You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show Listen, I got to tell you, I mean I always say nice things about my guest books because I wouldn't have them on if I didn't enjoy the book because that's how I started the podcast in the first place was these are books I would read anyway and then I have the opportunity to actually talk to the author which is fun but your book is really one of the most important I've read in a long time.

Wow, that's incredibly nice of you.

Yeah, no, I mean it not just because it's well written and research and all that stuff, because the topic, you know, it's like we've

spent our whole lives as social scientists trying to find meaningful patterns in random noise and we think we have it down where

we can make some probabilistic predictions based on large scale forces and laws and whatnot

but you know what you really show is that chaos contingency randomness chance whatever words you want to use

plays a much bigger role than any of us think is that the purpose of your book are you writing you know this is my favorite quote from Darwin you know all observations must be for or against some view if they are to be of any service when he was accused of being too theoretical in the origin of species.

So I gather you're pushing back against these deeper social science

program.

Yeah, you know, I think there's a few things that sort of are the origin story of the book. I mean, one of them is personal. I tell the story early on in the book of how I'm basically the byproduct of a mass murder and how I wouldn't exist but for a mass killing that happened in

1905 which was unfortunately done to done by one of my not ancestors but the relative of my great-grandfather who thankfully remarried and led to me.

But the bigger sort of ideas aspect of the book, there's sort of two strands that I come at this with.

One is I've been a disillusioned social scientist for a pretty long time, where I just don't think

that what we're doing is that useful a lot of the time, and I also think it's this sort of fake version of reality

that doesn't really exist when we set up these models that are pretty much

always wrong and only sometimes useful. And then I also think there's this aspect of sort of malaise in the general population about how we see ourselves in the world.

And I think these ideas are actually quite linked.

I think that the model version of reality in which everything is neat and tidy and there's always sort of X causing Y and all this type of stuff doesn't align with the messiness of the real world and that causes us to misunderstand who we are and the purposes of our lives.

And so the book is part science, part social science, part chaos theory, and part philosophy.

And I'm trying to bring those strands together to say something a bit different.

Right, so your specialty is dealing with power corruptors like dictators and autocrats and so on.

And in your previous book you really looked for... like dictators and autocrats and so on.

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