Laurence Gonzales
Author

"Cheating the Devil"

Thank you all for inviting me here. It's really a great honor to be here with this august company. I've always thought that I would rather be an ordinary guy bent on self-improvement than the smartest guy in the room, because over time and through history, sooner or later, the smartest guy in the room does something really dumb. This got me thinking about smartness. The smartest guys at NASA have crashed the space shuttle twice. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton won the Nobel Prize and lost nearly $5 billion for Long-Term Capital Management. Robert Falcon Scott was smart enough to get to the South Pole and then failed to get back. So I tend to believe, as Forrest Gump put it, "Stupid is as stupid does."

We all want to be smart. We're learning all this great stuff about the brain here. The question is "How do you use the darn thing?" I'll tell you a couple of stories, and maybe we can delve into that a little deeper.

Back in November of 1999 at Texas A&M, the students were enacting a tradition that goes back to the 1920s. They were making a bonfire for the homecoming. They did this by using entire felled trees that were stood on their ends, bound with wire, and stacked in tiers like a wedding cake. The structure was 80 feet tall and weighed two million pounds. The university is famous for its engineering department among other things, and yet no one there had ever gone to the engineering department and consulted them on how to build this monumental structure.

They had started in 1928 with just a pile of scrap lumber, and year by year, little by little, by an imperceptible process, it had turned into a really complex, monumental engineering project. The engineers in the department had even mentioned to them that, by the way, this thing needed to be 10 times as wide as it is tall to be stable. But the people involved in the project never stopped and stood back and asked themselves, "What is it, exactly, that I'm really doing here?" The answer would not have been "I'm building a bonfire." That was the old model. But rather, "What am I doing now?" On the morning of November 18th, the pile gave way with 70 students still working on it, and 10 boys and two girls were killed. Many of you might remember that event. These were college students. They were the cream of the crop of people their age in the United States. Were they stupid? No, they were not stupid: they were very smart. The question becomes "How can smart people do stupid things, and how might they avoid that?

This guy named Kyle Lake, a 33-year-old pastor from University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, was in the middle of a baptismal ceremony, up to his shoulders in the baptismal font, when he reached for a microphone to address the 800 people in the congregation. I have no doubt that Kyle Lake, who had a master's degree and had published two books, would not have taken a bath with a hair dryer. I think that's fair to assume. Yet, he became so familiar with this microphone that he reached out and grabbed it without stopping to think that it had a cord that was plugged into an amplifier that was plugged into an electrical outlet. He was electrocuted, leaving a widow, a five-year-old daughter and two three-year-old twins. I'm sure also that the microphone had a warning label on it as well, which we all do not read.

Most of our lives go on that way. We're essentially waiting around for the right combination of forces to take us out. We're just not aware of it. It happens all the time. You don't have to go seeking thrills to meet this kind of fate.

One last example on this line of thinking. Robert Colla, an adult education teacher from Ventura, California, kept a 40mm cannon shell on his desk as a paper weight. You can all probably guess where this is going. Last April he's sitting there in class, sees a bug crawling across his desk, picks the shell up and kills the bug with it. It exploded and blew his hand off. He's lucky to be alive. I believe in luck, but I also like to have an edge. Colla never stopped and looked at that 40mm shell in a new way and thought, "What exactly is this thing? What are 40mm cannon shells used for?" To him it had changed. He didn't see it that way anymore.

These people I'm talking about have a shared characteristic. They tend not to be extremely curious about everything in their world. They tend not to be paying deliberate attention to everything. They tend not to learn stuff all the time-any stuff. It really doesn't matter what you're learning, because you never know what you may need in the future. It pays to always be learning new stuff. And in most ways, these people are not very different from us. We're lulled into this kind of complacency by a natural tendency of the mammalian brain. This tendency is with us still because for eons it was good for us and good for our survival. It's a tendency to assume that what has happened will happen again, and that what has not happened, never will happen. This is an assumption the emotional system makes when it classifies stuff. It classifies our interactions with the world and the outcomes of those interactions. If I repeatedly grab a microphone and nothing ever happens, then I classify that action and result. If it were to shock me the first time I grabbed it, I would be careful the next time. But if nothing happens for five or 10 or 20 times, the assumption will be that the microphone is an unimportant thing that I don't need to pay attention to. It neither feeds me nor mates with me; therefore, it goes into this other category I don't pay attention to. This is the best system we have, given the survival lottery that we came from.

