Episode #032 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Blaise Pascal famously said that all of us living right now in the condition that we find ourselves living through—this crazy rollercoaster that we’re on—he refers to it as the supreme paradox of creation. Man is the great paradox of creation. He said that as humans, we constantly live in a state of both the highest grandeur and the deepest misery, simultaneously. But why? What is it about man that could possibly account for that sort of variance? I mean, he’s obviously calling us out as a species. He didn’t say living creatures on planet earth are this way. He said, man is the great paradox of creation. Why did he say that?

Well, to fully understand where he’s coming from, we need to set the stage and get a little perspective on what sort of world Pascal was living in and what sort of person Pascal was. We’ll gain that perspective through the show today. And near the end of the show, we’ll come back to that famous quote, and it’s going to make a lot more sense to us at that time.

So, Blaise Pascal—he invented the calculator. Not kidding, by the way. All the way back in 1642 at the age of only 18 years old, his dad was an accountant. And for anybody that’s done any sort of personal accounting in today’s world or taken a class on accounting, you can relate to this. But there was a ton of monotonous, menial calculations of arithmetic that were incredibly time consuming. And Pascal, filled with ingenuity and the mind of a polymath genius, he created a device in 1642 that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

And what I think is, he not only became an object of admiration from the people immediately around him for actually inventing the thing, but at that point, he instantly became his father’s favorite son. At that point, what does his father say to his other kids? I love you guys just as much as Blaise, just differently. He invents the calculator; you guys make some finger painting, you know? No, nobody was buying that garbage anymore after that. Pascal was the man—18 years old. But look, it’s not like his father didn’t see this early representation of his genius coming. He had been facilitating it and trying to nurture it for years.

Blaise Pascal lived in a pretty amazing time. Obviously, because this show is chronological, it wasn’t that far removed from the time we’ve been talking about for a while now—the Scientific Revolution. Well, the exact decade that Pascal was born was a time of unprecedented change, change on a scale that no one ever could have foreseen. If you were somebody that wanted to create something or think of some idea that was going to change the course of human history—intellectual contagion—change how the people around you view the world, Pascal’s lifetime was the perfect time to be born.

Whenever there’s a huge breakthrough in human history, it’s always very shortly after those breakthroughs come to pass that some person is born that’s seen in retrospect as incredible. The reason why is because the period of time directly following these paradigm shifts is a time that, if you’re trying to change the world—incredible opportunity to do it. Pascal was part of a new age of thinkers. He was 14 years old when Descartes released his Discourse on Method. Now, this text, as we talked about before, sparked a huge debate. And in that sense, it was revolutionary. Pascal was the first generation to benefit from those insights.

And it kind of makes you wonder what’s possible and what sort of people are emerging as the first generation able to benefit from something as revolutionary as the internet in today’s world. I mean, imagine if someone as brilliant as Blaise Pascal had access to the internet. What could a polymath genius accomplish if he had the collective knowledge of the history of man available at his fingertips instantly? What could he do? It’s incredible to think about. It probably wouldn’t be Nyan Cat, that’s all I’m saying.

But anyway, Pascal’s father was a very intelligent man, and he understood the inherent biases in the way that people were being educated back in the 1600s. See, during the time of the upbringing of Pascal, the average school of the time was riding the tail end of this wave of scholasticism. And they were riding it directly into the ground, really. See, for a long, long time, if you were learning about something like the natural sciences in school, you just read Aristotle. You studied him. You memorized him. He was the unchallenged authority on that sort of stuff. But now that we’re trying to navigate the dark waters of this post-Scientific Revolution, now that we’re searching for certainty about natural causes, we don’t want to be creating people that just blindly accept whatever came before them as the truth. That’s what got us into trouble in the first place. We want to move forward.

