#806 - Brian Klaas - Chaos Theory: The Hidden Force That Secretly Controls Your Life

Chris Williamson
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Brian Klass. He's a political scientist, a professor at University College London and an author. Small, seemingly insignificant events can have profound effects on the world.

But how much of our fate is truly determined by chance? And if chaos plays such a huge role, how much control do we actually have over anything? Expect to learn the chance story of the atomic bombs targeting the difference between contingency and convergence. Why our brains are so good at distorting reality the link between Donald Trumps election and the dinosaurs, how a cigar changed the course of the american revolution, why floorboards in New England are 23 inches wide and much more. Those of you who subscribe to the three minute Monday newsletter will have already seen that I was blown away by this episode.

Its one of my favorites this year. Brian is a total underground hero. His stories are fantastic. He's got these anecdotes. I have no idea where he's found them.

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What is the chance story of the atomic bombs targeting? Well, so this story starts in 1926, and it's where a couple goes on vacation to Kyoto, Japan. And Kyoto is an incredibly charming city. It's a place where this couple sort of, you know, looked around. They recorded a beautiful day of sightseeing in the, in the man's diary.

Brian Klaas
And 19 years later, this man from this couple turns out to be America's secretary of war. His name is Henry Stimson, and he has a decision to make, which is where to drop the first atomic bomb. And the us government has basically decided on a target because they have something called the target committee, which is full of soldiers and scientists, and all of them agree that Kyoto was the top pick. Now, Stimson does not want Kyoto to be bombed, so he springs into action and meets with President Truman twice. He sends a whole bunch of cables trying to convince people to take Kyoto off the list.

And eventually Stimson gets his way. And so the first bomb is not dropped on Kyoto. It's dropped on Hiroshima. And the second bomb is supposed to go to a place called Kokura. But when the B 29 bomber takes off and flies to what is supposed to be a clear sky, it encounters this unexpected cloud, and they can't see the bomb site.

So because they're running low on fuel, they go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki. And the reason I opened my book with this is because it's this alarming but true aspect of our history, that the 20th century and the future of modern Japan and all of these things, and whether 200,000 people lived or died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to Kyoto and Kokura, hinged on one couple's vacation 19 years earlier and a passing cloud. And so I'm trying to take seriously the way that the world actually works, which is swayed constantly by these sort of random and small and seemingly meaningless. Details speaking about a attack occurring in the opposite direction. 911.

Chris Williamson
I didn't realize this. I think I was only maybe twelve or 13 years old at the time, but there was a storm the night before, and baseball games finished early and trains were available, or times had been changed, or people went to bed. And then because there was a storm the night before, it was a particularly clear day the next morning, which meant there's this crazy list of things just on that other event as well. Yeah. So there's a few things to think about with 911.

Brian Klaas
So one of the aspects of this is how timing matters in a huge way. And the most macro level way of thinking about this is that if it had been a storm on September 11 instead of September 10, maybe some of the planes wouldn't have taken off on time. Right. And the whole idea was a surprise attack. So if some of them had been delayed, then maybe you have this terrorist cell that just doesn't succeed and only hits one tower or whatever it is.

Right. That's part of the story. The other part of the story that I researched when I was working on my own work. And then I ended up meeting this guy, actually, after I published fluke. It was an amazing meeting.

It was this guy who was flying into New York on September 10, and he was supposed to meet his colleague Elaine, and they were going to have dinner together to prep for their conference, standard sort of thing you do in a business conference. But because he was delayed, they postponed it to the morning. His shirt was all wrinkled from 10 hours of travel that was supposed to be 3 hours of travel and so on. And so they meet the next morning, and she gives him a gift that she was planning to give him that night, the previous night. And the gift was a impressionist tie, a tie of a Monet painting.

And so in the moment, he's so moved by this because he knows that he has told her he really loves these sorts of ties, and she's gone out of her way to get him one that he decides to put it on, and he says, I'm going to wear this for the presentation. But because his white shirt was wrinkled on the storm day, all he's got left. And what he's wearing is this pastel green shirt, right? So he's like, okay, I'm gonna put it on. And she says, you can't wear that.

Like, you'll look ridiculous with this green shirt and this monet tie. So he says, don't worry. I'll go back to my hotel room, and I will iron the shirts, and then I'll meet you up there. And so he goes back to the room, and he starts ironing the white shirt. And as he's doing this, the first plane hits the World Trade center, which is where the conference was, and his colleague Elaine is killed in the explosion.

And so it's this incredibly bizarre moment where the confluence of a million factors. I mean, he stopped to look at an art museum a decade earlier, and that's why he developed this love for impressionist ties and this kind act by this colleague and the conference being put in this place and so on. All of this added up to this split second moment where, you know, being in the right place at the wrong time meant survival, and being the wrong place at the wrong time meant death. And what was really striking to me that I didn't include in my writing because I didn't know, I hadn't met him at the time, was what he said to me was he said the most annoying thing that anyone ever said to him after this happened, and it was a really traumatic experience for him, and it really upset. It messed his life up in a huge way to have gone through the survivors guild.

He said, everyone said, everything happens for a reason. To me, this is the way that I'm supposed to make sense of this. And he said, that is the single worst thing to say to someone in that situation, because it suggests that the world meant that Elaine was supposed to die and that he was supposed to live. And the pressure that puts on a survivor who's just the byproduct of a random accident is immense. Right?

So I think it's all of these sort of stories about the nature of how the world works also have philosophical interpretations for how we make sense of good or bad things happening to us. And that's why I think that story is so profound. But it's also one where, as you said, the storm on 911, had it been a different day, maybe the twin towers wouldn't have been hit. So if everything doesn't happen for a reason, does anything happen for a reason? Yes.

So this is one of those very difficult questions to answer, because so much comfort in the world is derived from the idea that there's a greater purpose to suffering, right? And I don't believe that. So I don't think that anything does happen for a specific reason or some grand purpose. I don't think my life has a cosmic purpose. So where do I derive comfort?

Right? And the way I derive comfort is that I think that you're sort of in this incredibly improbable thing that we call existence, where we have a tremendous amount of influence on the world, right? So one of the things I argue is that so much of our world is predicated on the idea that happiness is derived from control, right? That you like. If you control things, you will be in charge, and therefore that will allow you to feel happy and content.

And I don't think we control anything. I think that in this interconnected world in which, you know, getting a tie gifted to you can determine whether you live or die in a moment. Your control is really limited, but our influence is unlimited. Right? And so I have this phrase I come back to over and over, which is that we control nothing, but we influence everything.

And this is a phrase that I've sort of rift off from a guy named Scott Page, a complex systems theorist. And I think that this way of thinking about the world is actually really liberating, because it doesn't mean that there's always this hidden hand that's directing our lives that we have to uncover. It's instead saying that every moment is producing ripple effects that we may not understand or that we may never see, but that they're meaningful. And so, to me, you can still have a tremendous amount of comfort from a world of unlimited influence, even if it's very, very limited control. And I think that's flipping the sort of way that we're supposed to think about the world on its head.

But for me, it's enough. For me, it's enough to think that what I do is going to influence the way that other people's lives unfold. People listening to this podcast, their brains will be altered slightly by what we talk about. It will affect their trajectory through life, sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a small way, and I can't control that. But I like that we have that influence.

And I think that's the way that I grapple with what I believe is a scientific truth, that there is not a grander purpose to everything that happens to us. Yeah. There's an interesting analogy that you use talking about how even if you plant a tree and 100 years later, some small child falls out of it and breaks their arm, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't plant a tree because you're unable to have the clairvoyance to know all of the potentially positive and negative externalities downstream. Exactly. I mean, I still live probabilistically even though I know that there are things that I can't anticipate.

Right. I mean, yeah, like you didn't plant a uranium bomb or something. Yeah. And like, of course, like, you know, Elaine did the right thing by giving a gift of a tie, but it turned out to produce this catastrophic, you know, impact for her where she was in the wrong place and she saved his life. And she didn't anticipate that in the 911 example.

I mean, the other thing I should say, and this is something that, you know, it comes up very early in my writing, but it's, it's a story from 1905 about a woman in Wisconsin, and she has a mental breakdown after having four young children in sort of rapid fire succession. The oldest, I think, is four years old in 1905. So it's sort of every year she has a kid and she has this mental breakdown, and we don't know exactly why it happens, but she ends up deciding to murder her children and then commit suicide. And her husband came home and found all these kids dead and his wife dead as well. And the reason I put this in, and I talk about it a lot is because this is my great grandfather's first wife.

Her name's Clara Maudlin Janssen. And my great grandfather ended up remarrying later on, about a decade later, after he dealt with the trauma to what became my great grandmother. And so I was told this when I was 25 years old. I don't remember the exact period when I was told it, but I was in my twenties, and I had no idea. And all of a sudden, you get this information where it's like, first off, this is like a really disturbing part of your family history.

