Brian Klaas
Appearances
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
by command of General Robert E. Lee. So this, you know, OK, it seems plausible. And so Barton, you know, sort of sends this up the chain of command. The letters go to the Union tents and they go to a general named Alpheus S. Williams.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And outside of the tent, you know, this is one of these periods where the generals all have their sort of assistant outside the tent to sort of, you know, filter out what's worth the general's time. And the guy who was filtering this day was named Colonel Samuel Pittman. And Pittman reads this and he instantly knows that the orders are genuine. And this is the second part of the story.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
This is the part that I absolutely love. So the reason Pittman knows that they're real is because we worked before he joined the army as a bank teller in Detroit, Michigan. And he was the paymaster for the U.S. Army. And as a result of that, what he had to do was process checks that were signed by people in the military.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And it turned out that Pittman had seen Chilton's signature literally thousands of times before the war broke out. So he happens to be the one person in the Union Army who can look at the signature and say, yes, that's actually the right guy. This is a real set of orders and so on. And so he conveys this information. The Union Army changes its mind and moves and meets at the Battle of Antietam.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Again, this huge showdown. Now, the Battle of Antietam is not a decisive Union victory, but it stops the Confederate momentum. It's a critical moment in the war. And because of it, a lot of historians will argue that Antietam is sort of the thing that was the catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation, that Lincoln felt, you know, more emboldened to do this. But more, even more critically...
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
There's a relatively good argument you can make that the Confederates were about to get recognized or that the British government was thinking about recognizing the Confederacy because of the momentum they had in the war. And it sort of gave the British government pause. Right.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
They said, let's wait and see, because this battle seems to suggest that this is not going to be a decisive Confederate victory in the war. Of course, they wanted the cotton and so on.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
So it's one of those aspects where when you think about this, it's this critical moment where if Antietam or something like it had been another really decisive Confederate victory, you know, how different the world could be. I mean, imagine that this had led to a cascade in which the Confederates actually won. It's not impossible to imagine that.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And of course, everything about history would differ. Because you'd have two countries. I mean, there's so many things that would be different. I mean, World War I would maybe not have happened the same way. World War II would not have happened the same way. So you start to think about this stuff and it's really seductive.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yes. Yeah. And it all pivots on these three cigars and the guy taking a rest at just the right time. I mean, it's an amazing, amazing story.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those stories that I think it really makes clear that when we tell history, we always focus on the sort of obvious factors. And this one is really not obvious. So Henry Stimson goes on vacation. He's a U.S. government official at the time. He goes on vacation, basically, in this tour of Asia to Kyoto, Japan in 1926.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And some some incredible historians have done this work to track down. They went to the Miyako Hotel near the rail yards of Kyoto and they found the room number and everything. I mean, they went to the records because the Miyako Hotel still exists and they found, you know, the actual ledger where he stayed.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And the reason they did this is because 19 years later, Henry Stimson ends up as America's Secretary of War. And he's sort of the chief civilian in charge of the targeting decision for the first atomic bomb. And the generals and the scientists and the civilians sort of are together on what's called the Target Committee. And they come up with a list of recommendations for where to drop this bomb.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And they agree that Kyoto is the best pick. And the reason they argue this is it's got an airplane factory. It's a historic capital. It's got propaganda value. It hasn't been destroyed that much during the war. So it sort of will demonstrate the destructive power of the first atomic bomb. And Stimson, fortunately for the residents of Kyoto, liked Kyoto.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
He sort of was seduced by the city and the sort of beauty of it, the history of it. And he also didn't want to have, you know, this destruction of this cultural heritage site. So the generals start to call it his pet city because he starts talking so much about how they can't bomb it. They must not bomb it. And he twice meets with President Truman to convince him to take Kyoto off the list.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And eventually Truman relents. And so the first bomb goes to Hiroshima instead of Kyoto because of this vacation that was taken 19 years earlier. And the second bomb is supposed to go to Kokura. That's the primary target on August 9th, 1945. And because of a passing cloud where they basically couldn't see the target site, they end up going to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki, of course.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And, you know, there's a sort of element where when you look at the Miyako Hotel on the target plans, they drew up bombing sort of target maps and so on. And the bullseye for where they plan to drop it is the rail yards right next to where the Miyako Hotel still is today. And so you sort of wonder, you know, the psychology of this moment where Stimson is looking at these maps.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
He's remembering this trip with his wife 19 years earlier. He chooses to act. And so we don't know what would have happened differently if they had bombed Kyoto and Kokura instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But one thing that we do know is it would have changed the fate of science.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And I didn't put this in fluke, but it's an interesting aspect of it, is that if you've ever heard of, for example, the F scale for tornadoes, that's named after Ted Fujita. And he was in the bombing site that was supposed to be dropped yesterday. at the time, likely been incinerated. So, I mean, there's all these ripple effects, right?
