Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the summer of 2022, a man named Ivan went on a vacation with 2 friends to Kassandra, a peninsula in Greece. During the holiday, Ivan was swimming in the ocean when a fierce riptide pulled him away from the beach. His friends alerted the Coast Guard, but he was swept out so quickly that the search operation failed to find him. For hour after hour, Ivan struggled to stay afloat. The currents carried him farther and farther from land. Eventually, he was treading water about 15 nautical miles from the beach. It was cold. Soon it was dark. Ivan fought to keep his head above water. The night wore on. His strength began to give out. Just as he was about to drown, the first rays of the morning sun illuminated an object bobbing nearby. It was a ball. With his last ounce of strength, Ivan swam to it. He clung to the partly deflated ball, and it helped him keep his head above water. Hours later, he was found and pulled to safety. When news of the rescue was broadcast on the news, it caught the eye of a woman in a different part of Greece. 10 days earlier, her children had been playing with a ball on a distant beach. One of them kicked the ball a bit too hard in the direction of the ocean, and it bobbed away. The boys shrugged and went on playing without their toy. Watching the news, the boys' mother recognized the ball. It was the one that her sons had lost. It had floated some 80 miles on the ocean, just in time to save Ivan's life. Going about our day-to-day lives, most of us act as if the world is orderly and predictable. We make plans. We set goals. We schedule events. What we don't take into account is the ever-present role of chance and randomness Blind forces that wield more power than we recognize. This week on Hidden Brain, we conclude our Wellness 2.0 series with a look at how we can come to grips with the unpredictable forces that shape our world and turn them to our advantage. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with Planet Visionaries, Hidden Brain is proud to present Planet Visionaries Season 6. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. We hear a lot these days about separating the signal from the noise. The idea is that there's a deep order, a solid predictability we can count on, if only we can screen out distracting details, meaningless static. But what if those trivial, random factors actually matter? What if they matter a lot? At University College London, political scientist Brian Klaas studies these hidden forces. Brian Klaas, welcome to Hidden Brain.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian, there's a story you like to tell about a young American couple, Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson, who visited Japan almost a century Who were they and what were they doing in that country?

Yeah, so there's this couple, this American couple that goes on this sightseeing mission to Kyoto, Japan in 1926 in the autumn. And they do what everybody does when they go on vacation. They sort of see the city. They stay at this place called the Miyako Hotel. And Stimpson records in his diary that they have a, quote, beautiful day of sightseeing. And anyone who's been to Kyoto has seen these incredible colors in the autumn, the incredible temples, the sort of charm of this unbelievable city. And the Stimpsons, like everybody else, sort of fall in love with it and they get a soft spot for it.

Almost 2 decades after the Stimpsons' visit to Japan, the city of Kyoto becomes the topic of much discussion at the highest levels of the US government. Why were American military leaders fixated on Kyoto, Brian?

Yeah, so this is the summer of 1945 when they're on the cusp of having the first successful test of the world's first atomic bomb. And they have a choice to make, one of the most difficult and macabre choices that any American government official has ever made, where to use it. And so they have this, this group of scientists and generals that get together called the Target Committee, and they draft their choices for where they think would be the most effective use of the bomb. And Kyoto is consistently rated as the top choice. It had cultural significance because it was a former imperial capital. It also had an airplane factory that was churning out parts of the Japanese military force. And so it had military significance. You have the fact that it's relatively undamaged by previous American bombing. And on top of it, they even discuss how there's a university there, and therefore they'll have— the educated people of Kyoto will understand that a new chapter in human history has been opened with the dropping of this extraordinarily powerful weapon.

Hmm. So Kyoto is now at the top of this target list, but our Kyoto tourist by this point has become something of an important figure. Tell me what Henry Stimson was up to at this stage.

Yeah, so 19 years after he goes on vacation to Kyoto, Stimson has risen through the ranks of the US government, and he is now the Secretary of War in 1945. And that means he's the chief civilian who oversees the Target Committee, who oversees the decision of where to drop the atomic bomb. And he gets this memo, and we have all these memos, you know, preserved through historical records. And the memo basically says, you know, we agree Kyoto must be destroyed. That's where we're going to drop the first atomic bomb.

Hmm. What was his reaction when he saw that memo?

