live, and everything in the world became different. So this is the nature of reality. And I think it's something that's a coping mechanism effectively for us to just ignore the science, ignore the physics, and imagine that we are in charge. And this is where that saying that I come back to throughout fluke arises, which is we control nothing, but we influence everything. And for Ivan and the soccer ball, the influence that he experienced was from a couple of kids he will never have met, who saved his life.

- [Interviewer] How can science help us understand the nature of flukes?

- One of the most interesting realms of science is evolutionary biology. And it tells us so much about why things happen in the world, because it's a historical science where the outgrowths of what we see around us with all the life forms, including ourselves, have come through this unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now, evolutionary biology has a major debate within it, that I think is really useful for understanding change in our own worlds, in our own lives. And this is the debate between what's called contingency and convergence. Now, they're very easy terms to understand. Contingency is where a small change occurs and everything ends up different. Convergence is where there's a set of order because certain things work, and you can sort of have a little bit of noise, a little bit of fluctuations, but you eventually get to the same destination in the end. So to put it in more concrete terms, the best example of contingency is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. So, you know, 66 million years ago, there's basically this little tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud, this distant reach of space. And it flings this giant space rock towards the Earth and eventually hits in just the right way for maximum damage and devastation in which the dinosaurs go extinct. Now, if this space rock had been delayed slightly or had hit the Earth slightly earlier, it probably would not have wiped out the dinosaurs. It might have missed the planet altogether. And if that had happened, not only would the dinosaurs not have been wiped out, but humans would not exist because the extinction of the dinosaurs was the precursor to the rise of mammals and eventually to us. So you can imagine this single second of change 66 million years ago. If that's different, everything in human history is obliterated. That's contingency. Now, convergence is where there's order and things are a little bit different, but you still end up in the same place. And my favorite example of this in evolutionary biology brings us to the octopus, because believe it or not, if you look at the eye of an octopus and you look at the eye of a human, they're extremely similar. Now, this is very bizarre because about 600 million years ago, octopuses and humans diverted on the evolutionary branch of life. They're on totally different evolutionary trajectories. But the thing is that the eye just works. It helps a living organism navigate the world, and therefore helps it survive. And there's only so many ways that an eye can evolve. So what happened was nature basically experimented over and over through undirected mutations, which is what evolution is built on, and it produced solutions that are extremely similar even for radically different organisms. Now, the reason this is important for us to think about is because the frameworks of contingency and convergence allow us to think about the paths that we have through our own lives and the ways that our societies evolve over time. So one of the ways I apply this to our own lives is with something I've coined called the snooze button effect. And the snooze button effect is a very easy to understand idea where you imagine that it's a Tuesday morning, you wake up, you're a bit tired, and the snooze button beckons to you. So you decide to slap the snooze button and sleep for five more minutes. Now you imagine that the tape of your life rewinds 30 seconds and you have a slightly different decision, and you decide not to hit this snooze button. Now the question is, what changes about your life? Anything that would stay the same regardless of this snooze button, that would be convergent, because even though you have this little fluctuation, this little change, ultimately you got to the same destination in the end. But if your life unfolds in a profoundly different way, then the snooze button would be a contingent event because that little tiny change has diverted the trajectory of your life. And what I'm arguing in "Fluke" is that the contingency actually plays a much bigger role. The snooze button, we can never see the alternative pathway. We can't imagine or know what would've happened, but we can understand that we'll meet different people that day. We'll have different conversations, a five-minute delay. Sometimes that causes a car accident. Sometimes it allows you to escape from a car accident. So all these sorts of things are constantly reshaping our lives. And I think because it's so bewildering to imagine that, that we are an infinite number of branches on the pathway of life, every single moment you make decisions, I think we just ignore it. But scientific fact and evolutionary biology tell us this is actually how the world works. So we're somewhere between order and chaos, and that's where our lives unfold. And I think these ideas of contingency and convergence allow us to structure our thoughts to understand the different extremes of how our lives can radically change or not change that much with every individual decision that we make. So if you look at the idea of convergence, I would describe it as everything happens for a reason. If you think of contingency, it's the stuff happens. And, you know, we think about these things all the time. When people make sense of random occurrences in their lives, they do sometimes think, "Well, stuff happens." And yet when bad things happen to us, we're pretty uncomfortable with the idea that stuff just happens. And so there's a lot of psychology research that suggests that contingency is something that we systematically ignore with bad news. There can't be a random explanation. There has to be a broader reason for this. There has to be a higher power behind it. There has to be some sort of sense that we can make of it. When good stuff happens to us, like you win the lottery, people have no problem accepting contingency. So the sort of stuff happens versus everything happens for a reason mentality is one that is a debate that's alive and well in evolutionary biology. And it's also one that we sometimes will see, you know, stitched on pillows in our homes when we try to make sense of the chaos and sometimes the disorienting tragedies of life.

- [Interviewer] How do ripple effects define our lives?

- One of the things that happens when we think about our lives is we think that there's a lot of small stuff that is just able to be ignored, where you can just imagine it's not important. And that's not how physics tells us the world works. So when you think about why things happen, physics tells us that there's an unbroken chain of causes and effects. That's what causes everything in the world, right, all the way back to the Big Bang. So there's all these reactions and things that are happening, and they eventually lead to you. They eventually lead to the moment that you are in. Now, the bewildering thing about that, the really strange thing to grapple with, is that then if you imagine your life as a sort of thread, Martin Luther King Jr. called this the garment of destiny, that we're all sort of tied together in these sort of mutual networks and so on. What it means is that the thread of your life is not individual, right? It is part of a tapestry. But the really extraordinary thing is that if you pull one thread, the whole image of the tapestry changes. It's not like you can just unravel your little bit. And that's because your thread is part of everybody else. It's part of everything else. It's part of the way that we have come to be. Now, if you think about this for more than a moment, it becomes quite obvious, right? Because we understand that, "Oh, if our parents hadn't met in just the exact same way, we wouldn't be here." Okay. But take that back. Your great grandparents, their great grandparents, and so on. Eventually you get to a chimpanzee-like creature, you know, six million years ago. If they hadn't met and made it, humans probably wouldn't exist. You keep going back further and further and further. And eventually there's an extraordinary story, my favorite fluke of all time probably, the one that we owe all of our existence to, which is probably the most improbable fluke that's ever happened, which is where two microorganisms, basically a tiny bacteria, bumps into a prokaryote and finds itself inside of it. And that is the origin story of mitochondria, which powers all of the cells that we have. It's the origin story of complex life. It happened once two billion years ago and never again since. And if that hadn't happened, none of us would be here. So when you think about these aspects of life, the sort of explanations that we have, the decision to try to unpick them in the threads, it just keeps getting longer the more you look at it, right? The thread of your life is also tied to the thread of your parents' life, which is tied to the thread of their parents' life, back and back and back through evolution to, you know, a single worm-like creature hundreds of millions of years ago that all of us owe our existence to. And if that creature had been squished, none of us would be here. Or you can imagine another finding from modern science in evolutionary biology, one of my favorites, where you look at the story of why mammals don't lay eggs. And 100 million years ago, the best scientific evidence seems to suggest that a single shrew-like creature got infected with a mutated retrovirus, which gave rise to placenta. And that's the reason why we don't lay eggs. And, in fact, if it hadn't happened, we probably wouldn't exist because we wouldn't be the same thing if we didn't have live births. So, you know, every time you look at the story of life, we imagine this sort of, you know, one thread, and it's just about us. And, in fact, this sort of interconnection, the fact that we are part of the tapestry of life and the tapestry of existence, I think is a profoundly beautiful way to think about the world. It's also a way to think about the world that is scientifically accurate because it is the case that we cannot experience, you know, one part of our lives without the others. And this also has philosophical implications that I find very comforting because the worst moments in our lives are inextricably linked to the best moments. They couldn't exist without each other. And that's quite literally true for me because every joy in my life wouldn't exist unless four children had been murdered in Wisconsin 119 years ago. And so if that's the case, then these sort of ripple effects, they're all stitched together. They're not separate. And yet when we think about the nature of change or we think about our own lives, we are told, you know, the American dream or some of these other ideas that pervade modern thinking, they tell us we're individual, we control everything. "Just, you know, do your best and you'll be fine." And sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's a useful way of thinking. But scientifically it's wrong. It's not true that we're individuals. We are part of the tapestry of life. And if you change any thread of any individual, the whole image of the rest of the world will change. Sometimes profoundly, sometimes not that much, but it does change.

