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in life Anything is Possible because we can never fully understand how the world works and the laws of physics prevent us from being able to tell the future everything we predict is a probability some are a lot more probable others are less probable while some have astronomically low chances of ever happening the probability is vanishingly small but it remains non-zero would you get hit by a car well you get struck by lightning will we ever achieve world peace if there is a chance that anything can happen what are the odds I was scrolling through the

deepest parts of the internet one day when I came across this man Roy Cleveland Sullivan the man who has been hit by lightning seven times in his lifetime the odds of getting struck by lightning once isn't that low it's just about one in fifteen thousand even if you live in a small town chances are that somebody in that town has been struck by lightning at least once the odds of being struck seven times in a period of 80 years that's a 1 in 10 to the 28 chance this seems like such incredible and unfortunate odds

until you consider the fact that you're more likely to get struck by lightning seven times than you are to shuffle a deck of cards into perfect numerical order those odds 1 in 10 to the 68. probability is something that we can't really comprehend as humans if we did we'd stop worrying about a lot of things and stop taking granted for most of the things we should be worried about like sharks no thanks to the movie Jaws humans now have an immense fear of sharks but the reality is you're more likely to get killed by a

vending machine than you are to get killed by a shark the odds of getting killed by a vending machine are 1 in 112 million while the odds of getting killed by a shark are staggering 1 in 250 million now the odds that you'll be attacked by a shark are much lower at 1 in 3.7 million but even that is still too high for the monsters with branded sharks to be for context you're more likely to get killed by a dog at a 1 in 112 400 chance then you already get killed by a shark but

we still keep them in our homes as loving pets you're more likely to get killed by Hornets wasps or bees at 1 in 63 225 then you already get killed by a shark in fact you're more likely going to get killed by the government for committing murder at 1 in 119 000 then you are of getting killed by a shark when you put a little thought into it you realize that most of the time our fears are Sensational and not rational when something tragic happens and it Garners a lot of public attention we are more

likely to be afraid of that thing even if it is much less common than the less notorious things the most prominent example of this is the way we treat plane crashes no yes when planes do crash it is tragic but because they cause such a big spectacle and have lots of media coverage we forget that it is still by far the safest way to travel passenger airplane incidents are very rare and your odds of dying in a plane crash are very slim at 1 in 205 000 that's incredibly low when you compare it to your

odds of dying in a car accident which is just one in 107. for motorcycle riders it's 1 in 890 and even pedestrians aren't safe at one in 541. but wait maybe the reason the airplane deaths are so low has to do something with our fear before people go on an airplane they usually prepare well in advance no harmful objects are allowed on board and there's always usually more than one designated pilot who has trained for years on safety practices before they were ever allowed to fly a plane compare that to road travel where we don't

really think that much about it and you can maybe see why things are the way they are and with the odds that you'll be involved in a drunk driving accident in your lifetime being incredibly high at two and three you can see what I mean we barely give it any thought hopefully we can all do better try to reduce the risk by simply designating a driver beforehand or taking an Uber when you go out for fun before we continue I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor incogni what are the odds that your

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it's completely risk-free for 30 days so I encourage every one of you to at least give it a try and if you're not happy you get a full refund anyway but I can assure you when you see just how many data Brokers have your information you'll definitely want to keep your subscription back to our story another thing we should be worried about is right-handed appliances yes it's true that most of the world is right-handed for some reason but if we're learning anything as a species it's inclusiveness we must do the same with dominant hands because

as it is the odds of a left-handed person dying simply because they used a right-handed Appliance wrong is one in seven million and while the chances look ridiculously slim it has to happen to somebody if you don't die hey you'll get a lot of free money from that lawsuit the ambidextrous people among us can help us decide what appliances are better suited for what dominant hand and we have a surprising amount of them 1 in 100 to be exact now this does not include people who have had to learn how to use their non-dominant hand

because of injury or out of curiosity it's just people who are born with an amazing control of both of their hands art is very subjective what some people might find beautiful others will find ugly what one might consider great acting others might see it as over the top and annoying you see much unlike science art doesn't have a definitive set of rules and so they don't have a strict guideline for judgment either and while this allows for creativity it also makes it very difficult to find success in the world of the Arts if you want

to be a surgeon for instance you know that if you pass the med school exams in turn go through residency and so forth you'll make it you have a set path to follow but if you want to be a supermodel or a rock star or a YouTuber it's not that straightforward you have to work hard at it every single day and even then your odds are very slim you can be a theater kid all your life go to film school practice as much as possible but in the end the odds that you'll become a movie

star aren't very encouraging that's just one in 1.1 million it's amazing so that even with the odds as Slim as this every year thousands of people will travel from all parts of the world to La trying to fulfill their dreams of being on the big screen when interestingly you have a much better chance of winning an Oscar at just one in 11 500 then becoming a movie star but of course this Oscar includes all the technical awards that are given when everyone is taking a bathroom break and most people would much rather take a 1

in 1.1 million chance than to receive an award when no one's watching if you're a writer however the odds are slightly in your favor there is a one in 220 chance that you'll write a New York Times bestseller if you put in the time and the effort necessary these odds are definitely going to go up bringing you that inch closer to making your dream a reality sports store closer related to science than Arts because most of the time if you work at it hard enough you'll achieve some kind of success but how hard can you

work when there's only so many medals to go around millions of people around the world dedicate their entire lives to competing in the Olympics yet only one in 662 000 will ever win a medal and that's the thing about scarcity when there's such limited space the odds of ever being able to do or acquire said thing just gets increasingly thinner think about the number of children who have worn a space suit and helmet to career day in school and told everybody that they want to be astronauts now think about the fact that the odds of

becoming an astronaut are one in 12.1 million and you get sad for those little kids whose dreams will one day have to be crushed what if they wanted to be president well the chance of becoming a U.S president is one in 10 million unless you're a religious six foot tall Harvard Law graduate and Military veteran then your odds go up astronomically especially if you're a Harvard alumni because as surprising as it might sound the odds that the president of America has attended Harvard is one in 3.58 so if you want to have the best chance

of becoming president you know what school to apply for however getting into Harvard is almost as difficult as becoming president when you're done with a Chance of just 4.6 percent of getting in you might want to apply to some backup schools as well at the end of the day we all just want to be successful whether it's through the Arts or going through the so-called traditional route of finishing college and getting a good job we all just want to have enough money to live comfortably while we're still young but sadly the odds are stacked against

us there's a slim chance of just between 6.4 percent and 22.3 percent that you'll become a millionaire with different factors like race education wealth status and age helping to place you somewhere in that range while the chance of becoming a billionaire well there's 8 billion humans in the world and only around 2 000 billionaires so basically non-existent getting old has a Bittersweet taste to it on the one hand you're getting wiser more mature and you have a much better understanding of the world than you did when you were younger but on the other hand you're

also getting weaker you're forgetting things more and sadly your body just keeps breaking down one after the other and the stats don't really help at all if you're under 20 right now there's a one in four chance that you'll be disabled before you retire and it gets worse there's a one in two chance that at the age of 75 you'll have disabling hearing loss this is why whenever people say they want to work hard now so they can enjoy their retirement I kind of feel bad for them because most times at that age you don't

really get to enjoy anything all you can really do is sit around and reminisce on a life that once was and when the Grim Reaper comes you say goodbye to your loved ones and move on and that's why you should do everything you want to do right now for some reason there's a seven percent higher chance that you'll die on your birthday than on any other day going out together with the candles but for a few of us living to 100 is possible with the odds of that happening being approximately one in five thousand seven