Well, we don't know exactly what happened the moment he saw the memo, but we know that he sprung to action because the generals began to refer to Kyoto as Stimson's pet city because he had gone to such extraordinary lengths to try to save it. And that involved Sending messages. It involved twice meeting with President Truman, the American president at the time overseeing this choice, and convincing him to take Kyoto off the bombing list. So it's an extraordinary intervention by a government official who is basically going out on a limb to overrule the decision of the committee that has deeply thought about the strategic value of various bombing targets.

Hmm. So at one point, of course, as you just mentioned, Henry Stimson goes above the heads of the generals. Speaks to President Truman, has 2 meetings with him, and finally convinces Truman that Kyoto should be taken off the list. What were the Japanese cities that were left on this potential bombing list, Brian?

Yeah, so the first target is taken off the list, Kyoto. So they go to the secondary target on August 6th, 1945, the other one that was very highly rated, and that was Hiroshima, which as we all know, was destroyed by the first atomic bomb. The second target that was of significance, that was deemed to be one of the top value targets, was a place called Kokura. And that was where the second atomic bomb on August 9th, 1945, 3 days after the Hiroshima bombing, was supposed to go. So this, the second B-29, Bockscar, is approaching Kokura, ready to drop its payload, and the city is obscured by unforecasted fog and clouds and haze. So basically, they can't see the bomb site. And as a result of this, they think to themselves, well, we can't risk dropping an atomic bomb and missing. So they circle a few times, and eventually they decide to divert to the secondary target as they're running low on fuel, and that is Nagasaki. And so around 10:45 in the morning, they dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. And of course, nobody in Kokura was aware of this. And so there's a term in, in, in modern Japanese culture called Kokura's Luck, which is basically when you unknowingly escape disaster because for potentially 100,000, maybe even more people living in that city, they were spared by a passing cloud. And for the people of Kyoto, they were spared by a 19-year-old vacation of one pivotal government official who was at the right place at the right time.

So besides Kokura's luck, you might also say Nagasaki had especially bad luck because in fact, it was the removal of Kyoto from the list that brought Nagasaki onto the list in the first place, and then the cloud cover over Kokura prompted the bomb to be dropped over Nagasaki. That seems extraordinarily unfortunate, Brian.

This is the nature of luck, is that it's in the eye of the beholder. because one person's luck is somebody other's— somebody else's misfortune. Certainly it's the case that with Nagasaki, you know, if there had been a decision to drop the bomb on Kyoto, then the secondary target probably would have been Hiroshima. And so there's this sort of cascade of effects, this vacation which is intersecting with this cloud. All these things had to come together, not to mention the timing of when they discovered the atomic bomb, the discovery of uranium.

All of them connected to create that moment of intense misfortune for the people who were unfortunately killed in both Hiroshima But when you tell me that the fate of tens of thousands of people was partly, or perhaps even significantly, determined by a vacation that 2 Americans took decades earlier, there's a part of me that recoils at that, Bryan. There's a part of me that feels that is immoral.

Yeah, and this is something that, you know, when you get to these highly consequential events of warfare, of mass destruction, weapons being used, and so on, There is obviously a moral component. And yet I think there's also an aspect of this that shows the amoral components of some of these interconnecting factors. And that's because there's nothing immoral about going on vacation, but it produces this outcome that leads to an immoral action. The way I sometimes think about this is you could go outside tomorrow and plant a tree, and 100 years from now, a kid could fall out of it and die. It doesn't make your action immoral. Right. It just underlines the fact that the interconnectivity of the world means that unexpected and sometimes deeply problematic things arise from the smallest of human choices.

I want to talk about a very different story, Bryan. This one is personal to you. Take us back in time again to a small town in Wisconsin in 1905. Something terrible happened there June of that year. Tell me the story.

Yeah, so it's the summer of 1905 in a little place in Wisconsin, a little farmhouse. And there's a woman named Clara Maudlin Jansen who lives on the farm with her 4 young children and her husband. And the oldest child at this point is 4 years old. And if you do the math with 4 young children and a 4-year-old, I mean, she's been having kids basically nonstop. And at some point, the stress, perhaps the burden of being a mother for these 4 young children overwhelms her and she snaps and she has a mental health breakdown and takes this horrible decision to take the lives of her 4 young children before taking her own life. And so the husband comes home, Clara's husband comes home and discovers that most horrific thing that any human can experience, the single moment where his entire family has been wiped out in this intense act of of murderous tragedy, and all of them are dead. And so, you know, we can only imagine what that was like. The reason I tell that story is because the man who came home to that farmhouse was my great-grandfather. And what is really striking about it from my perspective is that because my great-grandfather remarried about a decade later to the woman that became my great-grandmother, I literally would not exist if those kids did not die. It's my sort of version of Kokura's luck in a bizarre way, that every joy of my life, every moment of my life indeed, is predicated on this horrible event. It gives you a lesson, I think, that the worst moments of your life are inextricably linked to the best moments of your life. And that the good and bads of our life end up creating future joy and future pain, and we can't do anything about that.

