BIG THINK

 Why the wrong people end up in power

BRIAN KLAAS: The people who end up in power are not representative of the rest of us: They are not average,
and they are not normal. People who are power-hungry tend to self-select into positions of power more than the
rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often
the wrong kinds of people, are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us.
BILL EDDY: There are high-conflict people in the world. I see them as potentially maybe 10% of people.
They're now getting into politics because they're seeing that their ability to grab attention gets them much bigger
attention and gets them elected to power positions.
MARIA KONNIKOVA: You have some people who are genuine politicians. In short, to be a politician, you
almost by definition need to be narcissistic and Machiavellian. I mean, if you're running for president, that's the
height of narcissism, to think that you are good enough to rule a country, to run the United States. What kind of
ego do you have to have to think that you're going to be good at doing that? You also had to have gotten there. So
your skills of persuasion and manipulation need to be pretty well-honed.
RICHARD NIXON: 'I welcome this kind of examination because people have gotta know whether or not their
president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.'
EDDY: These are the wrong people to put in positions of power. It's nothing about politics. These folks are
Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals. They're at every level of society; it's not about politics, it's about
personalities, and we have to learn how to spot them.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: And start to get a handle on what the negative possibilities are because I think we're only
beginning to start to see them.
KLAAS: Corruptible people are more drawn to power than the rest of us. People who are rotten and power-
hungry in the first place are more likely than the average person to seek and obtain power.
EDDY: So high-conflict personalities, or people with those, and I refer to them as HCPs, have unmanaged
emotions or intense emotions, and they actually shift everything to the emotional side, which helps give them
power. Emotional repetition is the key to how high-conflict politicians communicate with and excite everybody.
They excite their followers, but they also make their opponents angry and ineffective as they get emotionally
hooked and fight with each other. But it's the emotional message, and part of it is understanding how our brains
work. The parts of our brain that are paying attention the most to human emotions are the relationship parts of our
brain. And so, they can form a relationship with people by doing this at an emotional level without really thinking.
And in many ways, it's a seduction process. Just like a conman would seduce a woman that they want their credit
card, or they wanna marry them and then spend their money on the next person. They say all these emotional
things, "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, you're the best thing that ever happened to me," and high-conflict
politicians say, "You're wonderful. We agree with each other. We're the best thing for each other," when in fact,
it's all calculated.
KONNIKOVA: And then they engage your emotion, and they do that through the craft of storytelling. Again,
you know, now we have our protagonists. Now we've got them, you know, they know that they're part of the
story. I'm on their side. And now let's tell the story where they are actually acting. So they are going to be part of
this script unraveling around them, and they are going to buy it because it's a story where they're the protagonist
and it's the story they want, because you've done the put-up so incredibly well that you know how to tell the story
that your mark wants to hear. You show them the world as they already see it, as they want it to be. So con artists
are really, really wonderful at not just telling any story, but a story that grabs you and that draws you along and
that makes you feel like you're really part of something bigger. Because at the end of the day, all of them, from
the Monty Hustler to Bernie Madoff, to the Sweetheart Scam, to any number of scams, all of them are about hope,
you know, that sort of hopefulness about the future. That's why we're so ready to believe them.
EDDY: When a high-conflict personality wants to become a leader, first of all, they don't have good problem-
solving skills and they don't have good leadership skills. So what happens is to become a leader, they have to
create a crisis or just say something is a crisis, say there's an evil villain over there related to this, or caused the
crisis, and I'm a hero, but wait a minute- there isn't really a crisis and this person isn't really a hero, and there isn't
really a villain. Today's modern problems are much too complex to be the fault of one person. So we've got so
many problems, and I agree there's problems, there's always problems to solve, but there aren't all these crises.
Crises make our brains think we need to follow a strong leader, and the people that want to be that strong leader
are exactly the wrong people we should be following.
SNYDER: In order for there to be a democracy, there has to be something between you and me and our fellow
citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is a factual world. We have to have this thing
called the 'public sphere' where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain
realities out there. From those realities, we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what
would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that's important for you and I as citizens to
formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I as citizens to resist our leaders,
'cause if we're gonna resist our leaders, we have to say on the basis of this set of facts, right? This is the state of
affairs, it's intolerable, therefore, we resist. If there are no facts, we can't resist; it becomes impossible.