- [Interviewer] How can we better understand the butterfly effect?

- So the origin story of chaos theory goes back to the 1960s with a man who was studying meteorology named Edward Norton Lorenz. He decided to use a very simple computer model to try to forecast the weather. It had something like 12 variables. And, you know, it was a simplified version. It wasn't going to be perfect. But he was doing a simulation and he decided, "I'll do a shortcut. I'll go back halfway into the simulation. And I'll take the values that were spit out by the computer and I'll stick them back in. And, of course, everything will turn out exactly the same because it's the same model, same data, should be exactly the same." Now, when he reran the simulation, everything in the weather patterns was super different. It was extremely, extremely different. And he was completely confused by this. He double-checked the data entry. It was all right. So he had no explanation for this. What he realized eventually was that when the computer would print out the data, it would truncate the values to three decimal points. So if it was, you know, 12.345678, it would just go to 12.345. And as a result of these tiny infinitesimal changes that he would have, everything in the computer model shifted. And this is the origin story of what we know as the butterfly effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings can create a hurricane many days later. It's also the reason why we can't forecast the weather very far into the future, because any data being, even a tiny, tiny bit wrong will create a profoundly different outcome over the span of some stretch of time. Now, this helps us understand why physics is showing us that the nature of change is contingent on small events. Because if the tiny little rounding error on a gust of wind or a temperature can lead to a hurricane or a blue sky, then of course that's also true for us because we are made of physical matter. We're not some magical beam that's separate from the rest of nature. And so when you think about this, this interconnection of all these tiny causes and effects which add up to the way the world unfolds, it becomes impossible to imagine that we have complete control, this delusion of individualism where we're sort of in charge of things. We don't control things. We can't control things because the world is uncontrollable. Now, in the past, there was an idea called Laplace's demon, which grappled with this concept. And it was an outgrowth of this sort of Newtonian mechanics of physics, which are extraordinarily effective at predicting how things will unfold in the sort of normal world of, say, throwing a ball, right? Before Newton, you would throw a ball, and you wouldn't be able to really know where it was going to end up because there's sort of these mysterious forces, and none of them are understood, and none of them are there for tamable. And Newton's genius was to develop these clockwork models where the equations were extremely effective at predicting the future based on a few key ideas like momentum, and wind speed, and all these sorts of things which you can measure and compute. Now, this gives rise to the idea of Laplace's demon, where the thought experiment goes a bit like this. Let's imagine that we have this perfect intellect, a perfect intellect that can understand everything. So it knows the exact location of every single atom, of an armadillo in Paraguay, or a person in Beijing. Whatever it is, they know everything. And the idea behind this is that if that intellect could accurately measure everything in the universe, then it would be able to see the future as clearly as it saw the past. In other words, there would be no mystery about the world because we live in a clockwork universe. Now, there's a few reasons why this is not the case. One of them is because it is impossible for an intellect to know everything about every atom in the universe. It's just simply never going to happen. So we're never going to be able to predict the future this way. And chaos theory shows the limitations of our ability to forecast, which we often get things wrong, although we're rarely uncertain when we make predictions. Now, the other side of this is that quantum mechanics has thrown a bit of a wrench in this because quantum mechanics shows that matter behaves at very strange ways at the atomic and subatomic level in ways that are potentially even completely random. And therefore, there's a challenge to what is called determinism, this idea that the sort of unfolding of events follows this clockwork model from the presumed indeterminism that many people interpret as the evidence from quantum mechanics. So when you think about the nature of change, physics tells us that chaos theory means that there are limitations to what we can know and what we can predict and that small changes can have enormous consequences over the long stretches of time. And chaos theory in human terms, again to return to the story of my own existence, a mass murder leads to this conversation. This is chaos theory. A small change in the past leads to a profound shift in what occurs in the future. And my existence is one of those shifts that came from it. So physics helps us understand that there is no way to forecast the future accurately. And the world of Laplace's demon is a pipe dream that will always prove elusive.

- [Interviewer] Part two, understanding complexity. What are the basins of attraction?