A man is swept out to sea, and he is saved because a little boy kicked his ball into the ocean. Tens of thousands of people in Nagasaki are killed while their brothers and sisters in Kyoto are spared because of a sightseeing trip. Someone exists today because 4 children and their mother perished a century ago. We like to imagine that we live in an orderly universe that is occasionally upended by an unexpected event. But what if those unforeseeable occurrences are the rule, not the exception? When we come back, why we fail to recognize that we live in a world of randomness and what we should do about it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At University College London, political scientist Brian Klaas long subscribed to a view that most of us have, that history and politics are shaped by powerful people and predictable currents. Brian, as a political scientist, you studied the way power operates. A few years ago, you went on a research trip that made you question whether many of the assumptions and theories of your field were accurate. You visited Zambia to study a coup.

Yes.

What was the story you'd heard about Zambia before you went, and what did you find when you got there?

Yeah, I was studying the origin stories of a coup d'état, a military takeover of the government. And the official version of events was that basically a drunken idiot had tried to take power from the Zambian military in 1997. So I went to figure out what had really happened. And what turned out to be the case was that the plot was a lot more sophisticated than I originally had realized. So what they were planning to do was to kidnap the army commander, the top military general in Zambia, and force him at gunpoint to announce the coup on the radio.

Hmm. And I'm assuming at this point that if other people in the military hear the top commander say, there has been a coup, I surrender, they would basically fall in line.

That's exactly right. So that was the plan. And so I talked to some of the soldiers involved in the coup, and I asked them what they did. And they went out to the army commander's house in the middle of the night, you know, some— something like 3 in the morning. And he sort of hears these noises and runs out, presumably in his pajamas, out the back of the compound and starts climbing up the wall. And one of the soldiers I interviewed describes how he grabs the sort of pant leg or trouser leg of the army commander, and the commander is pulling up on the wall trying to climb over, and he's pulling down. And in this instant, the sort of fabric slips through his fingers. And as a result, the commander clambers over the wall, rushes to the government house where the sort of government headquarters are and alerts them to this coup plot underway. So he slipped through their fingers by chance, and the coup plot fails catastrophically. They find, they find the ringleader hiding in a trash can 3 hours later. I mean, it's just like clownishly disastrous ending to the story. But it taught me a lot about the way that we understand the world because What stuck with me and was always just sort of in the back of my mind when I was trying to practice social science as I do professionally is if they had just been a millisecond faster, that they would've actually captured Zambia's government. And that when I was taught all about models and data and trend lines and so on, the details, what people would call the noise, is what I thought was really, really important in that coup plot. And it was all reduced to one number, which was zero, a failed coup plot.

And of course, when people build models of political instability and how coups succeed and how coups fail, they're not taking into account whether someone's trousers are slippery.

This is the big problem of social research and why it's so unbelievably difficult to do effectively. Because if you were trying to model where the atomic bomb is going to be dropped, you wouldn't include the vacation histories of US government officials. But all of these things matter. And what I've realized is that intuitively, when we think about the trajectories of our own lives, we take this stuff seriously. When we think about how we met a partner, why we ended up going to this school rather than that school, the little bits of noise always matter in our life histories. When we aggregate it out to the social level and we try to make predictions and and talk about trends and so on, all that detail gets treated as though it's meaningless. And my argument in a nutshell is that that is a mistake, that the noise is really important because the small changes can create massive social differences over time.

So if the world is actually shaped by randomness and chance, but we manage to tell ourselves a tidy story about how it's governed by predictable rules and principles, Let's talk about some of the factors inside the brain that make this shift possible. You've observed that there are biases wired into the brain that lead us to overlook the influence of small or random influences. One of these is the so-called magnitude bias. What is this, Brian?