hundred and eighty with those odds increasing significantly if you're biologically a woman on the other hand of the spectrum one of the most incredible human achievements is being born if you're here watching this video right now you deserve a round of applause you ran you fought you survived and Against All Odds you made it thoughts of you existing were 1 in 5.5 trillion but here you are you might have been the one in 20 chance of being born on your mom's exact due date or you're like most of us who are born around two weeks

before or after you might be the one in 250 who are geniuses burdened with the weight of advancing our civilization or like the rest of us who are cheering them on whoever you are whatever it took you to get here that was an incredible feat one that is unrepeatable not in this lifetime at least as light travels through space it behaves like a wave but light is also made of tiny particles called photons this is the Paradox of wave particles and it has completely revolutionized modern physics the universe is filled with intriguing paradoxes like this

statements that challenge our understanding of reality and force us to question our deepest assumptions these paradoxes have the power to change our lives in profound ways opening us up to new possibilities and reshaping the very fabric of our existence here are paradoxes that will change your life well the lotto jackpot has grown to over 64 million dollars it all started with a lottery ticket [Music] if you go out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one it'd be logical to assume you didn't win you'd also

be justified in thinking that your friend your uncle his sister their cousin and their dog all have losing tickets you're justified in believing that everyone who bought a ticket will lose even when you know the lottery was fair and there has to be a winner you're justified in believing something you know to be false this demonstrates that truth is relative it depends on context Prejudice and your perspective about the world because the truth is the only thing you can prove with certainty is that nothing is certain this is why people don't consider Pinocchio saying my

nose will grow now to be a paradox his nose will not grow because he didn't lie he simply made a false prediction if we have a set of all sets that do not contain themselves does that set contain itself imagine there's a barber who shaves all men who don't shave themselves and only men who don't shave themselves does the barber shave himself this is an example of Russell's Paradox a paradox That Shook the mathematical world these paradoxes playfully notice into realizing that self-reference can often lead to unexpected contradictions contradictions aside though we all want to

be happy but those who seek out happiness directly often don't find it this is the Paradox of Hedonism if we truly want to be happy we need to stop searching for happiness and pursue other meaningful activities like nurturing our relationships or serving others and only then can we be truly happy the pursuit of pleasure in its raw form often leads to disappointment while a life lived in service can lead to unexpected happiness deep down we all know this endless partying decadent eating habits and shopping sprees we know these activities are never as fulfilling as we

think they are and more often than not we're left with a sense of emptiness after the dust settles it's called post-indulgence clarity we see this Paradox Even in our relationships expecting your partner to completely control your happiness often makes them unable to make you happy at least not in the way you want it the reality is that to have good relationships we need to be somewhat independent of them people think that to find the right partner they need all the options in the world to pick the perfect person but in truth having more options isn't

always better just look at the fact that we have all these dating apps at our fingertips and many of us still can't find a healthy relationship this is the Paradox of choice and contrary to what we think many options often leave us less satisfied with our final decision I once watched a tick tock where this guy said men today see more beautiful women while scrolling through Tick Tock for five minutes then Kings from the past did in their entire lives and although it was a joke he was entirely correct but it's not a good thing

according to biological Anthropologist Helen Fisher the human brain isn't built to deal with more than five to nine options for a partner after that the brain goes into decision paralysis where it almost refuses to pick so the next time you feel inundated by options remember that less is sometimes better and more data may not always be more informative learning is great asking questions and figuring out how things work is how our species has gotten to where it is today but learning is also a paradox because the more you know the more you realize you don't

know it's an amazing Paradox one that encourages you to never stop learning paradoxes are everywhere in mathematics and statistics like Simpsons paradox here trends that appear in a different group will disappear or even reverse when the groups are combined to form a larger group in the 1970s UC Berkeley was accused of gender bias against women in its admissions process at first glance the admissions data made it seem like men were more likely to be admitted than women but when the data was broken down into individual departments most departments had admission percentages that were significantly in

favor of women the problem was that a higher proportion of women were applying to more competitive departments with lower admission rates so when compared to all the men in the school it seemed like women had lower rates of admission but when compared to the men in each department it was clear that the women actually had a higher rate this is unfortunately how misinformation spreads it's usually not with wrong data but with the correct data expressed without proper context because the reality is that often as paradoxical as it may seem the whole is different from the

sum of its parts changes ever present in our lives the human body replaces billions of cells daily and every seven years or so you are an entirely different cellular collection so if we're constantly changing how do we know the person we are today is the same person we were seven years ago one might say the essence of who we are remains but that Essence is really just the result of our thoughts beliefs and experiences which are also changing so who really are you maybe you like defining yourself based on your struggles how hard you pursue

something do you want to achieve but have you ever thought that sometimes trying too hard to get something almost makes it impossible to get it's the backwards law and it's an interesting concept with lots of layers to uncover if you're interested in a dedicated video about the subject just let me know in the comments below in 2016 after his Infamous penalty Miss against Chile Lionel Messi hung up his boots with his beloved Argentina in what seemed like the last nail in the coffin Messi simply had enough on the club stage success seemed to come to

him so easily but where he really wanted it where he desperately tried to do it all by himself Victory seemed elusive consider the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise coin by Zeno the father of stoicism in this Paradox Achilles gave a tortoise a head start and races it to Infinity Xeno argued that Achilles will never truly overtake the tortoise because when he reaches where the tortoise started the tortoise will have moved a little further and this pattern will continue till Infinity the Paradox is silly but it challenges our perception of movement space and infinity and

the realization it leaves with us especially with Messi's story is that sometimes no matter how much you try some things seem just that little bit Out Of Reach Messi had to accept that part of his legacy was beyond his control the Argentine Football Federation was under financed and poorly managed and there was no one around him when he needed support with criticism pouring down from all sides and embarrassing defeats won after another the dream would remain just that a dream yet as soon as he let go the tide began turning Messi took almost a metaphorical

back seat dropping deeper than his traditional role playing farther from the goal that he had ever played his job now wasn't to shine himself but cast lights on the others many of whom were young kids who were fans of him when he hung up his boots in 2016. but there he was on December 18 2022 nearly six years after that missed penalty lifting the World Cup very few stories are as remarkable as Messi's most of us live and die without doing or being anything special or is that so if there's nothing oddly special about us

the earth and the life it holds then the universe should be teeming with life and yet it isn't you might say maybe that it is and we just aren't Advanced enough to search the Galaxy to find it and you'll be right but considering how young our galaxy is compared to others out there and that if given enough time any advanced species should be able to figure out Interstellar travel if there are any aliens we should have seen them by now this is fermi's paradox and put simply by a New York Times article it exclaims if

life is so easy someone from somewhere must have come calling by now maybe equally paradoxical is the insignificance of the question are we special when you boil it down to the individual there's around 20 quintillion animals on Earth that's 20 billion billion yet the value of a single life isn't questioned so why do we think that the Universe teaming with life will make us any less unique there's something innately valuable about life what exactly it is they remain forever elusive and speaking of elusive things in life the coastline Paradox is a geographical conundrum that originated

in the mind of British scientist Louis fry Richardson it's a concept that challenges our understanding of measurement and infinity revealing a surprising contradiction that's not only mathematical but also physical essentially this Paradox states that the length of a coastline depends on the length of the tool used to measure it the shorter the ruler the longer the measured length of the coastline this is because a smaller ruler can capture more of the intricate twists and turns of the coastline but here the Paradox arises theoretically as the ruler gets infinitely small the length of the coastline becomes

infinitely large consider the coastline of Britain as an example if we were to measure it with a hundred kilometer ruler we would get a significantly shorter length than with a one kilometer ruler which would capture more details of the coastline and if we used a one centimeter ruler the coastline would appear even longer following this logic to its extreme the coastline seems to stretch to Infinity as the ruler shrinks to zero but how can this be after all Britain is an island of finite size the Paradox stems from the fractal nature of coastlines they have