EDDY: But what we're seeing, especially with the high-emotion media that's come in more recently with the
internet, with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of that, is we're shifting from reading the news and talking about it
in a matter of fact manner, to high emotion, it's faces, it's voices, it grabs your attention. And it's kind of like
constant advertising. You don't even have to think. Your brain absorbs this information. So we see all these
leaders around the world, the ones who are the most high-conflict personality are the ones who come forward in
this face and voice news environment and they grab your attention, they grab your brain and they make up stories.
It doesn't matter if they're true or false, it's the best stories. And all the stories tend to have a terrible crisis and an
evil villain that caused the crisis, and a superhero, that's me, the candidate. And the modern media, inadvertently, I
think, is really promoting these people who would've just stayed on the fringes, who everyone would've laughed
at and said, you know, "You're just way outta line here." Today, the way outta line people get the most attention,
and that's not good for the future.
SNYDER: What follows from that is that if you wanna build an authoritarian regime, you try to make that factual
world less salient. You try to make the world less about the facts that are between you and me and more about the
emotions that will either divide us or bring us together, it doesn't really matter which. Authoritarianism depends
upon people getting used to hearing the things that they wanna hear. And what it does is it takes that public sphere
and dissolves it, right? It says there aren't really truths out there, there aren't really experts out there who can tell
you those truths- it's really all about how you feel about the world. What the fascist ideas do with the new
technology is they drive us into a situation where we think the real stakes of politics are all emotional and all
about enemies, usually enemies at home, where we get ourselves all worked up about things, whether we like the
government or not, but somehow we never leave our couch while we're doing it, where we leave all of our energy
right in front of the screen basically, and don't actually get out and vote or organize, or think creatively about what
policy might look like. Because what a social platform does, or even what a Google search does, is that it learns
what it is that you wanna hear and it gives you more of that thing, and thereby slowly changes you. I mean, it
shifts you away from a person who thinks there are facts out there and more towards a person who just get used to
hearing the things that he or she wants to hear. You shift from being a person who could function in the public
sphere, in a democracy, to a person who can't.
KONNIKOVA: We need to be very careful because the people that we call con artists are not that far removed
from people we consider pillars of society. If you look at a lot of professions-politics, law, business, advertising,
marketing, sales, even journalism- you start seeing a lot of the same techniques that you see in the hands of con
artists.
EDDY: But realize that a whole group can get divided like that and sometimes very quickly. And we're not gonna
see things in all or nothing terms. Say hang on, we need to really look at this more deeply. The problem isn't the
other people, the problem is something bigger than that. Let's work together to solve the problem, because when
you have good people versus bad people, you're not solving problems, you're just dividing a community and
giving somebody power.
KLAAS: And that is one of the key challenges of modern life, is that we have to find ways to block them. There's
this absolute intersection between culture, behavior, individuals, and systems. And so when we have this
simplistic view of power, we're missing the story. What you really need is a system that attracts the right kind of
people so that the diplomats who are clean and nice and rule-following end up in power. Then you need a system
that gives them all the right incentives to follow the rules once they get there. And then if you do have people who
break the rules, there needs to be consequences.

 Einstein, Hawking, and the conceptual problem of black holes

BRIAN COX: Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity? A deeper theory of how reality, of
how space and time works?
Black holes are interesting because we have a place called the 'event horizon' where we think that we have full
control of the physics. We understand what's happening, but there is a fundamental clash between our two basic
theories of nature: both quantum theory and general relativity together. And the quest to unify those two great
pillars of 20th- and 21st-century physics into what's often referred to as 'a quantum theory of gravity' is in some
sense the holy grail to theoretical physicists.
So black holes are forcing us into a deeper understanding of what space and time are. And in that sense, I think it
is fair to say that black holes are the keys to understanding the Universe.
I'm Brian Cox, I am a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, and the Royal Society
Professor for Public Engagement in Science, and amongst other things I'm the author of the book, "Black Holes:
The Key to Understanding the Universe."
The idea of black holes goes back a long way actually, back into the 1780s and 1790s. There were two physicists,
mathematicians, natural philosophers, whatever you want to call them, working at the time that had the same idea,
apparently independently of each other. One was a clergyman called Mitchell and the other was the great French
mathematician, Laplace. And they were both thinking in terms of an idea called 'escape velocity.' The escape
velocity is the speed you have to travel to completely escape the gravitational pull of something, a planet or a star.