- Okay, so complex systems involve diverse parts where not everything is uniform. They're interconnected with each other. They interact with each other. And crucially they adapt to each other. And with these four features, human society is obviously a complex system. We're not all the same. We're not uniform, right? Whereas molecules and a gas, for example, are interchangeable. If you have the exact same molecule of a gas and you switch it out for another molecule of the same gas, it's gonna be the same. That's not true for humans. If we switch out a person, it's totally different, right? We obviously are interconnected. We obviously interact with each other and constantly have small diversions in our lives as a result of this. And we also adapt to each other. So when something goes wrong in someone's life, our lives change a little bit as well. Now, this on the large scale of human society means that we are a giant complex system of eight billion interacting individuals. And so these sort of old models that ignore that are going to be very, very bad at understanding change on human timescales. Now, there are a few other ideas within complex systems theory that I think are particularly useful for understanding how our lives unfold, partly between order and chaos. And we're in the middle there. That's where complexity thrives. Okay? So the first one is called the sandpile model, which is a subset of what is called self-organized criticality. And the sandpile model is really easy to understand where you have a grain of sand and you add another grain of sand and another grain of sand, and eventually you build up a pile. Now, at some point, the pile of sand is going to get so tall and so unstable, it will be on what physicists sometimes call the edge of chaos. And at this point, a single grain of sand can cause the entire pile to collapse. Now, that collapse can be produced by something so tiny and yet have such huge effects that it explains the nonlinear dynamics of that system where one tiny grain of sand can change everything in the pile. Now, this is something that I think we have engineered in modern society because of what are called basins of attraction. And a basin of attraction is where a system will tend to move towards this evolution of the system over time. Now, a great way of thinking about this is traffic on the highway. If you are driving down the highway, there is a speed limit. The speed limit is a basin of attraction for that system. Not everyone is going to drive 60 miles an hour when the speed limit is 60 miles an hour. But most people will drive somewhere near it. So it's sort of the system evolves towards that equilibrium of roughly around the speed limit. Additionally, the cars are going to be roughly evenly spaced. Of course there might be a jerk who's tailgating, there might be someone who's way far behind you. But for the most part, there's sort of this order that emerges from a lot of interconnected individuals driving cars, producing a relatively predictable system. The problem is that the modern basins of attraction we have for our societies are on the edge of chaos. In other words, what we do is we try to maximize the sandpile to its absolute limit so that we are prone to the avalanche. So what we do is we say, let's optimize, let's squeeze this last 2% of efficiency out of a social system. Let's do just in time manufacturing where if something arrives even an hour late, it's going to screw up the supply chain. And that's supposed to be good for us because efficiency is the main driver of so much of our modern social systems. But this means that the basin of attraction for our world is on the edge of chaos. It's at the absolute limit of the sandpile so that when the sand falls, it's more likely to cause an avalanche. Now, the problem is what happens, and this is where I think we make a profound error in understanding social disasters, is we tend to say, "Oh, well that was just a black swan." And now we've gone back to the normal way the world works. So 9/11 happens, or the financial crisis happens. "Oh, now we can go back to regular order." The problem with that is you've misunderstood the origin of those black swans. What's happened is you've developed a sandpile that's so tall that the avalanche is inevitable, it's part of the system. It will absolutely happen at some point. And so if you write those out as accidents, or as black swans, or whatever, you don't understand that they're actually part of the system. They have been produced by the system. They're not outside events or outliers. They're actually the inevitable culmination of a sandpile model that is a basin of attraction at the absolute limit, that is teetering on the edge of chaos in which a small change can cause a catastrophe. And so this is where I think the lesson for us is to prioritize efficiency and optimization slightly less, to build a slightly smaller sandpile so that it's more resilient, so when the sort of randomness or the flukes of life, the noise of life does happen, we don't end up with disaster. And this is where there's a great example from South America, there was an electricity grid that was designed where it was less efficient. It was also more expensive. But what they had done was they had decoupled regional hubs from the national grid. And this meant that when one part of the system failed, the rest of the system could still continue at greater cost with less efficiency. But it meant that when the blackouts did occur, it didn't affect that many people. And instead, what we have designed are systems that a single shock can reverberate around the world and change everything everywhere, all at once.

- [Interviewer] What are black swans?

- A black swan is a term that was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And he wrote a book of that same title. And what it basically refers to is a highly consequential rare event that was unpredictable. And so these are the kinds of things that wallop us in our complacency where we sort of think that the world is, you know, unfolding in very predictable, very regular patterns, and then, boom, all of a sudden something changes, and it changes the entire world. Now, people interpret this slightly differently. Some people say the pandemic was a black swan. Taleb disagrees with this because it was foreseeable in some way that a pandemic could happen. It's usually something that you couldn't actually foresee. It was impossible to forecast. It's related, by the way, to an idea that former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, used to talk about the unknown unknowns. The things you don't know, you don't know. So you can't plan for them. Now, one of the things that produces an early warning sign in natural systems, which is to say systems in the natural world, is something called critical slowing down, which is a new branch of science that I think will be developed further in the coming years and will be an important way of having an early warning system that a system has become more prone to black swan events. Now, normally what happens when there are fluctuations in an ecological system, for example, is that at some point, it's snaps back to normal. So you might have a fluctuation in, you know, how many mosquitoes are in the forest, or how many beavers are in a river. And then after that, you have, eventually this sort of noise gets back to equilibrium and things go back to how they were before. When critical slowing down happens, you have fluctuations that don't go back to equilibrium. They start to become really erratic. And they can measure how quickly it takes for a system to snap back to normal. This early warning system potentially can provide us with a red flag that things are a little bit unstable, and that this means that when a perturbation or sort of shock to the system is going to happen, everything can rapidly shift. And so there's all these sort of mathematical representations of complex systems that allow us to navigate uncertainty a little bit more effectively. I think it's hubristic and incorrect to believe that we tame these things. I don't think we're ever going to be able to tame black swans. But I think it's so important that we understand that the systems we have designed have not only made it more likely that black swans will hit us, but also that the consequences of them will be larger and they'll be faster felt by more people around the world. So this is where I think, you know, the sort of dogma of society around optimization and efficiency actually makes it more likely that those perturbations, those little shocks or flukes, are going to end up producing wild fluctuations that we see in terrorist attacks, and stock market crashes, and pandemics, and all of these other things that blindside us, but that profoundly reshape the way that our lives unfold.

- [Interviewer] How do we define the research model of social change?