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
The science of tornadoes and one of the main figures of modern meteorology probably would have been incinerated. Of course, we don't know who was incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that might have changed the course of the 20th century. And so that's the sort of great what ifs is that Japanese history would have been different. Of course, the U.S. probably would have won the war either way.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
But the course of Japanese history and the ripple effects, when you swap 180,000 people out for a different 180,000 people, it changes the future. And all of it can be traced back to this one tourist couple's decision and a passing cloud on August 9th, 1945.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
What's interesting is there are some potential references to the idea that this was viewed as an upside in the target committee's thinking because they knew that the scholars who survived and the sort of educated population would instantly know that this bomb was different and would convey it to the rest of the country and say, look, you know, you have to surrender.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
So whether that was fanciful thinking or not, but all these little details, I mean, they're fascinating to ponder tragedies, of course, but they're ones where Just when you have such consequential moments, the little tiny aspects of human history are written in the margins.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yeah. I mean, the people in Kokura didn't know that they were the target until it was declassified. I believe it was like two decades later. So, of course, you know, all of a sudden they declassify this thing. And all of a sudden the residents of Kokura have been told you very narrowly escaped being Nagasaki. I mean, just an incredible, incredible facet of history.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yeah, of course. I mean, war is one that's obvious because you can imagine so easily how if the victor had changed or if the destruction had been different, that the consequences would be enormous. I mean, one of the arguments that I'm making is that, you know, these things have really long tails. And one of the aspects that I think is really difficult for us to grapple with
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
When you think about history is whenever I point these aspects out, you know, these tiny details of the cigar or the vacation that Stimson took, the people who push back against me will say, well, yeah, but like the U.S., the Union would have won the Civil War anyway because it had structural advantages or the U.S. would have won against Japan because they would have dropped the bomb elsewhere.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And of course, you know, that's probably true. There's some aspects of this that are probably true. But the point that I make is the way you lose conflicts, the way that history unfolds is not just a series of discrete events, right? It's not like the war is now over and now we enter a new chapter of history.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
The way the war ends affects the way the next war begins or it affects the way the economy recovers, right? If Kyoto is not part of Japan's economy, Japan in the 20th century maybe has a different history. Right. And so the argument that I'm making is that the wars are the most obvious, but everything matters. Right. That these little details are always reshaping history.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And it's just these little glimpses we get when we can actually make the counterfactual make sense. That is why I use warfare very often in illustrating the points. Right.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
I think it's the opposite, unfortunately. And I think it's the opposite for two reasons. I really worry about this. This is where I go into the social science hat a little bit. But the two reasons I think this has gone the wrong way. First is because we have so many data tools at our disposal. that an AI is going to amplify this, that people begin to believe the data can predict the future.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And we can't. We just simply can't because you can't model every possible contingency of history. I mean, you would never put in your model the vacation histories of US government officials or the cigar locations of various armies and so on. So as a result of that, I think there's a false hubris that we have when we look at the world.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And, you know, I'm part of this as a social scientist where you sort of have these models and you say, this is what's going to happen. Here's the trends, the economists forecast, all these things. And we're very often wrong. So I think that aspect is problematic. And the second aspect of this is that I think the world has become less stable because it's more interconnected.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
So in other words, the cigar story quite obviously changed American history. And over time, that would have ripple effects for the rest of the world. The problem is a pivotal moment in China now affects Americans. And a pivotal moment in America now affects people in Zimbabwe. So because of the interconnectivity, I think we have more risk. that is harder to navigate.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And so I wish we had decision makers that were constantly thinking about sort of resilience and contingencies. I really worry that our sort of overconfidence is one where we haven't actually learned the lessons of history.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yeah, so I'll talk about 9-11 briefly and then the Bin Laden raid. I mean, I think one of the stories I have in Fluke is a really moving personal story of a man who went to a conference that was supposed to be held in the World Trade Center on 9-11. And his colleague gave him the gift of a new tie on the morning of the conference as a sort of token of appreciation or whatever.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And the tie didn't match his shirt that he was wearing. So he went back to iron the shirt. And when he went back to iron the shirt, she went up to the conference and was killed when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. And he survived and she didn't. So her act of kindness is what caused her to die, unfortunately, is very, very sad.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And one of the things I just wanted to talk briefly about the philosophy of the history that you get from a story like that.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
is that what he really got upset about when I talked to him, his name's Joseph Lott, and when I talked to him about this, what he said is that everybody told him the same thing, which was that everything happens for a reason, as though there was this grand plan to why he was supposed to survive and she was supposed to die, which put so much pressure on him, right?