It lumps things together into categories. For example, take the generalization that shiny stuff is interesting. This makes a bit of sense. Water is shiny and you need it to live. Lots of different kinds of nice fruit tend to be shiny. We can eat those. Eyes are shiny, and we need to notice them to know if we're looking at a friend or foe. Healthy hair is shiny, and that tells us whether we might mate with someone who is healthy. There's a kind of reasonableness to the idea of "shiny stuff is good." The organism tends to generalize. By this process, Robert Colla began to think of a 40mm shell as a paperweight, because for years it had been holding papers down. He also assumed, unconsciously, that because nothing bad had happened, nothing bad ever would happen. So there's this unconscious labeling process that goes on from when we are very little and on up through our lives, and moves us smoothly through the world so we don't have to stop and reexamine something every time we use it again. Obviously, if our ancestors were forced to stop and reexamine things all the time, they would have died out long ago.

Lots of animals work by this system. The Speckled Emperor Moth of South Africa is an amazing creature. It's beautifully colored in ochre, brown and gold. It looks like the shape of an animal's face. It looks like a meat-eating animal, in fact, so that it can frighten predators away. It even has little white highlights in the "pupils" to make them look like they're shiny. This wouldn't work unless the animal looking at it produced the kind of mental models I've been talking about.

So generalization-creating and storing these mental models-provides us with a quick reference system for what we're seeing and what value it may have for us. Most things fall into the category called "ignore." We just don't need to know about them. This is the reason you can buy a picture that you think is very beautiful, hang it on a wall, and in a few weeks you won't be seeing it at all anymore. Unless it squeezes out supplies of food or bursts into flame, your emotional system will just assume that it's not important. This may not be true if it happens to be a Picasso, but it's true for most things.

This emotional system that is intimately connected with your senses and the information you're taking in is exquisitely tuned to detect novelty. That's what it's looking for. This makes sense, as well. Unless something is new, it can be ignored. Then the emotional system packs things away, so that in a perfect world you end up doing what's logical, like smelling food before eating it, running from a thunderstorm, ignoring a lamppost, a tree or a stray cat. This is a system of mental models that also works on symbols. If you see a handicapped-only parking sign, even though that symbol doesn't look much like a wheelchair, you know it's a wheelchair. It's the same reason you can recognize a caricature of Teddy Roosevelt. It's the same reason you can do cross-modal processing. You can find your keys by reaching in your pocket because the touch of the shape of your key produces a visual image in your head. It's also the reason you can read fast. Words become objects, and you don't look at the individual letters.

Those mental models and analogies can fail us in the real world. We can start to draw incorrect or misleading assumptions and false analogies. There was an incident a few years ago where an airliner was loading passengers and food, and the catering truck pulled away from the airplane. Before somebody could close the door, a guy walked in, walked right through and out the open door and fell to the tarmac and died. I can imagine what was happening in his head, because I know how I am when I'm in the jetway. He wasn't thinking, "I'm walking 30 feet off the ground and better be careful." He was thinking, "I'm in a hallway." It was a false analogy and a bad generalization.

We can avoid these kinds of accidents by a new habit of mind. It's a habit of being curious and paying attention, and also by being aware of these mechanisms. Even though they served our ancestors well in statistical fashion, they can really betray us at times.

Take Quaker Oats, for example. Most of you will know that Quaker Oats had a drink called Gatorade that was doing extremely well. Then they made the analogy-generalization-that Snapple would be a good idea, too. A drink is a drink. They bought the company. The problem was that Gatorade was this electrolyte replacement drink with a mass distribution system, and Snapple was a touchy-feely drink with a quirky following that had a grassroots distribution system that didn't match. It was a completely natural analogy to make, but it cost quite a lot of money when it didn't work out.

Xerox did something similar when they decided that they were a technology company. A copier, after all, is a box with a bunch of electrical stuff in it, and a computer is a box with a bunch of electrical stuff in it. It does make sense. Most people know the basics of this story. Xerox's patents were running out and the company went out to grab a piece of the future, and with visionary accuracy, Joe Wilson predicted that computers were, indeed, the future. All well and good. He was right. His protégé, Peter McCullough, made a second flawed analogy: all computer companies are basically alike. This was similar to the Gatorade/Snapple fallacy. He felt he needed to give Xerox a transfusion of this future stuff, and he bought a company called Scientific Data Systems for almost a billion dollars. It was the biggest acquisition Xerox had ever made up to that time. SDS, unfortunately, was a worn-out company, and there was no way it was going to pull off this future stuff that Joe Wilson had envisioned. In a sense, it was a little like giving yourself an infusion of ketchup. After all, blood and ketchup are both red. It didn't work.