- When we think about social change, and change in general, we have been drawn to very, very simple explanations. And it's because those are really comforting. They make sense to us. But the world is far more complex than it's ever been. And so those assumptions are falling apart. And the research we do doesn't fit the standard of the dynamics of the modern world. And one of the first assumptions that we start with is this idea that when you look at why something happens, that there's going to be a clear cut cause behind it. And, of course, sometimes this is true if we think about why people are developing cancer, for example. Yes, smoking is correlated with cancer and it is one of the main causes of lung cancer. But there's a lot of stuff that unfolds in the world that doesn't have a clear cut cause. It has an infinite number of patterns that had to occur in exactly the right way for that moment to unfold as it was. So, for example, you think about the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan. If all sorts of things had been slightly different, this would not have played out the same way. So if the Battle of Midway had not happened, or if Albert Einstein had not been born, or if uranium deposits had not been forged by geological forces, all of these things had to exist just as they were for that event to happen on exactly August 6th, 1945. And yet our models don't do well in trying to understand an infinite number of causes producing a single effect. Now, the second assumption that we have, which complex systems theory challenges and tells us is wrong, is that if you just understand the components of an individual system, you will therefore understand the entire system. And the reason that's incorrect is because complex systems are different from what are called complicated systems. It sounds like a very small nuance, but it's a very important one. So a Swiss watch, for example, is complicated but not complex. And the reason it's complicated is because it has a million interlocking parts. It's got all these little things in it that need to work for the watch to actually perform its function. But it doesn't adapt within the system if something breaks. So if part of the watch breaks down, the watch just stops working. A complex system is different. It's adaptive. So if one part of something changes, something else might shift in the system as well. And we can imagine this in our own lives because if you're in traffic, for example, if somebody pumps the brakes, it's not like everybody just keeps going and slams into them. They also pump the brakes and it affects the entire system. So this adaptation that we have in a complex system means that you can't just understand the constituent parts, you have to understand exactly how they interact with each other. And most models of social change are not good at that. So it causes us to misunderstand the world. The third big assumption, and this is something that's totally central to social science and a lot of understandings of change in the past, is that if something was a pattern of cause and effect in the past, it will also be a pattern of cause and effect in the present or in the future. And the Philosopher David Hume identified this problem many hundreds of years ago and highlighted it. But we've just sort of ignored it because it's very difficult to overcome. Now, the problem is that the world is more rapidly changing than ever before. So that means that this problem is particularly acute right now because the patterns of the past are least likely to apply to our current moment or to the future. And of course we understand this with things like climate change, where you look at models of weather. And someone will say, "Oh, it's 100-year flood." You say, "Well, hold on. The 100-year flood is happening every 3 years now." Well, that's because the pattern of the past no longer fits the pattern of the present. The underlying system has changed. And this is one of those really strange dynamics of social research that I think is difficult to wrap your head around, but is a very important question for understanding the world. So, for example, there's an analysis of authoritarian regimes and how they work and why they're so stable. And this analysis says that Middle Eastern regimes are extremely resilient, they're extremely stable. And then about a year or two after this book was published, the Arab Spring happens and all these regimes collapse in the span of like three months. Now the immediate reaction is to think this theory was wrong. It was disproven by the fact that they said they were stable and then they broke apart. But the second way of thinking about the world is that the world actually changed from the point that the book was written to the point when the regimes collapsed. And it sounds like a small nuance. But it's actually a very profound idea. It's saying that when they were writing the book, they were right. The world worked this way. The regimes were resilient. Then something happened and the world changed. And now the theory is incorrect. But not because it was wrong in the past, but because simply the world has shifted. And this is a really, really important idea to wrap your head around because so much of modern life runs on models that assume that past patterns are predictive of future ones. AI is also like this, right, where AI is learning based on past patterns and then trying to develop, you know, machine learning driven models that can help us navigate uncertainty in the future. But if the underlying world has shifted, then that analysis is not going to just be wrong. It's going to be dangerous because it will lead you astray to thinking that this is the way the world works, when in fact the world is now profoundly different. And the problem is we can't really test this. We can't know when the world has shifted because the only way we make sense of cause and effect is by looking at what happened in the past. And this is the point that Hume made. He says, "Look, if all we can know about the current moment is from the past, if those relationships are changing, then our information is not going to help us navigate uncertainty into the future." And I think that's one of the reasons why we are so often blindsided by things that are unexpected because we're applying the lessons of the past to a moment that is profoundly different from anything that has happened before in terms of social dynamics in the history of our species. So when we tried to understand why things happen in social systems, or in our own lives, or our own societies, the old way of thinking often involve what are called linear dynamics. Now, linear dynamic is very easy to understand. It just means that the proportion of a cause is directly related to the outcome that occurs, right? In other words, a small cause has a small effect and a big cause has a big effect, and the relationship between them is linear. Now, the way the world actually works is non-linear. And this means that sometimes a very small change can produce a very big effect. And complex systems theory and the sort of world of complexity science understands this and tries to incorporate it into its models. Now, one of the reasons why we used to have linear models was simply because of computing power. And this is another one of the flukes that has sort of lingered on to the way that we understand the world is that back in the 1980s and 1990s, computers just simply couldn't grapple with complex systems. They had to have simple dynamics where a straightforward cause is a straightforward effect, and there is a linear relationship between them, which can be spit out in a neat and tidy equation. Computer models have gotten radically better in technological advancement, but the way that we think about the world hasn't really caught up to it. So a lot of models that we derive our understanding of reality from, especially in the social sciences, are still linear. And it's a huge mistake. Now, the problem of course is that complex systems models are trying to come up with very difficult equations to explain a very complex reality. And it's not always easy, right? I mean, this is the kind of thing where we're not going to solve every problem. There is some uncertainty that can't be tamed. But we should acknowledge that linear relationships are wrong, that almost nothing in the world actually has a very straightforward relationship between the size of the cause and the size of the effect. And so, you know, complex systems theory, which is still a small minority of social research, I think, will be the future of 21st century thinking. It's not been, it's not completely new. It's been around for several decades. But it's still only forms a small slice of what social research is produced. Another reason why this exists is derived from a fluke that is arbitrary, which is the way that we design our silos of knowledge in university research. We have these very strict definitions of, this is a political science question, and this is an economics question, and this is a sociology question. And these people study physics and biology. A lot of people are actually thinking about change. They're not just thinking about these realms of knowledge which are totally disparate. And it's not like change happens completely differently, whether it's, you know, a mere cat versus a human. They have the same sort of aspects behind them because physics is determining the way the world works. So I think these silos between disciplines and sort of fields of knowledge are holding us back. And what complex systems theory does really, really well is it connects the dots. It brings these groups of thinkers together who are thinking about really different questions and says, "Hold on, let's try to see if there's any commonality in how we can understand change." And that requires non-linear thinking. It requires the idea of modeling a world in which a tiny shift, a little split second change of timing, or a little fluctuation that seems to be noise, can actually radically shift the way that the future unfolds. And we're not there yet. We don't have a complete understanding of this, which is why our forecasts are still so often wrong. But I think this is where the action is going to be in the intellectual developments of the 21st century, is jettisoning the old ways of thinking about these systems and thinking much more about complexity.

- [Interviewer] How can we resist the illusion of control?

- When we navigate our world, we tend to have what I call the mirage of regularity. And it's very easy to be seduced by this because the world does seem really stable. I mean, I think when we think about our daily lives, we can set the alarm at the same time every day, wake up, have roughly the same commute, go to the office. Things unfold in these highly predictable ways. And because of this, we start to think, "Okay, the world is controllable, the world is tamable, and we can just decide how things are going to unfold." This is however a mirage. And I think this is where the sandpile model, and some of the other ideas from complex systems theory, are so important for correcting that mirage and making us understand that it is just an illusion. The mirage of regularity is one where when you think about the 21st century, we have been able to delude ourselves into thinking we can make forecasts, right? We can say here's how the world is going to work. But every forecast has been invalidated by these black swan events. I mean, every single economic and geopolitical forecast was invalidated by 9/11 and the financial collapse of the financial crisis. We have every single geopolitical forecast about the Middle East being invalidated by the Arab Spring. Everything that we thought about the world was invalidated by the rise of Donald Trump. I mean, how different would the world be if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016? And that was a very close race. And it could have profoundly reshaped the world. And of course the easiest one is the pandemic. I mean, just imagine going back and reading the economic forecasts for what the 2020, you know, what the world in 2020 would look like written in late 2019. I mean, those forecasts were so unbelievably wrong. And I think one of the things that's worth thinking about is that we could never imagine some of these dynamics until they happen to us. So one of the arguments I make in "Fluke" is there are things that we call radical uncertainty where we can't simply understand the future in any possible way because the idea doesn't even occur to us. So, for example, if someone said to you, how much do you think that a person will use their phone in the year 2020, and they were asking you this question in 1995, there is absolutely no way you could forecast the answer correctly because, a, phones only existed to call people on in 1995. So you couldn't imagine a smartphone. You wouldn't understand that it was possible to spend all day on your phone. And secondly, you would not know that a pandemic was about to be unleashed, in which we were all stuck at home, bored and scrolling on our devices. So the forecast that we make are very often wrong. And yet what we do is we continue to make these assumptions under the mirage of regularity that are rarely uncertain, often wildly inaccurate. And I think the lesson we need to learn from this is that we can't tame the world, that we can't predict accurately. And so there are things that we have to separate from the questions we have to answer, from the questions we don't have to answer. So, for example, if you get a very strange medical disease that you don't understand, there's no diagnosis, no one knows what's going on, you still have to try to answer that question, right? You still have to say, "Here's what we're gonna try. This is the medicine we'll give you. We hope it works." If you want to make an economic forecast about the GDP growth rates or the inflation rates of Malawi in 2035, we don't have to answer that question. And we're going to be extremely wrong, we're going to look really stupid, because it's inevitably going to be inaccurate. So I think if we parcel out the parts of the world that we have to try to navigate through this uncertainty with the questions we must answer, and we separate it from the questions we don't have to answer, we'll make fools of ourselves slightly less often, and that will be a good thing for our societies.