a high degree of complexity and self-similarity at all scales this is a real world example of a mathematical concept known as fractal geometry the coastline Paradox is not only mind-bending but it also has practical implications for cartography geology and various other disciplines it teaches us a humbling lesson about the limitations of our measurements and how they can be influenced by the skill at which we look at things it's a testament to the unexpected complexities that can emerge from something as simple as measuring a length the coastline Paradox is a stunning illustration of how reality can

defy our intuitive assumptions revealing an infinitely intricate endlessly fascinating world of surprises it's a poetic Ode to the idea of paradoxes themselves from being incorporated into movies to revolutionizing reality and the Sciences paradoxes have captured our imagination intellectual enigmas that's what they are beautiful puzzles that tease our intellect to challenge our perceptions and invite us to look beyond the apparent they hold up a mirror to the complexities of life in the universe reflecting an intriguing and Elusive existence paradoxes gracefully illustrate that our universe isn't a mere collection of absolutes but a symphony of mysteries wonders

and unfathomable truth for the past month or so I've been thinking a lot about life and when people say that they usually mean what they want to do in life whether that be their career or relationships or entertainment or leisure but I've been thinking differently of course I've been thinking about those things but I've also been thinking about how much of your life is really yours how much of your life is really being lived to its full potential are you living or are you just existing on average you're gonna get about 79 years on this

big rock called Earth if you live in Monaco it's closer to 90. if you live in Chad you'll be lucky to get 50. regardless we don't get 79 years of Freedom we have responsibilities and things that we can't ignore most importantly our bodies assuming you sleep eight hours a night on average about a third of your life or 26 years is going to be spent sleeping so right away we're down from 79 to 53. but it doesn't stop there chances are if you're watching this video you're going to or have gone to school in the

United States you'll go for at least 12 Beers 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 36 weeks a year this amounts to 17 280 hours spent just inside the school building but wait we also have to factor in homework and out-of-school activities among other things so this is more like twenty two thousand to twenty five thousand hours or about three years of your life if you go to college or university afterwards make it five years instead we're down to 48 years well all this schooling and money you spent getting a degree has to

be put to some use right chances are you'll try and get a job in the field of whatever it is your degree is in it'll probably be a full-time job so you'll be working 40 hour weeks pretty regularly if not more than that let's say you get two weeks of vacation per year the average person works for about 40 to 50 years of their life so we'll just go with the average and say 45. over your entire life you'll work on average about 90 000 hours or about 10 years of your life we have 38

years left wait depending on where you live your commute to work will vary you might drive yourself you might walk you might use an Uber or a taxi regardless your commute to and from work on average takes about one and a half hours a day adding this up over your entire working career it amounts to 17 520 hours or about two years of your life 36 years left all of this work and studying really builds up an appetite so you should probably spend some time eating on an average day we spend about 70 minutes just

eating food to survive in your 79 years of life you'll spend about 32 000 hours just eating or about four years of your life down to 32 well after you're done eating you have to clean up and maybe do some chores around the house on average you spend about one hour a day doing tasks just around your house cleaning up after you eat washing dishes doing laundry showering and plenty of other stuff this amounts to nearly 29 000 hours over the course of your life or about three years 29 years left eventually all of that

food and water has to leave your body somehow you'll spend about three months of your life just sitting on the toilet yeah of course we also waste time and we do it pretty well over the course of our lifetimes we'll spend about 115 000 hours on our phones or about 13 years this of course is just your phone this doesn't include you watching TV you playing games among other things 16 years left assuming you can afford to retire at the average age of 62 you'll spend the rest of your life living the luxuries of retirement

if you can still function properly over 50 percent of retired people over the age of 65 have some sort of disability with 15 of those people having three or more chances are if you are one of these people you'll be in and out of Medical Care pretty often so those final 16 years of Freedom you have it's a coin flip that doesn't exactly entail freedom so overall you have one year in your 79 year life to really and truly do what you want to do but despite the age you might be young or old you

may be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life for example while you're young and in school from the ages of 1 to 18 you'll most likely be spending nearly every day in the presence of your parents after you finish your schooling assuming your parents are in their mid-40s we'll say they have about 30 years left in their life the real world starts to set in your job your possible relationships your important things to do in life take priority eventually if you leave your hometown you'll only be

seeing your parents around holidays and special occasions maybe 10 days a year so 300 days left with the people who brought you into the world whereas before you would see them almost every single day you have already spent 95 of the time that you will ever spend with your parents in the first 18 years of your life and now you only have the remaining five percent for the rest of your life at the end of the day there's only one thing that matters and that's your own happiness well many people don't realize is that they

do so many things in life just to try and succeed as opposed to fulfilling a purpose they work a job they hate for 40 years just to make that extra thirty thousand dollars a year so they can afford a car that they only drive to work it's temporary happiness not genuine happiness people go to school to become a doctor because their mom or their dad or somebody else told them to not because they actually want to I really hope that every single person watching this video gets insanely rich and famous so that they can finally

realize that this isn't the point of life the point is to be happy with what you're doing while you're doing it alright sure the 45 working years or however long you're working is gonna be hard to get past but what if you don't hate waking up every day to go to work what if your work is your happiness you see life isn't a straight path you can't map it out perfectly one to one it just doesn't work like that we spend every day planning on what we're going to do the next instead of just taking

in the day for what it actually is sure we have to eat duh but what if we spend that time eating with friends or family or just people who make your life better your commute to work might be long and tedious sometimes but what if you spend that time listening to podcasts or carpooling with co-workers and Friends the 13 years we waste on our phones might seem useless but what if we use that time to build the business you've always wanted to or build the brand you've always wanted or make a YouTube channel to talk

to people about the random ideas you get you'll bring so much value to people that you never even thought was possible let's say you take care of yourself and regularly work out decently well your chances of being healthy later in life is much more likely and you'll have much more free time to master the things that you really want whether that be a skill or just relationships with others no matter what you or I or any person on this planet does time doesn't stop for anyone time is the one thing you cannot get back if

you lose a lot of money it's fine you can get more if your friend decides to turn their back on you it's fine there's millions of people out there in the same situation but time you can't get it back once it's gone it's gone how many days have you spent doing the same mundane tasks that you hate and more importantly when is it going to end life is about choices every choice you've ever made has led you to this exact moment watching this video and given that you only have one life at least in this

universe why not make your own decisions so many people live life predicated on somebody else's opinion which is dumb people have so many barriers in life but they aren't really about money they aren't about time they aren't about how you look it's about opinions other people's opinions probably about 90 percent of people are unhappy because they value someone else's opinion more than their own when you're old and unable to do the things that you could have when you're younger you'll regret and regret hurts more than any breakup failure or anything else ever could life doesn't

have to suck you don't have to regret everything that fomo or fear of missing out is a poison instead of living trying to mimic people you see on Instagram or YouTube or social media just live based on your own terms instead of just observing and living passively really start to think about what you do with your time does that mean call your boss and tell him you quit no does that mean drop out of school tomorrow no all it means is to truly decide what you want in life and put yourself in the right direction

it's not gonna happen overnight that's not the point there would be no Journey then cliche as it sounds your 79-year journey here is very short sure it's technically the longest thing you'll ever do but the universe is 13.8 billion years old if the universe's history was condensed down into 24 hours the World As We Know It with cars and airplanes and civilization as we know it would only come into existence in the very last second block out any and all negativity in your life and once you can truly realize that the only opinion that matters

is your own life can get pretty clear and the noises inside your head get pretty quiet [Music] as kids we believed a lot of different things from thinking that the gifts under the Christmas tree were kept there by Santa to imagining a tiny fairy that came in at the dead of night to steal the loose tooth from underneath our pillows [Music] most of the things we believed in as kids are magical information pieced together by stories that we've been told by adults or things that we watched on TV one of those things that some of