So, Pascal’s father, with an incredible amount of foresight, decides to keep him out of the school system and educate him at home. Pascal talks about how his father didn’t dive instantly right into trying to teach him stuff from the very beginning. No, he spent a lot of his time at the beginning just talking to him about the subjects in general. His father would talk to him about what mathematics is in a broad sense and why it’s important and how it’s used. And because of this approach, apparently it got Blaise Pascal really excited about doing it. His father actually forbid him to study math until the time was right. He held it back from him. And that caused him to want to do it so bad, the story goes that by the age of something absurdly young, like 11 years old, Pascal had independently worked out all of the geometrical axioms that Euclid had worked out centuries ago.

I mean, it’s genius. Pascal’s dad is really the hero here. I’m going to try that with my kids one day when I eventually have them. I’m going to say, look, you guys can play all the video games you want. I will personally buy you all the drugs you can possibly inject into your arm. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s not going to fly under this roof, mister, Immanuel Kant. That book stays on the shelf at all times. Don’t you read it! That’s the last thing you should be doing. That book is forbidden.

So, anyway, this extremely novel approach to education, coupled with a genius mind and the luxury of being born into incredibly interesting times, gave Blaise Pascal a very unique perspective on truth. Now, truth, as we’ve talked about on several different shows, it’s a very slippery thing. But to Blaise Pascal, being the generation that all these people are looking to, to try to solve this problem of science and truth, people thought it would come out of his generation if it came at all. And Blaise Pascal in particular had a very hard time proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that scientific truth was possible at all. In this way, he shared the struggle of one René Descartes. But the good news was that it didn’t really matter to Pascal anyway.

To be clear, he thought that we could arrive at religious truth, but scientific truth was impossible to achieve. The reason why is something very similar to what Montaigne talked about, who Pascal was influenced by tremendously. And that is that the scientific truth of today is tomorrow’s punch line, right? We are constantly—especially in the times of Pascal—proving things to be true and then finding out in a couple years that the mechanisms we were using to measure it or collect whatever it is that we’re trying to prove were flawed from the start. So it was wrong.

But look, don’t get Pascal wrong. He isn’t using this as a basis to denounce all of science. The reason he’s saying this is so that we never stop looking, so that we never grow complacent. The last thing Pascal wants for us to do is to arrive at something that we determine to be scientific truth and then just say, okay, we’re done. We dust our hands off, and let’s just move onto other things now. We should never consider anything in science to be absolute truth. That’s a very dangerous precedent to set, to Blaise Pascal. This is not only a very central and important point within the thought of Blaise Pascal, but it’s something all of us can relate to in our own lives and something that’s a very special idea to me.

Do you know what three words are the most honest words you’re ever going to say? “I don’t know.” Try it sometime when somebody asks you a question about something important that you should have thoughts on. There is never a time that I feel more confident about how well I know a subject than just after I’ve finished reading the first book that I’ve ever read on it. I feel like an authority on the subject. I feel like going out and educating all my friends and all my coworkers, because now I feel like I know everything about it, right? At least that’s how it used to be the first couple times. Because what I’ve found is what inevitably happens is, I read another book on the subject, and that initial confidence dwindles a bit.

Suddenly the picture isn’t so clear. Like, now there’s these other things to consider. Now my thoughts on this subject can’t be distilled down to a single tagline. Now it’s a couple/three taglines. It’s a little bit more complex. And then I listen to experts talk about the subject and I feel a little bit less confident and like, oh, these guys seem to know a lot. And then I start to seek out the opposing viewpoints of what I currently believe, and I start to realize that there’s a lot of really intelligent people with great arguments on the other side of this issue too. And then I start to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. And then I start to see how the side of this issue that’s eventually going to be right or wrong depending on what happens in the future—it really hinges on things that nobody can predict and nobody has any control over anyway.

This process has been by entire adult life. For example, the first time I ever wanted to educate myself on American politics, I was looking desperately for a place to be educated about it. And the first thing I came across was conservative talk radio. For like six months of my life, all I listened to was Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, people like that. And I can’t imagine how different of a person I would be today if I just assumed that these people were right. What I mean by that is, what if I took the first thing that presented itself to me and just accepted it as the gospel truth? Look, it would have been much, much easier for me to just never question anything, to grow complacent.