- [Interviewer] What is the upside to uncertainty?

- One of the things that happened to me while I was researching this book and writing it was I realized that I don't think I have a cosmic purpose. I effectively believe that I'm an accident, and I'm an accident in a short sense in terms of the fact that I was born rather than somebody else to my parents, which, you know, could have been very different. But it's also a cosmic accident in the sense of humanity is but one evolutionary fluke that could have turned out differently if the trajectories of evolution had been slightly different. Now, this is something that a lot of people have a hard time accepting because the idea that I don't have a cosmic purpose seems to be jarring and uncomfortable. I actually think there's significant upside to this. And I think the reason there's upside to it is because the idea of certainty, which we seem to crave, we want to be certain and have control, is actually really awful, if you think about it. If somebody could tell you when you were born, here's everything that's about to happen to you, here's the partner you're going to find, here's the way your life's gonna unfold. I think that would be terrible. I think it would be awful to know all those things, the moment you're deaf. You know exactly upon being 13 years old that you're gonna end up marrying this person and you're gonna have these children, and so on. The sort of serendipity of life is where a lot of the joy comes from. The unplanned flukes are where our lives actually derive the most meaning. On top of this, I think it's also something where it allows us to let ourselves off the hook a little bit, right? Because if you believe that everything happens for a reason and you believe that you're universally in control of the trajectory of your life, then anytime something bad happens to you, any setback you experience, in that worldview, it's your fault. And that is terrible because it's often not your fault. I mean, I think about the things that have brought me to the moment I'm in now, and the most important ones are things I had zero control over. So I did not choose when I was born. I did not choose where I was born. I did not choose who my parents were. I did not choose my brain. There's none of these things were in my control at all, and they've had a significant, significant impact on my life path. And so I think what we do is we tend to pretend that we have the driver's seat of our lives, that we're sitting in the driver's seat of our lives, and that we're the ones who are determining the path. But, you know, the more you think about it, the less that's true. And I find it really helpful to imagine that when there is a setback in my life, that, yes, I'm going to try my hardest to fix it, I'm going to try my hardest to be a good person to live the life I want to live. But I also should take a lot less credit for my successes and a lot less blame for my failures because we're all part of this thing that we have a lot less control over than we pretend. So, to me, there's upside to uncertainty, not just in the serendipity of life, but also in the fact that we're just part of this cosmic accident that is existence that we don't fully understand. And I think the lesson of that accident is to enjoy life. I think that if you don't think that you have a grand purpose, if somebody else would've existed, but for a millisecond change, then maybe the best thing to do is to just try to make other people's lives a bit better and to enjoy being on the ride. And I think that's the way that I have sort of come to think of my own existence as a result of the revelation, that I am quite literally a fluke. Modern humans experience a different world and a different dynamic of our existence than anyone who has ever come before us. And the reason for that is because we've inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. So all of the past people, the hunter-gatherers that came before us, the sort of vast stretches of prehistoric humans, they lived in a world that was defined by what I call local instability, but global stability. And what I mean by that is that their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. It was difficult to navigate. They might starve one year because their crops would fail or because the animals they were hunting would disappear. And so they didn't have regular predictive patterns of life, and yet their world did not change that much. The parents and children of each generation would basically inhabit the same kind of existence. They would be hunter-gatherers. Their kids would be hunter-gatherers. Now, we have flipped that world. So we have what I call local stability, but global instability. So we have the ability to go to any Starbucks in the world and basically drink the same thing. And it's gonna taste roughly the same no matter which branch we're in. We have the ability to sort of order something online and we know exactly when it's going to arrive at our door. And, in fact, you know, we have extreme regularity in our daily lives to the point where when researchers looked at cell phone data, they found that they could predict with about 93% accuracy where any given person would be at any given time because we're creatures of habit. So our lives on a day-to-day basis are extremely stable. But our world is extremely unstable. This is the global instability. And that's because our world is changing faster than it ever has before. A lot of this is driven by technology. So, for example, I grew up without the internet. And now it's impossible to imagine life without it. And when I think about the way that the world is changing, you know, you used to have for every human who came before us, there was technology transfer from parents to children. They taught their kids how to do things, how to live, how to use technology. We flipped that. You have to go to your kids to ask them how to use new technology instead of the reverse. And on top of this, we've also engineered a world that is much more prone to shocks, to flukes, diverting the way that the world works. And the reason for that is because the world is hyperconnected and hyper-optimized in a complex system that is fragile. And what I mean by this is that when you think about the way the world works, we are people who worship at the altar of efficiency, the altar of optimization. The life hacks we have squeeze every ounce of inefficiency, don't have any sort of slack in your life or in your social system. But the consequence of that is that when things do go wrong, and they do, because this is the way the world works through chaos theory, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. So, for example, you can remember that in 2021, the Suez Canal was briefly blocked by a boat that was hit by a gust of wind and twisted sideways. It caused $54 billion in damage and disrupted global supply chains. Now, 50 or 60 years ago, it was impossible for one boat to wipe out $50 billion of economic value. But now we've embedded risk into our world because we are hyperconnected. So what this means functionally is that our world is upended by flukes much more than it used to be. And if you think about the history of the 21st century, it is a history of calamities and black swans that were not predicted, but have changed everything. So you have September 11th, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit, the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and so on. All of these things, unpredictable but highly consequential. And so what we have done is we've embedded the risk into the world through the fact that when flukes do occur or when small chance events and black swans hit us, they're going to change everything almost immediately. And this is where that sort of aspect of global instability is really dangerous. I think that we've actually engineered a volatile world, a world we don't want to have, where Starbucks is completely unchanging from year to year, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up. I think we would be much better off if we focused a little bit less on optimization, a little bit more on resilience, and tried to ensure that we had slightly more serendipity in our day-to-day lives and slightly more stability in the way that the world actually works.

- [Interviewer] Why is the world of self-help delusional?