The magnitude bias is the belief, often the false belief, that any big event must have a big cause that triggers it. So if there's a war, if there's an assassination, if there is a major shift in society of any sort, or indeed if our lives are upended, that there must be some big explanation. And so we've, we've basically got brains that are evolved to gravitate towards large explanations for large events. And it's really unsatisfying to think the opposite, right? So one of the ways that this manifests is in conspiracy thinking. And if you think about Princess Diana's death, this is one of my favorite studies that goes to the cognitive psychology of this. A lot of people in Britain looked at what they saw as an extremely momentous world event of Princess Diana dying. And the idea that a car accident, something so banal and so arbitrary as a car accident, could be behind this was so unsatisfying that a lot of people, when they were being studied for their beliefs on what had actually happened, will happily take large explanations, even if they're mutually contradictory. So people who are conspiratorial thinkers will sometimes say that, yes, we think that she's still alive, and also we think that she was killed by the government. And both of those can't be true, but they're totally unsatisfied with the notion of an arbitrary or an accidental explanation.

Hmm. I mean, even in the story that you just told me about the Stimpsons and their vacation to Japan, you know, as you're telling me the story, I'm recoiling at the idea that someone's vacation can decide where an atomic bomb is dropped. Surely, I tell myself, there have to be bigger causes driving this. It can't be something so trivial.

Yeah, but if you go back further, all of this is this intersection of tiny events. I mean, sometimes I'll say things like, have you ever heard of Albert Einstein's grandmother? It's like, no. Well, she was really important because if she didn't exist, Albert Einstein doesn't exist. So the more that you end up looking for explanations, you end up in what's called an infinite regress, which is where there's another explanation, and then that has another explanation behind it, and that has another explanation behind it. And what you ultimately end up with when you're making truthful assessments of what happened is that there's an infinite number of causes, many of them tiny, but all of them essential, because if you take them away, you probably wouldn't end up with the same outcome.

And of course, if you take the even longer view and you look at the You know, the evolution of humans in the first place, the number of chance occurrences that must have had to take place for that to happen is extraordinary.

This is one of my favorite sections of my research, is that I'm looking at all these crazy aspects of human evolution where, but for this one thing, we wouldn't exist. My favorite is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, because the best science we have today suggests that an oscillation in this part of space called the Oort Cloud, flung a space rock towards Earth, and it hit in the worst possible place from the perspective of the dinosaurs and the best possible place from the perspective of humans, just off the Yucatan Peninsula in what is this rock that is very rich with gypsum. And so the impact creates obviously some devastation, but what really wiped out the dinosaurs was this toxic gas along with the heat. And so if it had hit anywhere else on the planet, or if it had been delayed by a few seconds, it probably would have missed the Earth. Humans almost certainly would not exist, right? Mammals would not have risen as the sort of dominant player after the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is constantly happening. My other favorite story of this type from evolutionary biology is the origin story of live births and the sort of emergence of placenta. That is, according to the best genomics research we have today, derived from a single chance event Where one shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus about 100 million years ago, and this is why mammals don't lay eggs, right? And you sort of think, I mean, such a profound evolutionary change, maybe we wouldn't exist if not for this one shrew-like creature 100 million years ago. It's a very, you know, humbling thing to look into these backgrounds because the fragility, not just of your individual existence through the maddening, you know, random chance that leads to you being born rather than somebody else from your parents, but also just humanity's existence is incredibly, incredibly fragile.

So in the middle of the last century, scientists in a number of fields began to recognize that contrary to our assumptions, very small influences could produce very big effects. One of the researchers who first drew attention to this reality was named Edward Lorenz. Who was he, Bryan, and what was his story?

So Edward Lorenz is a fascinating character because he accidentally ended up in meteorology during World War II. You know, when Uncle Sam was sort of drafting everyone into the military effort, Lorenz was a really bright guy and he had an interest in the weather. So he joined up and ended up, believe it or not, working on forecasting weather during American bombing raids in the late stages of World War II in Japan. Now, after the war ends, he's sort of aware that there's some really limited computing power involved in forecasting, and we really don't know how we can predict the future of weather. It's really arbitrary and really poor quality. So he starts to invent a weather computer and tries his best to improve forecasting of how we might be able to predict the weather. So he has this really rudimentary computer that can only handle a few variables. I think it was about 12 variables of the weather. So maybe you've got temperature and wind speed and so on. And he plugs them into this computer, this sort of early computer, and runs a simulation. And one day he decides to rerun the simulation starting from halfway through, but he sort of groans and doesn't really want to start all the way at the beginning. It will take too long. So he figures, I'll just start halfway. I'll look at the computer printout for the data for all of the variables in the model. I'll type them in exactly, and I'll rerun the simulation starting from halfway through. And what he sees, we can only imagine he's got this sort of befuddled look as he looks at the screen because the data is completely different. The weather patterns have changed radically from simulation 1 to simulation 2, even though they're using the same data. And what he finds after a lot of sort of chin scratching is that the numbers that were printed out ended after 3 decimal places. So imagine that you've got a number like 1.234. It would be printed as 1.234, but the actual number might be 1.23456789.