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
This idea that there was some preordained plan. And so this is where I think the sort of aspects of how we tell history matter, because if you emphasize some of the accidents... then there's some things that just happen. They're not just. They're not morally valuable. It's just sometimes you give a gift of a tie and you die.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And history works the same way sometimes, where sometimes the bad guys win, and it's not because they were righteous. It's because of accidents, right? There's a point around 9-11 that also illustrates, I think, that broader lesson of history.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Now, with the bin Laden raid, of course, one of the points I make is that you're trying to navigate what's called radical uncertainty, which is where you have no idea. I mean, nobody in America knew whether bin Laden was in that house, right? They had a guess. The CIA had sort of made an analysis and they said, you know, there's a person there that we think might be bin Laden. But we don't know.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
You know, this is one of the things that's really extraordinary about this moment in American history is that that night was so incredibly consequential in several different ways. One is that Obama goes to the White House Correspondents Dinner, which is basically where the president tells jokes. They do sort of stand up.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And he has ordered in the Situation Room all the preparations to be made for this raid. And after he does stand up, he goes back to the Situation Room and watches them kill Osama bin Laden a few hours later. Extraordinary amounts of sort of steel nerves to tell jokes when you're gambling your presidency.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
There's some confidence of Trump that say that that was the night he decided to run for president and wanted to contest for the 2016 election. So, you know, whether that's true or not, we'll never know. But it's one of these intriguing aspects of history. We have Obama gambling his presidency. as he's telling jokes, maybe inspiring Donald Trump to enter the political fray.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And then, of course, you know, one of the helicopters crashes, one of the Blackhawks crashes during the raid. They managed to kill bin Laden successfully, but it's, you know, I mean, they didn't know. There was no way to know. And one of the things that happens when you have moments like this is that You tell history with the benefit of hindsight. Of course, they were going to succeed.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
It's SEAL Team 6 on the CIA, right? But it could have gone very wrong. The Pakistan government might have noticed earlier and scrambled fighter jets. I mean, there's all these things. And I think when we encounter the stories of history, we know how they end. That's the area where if you write a book about World War II, it's impossible to inhabit a world where...