Rat poison is sweet; that's why it works. There's a generalization in the rat's brain that if something is sweet, it's good to eat. On average, over millions of years, for millions of rats, that worked. It just may not work for this particular rat on this particular day.

There was a graffito at the University of Chicago that said the following: "Love is blind. God is love. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore, Ray Charles is God." That's the kind of thinking that we want to try to avoid. I love Ray Charles' music, though. It should be no surprise that we find this kind of thinking everywhere we look. There's a whole spate of new laws coming out across the country that prohibit talking on the cell phone while driving unless you have a Bluetooth or hands-free device of some kind. Unfortunately, the laws don't take into account how the system works. It is one of these false analogies. People who talk on the phone crash their cars. Cars are machines that are operated by hands. So if we free the hands to operate the machine, we'll stop the crashes. That's not why it happens. These people don't know enough about how their own brains work. The danger isn't that the cell phone occupies your hands. The danger is that the cell phone occupies your attention. You have to be paying attention to drive a car correctly. There's a study that just came out of Utah on this very thing. You're no more impaired when you're holding the phone than you are when you're talking hands free. What counts is the emotional content of the conversation or the amount of your attention that it requires. If your spouse is saying, "Could you pick up a gallon of milk at the store on the way home?" that's not going to impair you much. If the words you're hearing instead are "I want a divorce, and by the way I get the house," you might drive off the road. So we're getting these laws that don't make any sense.

The key to understanding these kinds of mistakes is recognizing how we think and then discovering some better ways to organize our thinking, if we can. The answer is always in the details, of course. How did we come to think this way? We often talk about it in evolutionary terms, and that's certainly a component of the problem. But it's also influenced a lot by our recent history. Our recent history conspires with the legacy of the emotional system.

I was in my nephew's wedding recently, and at the magic moment when the bride came up the aisle to join her beloved, something very weird happened among the 300 or so people who were there. They all whipped out these shiny metal devices and put them up in front of their faces. These were cameras and video cameras. Some of the kids were even taking pictures with their cell phones. I thought, wow, look at this: all these people are missing the actual moment. They're going to catch it on reruns. Ours is the most well-documented culture in the history of humanity, and many of us have been missing our entire lives, hoping to catch them on the reruns. Even if you believe in reincarnation, most of us are booked up into our next life. This is one subtle indication that got me to thinking about how our culture gets us to think the way we think.

Our very success has put us in a position where it's very difficult to pay attention. As a species, we're extremely successful, not because there are so many of us, but because so many of us have so much. The very success becomes incorporated into the emotional system's generalizations and analogies. We always get enough to eat. We have fresh water to drink. We always have adequate shelter. What does this tell us as an animal? It tells us we're doing something right. A big part of the emotional system's job is to tell us the outcomes of our behavior in relationship to various situations. We do something and get rewarded. We do something else and get punished. This is what we learn. Since we get rewarded all the time, this is what we are learning. Our strategy is correct. We must be doing something right. This tells the emotional system to keep doing what it's been doing. Since I trust my analogies, when a new situation comes up, I will find it easy to come up with an analogy that I like. I haven't been forced to be very curious about my environment to bring about this success, and I haven't had to pay close attention to eke out every little advantage to make this situation come about. All advantages flow to me freely from the culture that I live in. Sure, maybe I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, but that was a long time ago.

This is also the situation that we find at big corporations that have had lots of success. This is where they are in their emotional system. In mountaineering there's a phenomenon we call "celebrating the summit." You plan an expedition for months or years; you get in shape and get up in the middle of the night to make it to the summit. Finally, you reach the summit with your friends, and it's great. You take pictures (for the reruns in your life). You may have something to eat and drink. You feel like you've accomplished your mission. The only trouble is you're only halfway through the journey-you still have to get down. Corporate history seems to go through this kind of "What do we do now?" thing. I believe that they build an emotional system. The corporation develops the equivalent of a limbic system over time. It can set traps for the corporation just as our human systems can set traps for us.