And this is what Blaise Pascal was worried about when it came to the human race moving forward scientifically. Let’s not, figuratively speaking, listen to a few episodes of Sean Hannity around election time and think that we know everything about the universe. Pascal says, why don’t we never be satisfied? Why not always keep looking for more? Should we ever just say, “Okay, we figured it out!” This is an interesting point to think about. And this is a noble cause. And it’s one that I’m sure most people listening to this agree with. But it brings up very real implications when it comes to our lives, the most notable of which is probably, if we can’t know anything about this natural world that we exist in for certain, to Pascal, where does that leave us? I mean, isn’t that a really weird task? How do you navigate a world where you don’t know anything for certain?

Well, Blaise Pascal and a couple of his mathematician contemporaries were already trying to solve a problem. It’s very related to what we just said. But it’s much, much more important. See, Pascal focused on the real problems, alright? How can two people, if they’re in the middle of a gambling bout, whatever it is, and they have to stop the game early, how should these two people divide up the stakes evenly and fairly? This is what he spent his time on. Now, if they just decide to stop the gambling game, certainly the guy that’s ahead at that time shouldn’t just be declared the winner and get everything. That’s not fair. But then again, is it fair to the players to just split the money based on where the players were and when the game was stopped? What if one person had a statistical advantage to win the game but was just on a bad streak?

Leave it to Pascal to find a revolutionary solution to the problem. He lays the foundations for probability theory and expected value: two things that we can’t imagine not existing today, and they’re also two things that offer us some insight into how Pascal thought about decision-making in our personal lives. Let’s talk about how Pascal solved his friend’s gambling problem. Let’s talk about expected value.

Let’s say that I have a die, a 6-sided cube. You’ve all seen a die before, dice—I’m not sure what the proper thing is—1 through 6 written on the sides. And I tell you that for just $1, you can have a chance at winning $10. Here’s how the game works. You pick one of the numbers. Let’s say you pick 5, for example. You give me a dollar. I roll the dice, and if it comes up on anything but 5, you lose your dollar. But if it comes up on 5, you win $10. Should you take that bet? Would you take that bet?

The answer should be an immediate and resounding yes. The reason why is because this bet has a positive expected value. Let’s talk about why. You have a 1-in-6 chance of winning $10 and a 5-in-6 chance of losing $1. For every 6 tries, you should land on 5 once and win $10. How much does it cost you to roll the die 6 times? $6. For every $6 that you spend, statistically speaking, you should win $10. You may not roll a 5 the first 100 times in a row but, eventually, if you played long enough, you would be in the black. It is a good place to put your money in.

And real quick, just for the record, if you’re ever presented by somebody with this bet and you roll not-a-5, 100 times in a row, you should just stop. They’re probably scamming you. Quick disclaimer.

The way Pascal would be explaining it is by assigning values to each potential outcome. In the case of the die, the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 would have a value of -1 because we paid a dollar to roll the dice, and we lost that dollar. Those outcomes yield -1. The number 5, on the other hand, would have a value of 9, not 10 because, remember, we paid a dollar in to try to win it before we rolled it, so we would get 9. Now, all you math buffs out there know that there’s a mathematical formula to calculate this. And for the record, it’s much better because you can account for things much more complex than just the roll of a dice. But for the sake of this audio program, let’s add up all the values: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 are -1, so we’re at -5; plus 9 for the value if we rolled a 5. And what do you get? 4, a positive number.

This wager can be said to have what’s known as a positive expected value or +EV in gambling lingo. That’s what all the poker players call it. This is how professional gamblers think about things. I mean, you may ask yourself, professional gambler? What skill are they actually a professional at? Are they really good at pulling the lever of a slot machine? Well, no, it’s calculating the expected value of various wagers. Professional gamblers are experts at wagering their money in places that yield a positive expected value. They may lose 100 gambles in a row. But it doesn’t matter to them because as long as they keep getting their money in good, as they say, or wagering on +EV bets, in the long run, with enough times wagering, they should be profitable.