There's this mass murder that you didn't know happened, but then the second thing you think about is, I wouldn't exist if those kids didn't die. Right? And it's quite literally true. I mean, this is not something that's sort of an analogy or anything. It's literally true that the happiest moments of my life are inextricably intertwined with their deaths.

So, like, a baby dies, and that is part of the causal chain of events that leads to me having the best moment in my life. And so a lot of people don't have to think about that because they don't have such incredibly, incredibly grotesque and macabre parts of their family history that they contemplate all the time. But it really throws into relief what all of us are dealing with, which is that all the worst things that happened in the past that led to us are part of our story. And what I always, whenever I talk about this with people, I always say, you've been roped into this now because you're listening to my voice, because those children died. I wouldn't be on your podcast if those kids hadn't died.

And so all of this stuff, I think the main idea that I'm trying to suggest is that chaos theory, which is a scientific theory about how tiny changes can have profound effects in the world, also applies to our lives. And it's much better if we just accept that than pretending we can write out the little noise bits that we say are unimportant. Because quite literally, this podcast was through a very, very complex chain of events produced by a mass murder in 1905. Wild. I was on tour November and December last year, and one of the guys I was on tour with basically did a forking paths experiment in front of us, and he checked us all in.

Chris Williamson
So there's four of us here. We were staying in Chicago at this nice hotel, and he got all four cards out and said, it's so strange. Said, you know that depending on which one of these cards I give to which one of you, this could change the entirety of your life. Everything could change because of me doing this to you. And when you actually start to drill into that, it sort of breaks your brain.

It kind of makes me go into sort of like debug mode, and I control alt delete myself. Yeah, well, I think the problem is it has to break your brain because it's true. And I think this is the thing where the way I try to always explain this to people, because a lot of people are skeptical of this, right? They sort of say, well, you know, it doesn't really matter. Like, if I turn left versus right and so on, you know, it all sort of get washed out.

Brian Klaas
And what I always say to them is, you know, whenever we watch science fiction films or read science fiction books that involve time travel, you completely agree with me. Whenever there's time travel involved, because when you travel back in the past, we are always told in the premise of these books or these films or whatever, like, don't touch anything. Because if you squish a bug a million years ago, or if you talked to your parents 100 years, 50 years ago, whatever it was, then you will delete yourself from history. You might even delete humanity. If you squish a bug in the prehistoric past, maybe you'll end up making it so humans don't exist.

And all of us are sort of like, yeah, that makes complete sense. These little changes can add up over time. And what I always say is, why would that possibly differ between past and present? It's not like cause and effect has two modes. Cause and effect has one mode, and it's exactly the same in the past as is in the present.

And what that means is that when we squish a bug now, we are affecting a million years into the future, when we are going to have a conversation with someone now, we're affecting the people who might be born in the future. And I think the thing is that the third part of the subtitle of my book is why everything we do matters. And I'm bringing it up simply because I think when I say that the first time to people, they say, oh, it's like this turn of phrase that you could, you know, put on a self help pillow or something like that. I mean it as a scientific truth. I mean it that there's literally nothing that we do that has no ripple effect.

And so when you get those cards, yes, it's changing your life, but so is everything. So is every word you say. Because there's no part of our existence that doesn't have an action that affects other people or the trajectory of our lives or even at a basic level, our neurons. Right? I mean, eating a ham sandwich as opposed to a cheese sandwich.

Your brain is slightly different. Now. Will we notice that maybe not, right. We can never see how the world might have been. But in aggregate, this is something that does add up.

And the ironclad logic that I've never heard anyone argue against is, without going into the details of a child being conceived in graphic detail, the exact instant that that happens, if it's a microsecond different, a different baby's born, right? Because you're going to change a little tiny thing, and all of a sudden, a different sperm cell is going to produce the child. And that means that that day, if you pause to have a sip of coffee, or if you send a text or don't send a text, all of a sudden you've slightly adjusted the timing of that moment of conception. But that's literally true for every part of your life, right? Just in case, Brian.

Chris Williamson
Just in case. There were some guys listening that don't have enough performance anxiety already, they're now thinking, like, oh, my God. Like, should it be this thruster? Should it be the next thruster? Brian, that guy on the podcast told me that he's going to change the entire future.

There it is. I appreciate that. Normally I say I'm not going to go into graphic detail, but, yes, it is true that which thrust it is will affect which child it is. And I think, you know, I find, to be honest, though, the flip side of the performance anxiety, because this is, like, there is something that's, like, crippling anxiety for people with this, like, the idea that everything they do is affecting their life. I think it's exactly the opposite, though, right?

Brian Klaas
I mean, you had Oliver Berkman on your show, and he talks about this sort of aspect of giving up control and so on. And I think there's something really profound about accepting the limits of our control, but also about understanding that every moment counts. Right. And I think there's something about the modern world that does create anxiety, malaise, depression, et cetera, which makes us feel somewhat interchangeable. Right.

What does it matter if I go to work? Like, my company is just going to replace me anyway? I'm just a cog in the machine. And that viewpoint, which I think is producing lots of really poor mental health in people, the scientific antidote to that is that every moment of your life is affecting the trajectory of the universe. And whether that's in a huge way that you can see or in a small way, it is changing things.

And I think there's something really empowering to me about that, where us thinking we're just sort of interchangeable dust is just scientifically totally wrong. It's not the case. It's not the way the world works. So, you know, yes, okay, maybe you'll have some performance anxiety about when you're trying to conceive a baby, but it's also something where it's profound. To me, it's profoundly beautiful.

Chris Williamson
Anyway, I've read a number of really great articles from you before I read the book, actually, one of them was about this great series of micro petri dish things. I want to talk about that. But you have this gorgeous, like, taxonomy breakdown where you say short term, like short term blow up risk and long term unpredictability ancestrally versus sort of what we have now. Can you just explain that? Because I think that's a really important frame.

Brian Klaas
Yeah. So I think one of the reasons why we underestimate the role of chance and randomness and flukes in the world is because we have something that nobody else has had in the history of humanity, extremely stable day to day lives. So we've basically flipped the dynamics from every human that came before us, minus the last two generations or three generations or so. So what I mean by that is that if you think about, like, what happened in a prehistoric human, the early homo sapiens lives, they couldn't know what was going to happen to them day to day. I mean, one day they might get eaten by a saber toothed tiger, or they would starve to death, or they would get attacked by a rival group.

All sorts of things that were unpredictable and upheavals that sort of ruin their lives or sometimes cause their death were lurking around the corner. But the overall structure of the world didn't change. So what I mean by that is that if you learn how to hunt and how to gather in the hunter gatherer period, those same, exact same tools and exact same tactics are going to work for 100,000 years. So you can have generation after generation after generation that is basically inhabiting a very unstable day to day world, but a very stable macro world. And we have exactly the opposite of that.

So what we have is a world. I have this line where I say we've sort of engineered a world where Starbucks never changes, but rivers dry up and democracies collapse. And what I mean is that if you click order on Amazon, you'll get a package at a sort of prearranged time. You'll go to a Starbucks anywhere in the country and you'll get the same coffee. All these things have been sort of constrained in ways that make them highly, highly predictable.

And this gives us what I call the illusion of control, this imagination that everything is in this sort of clockwork way really, really tameable. And at the same time, the world itself is changing, not just generation to generation, but year to year. I mean, generative models with large language models like chat GPT didn't exist a couple of years ago. I mean, the pandemic hit a couple years ago. We had, I can rattle off the there's the Iraq war, 911, the Arab Spring, the financial crisis.

I mean, all these sort of massive upheavals happening in short periods of time. And so we basically have a world in which parents are learning from their children as opposed to the other way around. And that's never happened before. So I think it's what's caused us to systematically discount the role of chance and randomness is because our lived experience is extremely stable and free from flukes, whereas our actual structure of the world is consistently being swayed by, say, a mutation of a single virus in Wuhan or a small part of one part of the american economy having a meltdown and that causing a financial crisis. So it's a fundamentally different dynamic from every other period in human history.

Chris Williamson
I think there is an illusion of control that we have. If we can predict what the weather is going to be tomorrow in San Antonio, Texas, why can't I? It also, I think, feeds into why we get so frustrated when things occur seemingly outside of our control. God, how can people get ill? Why am I sick?

Why is the traffic, why is there a traffic jam? Look at all of the seeming degrees of control that we do have. But I think you're right. I'm still not sure how empowering versus disempowering it is for me. But I do think that you're right.

The blast radius is from whatever the present moment is. Now you just start to realize this. So you mentioned there a number of sort of black swan blow up, kind of catastrophic y risk things. There's a very famous analysis done of headlines during the 1920s, before the Great Depression, looking at how many people predicted that there was going to be a great depression. Zero.

None. None. Zero. No one. No one, absolutely no one predicted that.

Go back to 2018, early 2019. How many people predicted that there was actually going to be a big pandemic? Like handful of people that kind of are just scatter gunning this probabilistic? Oh well, if you play about with gain of function research and if we have desktop biosynthesizers and blah, blah, blah, basically no one using that sandpile model, what did you learn about the way that large, crazy events are sort of contributed to from very small things. Yeah.