So for the Earth, for example, the escape velocity from the surface of the Earth is around eight miles a second. If
you go bigger, you make a bigger, more massive thing, let's go to a star, for example, like the Sun, it's somewhere
in the region of 400 miles a second. The escape velocity increases because the gravitational pull at the surface
increases.
What Mitchell and Laplace thought, and I think it's a very beautiful idea, is they imagined in their mind's eye,
"Well, can you go bigger? Can you imagine more and more massive stars, giant stars such that the gravitational
pull is so large at the surface that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light?" And then you wouldn't be able
to see them.
To understand why black holes cause so many conceptual problems, it might be worth just describing very, very
briefly what a black hole looks like. So a black hole, what do you see from the outside?
Well, there's an event horizon surrounding the black hole. In some sense, it defines the boundary between the
external universe and the interior of the black hole. And if you go across the boundary into the interior of this
sphere, then even if you can travel as fast as the speed of light, you can't escape the gravitational pull of the black
hole.
But another description of the event horizon which confused people all the way through the history of black hole
research actually, was the idea that the event horizon when viewed from the outside is a place in space where time
stops. And that's a direct prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity.
From the external perspective, there is a central problem though which is still not solved, which is what lies at the
center of a black hole? You might think of it as an infinitely dense point to which this massive star collapses. So
what are we picturing? It's this thing called the 'singularity.'
Actually, it's not right to talk about the center of a black hole really. Just even in pure general relativity, when you
look at a nice map of a black hole, a so-called 'Penrose diagram' named after Roger Penrose, what you see is that
space and time is so distorted, that in some sense, their roles swap, the singularity is not really a place in space at
all, it's a moment in time, and actually it's the end of time. But the nature of that thing was not and is still not
understood, and for many, many years actually until quite recently, then people thought, "Well, there we are, we
have a problem with the singularity. We don't really have any access to it. We don't have the conceptual tools to
explore it. So it may remain a mystery for a century to come; it is not clear what to do.
The great revolution in black hole research was to notice that actually there are conceptual problems, not only in
this extreme place at the singularity, whatever that might be, but at the horizon. What Stephen Hawking showed
in a landmark couple of papers is that if you consider quantum theory, quantum mechanics in the vicinity of the
horizon of a black hole then you find that they glow, they produce particles, they have a temperature. This thing
that we've pictured in Einstein's theory is pure geometry, just distorted space and time actually emits particles- it's
called Hawking radiation.
And Stephen, in his 1974 paper, gives this hand-wavy description- which is kind of a nice way to picture what's
happening- the idea is to zoom in in the vicinity of the event horizon of a black hole. You can picture what's
happening as a series of particles coming in and out of existence all the time, so-called 'entangled particles.' And
so one of those pairs of particles is on the inside of the event horizon, and one is on the outside. And then it can
happen that the one on the outside instead of merging back with its partner again can escape into the Universe,
removing energy from the black hole as it goes; therefore, it's shrinking, which means that one day it will be gone.
That has profound implications. So black holes are not eternal prisons, they have a lifetime. One day, whatever's
in there is returned to the Universe. The question was, the central question that was immediately raised by those
calculations is this: What happened to all the stuff that fell in?
The way I've described it, the way Einstein's theory describes it, is somehow that stuff goes to the singularity,
whatever that thing is, the end of time, the region of space time that's so convoluted and distorted that we don't
understand how to describe it at all- But then one day the whole thing is gone. All that's left in the far, far future is
Hawking radiation, those particles that were produced in the vicinity of the event horizon.
The question is, is it possible if you could collect all that radiation, all the Hawking radiation through the whole
life of the black hole- is it somehow possible in principle that the information about everything that fell into the
black hole throughout its history is imprinted in that radiation in the far future? Is that true or is it not true? You
might say, why did I ask that question? Seems like a bit of a random question. It's a very important question.
Information is conserved in the Universe as far as we know. So every law of nature that we have says that
information is conserved.
So let's say that I take a book and I set fire to it, I incinerate it, I destroy it in any way that I can. In basic
fundamental physics, then it turns out that if you could collect every piece of that thing that I detonated or
incinerated,
every quantum of radiation, every photon, every particle, everything, in principle, if I could just collect it all, then
I could reconstruct the thing that I had destroyed.
The problem was black holes, quantum mechanics, general relativity, when you put them together you have this
apparent prediction that these things erase information from the Universe- this became known as the 'Black hole
information paradox.' It turns out if we fast forward to the present day and a series of papers are still being written,
so this is still research that's happening as we speak, but it turns out now that the general view is that black holes
do not erase information from the Universe. We now think you could collect all that radiation, and in principle,
put it into some quantum computer and reconstruct the information about everything that fell in.