Yeah.

And so in losing those little tiny numbers after the 3rd decimal place, what Lorenz realized was that that was where the weather was diverging. And this is the origin story of a realm of science called chaos theory, where you realize that these tiny changes over time can have profound consequences. And it's, by the way, the reason why today, even with the best supercomputers, we cannot forecast the weather reliably between— beyond 7 to 10 days. And that's because We can't measure everything absolutely perfectly. There's always going to be these little variations, and that's the difference between a forecast being correct 2 weeks down the road and being wildly off.

One reason we don't see the hand of chaos is that we are often quick to explain things in a way that makes them seem predictable. Brian says this is because our brains are storytelling machines. Evolution has designed us to come up with explanations for the things we see and hear.

So imagine that you are a sort of pre-modern hunter-gatherer and you see this little rustling in the grass, or you hear this rustling in the grass. Now, your brain could either decide it's probably nothing and just carry on with your day, or your brain could say, Okay, hold on. This might be a saber-toothed tiger. This might be a predator. Now, if you happen to make a mistake and you think it is a saber-toothed tiger when it's not, you will survive and maybe waste a little bit of energy by running away. But if you make the other kind of mistake, if you think it's nothing and it turns out to be a saber-toothed tiger, you will die. So our brains have evolved to overemphasize patterns, and this helps us survive because You're more attuned to what might be a threat. But it also means that we see patterns where they don't necessarily exist. And this creates a mismatch with modern life where we make mistakes because we believe things to be true that simply are uncorrelated clusters of data that we sort of connect the dots between.

And this must be why when you watch cable television about the stock market or even about sports, you have People very, very confidently explain why the game turned out the way it did, why stock A rose yesterday and why stock B fell 15 points yesterday. It's the same phenomenon.

Yeah. So I find this both from sort of an observational point of view and also from participating in this world of forecasting and punditry. On the observational side, I think when you look at something like the stock market, 8 billion interacting humans producing a global economy, and then some analysts will say, Well, stocks are reacting today to this one piece of news. And you're like, really? Out of 8 billion people, this one thing is what's causing the market to move in this exact way? And of course, if it had moved the other way, you would've just come up with an explanation that also fits that. But when I end up going on television to talk about politics or social change, I've been really aware that one thing I can't really say, and I'm never told this, but it's sort of the implicit norm of this world, is you can't say, I don't know. And I don't know a lot of the time because the world is really complicated. It's really complex. So it reinforces the bias because it's what we crave the most from the people who seemingly are the smartest among us, when in actual fact, the smartest people are the ones who are most prone to saying, I don't know.

There's a movie that came out in 1998 that brought the reality of these choices into sharp relief. I want to play you a clip from the trailer of Sliding Doors. Have you ever wondered what might have been? Would things be different if you caught the train instead of missing it?

How much would your life change if you were 10 minutes early?

You're a fan of this movie, Brian. Tell me how it speaks to all our lives.

So Sliding Doors tells us something really important, which is that the moments that we believe to be consequential, those sort of what-if moments, those are the tip of the iceberg, right? They're the ones where we're aware that our lives have diverted. And the point that I'm making is that that is happening literally 100% of the time. When I talk to people about the ideas that I'm grappling with, I often will say You know, all of you sort of have these moments where you know that something could have been different, where you, you could have turned left rather than right when you got into a car accident, or you could have gone to the bar or not gone to the bar, and that's when you met your spouse. The problem is that those are not the sliding doors moments. The sliding doors moments are the ones that we don't know that our life has diverged. That every moment you have, every little quip you make in conversation diverts the conversation, every little A decision you make, whether to leave the house now or in 5 minutes, changes the kinds of people you'll meet that day, the conversations you'll have, and those ripple effects emanate throughout our lives. And so one of the biggest mistakes I think we make is that only big things matter and only things we're aware of matter. And those are both completely wrong. So all of the time, every single moment of our lives is reshaping our futures. And we intuitively understand this whenever we encounter science fiction that involves time travel. Because if you're going to go back in time, everyone gives you the same warning, right? Don't touch anything. Don't squish a bug a million years ago because you'll delete humans from the future, or don't talk to your parents because you'll never get born. So they understand in that logic that every little detail matters. Cause and effect happens the same whether it's in the past, the present, or the future. So if squishing a bug a million years ago can reshape the world, squishing a bug today can reshape the world. If talking to someone 50 years ago can reshape who's born, talking to someone today can reshape who's born in 50 years. And that is a bewildering thought. But in my view, it is scientifically accurate and completely true as well.