Brian Klaas
So I think we basically think about these problems in exactly the wrong way. So we always describe them with a word that is constantly used and I think is wrong, which is shocks. So we always imagine that there's a sort of lightning bolt that hits us. Right? It's like, oh, my gosh, we don't know where it came from, but all of a sudden, this massive shock occurred.

And I think a better way of thinking about this is that you can create systems that are more or less fragile and more or less resilient, and then the seeming black swan events that sort of wallop us and ruin our lives and so on, they are the byproduct of fragile systems. So they're not out of the blue. They're systems that have been stretched to the limit, that become more likely to have these shocks as we conceptualize them occur. So the sand pile model is basically this way. It's drawing from physics, but it's basically this.

This idea that if you add a grain of sand over and over and over to a pile, eventually the pile will be so tall and so fragile that a single grain of sand can cause an avalanche. Whereas if the pile is much shorter, if it's much smaller, it's less likely that any grain of sand will cause an avalanche. And the way I think about this, in social systems, the easiest analogy is the arab spring to me, because in late 2010, this guy named Mohammed Bouzizi lit himself on fire in central Tunisia. And this leads to the collapse of multiple dictatorships. It leads to the syrian civil war with hundreds of thousands of deaths.

It leads to this huge calamity in the Middle east right now. If somebody lights themselves on fire, God forbid, in Norway or Finland tomorrow, it will not cause a civil war. I can predict that with high levels of confidence, and that's because the social sand pile in Norway is low, whereas in the Middle Eastern dictatorships, the people were stretched to their absolute limits. So the sand pile was really, really tall. And so we think about the arab spring as a shock, but it's like, no, we actually allowed this very, very tall sand pile to just sort of fester there for a long time.

Should we be surprised when a single grain of sand can cause the avalanche? And so I think this is the kind of way where you have to think about resilience and systems much more. And most of our economic and political models are not about this. Right? Quarter three profits are all about short term gains, elections are all about short term performance.

Resilience is about long term planning. And so a lot of our economic and political reward systems basically discount resilience and amplify fragility. And it's why I think we have sandpiles that are pushed to the absolute limit and why it shouldn't be surprising that these seeming shocks are happening with greater regularity than they were before. Isn't it interesting that you can have a sand piley event in the opposite direction, moving towards something that almost everybody regards as a universal good, maybe like a Rosa Parks situation? You have this sort of burbling sense below the surface.

Chris Williamson
You have something that occurs, and then that's the match that begins a movement toward a better future. But I guess you've got an interesting idea about whether or not you kill baby Hitler. Why? Is that a useful model? Yeah.

Brian Klaas
By the way, I love the point you just made, which no one has ever made to me, but is absolutely true, which is that the sandpile doesn't have to be bad if it collapses. Right? If a system of oppression. Real science here. Yes.

But if a system of oppression is pushed to its limit, then, yes, a single person can bring it down, which is actually a very empowering idea given the amount of oppression in the world. Now, when it comes to baby Hitler, this is the classic intro to philosophy thought experiment that lots of people have contemplated, where it's, if you could travel back in time and you're sitting in a room and baby Hitler is sitting there, would you kill him? Right. And what it's usually used to sort of highlight is whether you are a utilitarian or a kantian when it comes to ethics. So do you think about the consequences, in which case, you would kill Hitler because you'd want to save 6 million people, plus the world war two, et cetera.

Or would you say, no, it's wrong to kill babies? Therefore, I couldn't kill him until he committed horrible atrocities and so on. But what this question is really about is about causality, because what you don't know is, would killing baby Hitler actually produce an aversion of World War two, or could it actually be worse? Sometimes? And this is what Stephen Fry, he's got a novel that not many people have read, but he has a really interesting novel that imagines traveling back in time to make Hitler's dad infertile.

It's not the exact same as killing baby Hitler, but the same sort of idea. And in that novel, a more disciplined Nazi emerges, becomes the leader of the Third Reich, and wins World War two, because they get the atomic bomb sooner, and so it actually produces a worse outcome. And this is the kind of stuff where I think, when you understand these unanticipated ripple effects of actions, questions about morality are also questions about causality. Why do things happen? And if you think you're certain that killing baby Hitler would be a net positive, you don't know, because there's decades of intervening time, and you might produce unintended consequences that could actually make the world worse.

Chris Williamson
Talk to me about the difference between contingency and convergence, then. Yeah. So this is a framework. I try to be a bit of a sponge from other smart thinkers, and these are smart thinkers in the field of evolutionary biology who are trying to understand why species rise or fall. And they have two basic frameworks for it that I think are incredibly useful for how humans should think about their own lives and how we should think about our societies as well.

Brian Klaas
Contingency, in a nutshell, is the shit happens version of reality. I think I called it the stuff happens in the text. But, you know, we can be a little bit less. Less PC here. The shit happens version of science, where things just sort of happen, right?

And the convergence idea is sort of the everything happens for a reason version of science. There's sort of like order and predictability and so on. And my favorite examples of this, very briefly contingency, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, it was flung from the Oort cloud in the distant reaches of space. It hit the earth in exactly the worst place for the dinosaurs because it had this gypsum rich rock, which basically produced a toxic mass. Tell me more about that.

Chris Williamson
I didn't know about this. Yes. So, basically, when you look at the sort of origin story of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the best scientific theory suggests that there was an oscillation in this place called the Oort cloud. And the Oort cloud flung this rock towards the earth, and it hit the earth off the yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago. Now, if it had hit most other places on the planet, the dinosaurs probably would have been partially wiped out, but probably wouldn't have gone extinct.

Brian Klaas
The reason they went extinct is because there's this really gypsum rich rock in the shallow seas off the yucatan peninsula that, when it was vaporized, produced a toxic gas. So the initial die off happens from the heat, which is 500 degrees, incredibly, incredibly hot. But some of the animals would have survived. And then the second die off is from this toxic gas cloud, and it's much deadlier. So what this means is sort of two things.

One is that the only things that survived could either dig or swim. So, basically, all life, all animal life that exists today was either descended from a digger or a swimmer 66 million years ago. And then the other thing that's really bewildering is that if the asteroid had been delayed by a second or had been sped up by a second, dinosaurs probably wouldn't have all died, and then maybe something else would have gotten them. But the story of humanity is the story of dinosaurs dying, mammals rising, and then eventually evolution producing us. So you have this very strange contingency, which is that if this space rock had been a second faster or slower, none of us exist.

So that's the ultimate shit happens version of science, right? The convergence version. My favorite example of it is the eye of an octopus and the eye of a human are basically exactly the same. So there's slight differences and so on, but the structure is very, very similar. And this is extremely weird, because what became humans and what became octopuses diverged on the tree of life 600 million.

Chris Williamson
Years ago, before any optical sensing machinery existed in either of those branches. Exactly. So, in totally separate terms, totally separate lineages, they solve the same problem twice. And obviously, they're not learning from each other or anything like that. It's just evolution solved the same problem twice.

Brian Klaas
And so what it's basically telling us is that sometimes things work, and when they work, they might happen more than once. And so there are structures and rules and patterns to the world. So convergence is sort of like this idea that maybe you were always destined to end up going to a certain university, and convergence would say, okay, no matter what you sort of do in your childhood, you're going to end up at this place. Contingency would say that maybe if you hit the snooze button on a certain day, you don't meet your spouse because you don't bump into them, or you don't meet the person who introduces you, or you don't swipe on the app, whatever it is. So, this is the kind of stuff where I think both of them are constantly happening.

There's basically contingency and convergence that are both structuring our world. But I think they're really, really good frameworks for thinking about change, because contingent moments divert our trajectories forever, and convergent moments sort of push us towards an outcome that is more likely because it's going to work in the same way that the eye is helpful at helping us survive. William, it's very interesting to think about what are the. It's not an inevitability. Nothing is necessarily an inevitability.

Chris Williamson
But what are the things that are closer to inevitable in our future? How likely or unlikely was it for me to end up in Texas for you to write your book? You know? Yeah, and we never know the answer to that. I mean, I think the fundamental thing that people don't think about enough is that there are an infinite number of possible worlds and that we only see one.

Brian Klaas
So everything that happens to us makes sense because it's the only thing that's happened. So we stitch it together in this story. I mean, and we will never know. So, like, if you end up meeting your spouse or if you end up at a certain university, that could have been a one in 100 probability, or it could have been a 99 in 100 probability, and it would look identical to you because it's the only thing that happened. So you have no way of knowing whether this was a rare and unpredictable oddball event or whether it was basically inevitable.

There's just absolutely no way to do this because you can't rerun the world. So, fun. What do you mean when you say that our brains distort reality? Yeah. So this is drawing on neuroscience and sort of evolutionary principles of how we have cognition and how we process reality.