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Where something else happens because we know what actually happened and forever our our sort of interpretation of events is biased by that what actually occurred. And we can never go back to that moment like Obama did on that fateful night where he genuinely didn't know what was happening.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
I think that there's a lot of the world that we try to explain with neat and tidy stories, right? And I'm a social scientist and social science is trying to sort of use trends and patterns and say where we're heading. And we always sort of, you know, I think we overly simplify the world to do that.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And sometimes when you're writing historical narratives, the same thing happens that, oh, of course, this was inevitable because the great trends of history brought us to this moment. Every time that I started to look more deeply into anything that happened, whether it was in history or a case that I was studying in my social science research, all of that sort of fell by the wayside.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And it became utterly clear to me that the idiosyncratic personalities, the small decisions, the tiny little flukes were things that swayed history forever. And of course, We don't know when they're going to be consequential, right? I mean, this is the thing is that sometimes a tiny decision doesn't really sway history that much. And other times it redirects the course of the future forever.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And I think that the sort of narratives that we build around telling stories of where we, how we ended up where we are today, write that out. They pretend it's meaningless noise. And so I'm trying to correct that and argue that the small stuff really matters.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Well, it sort of builds the narrative sequentially through a series of sort of claims, right? So the first one is that the world is much more swayed by the arbitrary and the accidental than we imagine. And I start with a story about the atomic bomb, which I think we'll probably get to in a moment. So I won't talk about that yet.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
But I sort of am illustrating that this is something where throughout history, these accidental changes have happened. And then I explain why it happens. And the reason why it happens is because of chaos theory, which is effectively that when you have a complex interconnected system, which we all live within, right? We live within this system of 8 billion interacting humans.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
that what somebody does halfway around the world, even somebody long dead, can have a ripple effect that affects the trajectory of our lives. And of course, we were extremely clearly illustrated this point a couple of years ago in the pandemic hit, because one person getting infected in Wuhan, you know, changed the world.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And of course, history operates like this too, where you can have, you know, the World War I example, which we can talk about as well, of a single person getting assassinated, and then all of a sudden you have millions of deaths.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
So that aspect of interconnection is really important to the book, the sort of ripple effects of our actions and the sort of unforeseeable consequences of small behavioral changes and so on. And then I try to argue why we pretend otherwise, right? Why our brains have basically evolved to draw in neat and tidy stories about how the world works.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And of course, you know, it would be really boring and annoying to read history books that don't have a narrative because our brain has evolved to crave it. So, like, what would you do? You know, the story of World War Two and it's just a list of facts. You need to stitch them together.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
But I think that even though that's the way we make sense of the world and it's the way we make sense of history, I think it's important for us to understand that. That it's a bias, right? It's called narrative bias. And it's something where we misunderstand the world if we overly clean up the sort of details of history and make them fit into these sort of neat and tidy boxes.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And then there's sort of the philosophy of this, right? The sort of questions about how much can we know about the world? How much can we forecast the future? If history pivots on the tiny details, maybe this is one of the reasons why the 21st century has been a series of calamities that have sort of blindsided us.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Because we like to pretend that we know what's happening and we know the cause and effect relationships, but if the tiny little details are changing the world... then in some ways it's going to be impossible to forecast the future.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And that's something that I think flies in the face of some of the hubris we have around things like AI and so on, where people imagine, oh, we're just one data model away from knowing what's coming next. And I basically argue that that's not true.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
Yeah, it does. And it depends how far you go back, right? Because there's sort of there's this period where Britain is not always an island. I mean, it eventually becomes an island 8000 years ago when this landslide in Norway created a tsunami that permanently cut off, or at least up until now, cut off Britain completely and made it an island.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And that is, of course, one of the reasons why the Navy is so important to British history. And then once you develop naval superpowers in the sort of British Empire, you need a lot of trees because you need to build the ships. And so what happens during this period as the Navy rises in Britain is that they basically decimate a lot of the old forest trees.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And they just, you know, there's this voracious desire for tall timber. And so the British landscape is forever changed. I mean, there's still remnants that you can see in terms of how different and deforested it is because the Royal Navy in the 18th century took in an estimated 1.2 million trees down in order to build these ships. So there's this sort of unmet demand for
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And all of a sudden, people realize the answer is America. And they think, okay, we've got this huge continent, these enormous what they call cloud-kissing pines in places like Connecticut. And so, you know, the settlers began to cut these trees down because, of course, they're really good for building houses. But the king wants them to build ships.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And so they have this sort of moment where the finest specimens were supposed to be reserved for the king. And they made this sort of etching onto the bark with what was called the king's mark, this broad arrow shape that was imprinted on these trees with three blows from a hatchet. And it was marked as the king's trees, right?
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And of course, this produces an illicit trade because the settlers in America want to use these trees and they sort of hope they can get away with it. Now, eventually, this all comes to a sort of showdown because the resentment between the king claiming the trees and the settlers wanting them and the colonies...