But the implications of that, that the mechanism by which that happens, I would say it's profoundly exciting
because it really does seem to be given as a glimpse of a deeper theory of gravity. The simple way to say it, let me
say it in in one sentence: It seems that space and time are not fundamental.
So one view, and I emphasize that there are other views where the cutting edge of research now, but one view is a
field which has become known as 'emergent spacetime.' And so the idea is that space and time themselves emerge
from what? From quantum entanglement, from some kind of smaller parts or pieces. We don't know what those
things are. We don't know the nature of them but it does seem that there's a deeper underlying theory from which
space and time emerge. That is what we call the 'quantum theory of gravity.'
And my view is that if we're gonna talk about the origin of the Universe, even ask questions such as did the
Universe have a beginning in time, which we don't know the answer to, then it surely seems to me that we have to
understand what space and time are before we can ask and have any chance of answering such questions. And
black holes, it turns out are the objects that we can see, that we can observe that actually exist in nature that force
us down that route to ask questions, sharp, well-defined questions actually, about the nature of space and time
themselves.
Einstein said that if you look at nature really carefully and keep pulling at the intellectual threads and keep going
and just keep delving down into what nature seems to be trying to tell us, then if you're lucky and persistent, you
can catch a glimpse of something deeply hidden. It's beautiful that, isn't it? A glimpse of something deeply
hidden, which is the deep underlying structure of nature, the deep underlying structure of reality itself. And I think
it's very beautiful. No one really knows, I think it's fair to say, where this is going, but that hints of something
deeply hidden.

 What was it like when the first galaxies began to form? (space and astrophysics)
 https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/first-galaxies-began-to-form/
Whenever you look out beyond the Milky Way today, as far as anyone’s ever been able to see, there’s no
place you can look where you won’t eventually find a galaxy. There are galaxies absolutely everywhere, in all
directions and locations, even at the greatest cosmic distances ever probed. Even if you were to take a dark
patch of sky without any known stars, galaxies, or matter of any type within it, if you leave your telescope’s
shutter long enough and you look in the proper wavelengths of light, thousands upon thousands of galaxies
will be your reward. All told, there are estimated to be many trillions of galaxies found within the observable
Universe, stretching for tens of billions of light years in all directions.
Yet, despite all the galaxies we’ve observed and measured their properties, never have we gone far enough
back to encounter the very first ones ever made in the Universe. The current record-holder, despite its light
arriving from when the Universe was only 320 million years old — 2.3% of its present age — is already evolved
and full of old stars. The very first galaxies have not yet been discovered and must come from a time earlier than
the epochs humanity has ever probed. But if we get lucky, we’ll get there soon. Here’s what those galaxies should
be like.
The galaxies we see today, even the earliest, most distant ones, are already old. They’re massive, they’re huge,
and they’re full of a variety of stars. For the most part, there are lots of heavy elements in there: approximately 1-
2% of all the atoms present in most galaxies (by mass/weight) are composed of materials other than hydrogen or
helium. That’s a big deal, considering that the Universe was born without carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon,
sulfur, iron, or practically any of the elements we find in stars and galaxies today. It was 99.999999% hydrogen
and helium to start, but that’s down to 98-99% by today.
 But it’s had billions of years and many, perhaps an innumerable amount, of generations of stars that lived-and-
died previously to bring the types of galaxies we’re observing, complete with the variety of stars and stellar
populations we find within them. If we look back to the distant Universe, we also look back in time, and find that
galaxies were vastly different back then from how they appear today. They were smaller, bluer, more numerous,
and poorer in these heavy elements than the galaxies we have today. Over the history of the Universe, galaxies
have evolved substantially.
But how did the very first galaxies form? And what was the Universe like when they first arose?
The cosmic story that brought them to us saw a number of important steps happen first. Matter won out over
antimatter; atomic nuclei and then neutral atoms formed; the first generation of stars were born, died, and gave
rise to the second generation of stars. But even after all these steps, there were still no galaxies around. The simple
reason? The smallest-volume cosmic scales gravitationally collapse first, while the larger scales take longer.