Our brains are not an objective, neutral computer, right? They are an evolved organ that has been shaped by forces that basically reward things, that help humans or our predecessors survive long enough to have children. So evolution has shaped our brain in a way that helps us survive and navigate the world. And one of the ways that it does that is by over detecting patterns. And what I mean by that is like, you know, let's.

Let's imagine we're 200,000 years in the past, and there's some predator that might eat us, and we hear this, like, rustling in the grass nearby. Well, if we imagine that it's probably the predator and we run away, all that happens, if it turns out to be nothing, is we've wasted a little bit of energy, but if it turns out to be something and we ignore it, we will die because the predator will eat us. Right? So there's this sort of asymmetry which rewards pattern detection, and it's basically much, much worse to under detect patterns for survival than it is to over detect patterns. And so our brain, as an evolved organ has basically rewarded pattern detection.

And, you know, like, one of the examples that's very easy to sort of show people is if I say. I'm going to say six words, and I would guess that 95 plus percent of listeners will have the same image in their head. So I say a tiger, a hunter, a tiger, right? And if I say that most of us are not imagining that, I'm talking about two tigers on different parts of the planet, right? Like, we're not imagining that there's, like, a tiger in 1950 and a tiger in 2024.

Like, we stitch together a narrative automatically because there's supposed to be an underlying pattern. And so this is something where we have a tool in our heads that's very, very effective for helping us survive, but it over infers patterns and under infers randomness. And this is why I think we basically discount things that are chance, random, fluky things, because our brain rewards us when we do that, and it also helps us survive. I mean, I think it is something that's very important where pattern detection is useful in the modern world. There are problems with this, and one of them is conspiracy theories, because pattern Detection is extremely seductive.

And when someone says to you, hey, look at this set of pieces of evidence that are seemingly unconnected, and now I'm going to show you how you can stitch them together, our brain is just latching onto that. It's the same reason why mystery novels are so compelling, because you have all these pieces of seemingly unconnected data. And then in the last ten pages, the detective says, aha, it all fits, right? And so our brains are, you know, our literature, our brains, et cetera, all of them are fitting together in this way that basically rewards pattern detection. That is very interesting.

Chris Williamson
I've never thought about that before. The fact that if you're reading some true crime thriller thing and you get to this moment and that emotion, that realization that you get, I read, which was one the silent patient by Andrew Michelades. Highly recommended. If people need a bedtime, listen, there's a big twist nearly at the end of the book. And that emotion, it's kind of shock.

There's a good bit of sort of shock in there. There's a little bit of fear, but there's this weird sense of satisfaction. Right? Ah, there it is. This sort of unshapely object.

You know, when you were talking about sort of the predictability of patterns. I was playing pickleball yesterday, and I was thinking about the fact that the ball is very predictable. I know exactly where it's going to bounce. And I can reliably see that unless there's a something, if there's a little stone or something on the court and it deviates, that's something that's irritating. Very few sports, with the exception of rugby and american football, are played with a ball which does not bounce reliably.

And the only reason that that's the case is that they don't require it to bounce off the ground. That's actually a feature rather than a bug. But if I was to play pickleball with one of those dog toys that's got all knobbly bits on it, and you throw it and you have no idea, it's just chaotic. How much less satisfying would the game of pickleball beverage? Way less satisfying, because all of the predictability that I want in the system, that gives me the satisfaction of knowing where the ball is going to go and knowing where I'm going to hit it, and, ah, control, control, control.

I have control over this system. Uh, all of that would be lost. Well, I'll give you. So you're completely right about this in pickleball terms when it comes to the first few bounces. But one of the things that this research paper blew my mind in physics, where they were looking at billiard balls, which, you know, I mean, it's very round, very regular, it's not a dog toy.

Brian Klaas
But what they found is that you can predict very, very clearly for the first several bounces, right? But it was, I think it was after either seven or eight bounces that the detail in the initial conditions of the strike, or the room or whatever it was, would start to matter after eight bounces. So much so that literally the gravitational force by the people in the room could affect where the ball would end up after eight. So these are the kinds of things where it's a perfect. Actually, I'm really glad you brought this up, because it's a perfect analogy for how we make sense of the world.

The first few bounces are the things that are most meaningful to us in pickleball, because you're not going to worry about it after 25 bounces later, you've already lost the point or whatever. Whereas in the actual underlying nature of reality, the further you go out, the more that these tiny little changes will affect the trajectory. And I think that's how our lives unfold, where it's like the day to day stuff seems to not matter, but in aggregate, it really, really does matter. And these tiny little details can affect the trajectory both of billiard balls and of our lives. I watched as maybe a lot of people did, some breakdowns of the three body problems science on YouTube, and I forget the name of this particular way of representing a physical system, but it's imagine a lever that's hanging and sort of swinging like this, but halfway down the lever there is a hinge.

Chris Williamson
So it's basically two sticks attached together that can completely rotate through each other. And this first one here is pivoted, so it does that, but it also has this chaotic movement where the end of it is able to spin back on itself. And they show the tiniest, tiniest amount of change in the initial conditions, and they trace how wild the little spirograph thing ends up being. And it's berserk. And the three body problem has to.

You must have thought about this. You must have thought about the three body problem in relation to your work. Yeah, I mean, it's a classic example of a chaotic system. And it's one where I think what happens when you talk about this with people is you sort of say, chaos theory applied to humans, is what I'm basically researching here. And they say, oh, I may have heard about this in Jurassic park, where there's this line about chaos theory, whatever.

Brian Klaas
Some people read this book called Chaos in 1987 by James Glick. So they've had little glimpses of it, but we all live it all the time, right? Because the weather system is the perfect example of this, where if you are off by an infinitesimal measurement in a weather system that's a model, the weather will be totally different ten to twelve days in the future than it is now, even with the best supercomputers. And it's exactly what you're describing with these tiny little details. This is what chaos theory basically means.

The big takeaway for people is that it means that in chaotic systems, the tiniest. And I mean, one 10th of a millionth of a, you know, like, this tiny little thing will forever affect the trajectory of the system. And the three body problem is basically, you know, it's riffing on this. The Netflix show is riffing on this idea that there's, you know, the sort of imagined worlds they have in their simulation are any tiny change means that you can't predict the future. And so these people constantly get wiped out because they can't control things.

And so it's upending what is effectively the certainty that seemed to exist after the scientific revolution, when Newton gave us all these equations that were supposed to make sense to the world. Things like the three body problem and quantum mechanics and so on. Throw a little bit of a wrench in that. What was that cow that was related to World War two?

This is the cow that could start World War three worldwide. Sorry. Yes. So I came across this. Whenever you work on something, you just remember the things that you've come across earlier in your life.

And I read this book when I was 18 years old, and it was basically around the millennium. It was talking about something happening around the millennium of the year 2000, where this group of people in Israel believed that the arrival of a sacred red cow was an essential part of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. And this is something that comes from the book of numbers. There's a sort of prophecy that talks about how the only way to purify someone in order to allow them to build the temple is to basically burn the body of a purely red cow, a red heifer, and that the ash will then be used to purify these people, and then they can build the temple. And so in 1997, which is a crucial date, because the cow was supposed to be three years old when it was sacrificed, right.

In 1997, this cow named Melody was born in Israel, and it was purely red. And so they were looking at it and sort of saying, like, oh, my God. Like, you know, three years before the millennium, this red cow has appeared. Let's start preparing. And it's particularly dangerous because some of these groups have extremist links.

And there was one faction that in the 1980s, thought about trying to blow up the Temple Mount sections that had, for example, some of the holiest sites in Islam on them. So this could have started a very serious international conflict. If you can imagine a group of extremists blowing up some of the holiest sites in Islam, it would not have turned out well. And so what was bizarre about this was they were very diligent in actually following the scripture to its words. So they sent these people with magnifying glasses to look at hair follicles to see if it's fully, fully read.

And I think it was like a year and a half or two years into melody, the cow's life. There was a white hare. And so they were basically, rather than sort of fudging it, like, taking the tweezers and being like, no, no one saw this, they said, oh, it's not the cow. And they just decided that wasn't the right one. And they didn't do anything further with melody.

But what's crazy about this, and this is something that I think is an underappreciated story, is that there are attempts to breed red cows now in Texas in coordination with groups in Israel. And they are trying to bring them, and they brought some recently. I think there's been two batches, if I'm not mistaken that have been brought to. And they're talking about this in these sort of fringe radio broadcasts for these groups. I reached out to the groups.

They didn't want anything to do with me. They don't want to talk to me, obviously, because they're doing this sort of in the shadows. But there's an effort to basically engineer a red heifer that can then be used to sacrifice, to purify workers who can then effectively blow up these holy sites in Islam and replace them with the rebuilding of the temple. Yeah, I mean, the reason I sort of think about this is because it is lucky that melody had a white hair. But you can imagine that the sort of trajectory of the 21st century could have been really different if it had started with a holy war triggered by a single red cow that happened to be fully red.

Chris Williamson
Dude, how insane. I love these stories. I think these stories that you found phenomenal. One of the other things, you know, the reverse of the baby Hitler story is the single man theory. A very influential individual.

