Brian Klaas

So there was a brilliant study by some economists where they looked at a strike that was carried out in the London tube network, the London subway.

And basically it forced all these commuters to end up taking a totally different pathway to work, a different commute, right?

When they looked at the anonymized cell phone data of their pathways to work, they found that 5% of the people permanently shifted to the new route.

Now, they had thought that they were on the optimal path, the optimal commute, and then they were forced out of it and forced to experiment and they found a better pathway.

And I think this is, again, where that sort of mentality shift of thinking that you have control, thinking that you can therefore optimize, thinking that you know all the answers and so on.

When you start to appreciate the uncertainty and the chance and these sorts of aspects in your life, you play with uncertainty in a way that is, I think, experimentally very, very helpful to you.

And it provides different ideas, which is, you know, it's basically how evolution works too.

It's sort of the sort of evolutionary theory is all about experimentation and mutations happening and so on, solving problems.

So you're right.

I mean, I cannot tell you whether, you know, the snooze button or the sock or whatever it is, the train that you miss is going to produce a better or worse life.

I think it's just important for us not to live the lie that these things are meaningless.

And I think most of us sort of go through the world

Well, I would disagree with the idea that you're powerless.

I would say that you don't have good information about what's going to happen, right?

And I think there's a lot of examples of this where a woman who's going to a conference in New York City gives a tie as a gift to her coworker.

And he decides to go back to his hotel room to change and put the new tie on to show his appreciation because it clashes with his old shirt or whatever.

And she goes up to the conference and it turns out to be on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center on 9-11 and she dies and he survives, right?

Now, this is a random act of kindness that ultimately causes her own death and saves the life of a coworker.

She could never foresee that, right?

But I think that there's a lot of stuff when we think about, you know, you look at politics, you look at economics, you look at anytime you turn on the TV and people are explaining why things happen.