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
They eventually have this big sort of showdown in a place called the Pine Tree Tavern in New Hampshire. This happens in April of 1772. And the king's sort of, you know, enforcer gets attacked by this violent mob. And so this spurs what's called the Pine Tree Riot. And it's the hidden story that many people don't know about that's sort of this precursor to the Boston Tea Party.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
It's one of these parts of sort of an initial defiance of the crown in America. And because they were treated with a relatively light slap on the wrist, it emboldened those who wanted to sort of challenge the sort of royal power. And so it's viewed as one of these sort of catalysts of the Revolutionary War.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And when you think about this, I mean, if we sort of zoom out from what's going on here, there's this aspect in history where to tell this story, you need to have the history of sort of Doggerland, this aspect of why Britain gets cut off and becomes an island. You have to have the story of empire. You have to have the story of the sort of geography of Britain's forests.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
the geography of America's forests, the colonization of America, and then this little trigger, which is the Pine Tree Riot, along with the sort of resentment and the need for trees. And all of them combine, right? And the reason I tell stories like this is because any one of these factors being different might have created a different trigger for war.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
I mean, eventually you may have had the Revolutionary War anyway, but it might have started differently. And of course, one of the things that I think is really profound about this example is that the initial American Navy sailed under a white flag with a pine tree on it. And so if you look it up, you'll see this as this is the first naval flag for the United States.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And it's because of this attempt to sort of seize the American trees for the Royal Navy. And, you know, when I was writing this part of the book, I didn't have time to go into a lot of the detail. But the ripple effects of this continue because you have things like Captain Cook then goes on these expeditions and his ship breaks off the coast of Hawaii and he gets killed.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And part of that may be because they lost the supply line. It's tied to this question of supply lines for tall trees and whether you have good timber and all these things. So every story around naval history in this period is somehow linked to this question of supply lines around trees. And we sort of take for granted, okay, now let's look at the naval battle
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And there's this hidden set of factors that we just totally ignore that are lurking below the surface.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
This is one of my favorite stories because there may be a few people who know the first part of this story, but the second part of it I had never seen written about. I found it in a very obscure journal article, and it's just unbelievably fascinating because the fate of the United States does genuinely pivot on a complete accident involving three cigars. So this goes back to 1862.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And what you have happen is you have this person who is in the Union Army. His name is Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Regiment. And at 9 a.m. on September 13th, 1862, it's a Saturday morning. He sits down to rest, right? They're marching these long days as part of the sort of army's movements. and he sits down next to a fence row.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And he stretches himself out, and all of a sudden this thing catches his eye, and he looks at it, and it's a sheet of paper, and he unwraps it. It turns out there's three cigars inside this sheet of paper. But in the paper... What is written is it says, Confidential Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, September 9th, 1862, Special Orders 191.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And so what Barton has accidentally discovered is the marching orders of the Confederate Army, which have fallen out of a satchel of one of the messengers. And this is like the most priceless intelligence you can possibly get when you're in the middle of a war, because it's about to tell you where the Confederate Army is going.
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
And this, if you know the Civil War dates, September 9th, 1862, is not far before one of the most consequential battles and indeed the bloodiest day in American history of the Battle of Antietam. And so what happens basically is they sort of have this conversation in the Union Army of, OK, we found these cigars. It seems too good to be true, right?
American History Hit
Was the Civil War Won by Chance?