Think about two important factors at play here: gravity and the speed of light. Gravity is the only mechanism
that can bring ever larger and larger clumps of matter together. It’s limited, however, by the speed at which things
can gravitationally grow, and it only propagates at the speed of light. Given that the Universe as-we-know-it
began a finite amount of time ago with the hot Big Bang, and that the speed of gravity propagates at a finite speed,
it makes sense that the overdensities on small cosmic scales would collapse first, making stars the first things that
form, while larger scales (for galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the grand cosmic web) take longer amounts of time for
gravity’s influence to dominate.
Imagine you start with a small mass: a clump of matter that rises by some amount over and above whatever the
average density happens to be. If you have some additional mass for it to attract that’s a light-year away, it will
take that matter an entire year to feel the force from the mass, since the gravitational force only travels at the
speed of light. But if there’s an additional mass a hundred, or a million, or a billion light-years away, you have to
wait for all that additional time to pass. Gravity isn’t instantaneous; it only travels at the speed of light.
So what happens, then, when you finally get a large amount of mass together in one place, from the
gravitational collapse of your first stars and star clusters? They attract one another, and can finally do so
effectively.
But the timescale for one massive star cluster attracting another is going to be much longer than the timescale
for individual star clusters to form. Instead of looking at volumes of space that might be a few tens, hundreds, or
even thousands of light-years on a side — the scale of what might collapse to form a star cluster — you need to
look on scales tens-to-hundreds of times as large to bring together enough matter to start to make the first
galaxies.
Remember this fact, as well: that the original overdensities that lead to both star clusters and galaxies are only
one-part-in-about-30,000, meaning that these overdensities need to grow over large amounts of time. If it takes
gravity tens-to-hundreds of times as long to propagate between star clusters (and hence, for those star clusters to
gravitationally influence one another) than it does for gravity to propagate within an individual cluster, you might
worry that it would wind up taking tens-to-hundreds of times as much time to make galaxies as compared to how
long it took to make the first stars.
Luckily, this isn’t true! That’s an overestimate; the amount of time it takes to create galaxies is indeed longer
than the amount of time it takes to make stars and star clusters, but not by nearly that severe of an amount. The
power of an attractive gravitational force is cumulative, so it’s basically like starting a clock on a delay. The “star
cluster” clock starts a few million years after the Big Bang; the “galaxy” clock begins perhaps ten million years
after that, and starts with a handicap: it has farther to go to collapse.
But this is okay! This is simply how structure formation works in the Universe as we look to progressively larger
cosmic scales. We have, at the start, density imperfections existing on all scales, and they grow as soon as enough
time has passed for gravity to begin attracting matter that’s located a certain distance away. We form the first star
clusters quickly, after perhaps 50-to-100 million years. We form the second generation of stars almost
immediately after, in another 5 million years or less, because the first generation of stars lives-and-dies so fast,
and the material ejected back into the interstellar medium triggers a new generation of stars to begin forming
shortly thereafter.
However, we then have to wait several tens of millions of years after those “polluted” stars form for the first
galaxies to begin to take shape. The reason is that, in order to make galaxies out of these star clusters, those early
star clusters must attract one another across the abyss of empty space, until they finally draw one another in so
that they can merge. And it requires even longer timescales for large galaxies and then galaxy groups and galaxy
clusters to arise. In this sense, structure formation in the Universe is a process that we call hierarchical.
The hardest challenge, observationally, when it comes to finding these first galaxies is that there haven’t yet been
enough stars formed throughout the Universe to ionize all the neutral atoms in intergalactic space. So long as
protons and electrons remain bound to one another, they behave as neutral atoms, which block and absorb light,
particularly visible and ultraviolet light, which is a property that astronomers call “extinction.” The more neutral
matter you have, the more efficiently your starlight gets extincted, which makes it all the more difficult to observe
the light that’s being emitted behind this thick curtain of light-blocking material.
These conditions will remain until the Universe is flooded with enough sustained ultraviolet light to
permanently kick those electrons off of their atoms. This means that so long as the light from the first stars (and
first galaxies) gets absorbed by those atoms; the Universe remains in an opaque state, rather than a transparent
one. The earliest galaxies we’ve ever seen date back to as little as 320 million years after the Big Bang, and these
most distant galaxies were only discovered because they are both:
 located along a serendipitously more-ionized-than-average line of sight,
 and also because we’re observing them at long wavelengths, where the emitted ultraviolet light gets stretched
and redshifted well into the infrared portion of the spectrum.