The significance of this, the revolutionary thing that Pascal can teach us, is that rolling a dice is not as chaotic and random as it might initially seem. It’s a figure of speech to say that if something is random, it’s a roll of the dice. It’s reckless; it’s a roll of the dice, you know? Whenever you graft the probability of certain outcomes happening, you’re left with a bell curve: a high occurrence of certain outcomes that makes up the tall part of the graph, and the lower portions of the graph are made up of the outliers. A single roll of the dice may be unpredictable but, over time, if we keep rolling the dice thousands and thousands of times and make a graph of the results, that graph is symmetrical. Therefore, Pascal reasoned, the roll of a dice, or some seemingly random and chaotic event, is actually quite predictable. This was revolutionary.

Now, knowing the benefits of making +EV gambling decisions over the long term can help us understand Pascal’s wager better. Now we can see what Pascal was talking about. I mean, there are no certainties in this life. Each and every decision and action that we make is a risk, to Pascal. His basis for saying that it’s impractical not to believe in God is that, while in this state of uncertainty and risk, all you can do as a wise person is try to make a +EV play in life and hope for the best outcome. When it comes to the nature of existence, he argued that that +EV play would be a belief in the Christian God. And while that may be controversial for some people, I don’t think that many of us would argue with his point when it comes to every other decision in life.

How can we navigate living in a world where we can never arrive at scientific truth? This is a question that Pascal was faced with. Well, we make +EV decisions, right? Now, it should be said that when it comes to life, calculating +EV decisions becomes enormously harder than calculating it when it comes to the roll of a dice, alright? The reason why is because there’s just so many variables going on. See, in the dice game, you’re wagering your money. That’s it. When it comes to life, you’re wagering all kinds of stuff: your time, your emotional state, your health. And that’s not it. It becomes even more complex when you think in terms of what you’re winning by betting in life.

But by and large, overall, these calculated risks that Pascal talks about—using the best information you have to try to yield a positive expected value in your life—is what separates people who succeed at creating good lives for themselves and those who fail at it. Real quick, let’s talk about an example of this: Barack Obama, President of the United States. Like his politics or not, the guy is a pretty tremendous human being. He is effective; he is hard working. And what he’s constructed for himself in this lifetime is incredibly impressive to me.

Now, every decision that he’s made throughout his life can be thought of as a gamble, to Pascal, similar to the dice game that we laid out earlier. He could have made many bad decisions that he just didn’t make, alright? Well, those bad decisions are kind of like the street hustler coming up to him and telling him about this great dice game where he’s going to bet $5 for a chance to win $6. That’s just a bad game. Barack Obama said no to those games. The decision for Barack Obama to drop out of prep school and instead sit around collecting unemployment, playing video games, and watching sports—that wasn’t a +EV decision to him, so he didn’t do it. Barack Obama—what I like to think of him as—is a physical manifestation of thousands of gambles made with positive expected value. Barack Obama really is the equivalent of the bulging wad of money that makes up a professional gambler’s bank roll. He is the result of many good bets made over a long period of time.

So, at the risk of the Secret Service kicking down the door of my condo, storming in, and taking me away, I’d like to continue this thought experiment a little and imagine what if Barack Obama had a lot of bad things occurring in this life all of a sudden, one after the other after the other. Because after all, betting a dollar to win ten on that dice game is no guarantee of success. I mean, you could, theoretically, not roll a 5, thousands of times in a row. In that same way, you can make great decisions in your life and just get tremendously unlucky over and over and over. Let’s pretend it happened to Obama.

Let’s pretend he gets kicked out of office. Michelle leaves him. His kids want nothing to do with him. He’s a bum. He loses every penny he’s ever made. He hands in his resume to like 100 businesses, and nobody wants to look at his application. Nobody wants to give him an interview. He has nowhere to stay, nowhere to stay but on Dick Cheney’s couch, and then Dick Cheney kicks him out of his house. Picture a series of events so unfortunate that the former President of the United States finds himself living under a bridge somewhere for a night, trying to develop a plan for the future.