- There is an entire industry that exists to lie to you about how you can control your own life. And it's called the self-help industry. And the self-help industry is pervaded by these simple life hacks, that if you just do X, you will all of a sudden bring all the wealth and joy and wonderful nature of life to yourself. You can just beckon it, right? One of my favorite examples of this, by the way, is a book called "The Secret," which is an extreme international bestseller. And it has this sort of idea that you just have to manifest things that you want in your life and they will come to you. It'll be like a magnet, right? I mean, the problem with this is that you look back in injustices in history and you imagine that this worldview says, "Well, why didn't they just imagine their lives slightly differently?" I mean, you think about things like colonialism or slavery, and it's like under the worldview of the secret, these people were to blame because they simply didn't imagine riches and freedom. And, of course, that's a ridiculous way of understanding the world. So one of the problems with the self-help industry is it says, "Here are the three things you need to do to become rich or the three things you need to do to become powerful." It writes out the arbitrary, interconnected nature of reality. And it tells you that you are therefore to blame because you didn't do these three things. And if you're poor, it's your own fault. And if you're rich, it's because you deserve it. And so I think one of the things that's really liberating about the worldview that I present in "Fluke," it tells you that you should not take so much credit for your success and you should not take so much blame for your failure. You should strive by all means. We wanna strive and make our lives as good as we possibly can. But that doesn't mean that you can take all the credit in the world when things go right for you. Sometimes it's luck. Sometimes it's nothing that you could control. And so I think these aspects of advice are actually much more useful than the self-help lies that tell you that you can conjure up the success that you dream of, and that if you don't, it's your own fault.

- [Interviewer] What is your position on free will?

- One of the things I realized while I was researching and writing "Fluke" is that I do not believe in free will. And the idea of free will is one that I think a lot of people try to contemplate and grapple with. But, to me, it boils down to a very simple question, which is, is there a difference between my mind and my brain? Now, linguistically we say yes, there's two different words to describe these things. But I'm what's called a physicalist, which means that I believe that the substance in my brain, the actual matter in my head, is the thing that is making decisions. I don't believe there's some sort of disembodied soul that is behind my decision-making. And I don't believe that there is some sort of other magical property within my head that is different from my brain. In fact, my entire body is part of a complex system that is producing decisions. And one of the things that I write about in "Fluke" is this, this moment in my childhood where I went to the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battlefield of Gettysburg, and I watched a film about Gettysburg. And for some reason, it just hooked me. I was obsessed with it. I was a nerd, which I'm sure comes as complete shock to the people watching the video. But I was a very nerdy kid, but I got obsessed with the Civil War. And as I did that, I wanted to consume Civil War magazines. I wanted to read all I could about this historic event. And I don't know why. I have no reason why. There's not some like weird version of the eight-year-old me that thought the best thing to be in life is a Civil War aficionado child, right? It's a very strange way to be. So I can't explain why I was like this, but my brain was drawn to it. Now, when I think about the explanations, I don't think there was an independent choice being made. I think it just, it fascinated me. And I think, you know, when, I'm sure there'll be many people in the comments who tell me whether they like me or dislike me, I don't think they have a choice over that. I think they are going to react to me in exactly the way that their brains tell them to based on their brain structures, the chemical reactions in their head, and also the encoding that you have through all the experiences you had in life, which slightly affect those brain structures. So the question of free will to me is a question about causation or why things are happening or why decisions are being made. Now, there are a few ways to think about this philosophically. And they're basically in three main camps. The first is libertarian free will, which is the idea that you have an independent ability to determine what your brain decides to do separate from the physical material in your head. So the world is not scripted. It doesn't unfold according to very, you know, cause and effect-based patterns. You actually have independent agencies separate from the physical matter in your body. Now, I'm not saying that this is impossible because we don't understand consciousness, but I am saying that if this is true, if the libertarian conception is true, then basically everything we know about science would have to be wrong. So I don't believe this. The second and third are called the compatibles mentality and the hard determinist mentality. Now, the compatibles mentality says that it is possible to simultaneously have determinism, which says that everything that happens unfolds in this very unbroken line of causes and effects, and therefore the world can be scripted. It can be this unbroken chain of causes and effects from the Big Bang up to the present moment. So everything that's happening now is directly caused by something that happened 13.8 billion years ago. But at the same time, we can still have free will. And the compatibilist argument says that's because you get to choose what you want to do. So some people will say, "You can't will what you will, but you can want what you want." In other words, you can pursue your desires, you can pursue your preferences free from coercion. So no one's putting a gun to your head and saying, "You must do this." But you can't necessarily choose why you like something. So if I go to an ice cream shop and I decide that I want mint chocolate chip ice cream, I'm always going to pick that in the compatibilist mentality because my brain has a certain structure and my experiences with mint chocolate chip ice cream in the past have been positive, and, therefore, given the state of my brain at that moment, I'm always going to choose that. "But it's still free will," they will say, because no one forced you to order vanilla instead. Now, the hard determinist agree with the determinism. They say, "Yes, there's this unbroken chain of causes and effects, and the world is effectively scripted, therefore." But that's not free will. So there's, in my view, basically a definitional debate that determines whether you end up in the compatibilist camp or the hard determinist camp. And there's a neuroscientist, Sam Harris, who's a controversial figure for some of the other things he talks about. But his ideas on neuroscience I think are really persuasive on this front where he says, "The difference between the compatibilists and the hard determinists is basically whether a puppet likes its strings." In other words, do you accept that you don't have control over your decisions because the world is unfolding in this very bizarre but scripted way where your brain is basically choosing things for you, and you don't have independent control over it. But you're basically a puppet. And so he says the compatibilist have a cop-out. They're basically saying that a puppet is free as long as it thinks its strings are nice. And so I think this is the aspect of free will that is very mind-bending. We don't have definitive answers to it. But if I had to pick a camp, I am in the hard determinist camp. And the one wrinkle here is quantum mechanics, because determinism says that there's this unbroken chain of causes and effects, back to the Big Bang up to the present moment, which is really weird to think about because it basically means that if you throw the Frisbee for your dog, as I do some mornings, that was directly an unbroken chain of events that was caused by the Big Bang. That's a really strange thought, but it might be scientifically accurate. Now, the sort of wrinkle in this thinking is quantum mechanics because, although we don't fully understand the meaning of quantum mechanics, the experiments are highly verified. And they do seem to show there is some undiluted randomness at the atomic and subatomic level. And this creates the question of maybe the world is not deterministic at all, maybe it's actually indeterministic, which is to say that sometimes there are these sort of random things that change the way the world unfolds. Now, we don't fully know this. There's different realms of quantum mechanics. Some of them, for example, the many world's interpretation or things like super determinism, et cetera, they can have a world in which quantum mechanics coexist with determinism. Whereas other interpretations, like the conventional, what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, is completely incompatible with determinism. It's, I think, an open question. I think a lot of people believe in indeterminism through quantum effects, but we don't really know. And so I think the aspect of this is you make your own answer. You interpret the evidence as you see fit. I have interpreted it to believe that there is no free will. Everyone will make sense of this in a slightly different way, which is, I think one of the most beautiful things about the human experience, is that eight billion of us can be presented with different information, different experiences, and our brains, whether we control them or not, are going to interpret reality in slightly different ways. The question is whether you could have thought something different from what you end up deciding in the end. And I would say no.

- [Interviewer] What do we get wrong about the concept of genius?

