Brian Klaas

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, 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 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.

And we just basically don't – we basically ignore chaos theory when we think about change in our own lives or in our own societies.

I think it's a mistake.

When we tend to think about the way the world works, we tend to ascribe, and this is part of a bias that we have in how we think about things, we tend to ascribe straightforward reasons, right?

I mean, economics runs on models which say, here's how the world works.

You know, when we sort of look back at our life stories, we have a sort of narrative that we have about why things happened.

If you accept that there's a lot more chance, a lot more chaos involved, then there's a few implications for how you should live slightly differently.