Well, what would Pascal say? We live in an uncertain world. This was possible all along, Mr. Obama. There is no guarantee of success. And what can we do about it other than just continue to make the best calculated decisions that we possibly can and hope for the best? What I believe is that no matter how low someone like Barack Obama ever found himself, eventually, with enough rolls of the dice making his +EV decisions, he would be immensely successful again, much more successful than me. That’s what I believe.

Now, while trying to relate someone’s life to the probability of success with the roll of a dice—while that’s pretty much a lost cause, consider something for a second that’s pretty interesting. What separates someone blindly rolling the dice in Vegas and somebody that understands the expected value of that dice roll comes down to looking at all the potential outcomes. What the professional gambler is essentially doing is thinking about each possible number that could pop up on the die. He says, at some level deep in his head, okay, if it comes up 1, then I lost a dollar. Am I willing to accept that? How likely is that to happen? Where will I be tomorrow if that happens? And so on. He does this with all the numbers: 1 through 6.

In that same way, Barack Obama weighs all of the potential outcomes when making +EV decisions in his personal life. Whenever he makes a decision, he thinks of all the possible paths he could take to get there, like numbers on a die. He thinks about the cost associated with each path. He thinks about the worst-case scenario, etc. If nothing else, it’s really interesting to consider the fact that many times what lands people in bad situations is a lack of considering all possible options and then what the consequences of each of them are. Like the professional gambler, like Barack Obama, Pascal would advocate deep thought on major decisions in your life, looking at all the options to ensure that you make the best calculated risk possible.

Now, all this leads back to what we talked about at the beginning, what Blaise Pascal refers to as the supreme paradox of creation, that man lives in a perpetual state of both the highest grandeur and the deepest misery. See, we as humans, to Pascal, are at least a little bit different than all the other animals of the animal kingdom, at least ostensibly. We have the magical power of foresight. We have the ability to weigh the pros and cons of our decisions. We have the ability to do incredible things. We have the ability to imagine an electronic device that’s going to change the lives of millions of people and then bring that product to market.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the common reflection on the world that all these things around you—every table, every building, every book—all of these things were at one point just the figment of someone’s imagination. This ability to imagine, this imagination, has allowed us to manipulate our environment much more than any other creature. It’s allowed us to improve the quality of our lives more than any other creature. It leaves us in the highest state of grandeur in the animal kingdom.

Now, on the other hand, that same ability to imagine also leaves us in a state of deep misery, because it allows us the ability to imagine a life better than what we could ever possibly achieve. Pascal isn’t talking about class warfare here, though it certainly does apply to people that think they’re stuck in whatever economic situation they’re in. Pascal is talking about the inevitabilities of being a human.

What is the only certainty in life as a human? Death. Death, pain, suffering—these are things that we all experience sporadically, some more often than others. But Pascal points out that our ability to imagine also allows us to imagine a life devoid of death, pain, and suffering. And because of this, we feel poisoned with no possible remedy.

Pascal talks a lot about the power and detriment of using your imagination. He said it’s an incredibly complicated thing to master because it’s both right and wrong on occasion, but there’s no way for us to know which it is when we’re imagining it. He talks about how we use our minds to impose characteristics on people based on incomplete information. He talks about when we see somebody dressed, like, in a uniform or dressed importantly, that we tend to see their thoughts as more authoritative than someone dressed in—well, someone dressed like Barack Obama under the bridge from earlier.

But Blaise Pascal asks, what is that really based on? What is that judgment really based on? Is it based on a half-inch thick piece of fabric hung over somebody’s skin? Is it? Now, on the surface, this may seem trivial. But the point he’s getting at is actually a very important one to philosophy. This single thing that we call the imagination brought into being every great piece of technology and progress in human history, but simultaneously it serves to misguide us and imagine things that might hurt us in some way. The implications of this are that very important things—even things as fundamental as, you know, what we see happiness is or what justice is, what our entire judicial system is based on—these things could be as flimsy as that same judgment of the guy dressed in rags. Those two things could be based on the same amount of truth because they both come from the imagination.

He famously said, “Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.”

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.