Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. episode 158. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and the me. If you are listening to this and you are a human being, then I'm pretty sure that like

myself you have some regrets and I bet you've considered how things

might have turned out differently had you done things another way had you made different choices? Had you had the knowledge you have now? We talk about this sometimes, this feeling. We ask each other, if you could go back in time and change just one thing, what would that be?

And we think about this historically too. For instance, we wonder what would have happened if the United States had not dropped the atomic bombs on Japan?

Was that horrific act necessary?

And when people argue about this, they often say that if the bombs hadn't been dropped, many more people would have died than died in the explosions and their aftermaths.

And others will say, well, that's not true. The war would have ended anyway.

And what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was

superfluous to use a word without nearly enough power to convey that idea.

And we do this with elections when the outcome is surprising.

News stories will appear for years attempting to explain the deciding factor that led to

one person winning and not the other.

Because you can't run history again.

Because you can't change a few variables and then see what happens next.

So we're all left with history as it has unfolded, and so we can never know for sure what actions

led to this present.

And with products and businesses and billionaires and inventors is the same.

We can't go back in time to see what one decision, if any, led to their great successes

or to someone else's great failure,

because history only happens once,

so we can't go back and investigate what factors were important.

When we think about our own lives and what we might have done differently as

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