- One of the great myths that our society perpetuates is that if anyone is super rich, they must be a super genius. And this is not true. And there's a few reasons why this is not true, that when you start to peer in the dynamics of the correlation between wealth and talent, the whole idea breaks down, and luck plays a much bigger role than we are told. So the first thing to understand is that some human traits are normally distributed. They have a bell curve to them. And some are not normally distributed. So, for example, if you think about height, height is going to be clustered around a relatively narrow band. You're not going to find a human that's 1 foot tall, and you're not gonna find a human that's 200 feet tall, right? And as a result of this, you have a sort of normal distribution around a relative average. But wealth is not like this. Wealth is distributed on what has a long tail. It has this really long distribution at the top, and then a lot of people clustered towards the bottom. So there's a large number of people who have sort of average incomes and then a few people who might be a hundred, or a thousands, or even a million times richer than somebody else on the planet. And this creates a mismatch because in order to produce that long tail, you need to have some serious, serious luck. Now, my favorite study that shows this was a collaboration between some physicists and an economist. And they developed what is basically a sort of fake world with some crude relationships between wealth and talent. Talent is normally distributed. You have people who are clustered around a sort of normal area, the average of human society. And then you have a small number of people who are really talented and a small number of people who are really not so talented. But nobody in the world is like a billion times more talented than somebody else. It's much more clustered around this sort of middle value. And what this means is that when luck is introduced into the equation, when you have these sort of lightning strikes that we can think of with luck, they're going to hit in the place that has the most people. Because if you imagine a sort of bell curve where most people are in the talent spectrum, the idea that the lightning is gonna strike the one person who's the most talented in the world or the one person who's the least talented in the world, it's just highly, highly improbable. So instead what's going to happen is the lightning is going to hit someone around the middle value of talent. Now, when that happens, it's going to increase the chance that they become wealthy. If they get struck by lightning twice, the odds of them becoming extremely wealthy increase, right? So what ends up happening in these simulations they run is that over and over and over, the richest person in their fake world is not somebody of extreme talent. It's somebody who's marginally above average on talent who happens to get lucky. And I think this is the way the world works. I think we have a lot of complex dynamics that are producing these outcomes. Not to mention, by the way, all the things we can't control, like whether you were born rich, which is highly correlated with being rich in the future, and also whether you had a network that supported you through connections and so on. And a lot of people who are super, super rich, you know, pretend that they have earned everything, that they deserve their wealth, and that they obviously are the most talented person. And I think this is just so something that is fundamentally a myth. You have to have some talent. It's not possible to be become extremely, extremely wealthy if you have zero talent. But as long as you have some and you get lucky, you're more likely to end up on those long tails of the high degree of wealth. And I think this is something that our modern world infers backwards. That genius is something that always is attached to the people who are wealthy. And sometimes they were just the random byproduct of lightning hitting them rather than somebody else. Elon Musk is one of these great examples, I think, of someone who has some level of talent, but perhaps not as much as everybody pretends. And what happens with Elon Musk is, you know, I think he got lucky. I think he got super rich. And as a result of that, he inferred that therefore he must be a genius, and therefore that his skills are transferrable into everything else that he could possibly throw himself into, which has turned out to not be the case. So you look at some of the areas where he has had financial success. And then you assume, "Well, the reason for the success is because you're a genius." And geniuses, of course, all believe that they can control their own future and that their talent will see them through no matter what realm they enter. Now, Elon Musk has had some success with cars and with rocket ships, and so on, and some of that is due probably to his talent. But some of it is also due to the talent of the people who work for him, the scientists who run the breakthroughs, the funding mechanisms that allow him to get government grants and so on. And when he's been on his own, which is to say when he's acquired Twitter, for example, he basically lit tens of billions of dollars on fire and made that social media site worth a fraction of what it was before because his genius wasn't transferrable from one area. His so-called genius, I should say, wasn't transferrable to the realm of social media. And I think this is where, you know, when we have billionaires, they learn the lesson that they are so talented, that they can do whatever they want to. And I think it's one of the huge problems of society, is actually there's a lot of things about billionaires that are not due to luck or to talent. They're due to their greed. So one of the things that I think about with this as well is there is a degree of overconfidence and a degree of thirst for money that you have to have in order to become a billionaire. So with the thirst for money, for example, if somebody gave me $2 billion, the first thing that I would not do is say, "Oh my God, how can I get $3 billion?" I would give away most of my money because that is what I would think. I wouldn't think I need the $2 billion. People who are billionaires, they look at the two billion and they say, "How can I have three?" And then they get three billion and they say, "How can I have four?" So what's happened is you have a self-selection of certain traits that make it more likely these people will become super, super rich after they have gotten lucky, because they are greedy. And so, you know, I think there is a lot of the mythology around billionaires and a lot of the mythology around people like Elon Musk infers backwards, this straight line between talent and wealth. And there's so much more going on there. And I think the immediate assumption that the genius must be embedded in the person who is financially successful in one industry is a great misunderstanding of how our world works and the sort of arbitrary nature and sometimes the unfairness with which talent and wealth are not strictly correlated.