I remember Andy Grove talking about how and why CEOs are replaced. He said, "The replacements have only one advantage, but it may be crucial. Unlike the person who has devoted his entire life to the company, the new managers come unencumbered by their emotional involvement." He's saying that the board of directors doesn't really want to fire the CEO. They want to fire his emotional system. That's what's getting in the way. Andy Grove and Gordon Moore in 1985 did this to themselves when they had to switch from memory chips to microprocessors. They made this monumental effort to erase their own emotional system and rebuild it. They asked themselves, "If we were fired, what would the new leadership at Intel do?" Grove said that they decided they'd walk out the door, come back in and do it themselves. When he made that change in himself, he described it like losing his identity. He was right, because the emotional system is a large part of who you are because it has so much to do with how decision making goes in your life.

As Grove and Moore proved, the brain is very plastic. The system is plastic. Who you are is a malleable construct that has been set up in response to a given environment. Because that environment is constantly changing, we grow rigid at our own peril. It was significant that Grove had seen the worst that his environment had to offer in his lifetime. He escaped the Nazis. He escaped the Communists. He went through a revolution. He had even changed his name three times to survive. Experience had given him a lifelong habit of painful soul-searching and made his mind curious about what was going on around him. He had a deeply serious commitment to paying attention to change in his environment. He was not catching life on the reruns. He was in the moment asking crucial questions.

Knowing stuff and developing a habit of wanting to know stuff can help you survive in this world. Greg Berns put it this way: "People who seek out information about the world get more goodies."

Mountain climbing versus driving… Let's say that we're all logical people. Mountain climbing is safer than driving a car. The reason it's safer is because people consider mountain climbing so dangerous that they take precautions. Driving a car is more dangerous than mountain climbing because people who drive cars assume that it's safe, so they don't take precautions. Success in life lies in the willingness to question everything, especially whatever it is you happen to be doing at the moment. But we live in a culture that encourages assumption over curiosity.

We've created an environment for ourselves that has a paradoxical effect: it's doubly misleading to us. On one hand, we've created a material culture that changes extremely rapidly. This goes for anything that has to do with business as well. The rules, the products and services, the climate, people, and strategies all change. This is a constantly fluid material culture that we have. The other big part of our culture-the basic animal experience-is pretty static. We don't ever go to the grocery store and find it empty. We always have this kind of animal sense that everything is the same. These two things are competing with each other to create these powerful generalizations and assumptions that tell us when we're doing the right thing.

Two things you must never tell yourself are "This is the way it's done around here," and "We've got this thing wired." We see the results of these phrases all the time. We know intellectually that the climate is changing, but how do we justify the fact that we're doing things the same way we did two or five years ago? We get into a deadlock where the decisions aren't making sense, but we're still making them the same way.

This kind of behavior in companies reminds me of a group of Scandinavians who settled in Greenland about 1000 years ago. Jared Diamond talks about them in his book, Collapse. They settled there because the land looked like their home country of Norway. It was a superficial and flawed analogy but a natural one to make. That was their first mistake. The Greenland Norse then set about doing what they had always done, which was farming and herding animals, cutting down trees and burning off forest for pasture, and cutting up sod to make sod houses at a rate of 10 acres per house. While that worked for a while-that was their second mistake-their third mistake was their habits of mind. Their habit was to assume that they knew what they were doing and to assume that what had happened in the past would happen in the future. This is a common state of mind in doing business.

If the Greenland Norse had a habit of curiosity instead, they would have noticed something really odd. When they got there, the Inuit people were already living there. These people did things differently than the Norse did. The Inuits used whale blubber instead of wood for fuel. They ate the whale blubber for high-energy calories. They lived in igloos made of snow. They made their kayaks out of bone and skin instead of wood. They had all these different technological ways of approaching the world. The Inuit did not cut down trees or keep herding animals. The Norse showed no curiosity about this. The result was that the grazing and cutting of turf left the land unprotected. The topsoil washed into the sea. The trees were gone. They couldn't make charcoal for smelting metal. Their tools wore out and couldn't be replaced. Crops began to fail. Without food, they could no longer live, and they starved to death. The Inuit are still there.

The same could be said of many business decisions we've seen over the years. Motorola is one example. Motorola had 60% of the cell phone market at one point. It had a series of successes going back to the 1920s. The company's limbic system took charge and was able to shove aside a whole pile of logical evidence that said it was wrong to make analog phones during the digital revolution. As most of you will know, that resulted in the loss of that market position, and Nokia took over as the leader. When you're extremely well-rewarded for something, it's almost impossible not to keep doing it. It takes an act of supreme logic and will to go the other way.