We accidentally came across these sort of these special orders. So how do we know they're genuine? Because if we're going to move the Union Army and have the whole battle plan change based on this intelligence, we need to know this is a real order and not some sort of, you know, gambit by the Confederates to trick us. So they look at the document of the document signed by a guy named R.H. Chilton.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 U.S. government officials. But all of these things matter.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
When we aggregate it out to the social level and we try to make predictions 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And so 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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,
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So you sort of, 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 fluctuates
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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. Mammals would not have risen as the sort of dominant player after the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is constantly happening.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And you sort of think, I mean, such a profound evolutionary change. Maybe we wouldn't exist.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
if not for this one shrew-like creature 100 million years ago, it's a very humbling thing to look into these backgrounds because the fragility, not just of your individual existence through the maddening 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So he joined up and ended up, believe it or not, working on forecasting weather during American bombing rains 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So he starts to invent a weather computer and tries his best to improve forecasting of how he 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
The weather patterns have changed radically from simulation one to simulation two, 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 three 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And so in losing those little tiny numbers after the third 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And it's, by the way, the reason why today, even with the best supercomputers, we cannot forecast the weather reliably beyond seven 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 two weeks down the road and being wildly off.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Now, if you happen to make a mistake and you think it is a saber tooth 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 tooth tiger, you will die. So our brains have evolved to overemphasize patterns.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 have just come up with an explanation that also fits that.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Every little decision you make, whether to leave the house now or in five 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So the effects of randomness are produced by interconnectivity and we have created a hyper-connected world. And so one of my favorite examples of this is the thing where many of you will remember a couple of 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And so we see this with the pandemic where a single mutation of a single virus infecting the human in Wuhan shuts down the world almost instantaneously over the span of several weeks because of this hyper-connectivity. So there've been pandemics in the past but they didn't have quite so wide-ranging or quite so rapid of effects.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 absorb it. 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 cascading catastrophes.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And it's why I think we all have this sense that the world is constantly falling apart at a quicker pace than usual. I think it is partly because it is.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 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 gonna have the exact same strategy for life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 gonna 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So this is where I think we have engineered a system, a sort of upside down world, different from all of the humans that came before us, where 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 flukes in our daily life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 resolve.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 Stimson records in his diary that they have a, quote, beautiful day of sightseeing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 story of your life rewinds by five seconds, and in this version, you don't slap the snooze button.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
You get out of bed. Now, it is completely obvious to me that your life will unfold at least somewhat differently depending on these two 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 two reasons for that.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
But it's also extremely uplifting and I think empowering because it means that there is no moment of our lives that is a throwaway moment. 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And, you know, 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 Stimsons, like everybody else, sort of fall in love with it and they get a soft spot for it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 the social scientist Scott Page, where he says that we control nothing, but we influence everything.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 were going to marry. Imagine if you knew the exact moment of your death, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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, and all serendipity from our lives.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Yeah, so I think there's an acknowledgement 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 even if something goes wrong, even if the unexpected befalls you, you're going to be okay.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So when you think about stuff where on a personal level, you don't have control. It's the stuff where it's all about external validation, for example, what other people do in reaction to how you behave. If you have intrinsic motivation, things like passion, things like intellectual discovery, things like exploring the world, it's not contingent on how somebody else reacts to you.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
It's just the thing itself. And that's more resilient. So 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 sort of an eye for exploration, like walking my dog because I like walking my dog.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 everything is about short-term payoff, you've got to hit your quarter three targets and so on, that short-termism is good for efficiency. It's bad for resilience.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
It's bad for anticipating shocks that might come because the world is changing rapidly and is deeply uncertain.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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. And 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. So I feel grateful for that.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
It's also that when I realized 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Of course, there's unexpected setbacks too, but I'm more able to roll with them because I don't have the sense that I have to have top-down optimized control all the time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And I think about the times in my life where I was actually probably, you know, not saddest, but not exactly 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 in this ride that is extremely bizarre, contingent, swayed by randomness, swayed by luck, et cetera. And we're happy to be here. We're lucky to be here.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And so they have 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 one of the secrets to a happy life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Yeah, so 19 years after he goes on vacation to Kyoto, Stimson has risen through the ranks of the U.S. 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 preserved through historical records.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And the memo basically says, we agree, Kyoto must be destroyed. That's where we're going to drop the first atomic bomb.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And that was where the second atomic bomb on August 9th, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima bombing, was supposed to go. So the second B-29 boxcar 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And as a result of this, they think to themselves, well, we can't risk dropping an atomic bomb and missing. Right. 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 1045 in the morning, they dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. And of course, nobody in Kokura was aware of this.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And so there's a term 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
This is the nature of luck is that it's in the eye of the beholder because one person's luck is 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 and Nagasaki.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Yeah, so it's the summer of 1905 in a little place in Wisconsin, a little farmhouse. And there's a woman named Clara Modlin Jansen who lives on the farm with her four young children and her husband. And the oldest child at this point is four years old. And if you do the math with four young children and a four-year-old, I mean, she's been having kids basically nonstop.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And at some point, the stress, perhaps the burden of being a mother for these four 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 four 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
The single moment where his entire family has been wiped out in this intense act 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Yeah, I was studying the origin stories of a coup d'etat, 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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, something like three 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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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 the ringleader hiding in a trash can three hours later. I mean, it's just like clownishly disastrous ending to the story.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
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,
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
That they would have 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.