- [Interviewer] Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

- The modern world is full of conspiratorial thinking where people see an event and they come up with this extraordinary story, the hidden truth that explains everything. Now, the problem with that is it's often wrong, and that sometimes things just sort of randomly happen. And sometimes those things have very small causes. Now, this is a problem because our brains are driven to find explanations that fit a pattern, and our brains are also driven to find explanations that fit a narrative, a story that really compels us. Now, this is where you have two terms that are worth understanding if you want to understand the world of conspiracy theories, which are narrative bias and magnitude bias. So let's start with narrative bias. The human brain has evolved to make sense of the world through stories. And the reason for that is because stories have neat and tidy causes and effects. And when you understand the cause and effect, you're more likely to navigate the world in a way that allows you to survive long enough to reproduce. And that's the driver of evolution. So over time, our brains have gotten more and more attuned to pattern detection. Now, because of that, if somebody tells you a story, it's very seductive to us. It sounds plausible. If somebody tells you there's no story, that's not very attractive to us. Now, the problem with conspiracy theories is they're not just telling you a story, they're telling you a really good story, right? There's a hidden cabal behind everything that's happening. There's a secret pattern that you just have to be smart enough to detect. And once you do, you can be inducted in this group of people who understand the real truth, right? And that social glue sort of reinforces the conspiratorial thinking. So narrative bias is one of these things where conspiracy theories thrive in narrative bias because what you have is you have a thriller versus someone telling you nothing to see here. And the brain is drawn to the thriller. So even though some of these conspiracy theories are extremely insane and obviously wrong, they still have a lot of people that end up gravitating towards them because it's a good story. Now, magnitude bias is a slightly different idea. And one of the things that happens when you think about chaos theory is that sometimes very small changes can have very big effects. So, for example, you have the Arab Spring where a man decides to light himself on fire in Central Tunisia because he's disgruntled about his economic prospects. This is the trigger for multiple regimes collapsing and also a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, traced back to one person lighting himself on fire in Central Tunisia in 2010. Now, the conspiracy theories around this would tell you that there's something else going on, that there's some big plot, because this sort of random event of one man causing all of these catastrophes seems too strange to compute as a human brain. Now, on top of this, you have things like Princess Diana's death, which is also one of the areas where there's lots of conspiratorial thinking around it. And this is a, it's a car accident. It's basically a sort of random event where somebody was driving too fast and she died. Now, when you have a consequential event, you want to have a consequential cause, a large cause that explains it. So there has to be some sort of bigger story to make sense of this tragedy. And what's extraordinary about this psychologically within conspiratorial thinking is that research will show that conspiracy theorists will hold ideas that are quite clearly logically opposed to each other. So people who believe in Princess Diana conspiracy theories will simultaneously say that, yes, we think that she is alive and also that she was probably killed by the British government. Now, these two things cannot both be true, but they would rather accept that logical impossibility than the random explanation that there was some sort of small cause that was banal, which is to say she died in a car accident. So conspiratorial thinking is really difficult to debunk. This is one of the reasons why it's so sticky in modern life, because the fact-checkers, the people who are the explainers, are telling what Jonathan Gottschall calls the storytelling animal, that there is no story, right? We're a storytelling animal that gravitates towards stories and the people trying to counteract conspiratorial thinking say nothing to see here. And in that battle, it's a fight that's already lost, because you're telling someone who is evolutionarily predisposed to believe stories, that there is no story, move along, nothing to see here. And this is, I think, the best explanation for the conspiratorial thinking's pervasiveness in the modern world, is that you get exposed to these a lot more through social media and through the ways that we consume information, but they're simply sticky in our minds because we are predisposed to patterns and we're allergic as human beings to explanations that involve either randomness or small, seemingly unimportant changes. I think one of the other reasons why conspiratorial thinking is so prominent today is because the information pipelines that we use to get knowledge about the world have completely shifted. And this is something that's different from every other human who has ever lived. So if you think about the history of information flows, the history up until now has been a history of expanding the number of people who can consume information, but not the people who can produce information. So if you think about the printing press, or the radio, or the telegraph, or the newspaper, you still have a small number of people who write the news, and you have a larger number of people who consume it, from a very small number in the distant past to a very large number with the rise of mass media, and television, and radio, and so on. The internet has forever shifted that calculation because for the first time ever, we have gone from few-to-many communication to many-to-many communication. We have drastically expanded the pool of people who can make information and then disseminate it instantly around the world. And this means the barrier to entry for crazy ideas is significantly lower than it used to be. So people are routinely exposed to conspiratorial thinking in their daily lives in ways that weren't true in the past because you had to seek out conspiratorial newsletters, for example, rather than simply passively consuming them when you log onto the internet. And so this combination of the information pipelines shifting in the way that we understand the world and navigate it, combined with our evolutionary predisposition to storytelling and pattern detection, is a perfect storm for the rise of conspiracy theories as a major driver in our modern politics. It's a very dangerous development because if we can't agree on reality, we can't compromise. And democracies are based on a shared sense of reality, and then the compromise that is forged within it. And this is one of the reasons why I think there is so much polarization and democratic breakdown around the world, is because we simply inhabit different realities due to the fact that there has been such a surge in conspiratorial thinking around the world.

- [Interviewer] What are our conspiratorial cognitive biases?

- So when it comes to understanding conspiracy theories, there's three main cognitive biases that you need to grapple with. The first one is called magnitude bias. And magnitude bias is this idea that any big event must have a big cause, right? In a lot of our thinking about the world, we have these linear relationships and how we understand it. So anything that has a small effect must have a small cause. Anything that has a big effect must have a big cause. This is an incorrect and impossible way to imagine the world, because very often small changes make big effects. Now, the problem is conspiracy theories often revolve around really consequential moments, right? 9/11 or Princess Diana's death. And so we don't have this idea that there could be an explanation that is potentially small, like a car accident. It has to be something where these hidden forces behind it. And that's where magnitude bias causes us to misunderstand the world and over-interpret conspiracy theories as plausible explanations for big events. The second form of bias is called narrative bias. And this is where the human brain has evolved to make sense of reality through storytelling. And the reason for that is because stories involve a very neat and tidy cause and effect. And when you understand simple causes and effects, you can normally navigate the world more effectively. And certainly the hunter-gatherer brain that we're all derived from, right, 98% of the human experiences is basically derived from hunter-gatherer evolution. They lived in a simple world where simple cause and effect relationships were the way to survive. Now, the problem is that when you have these storytelling biases, this narrative bias, then when something random occurs, you don't end up accepting that the random cause was what produces the outcome. Instead, you want a story. And conspiracy theories are not just stories, they're really good stories. They would be thrillers if they were turned into films. And so if you think about the world that way, you have basically a debunking group that is trying to talk about why the conspiracy theory is wrong. They're saying there is no story. The rest of the people who are spreading the conspiracy theory, they're telling you, "Hold on, there's a really hidden story, a secret story, that's really attractive to make sense of the world." It's a losing fight. And it's one where normally the conspiracy theorists have an upper hand in this because of simply the ways our brains have evolved to make sense of this complex reality. The third form of bias is called teleological bias, which is effectively that there must be a reason for everything, right? Everything happens for a reason, is teleological bias in a saying. Now, I can speak from personal experience. I sometimes go on the news to try to explain events, you know, when I'm a pundit or whatever it is. And one of the things you can't say is, "I don't know." And you also can't say, "Maybe this was just sort of arbitrary, like sometimes just sort of random things happen." It doesn't make for good television because you don't want to be told that the guest has no idea either. So what you have to do is you have to sort of fit the world into these really clear explanations where exactly one cause produced exactly one effect. And you'll hear this when you listen to stock market news, right? Markets are reacting to whatever it is in the day. I mean, that's where you should be really worried that teleological bias has infiltrated the thinking of the person who's talking to you because the economy in the stock market is an unbelievably complex institution that does not have one cause for one effect. So conspiracy theories thrive on all of these forms of biases because they ultimately stitch them all together in a single really compelling big reason why things happen, a nice story, and one that gives you a reason to make sense of a bewildering thing that has occurred that is consequential in the world. And that's why the ability to debunk conspiracy theories is such a challenge for the forces who want to provide fact-based evidence for people who are speculating in the realm of these three cognitive biases. Debunking conspiracy theories is really difficult for all of those reasons, but yet we still have to try because it's really important to make sure that people don't fundamentally misunderstand the world or vote based on conspiracy theories that are ultimately wrong. However, it's really, really hard to do this. And so the best way forward is to try to clean up the information pipelines that we have that allow people to make sense of the world, to ensure that good information is provided to people, to also provide detailed fact checks that grapple with the parts of the conspiracy theory that make the good story and explain them in clear ways to show why it's incorrect. Now, a lot of people won't listen to this. This is the nature of reality. We understand that this is not going to get through to everyone, but it's worth trying. And I think this is something where if you understand that part of the reason for the storytelling bias, or for the magnitude bias, or for the teleological bias, is behind these conspiracy theories, you can more effectively debunk them. And I think this is where when people simply say, "Oh, you know, you're a fool. How could you possibly believe this?" It's better to engage on the terms that the person understands the world through and then explain this story is incorrect. Here's a better story. And the story is actually correct. It's truthful. It won't always work. But I think it's definitely something that we need to do because it is a huge part of the base problem that we're dealing with in modern society and modern democracies, people not inhabiting the same reality because they believe this conspiratorial thinking.