There was a big heat wave this summer, and a bunch of people were killed. A lot of these deaths happened because of a false analogy that people make. It goes like this. I have a fan. The fan will cool me off. It has worked in the past. It will work in the future. But then the temperature goes to 110 in your apartment and you turn the fan on. Something interesting happens that involves the second law of thermodynamics. If you take your body heat and add it to the temperature in your apartment, you get 208.6 degrees. If you divide that by two, you get 104.3, which is the average that the second law of thermodynamics is going to try to push toward. When you blow this fan on yourself, you're basically using a convection oven to cook yourself. That's why people die in heat waves using fans. It's an instance of not knowing something basic and simple about your world, and it hurts you.

We need to go back to learning as a lifelong effort or else we will perish. Here's an example from Hawaii about how culture shapes our thinking. This was on Mother's Day in 1999. There were about 100 people sightseeing in Sacred Falls State Park. There was a rock fall and it killed eight people and injured another 50. Some of the injuries were pretty terrible. Rocks were some of our earliest tools and make good cutting implements. It is a rule of nature that rocks fall. Gravity works on everything. Every time you're looking up at a natural rock formation, it's certain that it will come down eventually. The ancient people of Hawaii knew this. A thousand years ago they had built into their legends things that they had no physics teacher to teach them. There were warnings about the dangers of Sacred Falls.

Ancient people everywhere are very good at this kind of thing: knowing how to protect themselves from their world. After the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government went out to check on these native tribes on some islands. There were about 250 people in the tribe. All of them survived. That's because their folklore and legends contained warnings about what to do after earthquakes, and especially what to do when the sea recedes from the beach as it does before a tsunami comes. These people, whose highest technology is the bow and arrow, went to high ground and saved themselves while 900 more technically advanced people on those same islands perished.

After the rock fall in Sacred Falls State Park, the survivors sued the state of Hawaii and got $8.5 million. The official reaction was to close the park. It's still closed today. To our modern way of thinking, closing the park makes sense because people died there, so something must be bad. But the fact that it seems to make sense to us suggests an underlying problem in the way we think. When the state closes the park, it tells us that somebody else is taking care of us and that we're not responsible for our own well-being. It tells us that we don't have the sense to either avoid falling rocks or to accept the risk that we take if we do put ourselves in their way. We sue, therefore, because we want to place the blame anywhere but on ourselves. Seeking revenge is a natural primate urge, but I think we have the ability to rise above our apelike urges.

What's dangerous about these attitudes is that they make us take this view that our environment and anything we want to try can be made safe and should be made safe. That leads us to assume that someone else is watching out, and leads us to stop learning about our world. Why should we learn about our world? We don't have to. Look at the warning labels on every product. I bought a camera recently, and I read the long list of warnings that came with the camera. I finally came to the one that was my favorite. It said that the lens may concentrate the sun's rays and cause a fire. It's a $500 lens. Am I going to take it in the backyard, get some kindling, burn my house down and then sue? My favorite warning on ink jet printers is the line that says, "Do not drink the ink." I looked through the book to see if there were any recipes for ink cocktails… The warnings become absurd, and we stop listening or paying attention. We live in a world that causes us to stop paying attention. There's bad music everywhere we go, so we stop listening.

The trouble with this absurdity is that taking safety measures with technology has a ratchet effect attached to it. It's a one-way process. Once you've established a safeguard, you can't take it away. You can only increase it. The efforts at airports have become so silly because you can't edge your way out of it. I might argue that passive restraints in automobiles have the effect of not making people pay attention. It would be impossible to make the argument that we should take away seat belts and airbags. They're talking now about putting collision avoidance systems on cars that will automatically put on the brakes if you come near having a crash. I guess it's so you can sleep while driving. The point is not that we should make the world less safe or that we should take more risks, but we should be aware of the subtle, unintended influences that our culture places on the way we think-not just about our danger and safety-but about everything.