Hmm. So we've been talking about some of the ways in which humans overlook randomness and chance. But you say that modern humans have engineered an interconnected world that is even more subject to random occurrences. How so, Brian?

So the effects of randomness are produced by interconnectivity, and we have created a hyperconnected world. And so one of my favorite examples of this is the thing where many of you will remember a couple years ago in 2021, this little gust of wind tips this boat sideways in the Suez Canal, and it blocks global trade, and it caused something like $50 billion of economic damage. From one boat, from one gust of wind, right? And the reason that was possible was because we had optimized all of our systems to the absolute limit such that this tiny little chance event could debilitate global trade. And so, you know, we see this with the pandemic where a single mutation of a single virus infecting a human in Wuhan shuts down the world almost instantaneously over the span of several weeks because of this hyperconnectivity. So there've been pandemics in the past, but they, they didn't have quite so wide-ranging or quite so rapid of effects. So we've engineered this world that is extremely sensitive to chance events, constantly changing in these profound and upsetting ways all of the time. And I think that's partly by design.

You say that also our relentless drive for efficiency has produced very little slack in our lives, and the reduced slack itself has effects on randomness and chance. How so?

There's all sorts of areas in the social world where We are told to squeeze every ounce of inefficiency out of the system. This is true for our lives as well, right? The life hack approach is to always get that little extra 1% of efficiency into your life. And the problem is that that means that there's a cost to it, which is resilience. Because if you are optimized and absolutely efficient to the limit, the system or your life becomes brittle. It becomes one where there's no give. So when something inevitably goes wrong, as it always does, there's no ability to And all of us sort of know this with our daily schedules, right? I mean, if you pad something by 10 minutes, it's less efficient. But when something goes wrong or you get stuck in traffic, you end up still being on time. And what we're basically doing on a social level is we're taking out that buffer. We're saying the buffer is evil because it's inefficient, which is why when you sort of think about the last 25 years of global history, it's a series of these sort of small changes that have created—

Yeah.

cascading catastrophes. And it's why I think we all have this sense that the whole world is constantly falling apart at a quicker pace than usual. I think it is partly because it is.

So you make a very interesting argument that for modern people, there's a big shift in terms of how predictable our lives are on a micro scale versus a macro scale. What do you mean by this, Bryan?

Yeah. So this is where I sort of put myself in the sort of perspective of a hunter-gatherer living 200,000 years ago, right? Their world was extremely unstable and unpredictable day to day because they didn't know if a predator would eat them. They didn't know if their crop would fail or if their gathering would fail. They didn't know if they would have their next meal or if they would die in childbirth, right? Really scary stuff happening all the time. But their overall world never really changed. So, you know, you think about generation after generation. If you know how to hunt and you know how to gather, you can teach your kids and they're going to have the exact same strategy. for life. So parents taught children how to live, and it was very stable across generations. Now think about our world. We live in a world that is hyper-optimized and seemingly stable day to day. Google Maps tells you how long it's going to take you to get to work, and usually it's pretty close. You click a button on Amazon and the package arrives at the right time, or at least on the right day. We have these sorts of illusions of control that exist from systems that are seemingly extremely stable on the day to day. At the same time, the overall structure of our world has radically changed. I mean, the internet didn't exist when I was a kid, at least not for most people. AI didn't exist for most people until a year or two ago. You have all these macro-level changes, computerization, all this sort of stuff, smartphones, and it's created this dynamic that's really unique in human history where children teach their parents how to navigate the world rather than the reverse. So this is where I think we have engineered a system, a sort of upside-down world, different from all other humans that came before us where, you know, the Starbucks will never change, but the rivers will dry up and our democracies might collapse. And when you think about that, it's the inversion of what we want. What we want is sort of the serendipity and unexpected joy of, you know, flukes in our daily life. Meanwhile, we want the overall superstructure of the world to be pretty stable and reliable. And I think we've sort of inverted that.