us watched on TV and actually believed in was Barney that's right the purple dinosaur Barney's theme song while nonsensical offers us a rather interesting Paradox the song goes Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination Barney shows us lots of things like how to play pretend which begs the question if Barney was the one who taught us how to play pretend then how did we imagine him to be in the first place it's the classic causal Loop where an event in the future creates an event in the past which creates the event in the future and

so you're left without a point of origin paradoxes are all around us from the shows we grew up watching as kids to the songs that were stuck in our heads throughout Middle School you know that one song by One Direction that goes you don't know that you're beautiful that's what makes you beautiful just think about it for a moment for her to not know that she was beautiful she had to have been beautiful in the first place which means that she couldn't have known what made her beautiful as if that wasn't enough the song is

all about telling the girl that she is beautiful so does that mean then that when the song is over the girl stops being beautiful because now that she knows that she is beautiful shouldn't that make her no longer beautiful what if she stops believing she's beautiful doesn't that then make her beautiful again it's a weird thing in that the more you think about it the less sense it makes relationships are also weird two random people meet each other and decide that they want to spend all or at least most of their time together you're asking

each other silly paradoxical questions like if a person who can read minds and a person who can predict the future fight each other who would win soon after you're both in bed on a cold windy night sharing secrets you said you'd never tell anyone you're lying down there with your partner in a windowless room and then it begins to rain you don't have any idea of what the weather outside is like you have no weather app or anything like that and so when your friend walks in and tells you it's raining outside you don't believe

them in that scenario your friend can say about you it's raining but John doesn't believe it and it would be perfectly acceptable so why is it that if you say the same thing it's raining but I don't believe it is everyone in the room might think you've just lost your mind why is the second question absurd and not the first why is it absurd for us to say something that is true about ourselves speaking of Truth what do you think would happen to Pinocchio if he said the words my nose will grow now if Pinocchio's

nose grows then that means he was telling the truth so his nose shouldn't have grown what if his nose doesn't grow then he just told a lie and so his nose should grow some people don't consider this to be a paradox the argument is that Pinocchio's nose would not grow because he didn't lie he simply made a false prediction where's the fun in that a lot of the times we say things that make sense to us on the surface however on closer inspection you quickly realize things are not as they seem let's say you go

out and buy a lottery ticket knowing fully well that your chances of winning are 10 million to one it would be perfectly normal for you to conclude that you did not get the winning ticket in fact it would be considered a bit crazy for you to think that your ticket won you'll also be justified in thinking that your friend your uncle your sister his sister their cousin and their dog all have losing tickets you look around you in the store you're justified in believing that everyone you encounter will probably lose and in turn that no

ticket will win however knowing fully well that the lottery was fair and there must be one winner you are justified in believing something you know to be false just how this only goes to show that truth is relative it depends on context on knowledge and perspective about the world because the truth is the only thing that you can prove is certainty is that nothing is certain I watched a couple fighting outside Starbucks the other day the woman turned to the man who was with her and in a slightly raised voice she said deep down you're

really shallow and while the rest of the coffee shop pretended that they didn't just hear that I had to pause and think about it for a moment if he had a deep down then how can he be shallow but I bet that's not what was in his mind or was it for all we know he was probably thinking of shallower thoughts deep down in his heart for a relationship to succeed everyone in the relationship needs to trust one another but this is real life and sometimes people are insecure and sometimes it's not their fault everything

from anxiety to past traumatic experiences the reality of the world forces us sometimes to be insecure this is why people often find it easier to talk to strangers about their deepest darkest Secrets than the ones they claim to trust it's the Paradox of trust we claim to trust this person yet we fear they would judge us for our secrets and on the flip side we feel most comfortable telling people who we do not trust the secrets that could damn us not long before the couple finished their argument the Baristas and the coffee shop walked out

to the little girl and her mom in the chair adjacent to me they handed the little girl tiny birthday cupcake and sang the Happy Birthday song to her as she closed her eyes to make a wish before blowing out the candles I quickly glanced around the room and I thought to myself huh what are the chances that someone else in here right now also has their birthday today unlike most rational people I concluded that it was far too unlikely there were less than 30 people in the coffee shop that day and there are 365 days

in a year so of course the chances that two random people would have the same birthday would be slim right well most people would say yes but according to the birthday Paradox most people would be wrong because if there are 23 people in a room there's a 50 chance that two of them share a birthday now to fully understand this one we're going to need some math so permit me to do a little bit of probability analysis here let's start small with just two people Let's ignore leap years or Twins or any patterns that suggest

babies are born more times at certain periods of the year than others because those are just too confusing okay say you and I are in a room together there's a 365 out of 365 or 100 chance that I have a birthday I do and a 365 out of 365 times 364 out of 365 chance that we both do not share the same birthday now let's say one other person in the room joins us the probability that this new person does not have the same birthday as either of us becomes 365 over 365 times 364 over

365 times 363 over 365 and that multiplication just goes on and on and on for however many babies you want when you get to the 23rd baby this incredibly long series of multiplication gives you the number 0.492 which is basically 49.2 percent now this is the probability that we do not share a birthday to find out the probability that two random people in this coffee shop do share a birthday we have to subtract that number from 100 which gives us 50.7 percent if you don't fully understand the math honestly I barely did too but it

checks out trust me while we're on the subject of math a teacher once walked into her class on Friday and announced that there would be a surprise test sometime next week as she left the class the students began to murmur to each other about when they thought the test would happen one clever student stood up and told his mates that the test couldn't be given on a Friday because when Thursday comes around and they don't have the test then they know that the test is on Friday but it has to be a surprise test so

it can't be Friday because they already know it can't be Friday if it's by the end of Wednesday and it doesn't happen then they'll know it's Thursday so it can't be Thursday either the student continues his analysis for the rest of the week until Monday and finally he comes to the conclusion that the test cannot be given at all since they would know but the teacher said it would be a surprise so when the teacher walks in on Wednesday and hands them their test sheets the students are all surprised how could this have happened they

all asked themselves puzzled we're living in unprecedented times with Russia's attack on Ukraine the whole world is currently sitting on basically a live grenade one wrong move from any of the world powers and we could very well find ourselves in the middle of Another World War it's in times like these when you just paused and think about paradoxes in the way that our society operates we claim to be free but there is no freedom without Law and Order and as the Latin saying goes CVS pakum Parabellum which despite my poor pronunciation translates to if you

want peace prepare for war it's a strange thing to think about and an even stranger thing to be living through in World War II Pilots could only get out of combat duty if they were psychologically unfit to fly however anyone who tried to get out of combat Duty proves he is sane today we call this a catch-22 after the satirical World War II novel written by Joseph Heller we see catch-22s everywhere in our world today to get a job you need work experience but to get that work experience you need to have had a job

we've all seen it companies asking for five years of experience for entry-level jobs or coal miners who only have two options to quit working in die of starvation or to keep working and die of pollution most people pick the latter because then they can say at least they tried their best the world is unfair some people are born into wealth power and privilege and never have to work a day in their lives the rest are forced to struggle and slave away just to make ends meet truly all animals are equal but some are more equal

than others on the surface this statement might not seem logical however on close inspection it may prove to be well founded and even true if I told you right now that humans are perfect organisms and that in our mother's wombs we first are fishes who then develop into amphibians and then reptiles birds primates before finally becoming what we know as human I'm sure you'd look at me like I've gone insane and I have but that's besides the point just as recently as 1811 because of the works of scientist Johann Friedrich meckel everybody thought that was