When we're making all these little analogies, what's influencing them? In this business of the wisdom of crowds that you're all probably familiar with, there are three criteria in making the group smarter than the experts: diversity among the agents; some way to aggregate the decisions that are made; and a reward system. This prospect that I'm holding out is that knowing a lot of diverse stuff helps you make better decisions. You can stick the wisdom-of-crowds criteria into your own brain. Take a whole lot of diverse stuff that you read about from astrophysics to ant colonies and you just learn about it. You constantly generate input and are interested in everything and want to know more. The aggregation process is something that the brain naturally does. In order to do it, you have to give the brain some time and space to bring all the diverse knowledge together. You can't be constantly busy using your brain for other things. There has to be some down time to let the brain aggregate. Many famous scientists have habits of taking long walks while seeming not to do anything. There are many examples throughout history. People have good ideas in the shower because they're doing something physical and they're not occupying their minds with something else. It's a perfect place to have good ideas. "Eureka" happened in the bathroom.

I'd like to end with a brief piece from my next book:

"As I grew up and into the world where I now live, I saw more and more people who seemed to be missing their own lives while hoping to catch the reruns. This sort of paying attention that children engage in naturally and was essential for survival in traditional societies seemed to be disappearing. Against this tendency, I struggled to keep my eyes open; to stay awake for the ride; fighting this induced sleep as against the effects of a drug. How, I wondered, can I wake up for this amazing journey that is so quickly ended? How can we experience the live performance of our own lives? To be in the moment is the ultimate act of redemption. So, 'Live with the unquenchable curiosity that makes everything new,' is the ultimate triumph of the forces that inexorably pull us apart at the end. Although it's easy to pass through life as if in a waking dream, we can enrich our lives, make ourselves more effective, and sometimes even cast a protective web around ourselves by the habit of knowing our world and ourselves by constantly paying attention.

"Since I was in grade school, I had this fear that I'd be hit by a bus one day and be lying in the gutter, the last of life leaking from me, and I'd be thinking, 'Dang, I never found out how stars are formed, or how old the earth is. I've been here all my life in the most advanced civilization in the world and still don't know what makes my own muscles work. How far away is Mars anyway? Are whales really horses that returned to the sea long ago? I should have read more Shakespeare. And why wasn't I paying attention when that big, obvious, brightly painted bus came barreling down the road? Where was my mind when I needed it most?'"

Q&A Session

Question: Could you say a little bit more about how training experiences in extreme situations in some instances suppresses the survival instincts?

Answer: I think it's not so much to suppress the instinct, but training is an extremely specific thing. We're always practicing and rehearsing for something. For example, if you examine a type of one-car accident where the car drifts off the road, the person will jerk the wheel to get back in their lane and will roll the car. They do this because in the city it works. At city driving speeds, if someone jumps out in front of you and you jerk the wheel, you avoid them. It's something you've tried many times, and it's been rewarded. On the highway, you'll roll the car instead. We're always training for something very specific-we may not always know what it is. I always try to ask myself, "What exactly am I practicing right now? Will it be a good thing in the future for me to have practiced this?" In an emergency, you tend to revert to what you have practiced. When you're under extreme stress, you don't tend to invent new strategies. That's where you get people who dial 411 (information) instead of 911 in an emergency because they're used to dialing 411.

Does Navy Seal training make you a better investor? There are some ways in which training can transfer, but sometimes the training is so complex and specific that it's hard to say how it transfers.

Question: Could you summarize some of the results and lessons that you drew from looking at situations of deep survival.

Answer: The two things I was trying to get at in Deep Survival were the nature of accidents, which are inherent in the system. They're a behavioral outcome of complex systems. The other was how the emotional system influences people to behave-they'll do something that is stupid but looks very rational to their own emotional systems at the moment. It's a part of the habituating or training I was referring to. For example, you're skiing in deep powder. There's an avalanche warning out, but at the moment you get on the mountain, that warning was blown out of your frontal lobes by your emotional system that is looking forward to the rush of going downhill. You go for it, there's an avalanche, and you die. I also examine why one person survives a situation while another person doesn't survive a similar situation. When the USS Indianapolis was sinking, it dumped 2,000 sailors into the water. Then you look at who survived and how and why.

At lunchtime you were talking about financial systems that go through different cycles. The more complex the system, the more subject it is to accidents or collapses or avalanches or power law effects.

The comments, opinions and any forward predictions presented about any particular security, the economy and "the market" are based on the analysis of the speaker. These are not necessarily the opinion of, and should not be construed as a recommendation on the part of Legg Mason Capital Management or any of its affiliates.