And it's something that's a great challenge for the 21st century to Our failure to recognize that our world is saturated with randomness comes with great costs. We expect order and predictability to prevail and then get blindsided by sudden crises. We see each disastrous development as an inexplicable one-off occurrence instead of the product of a world that was always full of chance and that has become more vulnerable to chance in the modern age. When we come back, how we can learn to recognize the role of randomness and how to turn these forces to our advantage. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, What's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel Elevated. Because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Brian Klaas is a political scientist at University College London. He's the author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. So Brian, I think when we listen to these stories of chance, some of us might find these stories disturbing, and in part I think we find it disturbing because it challenges the idea that we are actually in control of what's happening. You say that it's important to come to terms with the fact that such control might actually be impossible. You deal with this yourself using something that you call the snooze button effect. What is the snooze button effect?

So the snooze button effect is a term I've coined, which is trying to showcase how our lives are constantly being diverted by the choices we make. in our daily existence. So imagine that tomorrow you wake up and you slap the snooze button because you're a little bit tired. Now imagine that your, your story of your life rewinds by 5 seconds, and in this version, you don't slap the snooze button, you get out of bed. Now, it is completely obvious to me that your life will unfold at least somewhat differently depending on these 2 versions of events, because you will have different encounters that day with different people. Your conversations will go differently, and the ripple effects from that will emanate out throughout your life. The little tiny changes will add up. And so when I think about the snooze button effect, it's a reminder that, yes, I don't have control. I don't know how the effects of that choice will play out. I find this incredibly liberating and incredibly empowering. And there's 2 reasons for that. One is that it's liberating because it means that with a little bit less control, I should take less credit for my success and less blame for my failure. The stakes are a little lower because I'm not the sole author of the story of my life. There's countless authors that are constantly writing little bits of my story. But it's also extremely uplifting and, and I think empowering because it means that there is no moment of our lives that is a throwaway. There's not a single moment of our existence that doesn't matter because every single moment is producing these ripple effects. And even when we're unaware of them, they matter. So the moment that a baby is conceived, if there is any millisecond difference in that moment, a different child is born, right? Now we sort of all intuitively understand that, but if you actually think about what that means, it means that on the day of conception, if you stop to have a sip of coffee or if you don't, You have a different kid. But that's true for the day before and the day before that and the day before that. All of those things in our lives that culminate in that one moment when the baby is conceived had to be exactly as they were for that child to be born. This is the phrase that I borrow from, from the social scientist Scott Page, where he says that we control nothing, but we influence everything.

Hmm. Now, the fact that we have little control, I think, prompts many people to say, how can I figure out a way to exercise more control? If you think about people who go down the IVF route of conception, for example, you in fact have more control than if you went the natural route of conception. And there's the illusion, I suppose, with IVF that maybe you actually do have more control over an unpredictable process. So I think one of our reactions to unpredictability and chance is to say, how can we exert more control? How do we keep all these forces at bay so that in fact I can chart my own course? You think that that's a mistake.

The way I sometimes describe this is imagine a world of perfect control, right? Where you could pick everything that happened in your life. It would be the most dystopian hellscape you could imagine. If uncertainty was eliminated, imagine that you knew when you were 10 years old Exactly who you're going to marry. Imagine if you knew the exact moment of your death, right? For a lot of us, it would be incredibly crippling. And the moments of creativity, of serendipity, of joy, I mean, if you think about all those moments in your life that really stuck with you, how many of them were planned beforehand to a T, right? Even in the planned events that we have, like a celebration, a wedding, a birthday, whatever, often the stuff we remember the most is the unplanned flourish. You know, when the, when the uncle did this unexpected thing on the dance floor or whatever. So we pretend that uncertainty is always bad, and sometimes it is. I mean, a cancer diagnosis is scary and you don't know what's going to happen. And I'm not trying to say that that's a good thing, but pure certainty, pure control would cripple everything that's good about being a human. And so it's a mistake to try to stamp out all levels of uncertainty, all levels of chance.

One of your important insights, Bryan, is that we should all focus a little less on control and a little more on resilience. What do you mean by this?