Look, the right place, the right time, the right man. How much truth do you think is in that? By your reckoning so far, everything matters. There is a lot of chaos. Therefore, a person, presumably, who has very outlier characteristics.

If you were to run many, many, many iterations of this, the more non typical that the influential person is, the less likely that the outcome downstream from that would be. How do you think about this? Yeah, so I completely believe that individual people matter. And I think that there's a problem in how social science sort of thinks about this. Because, you know, political science, when we're trying to make sense of things, we're trying to derive patterns of.

Brian Klaas
So idiosyncratic personalities are not amenable to modeling. Right? You can't just sort of say, like, here's what happens in a model. If we, like, stick this personality into a quantum, you know, into a quantified equation, and then out comes the right number. And so it's not seemingly scientific.

And this has caused us, I think, to downplay the role of individuals. I came to this from the complete opposite perspective because my PhD research was looking at dictatorships. And, my God, do dictators matter? I mean, they completely shape the fates of their countries. I mean, there's a.

The former dictator of Turkmenistan, you know, he banned smoking at one point because he wanted to quit himself. So he banned smoking for the country. You know, I mean, it's like, it's stuff like this where you're like, yeah, like, that's the reason the policy exists. Like, this guy just sort of wanted to do it. And, like, he tried to rename the days of the month after his mom, and, sorry, the months he named one of them after his mom.

And he also, I mean, he did this other crazy thing where, like, he. He wanted everyone to come to Ashgabat, the capital city, to see this white marble city that he had constructed. And so he banned rural hospitals because he said, if they are sick, they should come and see the wonderful capital I've made, and then they'll be better. Right? Like, loads of people died.

Because, of course, like, it's important how quickly you get treated for, you know, you have an emergency or whatever. And so if you think about a person in Turkmenistan and they're given some political science equation, that's like, oh, yes, well, here's generally how this works. They would say, our lives are completely directed by this man. And so I think what you can say is that systems have more or less proneness to being swayed by individual idiosyncratic behavior, but the idea that individuals are unimportant and interchangeable is totally wrong. And so I think.

Chris Williamson
Do you think about the sort of distribution of power as kind of building resilience into the system, like you were saying earlier on? Yeah, I mean, obviously it's the case, but even within. So even within systems, you're right. Absolutely. That, like, having distributed power makes it so any individual matters a little bit less.

Brian Klaas
It doesn't mean that individuals don't matter, but, like, in a democracy, an individual is less likely to be able to just ban smoking on a whim. Right. Because there's constraints. There's things like that. The same time, though, I would say that Donald Trump's personality has played a bigger role in american politics than, say, George W.

Bush's personality. Right. And so I think that, like, even within the same system, the idiosyncratic behavior or character of an individual can matter more or less depending on how assertive they are in having their personality drive, policy or whatever it is. So I don't think there's, like, some, you know, strict divide. I just think that this idea, there's, there used to be this idea called the great man theory, which is that history's gears are turned by great men.

And that was it. And then what happened was people said, wait a minute, there's this other part of the story which is ordinary people or technology or innovation. And so the great man theory got thrown out as simplistic. And I think the pendulum basically swung too far. I think it's both.

I think that obviously, trends, aggregations of individuals, technology, all sorts of things matter. But like, individual leaders, individual people who produce pivot points in history, they're important. And if it was somebody else, I mean, if Donald Trump had not been born, american politics today would be profoundly, profoundly different. So. And I think that's where, like, political science sort of got a real wake up call is that a lot of the models around the presidency were like, oh, the institution is what matters.

And, like, it's all about the rules and the Constitution. It's like, well, I don't know. Did plan for the Donald throw the Donald in the chaotic system? What's that link between Trump and the dinosaurs?

This is one of those ones where you sort of. I mean, this is true, but it does boggle your mind. So, basically, when the dinosaurs existed, so this is before the asteroid I was talking about, wipe them out. There was an inland sea in the United States, right? So you sort of imagine, like, much of the middle part of the country has got this ocean in it, and the coastline of the ocean is basically like the southeast United States, basically, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.

And there's sort of this swoop where the coastline is. So you can sort of imagine the swoop up the middle part of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. Now, when the inland sea basically was in existence, all these little plankton died and settled on the coastline. And the reason this is important is because it produced this really, really rich soil over millions and millions of years. So when slavery existed, the place that they decided to grow cotton was in this soil that was extremely rich for cotton growing, which was exactly where the swoop was.

Okay, so if you map where the inland sea coastline was, and you overlay the plantations in the southern United States during the times of slavery, it is a perfect match. Now, the reason this matters for us today is that if you look at the 2020 election returns in Georgia, one of the most important states, which didn't just potentially tip the election to Joe Biden, but also determined the control of the US Senate, the returns where you see the Democrats run up the score, is also in this swoop, because it's where a lot of the descendants of the people who worked on the plantations, the enslaved people who worked in the plantations, settled. So you have, if you look at county level election results and you can google this, it's really easy to find. If you look at county level election results in the southeast United States, you will see the pattern of the inland seas coast. It's exactly where it was.

And so this is the kind of stuff where geography continues to affect our societies. And, yeah, of course, like, it's sort of unchanging over time. The soil has always been rich for quite a long time, but it is astonishing to look at the inland sea, the plantation map, and then the election results in 2020 and presumably in 2024. And you can see the coastline in the voting patterns.

Chris Williamson
So we're in an election year, pollsters everywhere. What do we think is going to happen in November? How can we predict? Everybody is trying. The pattern detection system is just at overdrive now and distributed among lots of people trying to combine their patent detection systems.

And now we've got manifold markets and those sort of betting. It's like half betting websites where they're making predictions and they seem to be pretty good, but they're still obviously not 100% accurate or even really anything percent accurate. How do you think about people that try to predict social system futures given this inevitable, chaotic, unpredictable blow up risk, single man, multiple normal people thing? Yeah. So I get asked this all the time.

Brian Klaas
I'm a political scientist in my day job, so I think about this a lot. And I think there's just a fundamental error in how people interpret polling, because polling, first off, polling might be flawed, right? I mean, there's been plenty of examples where polls have gotten things wrong. So first, you have to have that caveat to begin with. But secondly, polling is not asking the question of who is going to win in November.

It is asking the question of who would you vote for right now? And those are different questions. Right. So what I always say is that the only answer to who is going to win between Trump and Biden is, I don't know. And it's the only defensible answer.

What I can say is it's likely to be close. Right? I mean, I think that we can assume that there's going to be certain stable patterns in some vote. You know, we can predict that California is going to vote for Biden. We can predict that Alabama is going to vote for Trump, and so on.

But beyond that, you know, I can, I can sort of have a pretty informed guess about which states are going to matter. But the reason I don't know who's going to win the election is because of what's called non stationarity, which is, I think, the most important idea that we never talk about, which is that it's basically referring to the idea that causal dynamics are changing over time. In other words, you're trying to measure something like what's going to happen, and the underlying dynamics are shifting as you're measuring it. And that's because the race is different. Right?

I mean, this is so obvious to us if we think about 2020. So in, in February of 2020, there were polls, who is going to win between Trump and Biden. They did not know that the pandemic was about to hit. And so all the polling in February 2020 was made useless a month later because the world fundamentally changed. And I will tell you, the world is going to change between now and when people vote.

How much? I don't know. Which direction? I don't know. So I'm asked this question all the time.

What would you do if you're a betting person? I mean, I have a hunch about what might happen, but it's purely based on speculation. And I always say the most defensible answer is, I don't know because you don't. And I think this is something where I actually think it's very important for people who are in the press and in punditry and in expert roles and so on to be honest about this, because the false sense of certainty causes people to make mistakes. And so, you know, when I do go on television to talk about us politics, like, you have this really strong pressure to not say, I don't know.

Right. It's like, it's super unsettling. Like, if you turn on the tv and, like, the expert being interviewed is like, I don't know. Well, it's like, well, then why do. You get the fucking expert?

Chris Williamson
I could have said that. Well, exactly. I mean, but this is the kind of stuff where what it does in, we were talking about pattern detection is it sort of over amplifies certainty because the pundits go on and they make a living. And, you know, this is, I'm in this category where I will go on. I don't get paid to do this ever, but I go onto tv sometimes to talk about us politics.

Brian Klaas
And it's like, you can't say I don't know. You can't talk about chaos theory. You can't say that this is extremely complicated and it's impossible for us to forecast. But I actually think sometimes it's important to acknowledge that. And, like, I think it would be better off if more people in the public eye said, I don't know more often because the world is really uncertain.

And yet whenever we tune into people who are supposed to know things, they always have an answer. So it gives us this sort of idea that, like, oh, things are under control. And then, like, wait a minute, why is there like every. Why is everything screwed up all the time? Why are these, like, massive disasters constantly happening?