true and this is because science is transient what we once told is truth quickly Fades away upon closer inspection and looking back we can only laugh at ourselves for the scientific facts we once held dear to our hearts some other times these aren't even actual scientific facts they're just very popular opinions that all of us have collectively agreed to be true even though they are in fact not these are all the times we were wrong not everything Michael said was wrong though in fact he was the first scientist to correctly predict that embryos have gills

well slits on their neck that closely resemble gills at least however unlike what he suggested we don't pass through a fish phase in our mother's wombs these slits are most likely due to the fact that both humans and fish share common ancestor and some DNA and not because we're trying to attain some kind of biological Perfection I mean who are we kidding we're far from perfect for a long time scientists believe this to be true well until the late 19th century when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution started to gain traction we realized that a linear

series of evolution in our mother's womb was completely illogical the theory of evolution is one that has been completely riddled with lots of false claims and ideas that are simply not true in reality evolution is a very difficult subject to research because of the limited amount of fossil information available as a result a lot of times all we're left with are hypotheses some of which are brilliant and others not so much for a long time scientists believe that all of life was aquatic until one day many millions of years ago A Brave fish dared to

walk on land starting with very short periods on dry ground the fish started spending more and more time on land and gradually its gills got replaced with lungs and it became amphibian then the amphibians became reptiles who became Birds who became mammals and while these scientists got the process of evolution right that one Brave fish was not the first animal to step on land the Earth was rich with insects and funguses and was bubbling with life before that fish ever came into the picture another hypothesis that we all seem to collectively get wrong is where

humans come from if I asked you right now you'd most likely tell me that we evolved from chimpanzees our closest living relatives but while the second half of that statement is true the first half is completely false we didn't evolve from chimpanzees yes we evolved from apes however we did not evolve from any Apes living today [Music] we monkeys chimps and gorillas all evolved from a common ancestor the so-called great apes that lived in Africa around 7 million years ago it was around that time in the evolution chain that we split so although chimpanzees are

our closest living relatives we're further apart on the family tree than a lot of us think are much closer relative although now extinct of the Neanderthals modern humans split from neanderthals just around 500 000 years ago but even these guys certainly came with their own controversy for a long time scientists believe that neanderthals and humans never lived together with some believing that neanderthals evolved into humans but again that's not true archaeologists have since found ancient human skeletons that proved that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for thousands of years in fact they didn't just co-exist they

actually made it which is why most humans living outside of Africa have anywhere between one to four percent of Neanderthal DNA is still in them today when we start talking about the theory of evolution in ancient humans we can't help but talk about dinosaurs you know those giant scary lizard looking things from Jurassic Park the ones that have Earth-like tones lizard-like scales and Roars more earth-shattering than that of a lion well in reality the dinosaur was none of those things I just mentioned first dinosaurs are more closely related to birds than lizards in fact every

single living bird today is a modern day dinosaur a descendant of theropods a species of ancient dinosaurs and because they're Birds they mostly had feathers covering their scaly skin fossil evidence has shown that a lot of tyrannosaurus had feathers which means that even the great T-Rex probably had a few as well mostly on its head and tail dinosaurs also never ran fast because they always had to have one leg on the ground they could only get to around 25 miles per hour which is still pretty scary because well one they're massive and two the average

speed of a human is 15 miles per hour what if you're Usain Bolt you've got nothing to worry about you can outrun these guys any day and let's be honest have you ever heard any bird Roar yeah me neither which is why a recent scientific study has shown that the two wrecks most likely hooted cooed or made deep-throated booming sounds like the Emu not a trembling roar like a giant lion it's funny when you think about it now we can forgive ourselves for getting these details wrong after all all of these things happen tens of

millions of years ago before any of this ever existed but if you look much closer in time you'll see a lot of things we get wrong every day even things that are as simple as George Washington's teeth in 1789 when George Washington was inaugurated as president he only had one natural tooth left but because the president needed an amazing smile he wore Dentures now in reality these Dentures were made from hippopotamus Ivory brass and gold but for some reason we like to believe they were made from wood why we believe that I have idea but

it's not too late to change your mind according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary a person who often changes their beliefs or behaviors in order to please others or to succeed is called a chameleon but our chameleons really chameleons this definition is derived from the assumption that chameleons change the color of their skin to match their surroundings most likely to camouflage and while there are animals that excel at using this tactic like the octopus the chameleon is not one of those animals in reality most chameleon species can only change from green to Brown and back to green

and they don't change color to blend into their surroundings they do it to regulate their body temperature when the chameleon is cold it becomes darker to absorb more heat and when it's hot it turns pale to reflect more heat so it can cool down there is one species of chameleon that can change into any color though and that's the panther chameleon but even those guys don't do it to match their surroundings their flamboyant display of colors helps them fend off against males competing for territory and also to attract females I mean isn't that why we

all buy designer in the first place to impress each other speaking of fancy who else was taught the diamonds are made from coal sorry but that's not true at all it's a terribly common misconception in fact most of the diamonds that have been dated were found to be older than even the very first plants that appeared on Earth and because you need trees to make coal it's impossible for a coal to produce diamonds when diamonds existed long before the material that makes coal even existed anyway NASA researchers have even found a number of Nano diamonds

and meteorites Nano diamonds are diamonds that are just a few nanometers in diameter simple enough they're too tiny to be considered gems but it's still pretty cool that you can have these precious objects just floating around in space still it makes you question why we deem them as so precious when in reality they're extremely abundant in our universe there are planets in space where it literally Reigns diamonds anyway of course these asteroids are floating because there's no gravity in space right well unfortunately wrong there is gravity in space it's what holds the moon in orbit

around the Earth and the Earth close together around the sun with all the other planets it's just that as you get further away from the earth the Earth's gravitational pull on you weakens and other gravitational forces begin to take priority but in reality everything in space is falling in every direction imaginable all the time the only reason it seems as if you're floating and not falling is because space is very large and most importantly very empty at least compared to Earth for instance on Earth if you were to and I really really don't recommend it

jump off a building you could feel the strong winds on your face you would see the ground appearing closer and closer you can tell that you're falling quite easily and in just a few seconds impact you're on the ground because the distance between the height you felt from and where you landed isn't that much in space there is no air so no whooshing sound to accompany your fall and because it's so large it takes you anywhere from a few hours to many years to land on one surface when you fall from another so it feels

like you're floating but you're not you're falling really really slowly and that's because of gravity one of man's most important discoveries when you think about the fact that it is one of man's most important discoveries you would imagine that the story behind it would have been preserved carefully but the version almost all of us have heard has not been preserved at all the old tale goes that Newton was tired from all the many failed experiments he had in his career tired and frustrated he sat under a tree to rest his head as he sat a

ripe Apple fell down from the tree and hit him on the head and in a Eureka moment he discovered one of the most important forces in physics gravity but the truth is much less dramatic than that in reality Isaac Newton was observing the apples falling from the tree of their own accord when he discovered that there must be a force behind it he wasn't sitting under the tree and apple certainly didn't fall on his head see sometimes I understand why we make up some of these stories they help make us feel better about ourselves when

we believe that some of Humanity's greatest achievements couldn't have happened without a huge slice of luck we can keep hope alive for our own share of luck our own piece of the apple pie it's the same with the story of Albert Einstein we all heard growing up about how he failed in class but still went on to become one of the greatest physicists the world has ever seen but that's just not true at all Einstein always excelled in school he didn't learn to read late in life and he most likely didn't have a learning disability

our teachers must have told us these stories to make us feel good about ourselves give us hope that even if we have rough starts in school we can still become Geniuses later in life if we worked hard and while there are a thousand examples of this exact Theory Einstein simply wasn't one of them Aristotle was one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived and was the first true scientist he practically invented formal logic and he described and explored the different scientific disciplines and their relations to one another but for all the good he did