Yeah, so I think there's an acknowledgment that we have less control. The question is, what do you do about it? The world is uncertain. It's a scary place often. And this is where I think both our social systems and individuals themselves need to focus more on resilience. Resilience is where we can take a little bit of control away Even if something goes wrong, even if the unexpected befalls you, you're going to be okay. So, you know, when you think about stuff where on a personal level you don't have control, it's the stuff where it's all about, you know, external validation, for example, what other people do in reaction to how you behave. If you have intrinsic motivation, things like passion, things like, you know, intellectual discovery, things like exploring the world, it's not contingent on how somebody else reacts to you. It's just the thing itself, and that's more resilient. So, you know, when I think about what I've done with my own life, I do spend more time with things that have intrinsic and immediate value to me, like going out into nature, like traveling with a, you know, sort of an eye for exploration, like walking my dog because I like walking my dog. And, you know, the sort of periods where I've felt worst often have been when I've put something out in the world and someone has said something horrible about it. And I've put all of my eggs in the sort of external validation basket, that's where I both don't have control and I'm ceding my well-being to other people, right? So I sort of think that that's one of the areas where society as a whole has not learned this lesson as well, because the sort of hyper-optimized social systems that we have where, you know, everything is about short-term payoff, you got to hit your quarter 3 targets and so on. That short-termism is good for efficiency. It's bad for resilience. It's bad for anticipating shocks that might come because the world is changing rapidly and is deeply uncertain.

How would you apply the same insight at the level of organizations or nations, Bryan?

Yeah, so one of the examples I use is a case where a Latin American country was looking at different proposals for an electrical grid. And one version of the proposal was hyper-efficient and way cheaper, and it was a single national grid. The second version had these sort of decoupled nodes at the regional level. So if you had a blackout in one area, you could sort of isolate it, right? But it was way less efficient and way more expensive. Now they went with the second option, the less efficient option, and the first blackout that happened, it paid for itself. Now, if you were analyzing that choice purely on the basis of short-term profits, short-term efficiency, and so on, you would never have made that choice. But because they thought about the long-term resilience of the system, They emphasized decoupling. They emphasized mitigating risk. They thought about the what-ifs. They ended up with a smarter strategy. And I really do worry that in a moment of extreme social change and rapid technological shifting of AI and all these things, that we are thinking short-term and not enough decision-makers are pondering the what-ifs and planning accordingly for them.

Would you say that your own life has become happier, or at least less stressed as a result of focusing less on control?

This is a fun one to talk about because I've written books in the past. This one changed my worldview completely, and I feel the happiest I have literally ever been in my life. A lot of the reason for that is just because it's a mentality shift. It's sort of this understanding, first off, that it is unbelievably improbable that humans exist, let alone that I exist. I feel grateful for that. It's also that when I realize the uncertainty and the lack of control that I have over my life, I have become more of an explorer, right? I've become more of an experimenter. I try things that I wouldn't try in the past. And as a result of that, I'm sort of attuned to the serendipity that happens when something unexpected comes into my life and the joy from it. Of course, there's unexpected setbacks too, but I'm more able to roll with them because I don't have this sense that I have to have top-down optimized control all the time. And I think about the times in my life where I was actually probably, you know, not saddest, but, but, but not exactly at my happiest is some of the time when I was on paper the most productive with inbox zero. And I was checking off, you know, every checklist was ticked. And, you know, like it sucked the joy out of life. I was on top of my sort of to-do list, but I wasn't having a good time. And so, you know, I think there's some of these lessons that I've incorporated where You just sort of have to think, you know, we're all on this ride that is extremely bizarre, contingent, swayed by randomness, swayed by luck, etc. And we're happy to be here, we're lucky to be here, and that every moment that I have is influencing the future in some ripple effect that I don't know how it's going to play out. There's something so magical and awe-inspiring about that, that it has just utterly transformed how I think about my life, and it's made me a much happier person. So what's interesting is that a lot of people, they first encounter my ideas or the ideas of chance and randomness, and they become nihilists, right? Nothing matters. And my argument is, no, everything matters, even the tiniest stuff. And if you fixate on that idea, your life will always have meaning and always feel important. And I think that's the— one of the secrets to a happy life.

Brian Klaas is a political scientist at University College London. He's the author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

It's been such a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.

In our companion to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we talk with Brian about what happens if we stop trying to make our days orderly and instead invite chaos into our lives. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled Engineering Luck. If you're not yet a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, this is a great time to give it a try. We're extending our standard 7-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January, and you'll get 30 free days to try it out. You can sample Hidden Brain Plus by going to apple.co/hiddenbrain and clicking Try Free. Again, just go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click Click Try Free. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Thanks for listening. See you soon.

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