And the answer is because we don't know. But we have this illusion, as we talked about before, because reflected back at us are a whole bunch of people in the public eye telling you, we understand this. And I will tell you, I have no idea who's going to win the 2024 election. I could bet, but I have no idea because it's something that's fundamentally going to change between now and November in quite consequential ways. Well, as a professional, uninformed person on pretty much everything, I managed to make a career out of being the most stupid person in every conversation.

That actually, this is clearly not true. You've already given me on the sandpile model something that I had not thought about at all. Okay. I'm glad that you're throwing me some scraps of offal off the bottom of this huge steak dinner that you prepared. I'm like the child that's moving the steering wheel and bipping the pretend horn in the backseat of the car.

Chris Williamson
But my point being that if more people say that they don't know, that's going to reduce the delta between my actual uninformedness and their sort of humble intellectual humbleness. I'm all for bringing other people down to my level of not knowing things. One of the things that I was thinking about there, you had this really fantastic point that I've never thought of before around percentage certainty poll sort of delivery, which is that if you give any kind of a percentage, it's actually no one's ever going to stress test it because they're not going to run this thing 5000 times and then get to say, well, distributed across the 5000 versions of this occurring, it didn't actually happen 87% of the time. So you say, I think 87% certainty that we're going to have a Trump presidency come November. And then Biden wins.

And you go, well, that's the 13%. So built into every percentage prediction system is just contingency, which basically makes it fucking pointless. Yeah, I mean, this is so like, you know, with, with all due respect to Nate Silver's forecasting and so on. Who's Nate Silver? Sorry.

Brian Klaas
So he's the sort of american politics forecaster who has made a name out of statistics, forecasting and so on. And he has this site, 538, that he used to run. And he's someone who in us politics circles, has sort of been viewed as the statistical guru because he had some very good results predicting previously he's like. The Michael Burry of the politics world. Yes.

Yeah. So Nate Silver, though, he had this model that had a certain percentage, 70 odd percent, that Clinton was going to win and then she lost. And he said, well, it wasn't 100%. And it's like, yeah, but that's always true. Unless you have 100% forecast, you will always have an out.

So you can never be wrong, which is, I mean, good for you for designing a system where you can never be wrong. But it's something that we have to think about more carefully. One way I try to describe this to people, and it is like, a difficult thing to wrap your head around, is 911 happened. Right. And it was successful.

Like they successful in terms of carrying out the terrorist attack they sought to carry out. It could have been that they had a 5% chance of success. It could have been that they had a 99% chance of success. We will never know because they succeeded. So all we have is 100% outcome, and we don't know whether it was a really, really lucky occurrence or whether it was almost certain to succeed because the TSA sucked and they had all sorts of really good plans and backup plans and all this stuff.

So the problem is, when you have one reality, you can't run coin flips. The way we derive probability that makes most sense to people is if I say heads and tails is a 50 50 probability. I cannot predict what the next flip will be. But if I do 10,000 flips, I can tell you that roughly 50% of them will be heads and 50% will be tails. With politics, with elections, we have won, right?

Because the 2024 election is not the same as the 2020 election. The world has changed. So you can never say that we have these sort of coin flips with politics or anything like that. All you have is what happened. And then trying to make probabilistic inferences on things that are extremely rare events like an election happening every four years, is inevitably going to be flawed.

So, to me, if you have something that is unfalsifiable, in other words, you can never prove it wrong. If Nate Silver says that Trump has a 55% chance of winning, what does that mean? I mean, if he loses, is he wrong? Well, no, because 45% of the time, that's what he predicted. So you sort of have to think about probabilities this way, that when you're talking about one off events, like one shot deals, a probability might not be the most useful tool.

And instead, you should talk about why do you think this will happen? And then you have logic and you have inference, and you have sort of bayesian probabilities. You can talk about what you think might happen and so on. But, yeah, I think that a lot of people, when they hear a probability, they think scientific, and it's a huge mistake because there's a lot of b's that comes out of probabilities. And it's very difficult for an ordinary person to discern the.

What is a good statement of probability versus what is completely, basically b's and sort of being misused in a certain way. What's that story about us? Independence and tall trees? Yeah. So this is one of those ones where you sort of think how the world affects our history in ways that we are completely blind to.

So, effectively, there was a shortage of tall trees in England and Britain in general around the time of the American Revolution, in the late 17 hundreds. And the reason for that is because all of the tall trees in Britain were basically cut down to make the Royal Navy, which was a dominant player at the time. They cut down a huge amount of trees and millions of trees to make the ships that made the british empire. And as a result, they needed new trees, and the US had a lot. So one of the things that happened was they tried to basically co opt all of the trees in New England.

The british government basically said, we own the king owns these forests. And so it created this sort of illicit trade in trees and created this backlash where there was something called the pine tree riot, which really got under the skin of a lot of the american colon, a lot of the american residents who were pissed off that the king was trying to take their trees to make the ships and so on. And the pine tree riotous ends up being the catalyst for eventually, the Boston Tea Party and the trigger of the American Revolution. So you have, the thing that's really odd about this story is that when you think about why the american revolution happened, we always make reasons that are tied to humans, right? So it's about choices.

So a king taxes tea, and then a bunch of people get angry that their tea is being taxed, and they dump it into the harbor, and now they rebel against the government. But there's also this aspect of, like, it also matters that the forests of New England had tall trees, and this has nothing to do with anyone. There was no choice. It just happened to be a fact about the world they inhabited. And those tall trees became precious because of timing, where they had basically deforested lots of England at the time.

So the tall trees mattered and so on. There's also this really weird wrinkle. I think I took this out of the book, but I love this little bit where the king made this rule that any bit of lumber that was 24 inches in diameter was the king's property. Right. So, like, if it was a big enough tree, like, the king owns it.

So what happened was this illicit trade sprung up where people started cutting their floorboards to 23 inches. And so. But the thing that's amazing about this, like, this is. This is, like, an amazing thing about modern America is that if you go into really old houses in, like, Boston or anywhere in New England, the floorboards are 23 inches wide. And it's because of this crazy moment where they were all trying to basically stop king from taking the wood that was in their land.

So the rebellion is not just the tea party. It's also tied the pine tree riot and the flag of the american navy. The original flag is a single tall pine tree set against a white background because of the idea that the navy was going to use these trees to fight back against the crown. What, a middle finger. It could have just.

Chris Williamson
You know, it could have just been that, couldn't it? It didn't need to be the tree. Yeah, it could have been a middle finger as a tree. What was there about cigars and the revolution? Wasn't that something similar?

Brian Klaas
Yes. This is about the American Civil War. So this is one of my favorite stories. I'm a total history nerd because of this kind of stuff where it's just, like, unbelievably improbable events that totally shape the way the world unfolds. So basically, what happens is this confederate guy from the southern army in the US Civil War in 1862 is riding around with these secret orders of where the army is supposed to go.

So it's like the marching orders for the army. And he's got in his satchel the orders wrapped around these three cigars. And as he's riding, the satchel must have opened and the cigars fall out, and they end up coming to restore next to this hedgerow. Now, by complete chance, the Union army, the northern army, takes a break. And one of these soldiers sits down next to the hedgerow and sees this paper and is like, oh, my God, a cigar.

This is wonderful, right? Because he's obviously happy about being able to smoke it, but he unwraps the paper, and it's like, okay, this is special orders 191, and it's the entire orders for the. The enemy forces, right? Like, he's stumbled across this incredibly valuable people, piece of intelligence. So what he does is he goes and takes it to the nearest official, right, to sort of say, like, look, I found this thing.

And the general is in this camp, you know, with his tent and so on. And so the guy he hands the cigars to is this sort of clerk, right? Like a guy who works for the general. Now, the problem is they need to figure out whether these orders are genuine, because, of course, like, maybe it's a fake. Maybe it's a decoy, whatever it is.

And it turns out that the person who looks at the signature on the piece of paper is the only person. This guy who's outside the tent. He's the only person in the Union army who could definitively verify that the signature was genuine. And the reason that was the case was because the person who signed the orders used to work in Detroit, Michigan, as did the person outside the tent. And the person outside the tent worked at a bank, and he was a bank teller, basically.

And so this guy who signed the orders used to sign pay slips, like checks to soldiers. And so this person, the teller, had seen this signature, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. So he looks at it, at the paper that's around the cigars, and instantly he's like, this is genuine. This is the guy's signature. I guarantee it's the guy's signature.

And as a result of this person being in the right place at the right time, seeing the orders, verifying the signature, the Union army quickly moves because they know where the confederate army is about to go. And this leads to the battle of Antietam, which is the single most bloody day in american history. I mean, tens of thousands of people were casualties on that day. And this changes the trajectory of the American Civil War because it basically stops the confederate momentum. Shortly after it, Lincoln decides to emancipate the slaves.

So the victory in Antietam is a trigger for that. And additionally, the british government was thinking about recognizing the south because they were providing cotton to the british population, and they stopped doing that after the battle of Antietam because they got cold feet. They thought, maybe they're going to lose, and then we're going to have to deal with the fact that we have now recognized the enemy of our other ally. Right? So the british government holds off on recognizing the confederacy.