there was one thing he got terribly terribly wrong he claimed that the Earth was at the center of the universe I mean why wouldn't he most things You observe point to this exact conclusion now while Aristotle wasn't the first to say this he championed the fight he claimed that using logic he had found this to be a hundred percent true and wouldn't back down from his argument it took the work of Galileo almost two Millennia later to discover that the sun was at the center of the solar system and not our Earth and still people

didn't believe him in fact they ostracized him and this is just one of the many times that we as humans have over emphasized our importance in the movie Lucy Morgan Freeman says this in a room full of students it is estimated most human beings only use 10 of their brain's capacity imagine if we could access a hundred percent interesting things begin to happen while it's fun to think that humans are capable of a whole lot more if we could just find a way to tap into that remaining 90 resource reality is far less exciting most

of the brain is active almost all the time while they might not be actively used for thinking they're working busy doing other things like keeping you alive kind of important think about it the brain is just three percent of the body's weight but it uses twenty percent of the body's energy to burn through that much energy you would have to be doing something right even though we get it wrong most of the time it's fun to explore the world around us we will continue to make assumptions about everything we see and chances are most of

it'll be wrong but that's a good thing because if we never know what's wrong we can never know what's truly right money Our Lives revolve around it we all want it we know we all want it most of it doesn't even exist Beyond The Heavy Duty servers of some bank and yet the pursuit continues for this elusive thing despite its presence in everyday life despite the fact that we spend most of our waking hours working towards money it still somehow taboo to talk about we like to pretend that money is not important to us and

sure money is not the end goal in fact one of the most common regrets of people on their deathbeds tends to be that they worked too hard she chasing after money of course for all its value however money still can't buy you a meaningful relationship or an experience but while money can't buy any of those things it can make them more accessible is happiness not easier to achieve once you know the bills are all taken care of is happiness not easier to achieve when you are able to give a loved one something you know they

deserve at the very least more money often equates to more choices in terms of how you want to spend your time whether that is with your loved ones or in chasing a passion you had as a kid and even if you disagree with everything I just said in order to change the world you will still need the backing of financial capital now with that said and hopefully having navigated through the awkwardness of introducing such a topic let's cut right to the chase how much money should you be making how much is enough and mind you

there is a very good reason to ask such a question this is not just for curiosity's sake studies show that when you have actually put a metric to a goal and maybe even written it down you are more likely to achieve it people who vividly picture a goal are 40 more likely to successfully achieve it so how much what does the literature say well the relationship of money and happiness is a complicated one first of all emotions are generally hard to track and second of all this question has not been researched all that much however

anyone talking about this topic has to bring up a piece of literature from 2010 authored by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton their paper looks into the relationship between income and happiness but it goes a bit beyond that the authors decided that simply looking into one metric as a measure of subjective well-being would fail to capture the complete picture and confound the findings so they looked at two things emotional well-being which is defined as the day-to-day satisfaction and life evaluation defined as the thoughts that come to mind when one thinks of Life as a whole you

could also think of emotional well-being as the sort of short-term happiness and life evaluation as the long-term happiness now what did the research find it turns out life evaluation Rises steadily with income the more people earn the more positively they tend to think of life in general emotional well-being on the other hand seems to Plateau after an annual income of around 75 000. meaning till that figure for the majority of people each bit of raise and income will feel great but after it your day-to-day happiness won't go up by that much so there it is

right that's the magical number well not quite for one this is a study from 2010 because of inflation today that amount is closer to around 93 000. and I should also mention that this study was conducted with U.S residents as participants what is considered a good life will definitely vary drastically in other parts of the world let's get that right just recently in the first few weeks of 2021 researcher Matt Killingsworth published the latest findings on the very same question how much money should you be making to be happy his findings experienced well-being continues to

rise even Beyond The Covenant 75 000 Mark and not just that it continues to rise just as deeply as before meaning the return on investment isn't any worse off the more money you make why does this research disagree with the previous findings well for a paper by Kahneman and Deaton the data that was collected for emotional well-being were answers to questions about the previous day that has the potential to fail to capture what a person was actually feeling in that moment of happiness or sadness because our minds tend to play tricks with us Killingsworth research

meanwhile is collected via an app which pings users at various times of the day it is more convenient than the traditional forms of surveying and as such he had a significantly larger pool of responses to base his findings on this also allowed him to more truly capture what participants were feeling so if we are to accept killing's worst findings then most people's day-to-day happiness as well as their General outlook on life tend to improve with higher income so does that mean we should all just aim for an astronomically High salary in search of happiness and

hope that we get there someday is that a realistic Target there's a thought experiment to try and answer that question for us as individuals author Brad stallery came up with the idea for the experiment it goes like this how much money would you have to be paid right here right now to never received another dollar of income from anyone else now you might think that's a straightforward experiment you just aim for a really really high number somewhere in the hundreds of millions or billions from most people I guess the catch is that this experiment will

be run in groups of five people and whoever has the lowest figure in mind will actually walk away with the money the rest of the players get nothing the game theory at play here is actually quite cool the interesting thing about this experiment is that it pits two of your impulses against each other and in doing so forces you to be reasonable because of course you want to aim for a high number but you also want to win and have the money so you can't just aim for a stupidly large number of course this experiment

is talking about money paid as a lump sum While most of the research looks at salaries the perceptions of well-being might as well be different for the two of them but it's hard to see what the thought experiment won't work with salaries too go ahead and ask yourself that question and see what you come up with the answer might help you more vividly visualize a Target that you can actually work towards of course we all want to achieve happiness but more income is easier said than done When shall we really stop trying and what if

the circumstances are simply not there for a raise or a commotion well that's where the other part of the puzzle comes in our adaptation don't get me wrong it's a wonderful thing being able to adapt is what allowed our species to come so far but at the same time it also means that whenever presented with an improved quality of life we rapidly adapt to it and begin taking it for granted it would explain why most people live their lives from nine to five chasing after that next raise because staying where you are regardless if you

make five figures a year or seven brings with it a heavy feeling of obsolescence then there's obviously an element of comparison we've known this for a while that comparison is the thief of joy you might have a seven figure salary but you won't be anything close to happy if you compare yourself with Jeff Bezos who has more money than brain cells literally studies also show that for the same salary people living in a rich neighborhood feel worse than people in a poor neighborhood while both participants likely take joy from their salaries they also compare them

with that of the Joneses if the Joneses make less than you you're happy if they make more you're not research also says easily accessible money improves well-being more than money that is stowed deep inside someone's pension the closeness of a number that you can glance out of your pocket can be a reassuring breath of air having only 500 worth of disposable money in a bank account can improve life Satisfaction by up to 15 percent then of course there's a question of what you do with the money that eventually leads to happiness if you simply make

more money for making money's sake you might still get some joy out of it assuming you're successful it's much like a game but the Elation will pair in comparison to that of a person who spends his hard-earned Cash In A Better Way buying time is often seen as one of the best ways to spend your money and that it allows you to focus on the most joyous aspects while offloading the more laborious aspects to someone who will happily do them the gig economy has made this more accessible than ever before allowing people to spend more

of their time for the things that truly matter even if it means having a little less in the bank account this might mean paying someone to do the dishes so you can read a book to your child in bed or it could mean purchasing a more expensive ticket to be able to spend some time with family material possessions also draw a lot of attention when it comes to the relation between wealth and happiness the research is clear on this too spend on experiences not things the reason is that experiences are exclusive nobody can feel what

you felt on that trip with your best friend nobody can buy that exclusivity despite the fleeting nature of an experience it can last a lifetime and unlike the value of objects which tend to depreciate over time experiences only seem more enjoyable in hindsight our minds tend to overlook the small bumps in an experience the delayed flight or the poor Wi-Fi and remember Only the Good parts so instead of aiming for a certain salary figure it might make more sense to aim for experiences and pursue the ability to afford those experiences of course this is not