However, there’s a method for attempting to “date” the age of the first galaxies that doesn’t necessarily involve
finding these first galaxies directly. It’s clever, powerful, and educational to explore. Take, for example, the
galaxy MACS1149-JD1. Before we entered the JWST era, it was the second-most-distant galaxy ever found,
whose light arrives from 530 million years after the Big Bang. (Now it’s down somewhere around 12th place,
showcasing the unprecedented power of JWST.) This is not a pristine galaxy, but it is a galaxy with a remarkable
property: we can measure the populations of stars inside, and determine an age for those stars.
When we make those critical observations, we find that the stars inside of it are approximately 280 million
years old, meaning that they first formed in a massive burst that occurred no later than 250 million years after the
Big Bang. These massive bursts of star formation don’t simply occur because you had a star cluster; they occur
when large mergers happen, giving rise to what astronomers call a starburst. Colliding gas causes material to
collapse, which can trigger massive amounts of new star formation. Much larger and more powerful than a
monolithically collapsing star cluster, these post-merger objects should signify the true first galaxies.
These first galaxies will be larger, contain more stars, be more massive, more luminous, and will leave an
unmistakable signature as compared to the individual star clusters that came before. In fact, the first galaxies
should create an observable imprint on the Universe, one that can be detected with a method known to
astronomers today: 21 cm mapping. Not only will the stars that form within these early galaxies begin
contributing to the reionization of the Universe, but wherever new stars are formed, we will find electrons
recombining with their ionized nuclei. That act, when it occurs for hydrogen atoms, has a 50% chance of forming
a configuration where the spins are aligned (up-up or down-down) and a 50% chance where the spins will be anti-
aligned (up-down or down-up).
The up-down or down-up configurations are more stable, by a tiny amount. If you form the aligned
configuration, it will transition down to the anti-aligned configuration on timescales of around 10 million years.
And when it transitions, it emits a photon of a very specific wavelength: 21 centimeters. That photon then travels
throughout the Universe, arriving at our eyes, redshifted by the expansion of the Universe. In 2018, there was a
paper that came out, albeit very controversially, that claimed to detect this signature for the first time.
Impressively, the timescale for when these first galaxies ought to have formed coincides very nicely with these
observations. Although the observations were not confirmed, superior instrumentation should enable us to detect
the actual signatures from spin-flipping hydrogen atoms arising due to these first galaxies in the coming years.
Whenever “cosmic dawn” occurred, whenever these first galaxies arrived, every piece of evidence points to a
timetable of 200-250 million years as the main origin of the first galaxies. This may yet be observable by JWST,
although no candidate galaxy from earlier than 320 million years has yet been verified by spectroscopic
observations. The first galaxies required a large number of steps to happen first: they needed stars and star clusters
to form, and they needed for gravity to bring these star clusters together into larger clumps. But once you make
these first galaxies, they then become the largest cosmic structures to exist for their time, and they will continue to
grow, attracting not only star clusters and gas, but additional small galaxies.
The cosmic web has taken its first major step up, and will continue to grow further, and more complex, over
the hundreds of millions and billions of years to follow. Early on, galaxies grow primarily via mergers of small,
low-mass clumps and clusters of matter, while later on, it will be by gradual accretion and gravitational infall.
Meanwhile, the regions that were born with smaller initial overdensities will continue to grow, forming stars for
the first (or second) time in places where no stars formed earlier. The great cosmic story of forming structures
doesn’t happen all at once, but in bits-and-pieces throughout the cosmos. But once the first galaxies take shape,
the race to form galaxies like our own has officially begun.

 Failure is the key to “ultimate success”

EMIL MICHAEL: Innovation requires failure. There's no person in the world, not Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk,
or anyone who hasn't tried something and failed. The early versions of Teslas that had batteries that made the car
stop. The Newton at Apple.
KEARNEY (THE SIMPSONS): "Hey, Dolph, take a memo on your Newton. Beat up Martin."
MICHAEL: All these great leaders have failed.
KEARNEY (THE SIMPSONS): "Bah."
MICHAEL: But they've failed because they had innovators who were willing to try something. And the
promise by the leadership is that if you try something and it's an earnest try and you've given it everything and it
fails, that's actually great, because now we know that that doesn't work and we can move quickly onto our next
idea. And you're not punished for failing. You're punished for not trying.
My name is Emil Michael. I was the chief business officer at Uber. We were the fastest-growing company in
the world from 2013 to '17 while I was there. My time at Uber was extraordinary because we had a business
model that worked from day one. If you can remember back to it, the first time you tried an Uber was magical.