All of these things happen in a cascade because of one discarded cigar in a hedgerow discovered by the right place at the right time. And so, you know, I don't know whether the us civil war would have unfolded completely differently, maybe the north still wins, but at this really pivotal moment, the north had a huge tactical advantage because of a discovered cigar that was. That basically fell off a horse. I have no idea why people listen to this and get immediately frozen and think, God, I don't want to move. If I don't move, then that means, but, God, if I don't move, that's also doing something.

Chris Williamson
There's no thing as inaction. So, you know, I think one of the takeaways is that everything that we do matters. But if there's basically no distinction between signal and noise, because all noise in some form ultimately does have an impact, which makes it signal functionally for us humans that are going to try and absorb what you're teaching us, there needs to be some kind of triage. We have to be able to make a distinction between signal and noise, or else we're just going to be stuck analyzing shit. Yeah.

Brian Klaas
So I think there's a few things I would say. First off is that you can still have signal over the short term, right? So, like, the fact that this mass murderess killed her family in 1905, and now I exist. I mean, that was the noise. My existence is part of the noise of her life story.

Of course, what mattered most was what happened in her immediate family and so on. So, like, over the long period, the little stuff matters. It doesn't always matter over the short period, and we can't always know the difference because we can't forecast the future perfectly. But in terms of how we navigate the world, there's two takeaways that I tend to tell people. One of them is that if you think that the world is perfectly well understood and certain and controllable, you will experiment a lot less because you already understand it.

Why would you experiment? What I'm saying is that if the small stuff matters, if it diverts our trajectories, produces ripple effects in that uncertain world, experimentation is the smartest strategy there is. And there's loads of examples where this is. Is the case where it shows that sort of a little bit of experimentation, even forced experimentation, where you go outside your comfort zone, makes us more successful, makes us happier. It does all sorts of things for us, because you're navigating uncertainty, so you're trying things, whereas if you falsely believe the world is understood, and certainly you won't, and then you'll end up stuck in ruts, and you'll keep making the same mistakes over and over.

So experimentation is one lesson, the other one is resilience, right? So, I think so much of what we're told, in whether it's economics or in self help, is about optimizing our existence. And it's all about this idea that you sort of, you know, the last 3% of efficiency is the enemy of your happiness. If you get. If you just get rid of that, then your company will be on the, you know, the up and up, and also your life will be on the up and up.

And I think it's a really bad piece of advice, because over optimized systems are fragile, whereas slightly less optimized, not like inefficient, but slightly less optimized systems are able to adapt to new realities, to new environments, and they create resilience. So I think the big takeaways of a world that is more swayed by flukes or by randomness than we tend to believe is experiment more in that world and build resilience more into your strategies for how you live. And then even when those fluky things happen, you can basically weather the storm. And that's the sort of takeaway in terms of how I have incorporated this into my life, as opposed to just continuing to race towards an optimal goal that ultimately might actually make us less. Happy and more fragile tactically or strategically.

Chris Williamson
How have you built resilience into you? Yeah, so this is one where I, you know, I sort of. It's. It's somewhat cliche, but I had, you know, lots of people during the pandemic had this experience. I had this as well, and it was amplified a million fold because I was writing a book about, you know, extremely improbable disasters happening and so on.

Brian Klaas
But I sort of. I thought about what I could always have, right? Like, no one could take it away from me. I mean, of course, if I have a health disaster, if I die, yes, okay, fine. But if I lose my job or if something goes wrong in my personal life or whatever, I can still go for a walk, I can still hang out with my dog.

I can still hang out with people who I love and who love me back. And so that's the kind of resilience in my day to day life that I've put more stock in. It doesn't mean that I don't care about my career. It doesn't mean I don't care about my ambitions. All that stuff matters, but it's building part of your identity into things that are truly, truly resilient.

That's one of the things. And experimentation, how I've tried to do that more, is I try to explore more. I mean, I think that Google Maps is one of the best tools that exists. I mean, it's incredibly, incredibly useful. So I'm not trying to sort of say, don't use Google Maps, but that thing that we used to do, which was just sort of driving places or walking places, it's often where you discover stuff that you didn't anticipate, whereas Google Maps is always going to give you the same route over and over and over.

And I think that's a parable for how we think about these sorts of things with a bit more serendipity, a bit more experimentation, along with sort of focusing on the things that are truly resilient, that are meaningful to you. As I said, I know it's a bit cliche, but it is something that's the biggest change in my life, is like, I was over optimizing my schedule in, like, February of 2020. I look at my Google calendar and it's just, like, full of stuff I didn't want to do. Like, just stuff I really did not want to do. But I was doing for some unknown goal.

And I just. I don't as often I spend more time doing things that I enjoy. And I think mortality and sort of contemplating mortality actually helps us clarify that. You know, we can't control everything, and so we do have to sort of focus on what we can control, which is the stuff that is most resilient in our. In our lives.

Chris Williamson
James clear says that a person's calendar is a better judge of their wealth than their bank account. And I think that this is true. And you can also have the same as the person with a fantastic job and a terrible marriage is having an awful time. Person with a terrible job and a fantastic marriage is having a good time. I think that this is the sort of thing which is much more egalitarian and kind of people have access to it.

Obviously, if you are struggling to make rent, you need to work hard, blah, blah, blah. But I do think that there is a lot of degrees of freedom where people can take back a little bit of control. Where am I investing my sense of self worth? Is it in something that I have more control over or less? Where am I investing the things that I concern myself with and I place my efforts, are they on things that are contingent on other people, or are they on things that I am largely in control of?

How much am I spinning up the efficiency in my system? How many billions of dollars did that freighter that got stuck in the Suez Canal caused $50 billion or something because of one ship to give you probably the largest single day. Your system is too tightly defined. Example from me. I ruptured my Achilles playing cricket about three and a half years ago, at the end of August in 2020.

My dad was there watching me play. This is the first time I played in a decade. A decade and a half, probably. I'm having a great time, and the sun's beating down, it's lovely, beautiful british Saturday afternoon. And then Achilles goes, because I'm, whatever, 32 or something, and I'm doing a big athletic sport under high pressure for the first time in a decade.

So, anyway, drive to the RVI, which is the local a and e thing, and a doctor comes over after we've waited for a little while, squeezes it and goes, yeah, that's, that's. That's gone. We'll buck you in for surgery in two weeks time. All right, fair enough. That weekend, I had constructed, and this was kind of typical, like just this permanent deck of cards that were ever, ever, ever higher.

I had a bunch of. I still have a bunch of properties in the UK that I let, and I had some people moving in a week and a day later, a week and two days later. So the Ikea stuff that I'd bought was in my car, and the ground that we were playing at was near the house. So my intention was to finish the game, drive to the house, drop the Ikea stuff off, put the key somewhere that the Ikea man that was building it could find it. But I also needed to go to the supermarket to collect a tv.

So I say to my dad, I'm like, I know that I've just gone through what is physically the most sort of serious injury that I've ever had in my entire life. But first, we need to go to the supermarket, and then secondly, we need to go to the house. And then I really could do with my car. My car needs to be back. So I'll left.

Remember I did my right foot, I left foot, drove home from my own Achilles rupture via the supermarket with my dad to then go back. And then I had to get up the next day and I'm on crutches, and I had to go up the stairs on crutches to explain to the Ikea guy the next morning, I was like, this one thing, which is a large thing, you know, any sort of big physical injury is not as small, but it just showed this downstream sort of total domino effect of, oh, my system is so tightly tuned, it's spun up so hard that even a tiny little sort of curveball or a very large curveball ruins everything. I thought when you were telling that story, I thought you meant that you built a literal house of cards. I was like, wow, that's amazing, and. I built a house of cards?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, figuratively. I continue to do it to myself in my life. Yeah. But I think that, you know, I think that's how, like, a lot of people feel all the time, right?

Brian Klaas
That they're like one mistake away from everything falling apart. And it feels great when everything sort of runs like this really well oiled machine. But on the flip side, you're setting yourself up for disaster. And I do think that the happiest people have some slack in their lives. I don't think that the people who have life hacked the schedule to death to the point where it's like everything is optimized.

I think they're actually people who are able to breathe a little bit and sort of have that resilience as part of their lives. And. And, of course, you need to have ambition and you want to chase things. I mean, humans strive for things, and it's good that we do. But I also think there's some people who have gotten a little bit out of whack where it's like the only way I can be happy is if I hit this goal, and then the next goal comes, and that's the only way I'll be happy.

And it's just sort of like it's the hedonic treadmill where it just. You never get happy because you're constantly running and chasing things that are moving targets. Yeah. I love that story that you told, because I think it is exactly the way that social systems are designed. I think that this is basically what happens where one bad thing happens, like in the housing market in the United States, and then the financial crisis brings everything down.