to say that material possessions cannot be an experience song might be an experience a cup of coffee might be an experience an expensive car might be an experience that's really up to the individual to decide but people generally overestimate how happy they'll be once they have that one new thing however once we have it feeling of satisfaction slowly erodes and we were back where we started on some level it might be a bit troubling to accept that money does indeed buy happiness or at the very least by his ways towards happiness but really haven't we

known this all along more importantly though this realization has to be qualified with the ideas of what's really important people experiences and time not only can It inform our career choices and how much we want to invest chasing after this thing but it also tells us why generosity is important why a more Equitable future is one to strive for because remember the only reason any of us want money is to inevitably get rid of it in the end [Music] if you're watching this right now you've won you've won the game of life you just don't

know it yet as of May 2019 there are approximately 7.7 billion humans on our planet 7.7 billion people just like you and me living their own lives with their own jobs relationships hobbies and not one is the same as any other the number of events of situations of interactions that happen on a daily basis across everyone on Earth is the number so high that it's hard to fathom but something that is even harder to understand is how you're even here in the first place a lot has happened over the course of history like a lot

of things there was nothing and then there was something there were a lot of things and all of this the entire history of the universe has led you to this very second the timeline we live in the one where you're breathing and using your senses to get all the information from this video what are the odds of that happening everything has led to this moment but by the numbers you shouldn't even be here in the first place [Music] living a life like you do today you had to be put here but even at one time

the Earth wasn't here the universe had to form in the exact way it did for life to form on Earth the fundamental forces of nature just so happen to come together in the way that they did luckily gravity is a thing and it's proved to be useful so useful that it's pretty much the glue that holds together any Star Planet Galaxy pretty much anything the strong and weak nuclear forces are able to keep us as humans held together at the lowest levels imaginable luckily one Lost Planet roaming the solar system collided with Earth over 4

billion years ago and that is why we have the Moon that is why we have seasons it's why the climate is just perfect it's why we have liquid water on Earth currently remains as the only place in the entire universe known to Harbor life forms of any kind out of millions billions whatever the number is out of all of those planets only one has life for certain but even one out of a billion are better odds than you being alive for some reason that I wish I could tell you one day a microorganism one that

couldn't be seen to our naked eye begin feeding on the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean this little almost insignificant organism played the most important role of them all for all they knew a world above them didn't exist but one day it would over millions of years Evolution took place these microbes began to be able to replicate themselves and each and every single step of evolution began the pure numbers of the situation doesn't do it justice the odds of everything being so perfect that each step brought us progressively closer to becoming modern humans

humans that could realize they're human that from one microbe spawned an entire species that took over the entire planet over a few thousand years on a universal time scale that's quite literally nothing but now let's think about humans what separates us from everyone else the minds of animals have continuously gotten more advanced over time but a human mind is something completely different sentience Consciousness we are aware of some internal state of being we don't wake up in the morning because you've thought about it your brain just did it we don't think about breathing we don't

think about blinking your brain automatically takes in all of your senses and creates a picture a view of the world in your head for all we know the Earth could be something completely different from what we see day to day but the way we perceive it all comes down to how a three pound organ in your head can put together a puzzle with the pieces being all of your senses but it isn't perfect it's easy to trick for example listen to this and try to imagine it right now you're probably thinking of a restaurant it

has multiple tables all having a little world of their own you might be imagining waiters moving food around this little Universe of its own was created in your head all from just your sense of hearing humans have the ability to picture things to see them from a different perspective to take our imaginations and make them a reality this works great actually every invention ever made was due to that spark that initial burst of creativity the brain built us as individuals and we built the world luckily we're on a planet with hundreds of different elements some

of which work great for shelter or technology some work greatest food sources to Keep Us Alive some release certain chemicals in your brain that make you feel a certain way and these chemicals released form you as a person for example the fight or flight response that we get when we're in danger is the result of adrenaline a hormone in your body happiness is the result of having large amounts of Serotonin and the most important one involving Your Existence today the love formula sorry to break it to you but you see you couldn't have gotten here

by yourself even if you wanted to you may think you're the result of Randomness but actually everything happened the way it was supposed to your parents met which by itself is an extremely low probability event depending on your age out of millions or possibly billions of people these two met at the perfect timing for example you watching this video offsets your daily activities by about 10 to 15 minutes everything you do after you finish watching this video will alter your life in some way as weird as it sounds you're actually changing the course of your

life right now some events that should have happened won't and others that shouldn't have happened will every day you stray further down your own personal timeline one that not any other single person on the planet has lived except you your parents are no exception to this they both live their own lives were raised by different parents hopefully worked different jobs had different friends but somehow ended up meeting and not only did they meet but they liked each other enough to stay together to come into the decision to have a child you unless you are a

mistake like me not even kidding it keeps going a woman has about 300 000 eggs inside her body a male can have billions or trillions of different sperms throughout his life but only specifically one of each could make you and it did the odds of that are one in 400 quadrillion if the situation hadn't been perfect if that one stoplight hadn't been green if that line at the grocery store wasn't so long there's a pretty high chance that your parents would have never met these lucky situations don't stop at your parents they keep going it

extends to their parents and to their parents all of which somehow ended up living long enough to have kids this goes back tens of thousands of years even your ancestors thousands of years ago when the life expectancy was literally 30 years this continues all the way back to that very first little microbe at the bottom of the ocean floor over 4 billion years ago your life is the result of a family tree that hasn't been broken for billions of years what are the odds that all of that happened perfectly you're more likely to be struck

by lightning a thousand times in a single day than you are to be alive you're more likely to be a victim of an airplane crash every single day of the year back to back to back then you are to be alive you're more likely to win the lottery nine times in a row than you are to be alive some may say you were put here for a purpose Others May say you just got lucky the universe has 10 to the 80 atoms the odds of you being born are much lower than that the number of

50 50 coin flips your family has went through when it comes to living long enough to have children or dying before carrying on the family line it goes back tens of thousands of millions of years this gets more interesting when you consider alien civilizations the odds of us meeting are already low but when you think about everything that had to happen for two different civilizations coming into existence close enough to each other to actually contact each other it's just crazy to think about no matter what age you are no matter where you live no matter

your gender you are alive this is a luxury that by the numbers you shouldn't have even been given what's the point in living a life that you aren't trying to squeeze everything out of looking at the regret in the faces of people who are too old to do the things that they really wanted to do in life is perhaps one of the scariest things in the world waking up in the morning and realizing that your existence is actually a miracle something that seems so perfect so orderly came from an infinite set of possibilities the amount

of thoughts you have in a day the number of neurons that are fired and exist in your brain are inconceivable in magnitude this doesn't happen by accident everything that could have happened didn't it only happened in the way that set the universe into its current state the smallest of things the tiniest of decisions makes the biggest differences the biggest impacts understanding how little of a chance there is that you're here today is terrifying but yet I find that more than anything else it gives me purpose it gives me a reason to say that I and

everyone else have a reason to exist I believe you exist for a purpose but that's for you to figure out I Can't Tell You Why We Exist but I can tell you one thing that's for certain we shouldn't have even been here in the first place I recently came across a magazine cover from 1962. created by Italian artist Walter Molino it depicts a busy road in the 21st century with what looks like a four-wheeled scooter Walter called it the singaletta while our roads today don't exactly look like this the imagination wasn't all that far off

we certainly have booster boards and scooters that somewhat resemble the single letter in fact if anything today's writers would probably be quite open to the possibility of having this glass enclosure that protects them from the elements but of course despite his futuristic appeal in reasonable accuracy you can still see that part of the artist's imagination is still stuck in the time in which it was drawn for example why would the artist imagine the transportation is so radically changed and yet leave the fashion stagnant in their time it made me think about how people in the