The notion of pushing a button and a car showed up was really revolutionary at the time. It was sort of an amazing
consumer experience. So we knew we were onto something from day one.
 So then the question is, how do we 10x this? It was the first time in my career I was working with a partner,
Travis Kalanick, who was the founder of Uber, who thought in an exponential way, "How do we exponentially
grow this all over the world as fast as we can?" Because we thought that the winner was going to be the one who
got the most customers and the most drivers the fastest. That kind of thinking from Travis was really attractive to
me. I was attracted to that notion of limitless possibility.
And so part of being a great leader is ambition. Not only your own, if you're a leader with an ambitious
agenda, can you communicate that to others so that you're attracting them like moths to light? It's one thing to say,
"Hey, I want to fly a rocket to Mars." It's another thing to surround yourself with the best space engineers that
ever lived and really spend a decade doing it. If you can, then you've got a way better shot at achieving that
ambition, because no one can do that alone.
The way it worked between Travis and I as partners was I had a legal background and I had a finance
background, and I was always thinking, "Do the numbers add up?" And he was always thinking, "How do I
get into the fourth city in Italy three days from now?" And so we connected the dots on those together, and that
combination made us the fastest-growing company of all time. But it allowed us to not break the rocket ship as it
was going into orbit.
I think the world in tech has changed dramatically in the last 10 years in that, more than ever, you have to be
thinking globally, otherwise your clones or competitors are going to pop up in all these other countries. So you
have to be thinking speed, ambitious, globalization. That was a really new thing for me, frankly, when I joined
Uber. Every country has its own ecosystem of who has the power, who makes the rules, how the money flows,
and how you fit in that system, and that you can't learn from afar. You have to learn by being in the middle of it.
One of the designs we did in the organization to enable that was we created what was called a Launch team. A
group of people who went out and launched various countries, and they couldn't leave that country until they
hired a local general manager to replace them. These people were young people, they love traveling the world,
very competitive, wanting to go on to the next thing. And what we did also with them is we wrote a playbook
which gave you 70% of the answer on how you launch a new country.
So, for example, when Uber would launch Mexico City, what is the playbook? How does that person, who's
never been to Mexico City, may not even speak Spanish, how do they start? Well, you have to research the
transportation fares. Research how people get around on public transport, bus, subway, taxi, personal cars. See
where are the stadiums and the gathered events to know where cars are going to be? To know how much drivers
are getting paid. What is the disposable income of the average person who lives in Mexico City? What are the
regulations? What do they say about "ridesharing?" All those things were, sort of, off the shelf.
These are the things you find out before you even leave the United States for Mexico. So you go into Mexico
City with a working knowledge of the transportation system, of the economic environment that you're operating
in, the legal environment that you're operating in. Those are the kinds of things that you can do ahead of time to
make those launches easier. And then that last 30% was what you learned on the ground, and you took what you
learned on the ground and fed it back into the system, so the playbook got better and better for every other
country.
We created this small team of launchers, that inside of two years, had launched in 90 countries in the world.
So, basically, we systematized global expansion. And that was an innovation that sort of hadn't happened yet in
tech that I think a lot more companies are doing now. Like Airbnb did it. Thinking globally from day one, having
the ambition to be global from day one, and systematizing as much as you can, well then, you have a roadmap to
success.
 One of the most challenging moments I had at Uber, and the most gratifying, was how Uber did business in
China. China, at the time, was the largest country in the world, so just the opportunity set in China was so
enormous. Yet one of the hardest challenges was how much money it costs to operate in a country like China.
You're literally marketing to a billion people.
Uber was spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to win China, and we had a fierce local competitor
called DiDi. We got to a point where we were spending in a month more than most startups have spent in five
years. That ambition from Travis was pushing on the gas on that. And I was trying to add the reality of how much
money was available in the world to continue this battle.
Travis and I did talk about it a lot, and I tried to drag him over the finish line and say, "If we merge with our
competitor there, that's not a loss, that's a win. We spent $2 billion in China, and if we merge with this company,
that's going to be 8 billion. So that means we made a $6 billion profit in less than three years. That doesn't mean
we're retreating. That means we made the smartest business decision this whole year of anyone in business." And
so changing how I described the outcome from we're retreating from China to we've won worked because it was
consistent with his vision of wanting to win everywhere in the world.