It is a house of cards that we've designed in lots of the systems that we rely on the most. Preston, anxiety, uncertainty, doubt, fear of the future. Lots of people suffer with that. How does your viewpoint after writing this book? How should the insights from your book impact people's anxiety and uncertainty and doubt about the future?

Yeah, I think there's sort of two things that work for me anyway. I mean, I can't speak to everyone else, and I'm sure people who have crippling anxiety won't be comforted by anything that I say. But. But I think there's sort of two things. One is it's okay to give up a little bit of control, and it's actually very healthy.

Right. It's okay to embrace the fact that you do not know how your life is going to unfold and you can't dictate it. And the second that you have that mentality shift, it liberates you in a way. I think that's something that's a really important mentality shift for a lot of people, where a lot of anxiety comes from the fact that you are chasing control in what is a fundamentally uncontrollable world, and you're always going to be disappointed. So you're better off just accepting that there are limits to your control and sort of riding the wave of life.

Right. The second thing that I would say is that if you take that idea that I said previously, this sort of, we control nothing, but we influence everything, then your life has meaning no matter what's happening, right? Your life is changing the world. And I think, to me, that's something that a lot of people don't actually understand. They sort of think of themselves as interchangeable cogs when they're feeling really low, and it's not true at all.

I mean, your decisions, the conversations you have, you're affecting not just how the world unfolds, but which people get born. I mean, every conversation you have at a coffee shop has ripple effects. It changes how the other person sort of feels about their day. It can be more positive or more negative depending on how you behave. I think there's something really empowering about this sort of interconnected nature that chaos theory embeds in us, which is that no moment is inconsequential.

And once you start to think that way, yes, okay, it can create its own anxiety because everything you do is important. But also, to me, it's so empowering about life where there's no throwaway moment. I think a lot of us sort of think that there's the moments that are big and the moments that are meaningless. And I'm saying that chaos theory scientifically says there are no moments that are meaningless. And that, to me, that gets me out of bed in the morning.

It's not something that is. I don't know how every day is going to unfold. I can't control it, but every day matters. And I think that's something that for people who are feeling self doubt or depression and so on, that ability to shape and influence the world and the people around you is something that's really, to me, quite magical. How do you balance these sorts of insights with agency?

Chris Williamson
It's the most important thing in my life, being able to determine the direction of where things are going to go is something that I'm hugely, hugely in favor of. And a lot of the people that are listening are as well. Do you feel like there's any contradiction or conflict between the way that the world is and the way that we have a desire for agency? Yeah, I mean, so I personally don't believe in free will for a variety of scientific reasons that, you know, we don't need to go down the rabbit hole right now because it doesn't really matter for agency anyway. Free will is a question about why things happen.

Brian Klaas
Right? So it's a question of, are you independently causing the decisions in your brain? And whether you are independently causing them or not, you are actually producing the decisions. Right? So in a way, it's a semantic debate.

And so agency still exists in a world without free will. Basically, individual actors still have the ability to shape events. And what I would say is that you have to sort of accept the limitations of your control. I think it's very healthy. But I still, even though I accept uncertainty, I don't walk into traffic because I might get saved.

I still think about these things probabilistically. So you still want to make strategic decisions, you still want to inform decisions based on whatever data you can have about the world. And then you also, and I think this is really, really important, is you have to accept that there are some things that you can never forecast. So I can probably figure out if I have, you know, if you get a terrible diagnosis, then the rates at which that leads to a recovery, you know, 95% chance of recovery, very important data, and it can help you understand how to behave and so on. If I ask you, what is the world going to be like in 2035?

There is no data that exists, literally no data in the world that can answer that question. It's impossible. And so I think there's stuff where we have to separate out that which we can control and that which we can forecast from stuff that we fundamentally can't and then behave differently. So the probabilistic behavior, the strategy is tied towards the stuff that follows regular patterns. It's the stuff that follow some level of certainty and order and control.

And you give up a little bit of control in the other realms of your life. Like, for example, will you meet the right person for you? Will you? There's only so much that you can do to control that. As much as you try, you can't guarantee that that will happen no matter what you do.

So I think this is the kind of stuff where it's just. It's a little bit about separating out the realms and thinking a little bit differently about that nature of control. And universal control, by the way, would be terrible if we could dictate the terms of our lives 100%. I think it would be absolutely awful for humans. I think a little bit of uncertainty and serendipity is very healthy and very helpful for the way that we process our existence.

Chris Williamson
There's a great frame from Alain de Botton, where he talks about how, in a world that's a meritocracy, if winners are worthy of their successes, what does that make losers? And he contrasts this with ancient Greece, and the people that were beggars on the streets were referred to as unfortunates. Lady Fortuna hadn't blessed them. But if you think about what Lady Fortuna is, if you see what she's holding, she's holding a set of scales. The reason that she's holding a set of scales is that the Greeks believed that fortune, it gives and it takes away.

I can't remember who it was that was locked up in a prison, maybe sort of seneca or epictetus, as someone that was an advisor to somebody and maybe had his legs broken or already had them broken or whatever, and his fifties, something like that. And one of his friends comes to visit him and says, why are you not despondent? Why is this not sort of upsetting you more? And he says, well, yeah, sure, Lady Fortune has taken all of this stuff away from me, but look at what I had for the first 55 years of my life. Like, look at all of these things that have been bestowed on me.

And I think that it's a delicate needle to thread, and I'm really. I've been very impacted by your work. I think it's very, very important. I think it's really cool and it's genuinely orthogonal to the way that lots of people see the world. So it's novel in a way that it's, like, novelly novel.

I'm trying to think about how I integrate it, but certainly thinking about that framing of, like, look, if you believe that you can control the outcomes in your life, if you have this illusion or belief in control, it is the same as being in a meritocracy, because any suboptimal outcome is laid at your feet. If you're unhappy with your life, that's exclusively because of you. If you didn't perform in the way that you wanted, that's exclusively because of you. Now, as is everything, it's like trying to balance on the top of some very, very sharp point where you go, well, you fall off on one side, and you end up in over optimization, self flagellation, super high performer, anxiety, hell. Or you fall off on the other side and you end up in nihilistic victimhood mentalities, despondency.

You're like, okay, I don't want to be on either of those. And it is the game to balance these two things, as far as I can see. Yeah, I think. I think you can synthesize. I think you're completely right about this, but I think you can synthesize them in a way where there are some things where our agency produces relatively predictable outcomes, and there are some things where I have absolutely no control that are quite important.

Brian Klaas
So where I was born, who my parents were when I was born, right, the fact that I wasn't born in prehistoric earth, etcetera, all of these things are really, really important. Also, my brain structure, which, if I'm an author, it's something that is very important to me. I had no say over that. And these four things, where I was born, when I was born, who my parents were, and how my brain works, I can't control them. And yet they had a huge impact on the trajectory of my life.

And the way that I see this really clearly is I've done a lot of work in international development and so on. And I've gone to Madagascar, for example, many, many times, where the average person earns $1.50 a day. And I see these people in rural Madagascar who don't have electricity. And I think, if that was me, there's no way I'm on this podcast. I could try everything I wanted to try, but, like, there's just no way you can escape that.

It's impossible. Right? So, at the same time, that that's true. Within the superstructure of my life, I still did control some stuff. I had agency to work hard in school.

I had an agency to try to succeed, and so on. And those things do follow some predictable outcomes. So there's a mix of them. But I think that when you synthesize the two, what you come up with is that agency and striving is important. But every time you achieve success, or any time you achieve failure, you have to dampen down the reaction to that.

Yes, I deserve some of that, but also some of it's not up to me. And that's, I think, some of the aspects that are really comforting, because the worst moments of our life are also not totally our fault, just as the best moments of our life are not totally something we've orchestrated. It also produces, by the way, something I think that's really beautiful about failure. If you connect the idea that my joyous moments in life. Are derived from the mass murder of children in this horrible way.

Well, it's also true that the worst moments in my life. When I felt lowest or most despondent or most depressed. Directly cause the happiest moments. There's not a break. They're literally causing each other.

Because they're producing the trajectory of your life. So I find that really comforting when I feel terrible. That without that feeling in that moment. I would not be causing the future happiness, in a way. And I think that's also scientific, philosophically true, and also philosophically comforting.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. When you're winning, you're not as good as you think. And when you're losing, you're not as bad as you think. It's probably. That's a much better way of putting what I just said in about a million words.

Brian Klaas
So thank you. Brian klaas, ladies and gentlemen. Brian, this is really, really great. I'm genuinely, genuinely impressed. I think the book's fantastic.

Chris Williamson
I think everyone should go and buy it. Where do you want to send people on the Internet? Well, it's fluke, is the book. And I write a newsletter about eclectic topics I'm interested in called the Garden of forking paths. So you can check that out as well.

Hell, yeah. Brian, I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Brian Klaas
Thanks for having me on the show.

#806 - Brian Klaas - Chaos Theory: The Hidden Force That Secretly Controls Your Life

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1. Introduction to Chaos Theory

2. Personal Stories of Chaos

3. Philosophical Implications

4. Practical Applications

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