past might have imagined their future which just so happens to be our present of course the fascination with the future is as old as time itself to be able to predict things with any level of accuracy was historically quite profitable what was at one time the sole expertise of the oracles became very much a concern for the entire population simply being able to predict when it might rain and when the weather would be right for crops was immensely useful to the people of the past how accurate they were in those predictions is a different question

altogether but after all despite all the technological advances weather apps reliably started working only relatively recently but beyond the monetary incentives we've always been Wanderers of possibility magazine covers movies books you name it from Marty McFly's self-lacing shoes and Back to the Future to the voice activated home security in Blade Runner these predictions are captivating bold and by definition ahead of their time some of them are even remarkably accurate [Music] this is a page from the 1928 edition of the popular mechanic trying to imagine a city of the future in what seems to be a

very omniscient and realistic take on cities of the president and even the future you could argue that the authors of this magazine have not only predicted just underground traffic but also some level of larger underground infrastructure we now know that this is going to be somewhat of a reality due to the initiatives of the boring company we can also see that it's all separated by vehicle types which is a concept we already tried to do today with Lancer different speeds and vehicle types like carpooling Lanes bus lanes bike lanes and so on the picture also

shows spiral escalators it needs to be said that both the elevators and the escalators had been invented by then but you would imagine the people from back then might be surprised that these things have largely remained unchanged both in Form and Function the move towards personalized technology was also one of the themes of prediction back then transitioned from the horse carriage to personal vehicles was simply the start of that however some even predicted things like video calling and Smart Homes this European postcard from the Victorian era said to depict the year 2012 seems to have

predicted video calling and while the device to get it done looks in no way like the pocket-sized devices of today it is remarkable that they were able to even conceive of something like this so early it also needs mentioning that the timing of the prediction was also eerily accurate casual video calling only kicked off in the mid-2000s after Skype gained popularity mere years before the image predicted of course not everyone saw it this way in fact some of the very people in charge during the dawn of the technological era were quite skeptical of its personal

promise in what may now seem as laughably inaccurate Thomas Watson the president of IBM said in 1943 that I think there is a World Market for maybe five computers of course Thomas's prediction was limited not by a lack of belief in the technology itself but rather the sheer size of computers back then he simply could not foresee a time when computers would be as portable and user friendly as they are today and who can blame him this is not to say that everyone agreed about a computer's promise Ken Olson was the founder of digital Equipment

Corporation in 1977 he and his company were a major force in the rapidly emerging world of computing and you would imagine that he would have first-hand knowledge of how a personal computer could revolutionize the world he famously said there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home you could tell me how correct he was there of course sometimes these predictions are even more out there in the 1950s people thought that all furniture and appliances of the home would be waterproof and as such we would clean everything with a hose in 1901 Thomas

Edison also imagined a world where we would streamline the construction process so much that instead of building things Brick by Brick we would have pre-designed models of houses and upon the customer's choice you would simply go ahead and pour them in place it sounds like an extreme large-scale water-based version of 3D printing one which needless to say is a ways away if at all possible there are also ideas about get this a whale bus by the year 2000. people thought that everyday travel would no longer be limited to the roads and that we would also

travel regularly through the Seas and oceans strapped to the back of a giant whale not even joking about this one but more often than not these predictions tend to have some anthropocentric residue of the time in which they're created for example in Blade Runner's hyper futuristic depiction of 2015 while the flying cars and heavily lit vertical cities might feel at home you can notice that Deckard in pretty much all occupants of those cars aren't wearing seat belts you would imagine that the speed of flying cars would make seatbelts a no-brainer but it turns out at

the time in which the movie was made seat belt laws still hadn't even been passed in California besides there are other similar Tendencies with predictions predictions made during fruitful periods of Life tend to be optimistic whereas those made during particularly Hard Times such as the Great Depression tend to be more pessimistic they all generally fail to foresee things like mobile phones and the internet in the sense that these inventions were so revolutionary that it would have been hard to think of these things simply by extrapolating previous technology the biggest source of these predictions have always

been science fiction and while it may seem that sci-fi of the past might have little use beyond the binders of some Buff's notebook science fiction is sometimes criminally underrated in terms of its importance in society this is because of the latest findings in physics or biology don't quite attract The public's attention like a well-made sci-fi thriller this gives sci-fi almost an exclusive position of authority which also happens to be a responsibility as sci-fi can then scope The public's ideas about technology and shift their focus from or towards certain issues for example too often we see

that the fascination of the future revolves around very fast flying vehicles and not so much about the threat of something like artificial intelligence even when AI does get the Limelight the depiction is almost always of evil robots destroying Humanity in one Fell Swoop however this largely misconstrues the deceivingly subtle nature of AI development robots such as those depicted in Blade Runner and the Terminator series simply haven't arrived yet they are significantly smarter than the best robots we can create today but the fact that evil robots haven't yet come out of the Horizon guns blazing might

mislead people into thinking that now is not yet the time to worry yet until very recently we were utterly oblivious to how social media and the intelligent algorithms behind those platforms were completely overtaking Our Lives the Black Mirror episode nosedive shines light on this very phenomenon a reading space dystopia that doesn't seem too far from the world of Facebook likes and Tick-Tock followers but sci-fi does offer some more inspiring cues as well this includes the idea of reusable Rockets an idea that might be the forward to Humanity's next chapter in fact when SpaceX and blue

origin were in dispute over rights to land reusable rockets and Associated claims SpaceX cited in 1959 soviet-era sci-fi film with the original idea of doing so these predictions are essentially wormholes into the past into the aspirations of the people back then how they thought how they felt and what was important to them on the other end of the spectrum are time capsules things that instead of predicting the future give us an insight into the past the Crypt of civilization is one such time capsule it's an airtight chamber built between 1937 and 1940 to capture what

life was like in those times it is not meant to be opened before the year 8113. authors of this Crypt tried their best to store as a diverse a set of mementos as they possibly could but despite that they couldn't have possibly stored everything the creators of these capsules store only what they think is important it too suffers from the same anthropocentrism that future predictions do even without a predictive element these time capsules can actually vary in their accuracy it seems this stems from the fact that there are some time capsules that are manufactured for

the purpose of being open later in the future there are other types of time capsules of course those of The Accidental type the most iconic perhaps of these time capsules is the sunken Titanic what makes it special perhaps even more so than the magazine covers and movies is the authenticity with which not how it was all captured but what was captured soon after the iceberg was hit people had to choose between life and death some didn't even get to make that choice but they certainly weren't choosing between which of the famous paintings on board they

were going to keep or which of the ornaments should go on the lifeboats similar perhaps in tragedy is the Chernobyl incident of 1986. the failure of the nuclear power plant resulted in an immediate evacuation that left people with very little Choice as to what to take and what to leave the nuclear fallout in the region had rendered it inhabitable for some Twenty Thousand Years the result is that the remnants of that day May remain largely untouched preserving not just the items and the furniture but the horror of those that left them there in the centuries

to come who knows when we will actually be able to truly revisit the place and possibly look back on the lives people had but both future predictions and time capsules from the past the fascination remains largely anchored around time and are belonging in it whether it's the Nostalgia of the past or optimism of the future we have always been captivated by times which are not our own sometimes they can offer poetic insights into what really matters to people in their dying moments sometimes they can reveal eerily accurate predictions about our present and sometimes they can

set the standard for an imaginary future we have yet to achieve in life Anything is Possible because we can never fully understand how the world works and the laws of physics prevent us from being able to tell the future everything we predict is a probability some are a lot more probable others are less probable while some have astronomically low chances of ever happening