Brian Klaas

I understand that the world is constantly in flux, that there are small things that can make a big difference and so on.

Maybe I'll experiment 5 to 15% more in my life.

There's a lot of studies that show that this makes happier people, and also it makes for more resilient solutions.

Yeah, so I think when a lot of people think about sort of thought experiments like science fiction with time travel, for example, they totally intuitively get this.

So whether it's Back to the Future or a story about someone going back a million years in history, the warning is basically not to change anything, right?

Don't step on the wrong bug a million years ago because you might end up deleting humans or don't talk to someone in the generation of your parents because you might end up making yourself not exist, right?

And then when we get to the present, we don't think like this, right?

But the way that change happens is identical in the past and in the present.

And so the point that I'm making is that small adjustments in our lives, in our societies and so on can have really profound effects.

And the origin story of this book to a certain extent was me finding out this story from 1905 in a little farmhouse in Wisconsin.

Where this woman is a tragic story.

She had four young children and she has a mental breakdown and kills her four children and then kills herself.

And her husband comes home and finds this whole family dead.

This is my great grandfather's first wife.

And, you know, he remarried to my great grandmother.

And

Quite literally, if she hadn't done that, I wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be listening to my voice.

And so when you start to think about those ripple effects through time and space and so on, I think there's quite a profound implication about the importance of even small actions changing the future.

Yeah, there's a few things.

So the butterfly effect is a subset of chaos theory.