The Power of Probability with Alex Cosoi

0:00You are alive against stupendous odds. And I take the posture that because of this, life should be cherished. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk's special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And of course, we've got Gary O 'Reilly. Gary, former soccer pro, sports commentator. Yep. Hi, Neil. And longtime co-host of StarTalk, Chuck Nice. What's going on, guys? Today's topic is one of my favorite, just as an educator, simply because it's where people miss think things most often.

0:56And I feel extra responsible to try to get in there and make it work for them. We're going to talk about probabilities. So, Gary, it was your idea to do this topic. I love the topic. Good. I devoted a whole chapter to it in a recent book I published. So I'm pretty fresh in commentary regarding it. But more specifically, where did you want to take me on this? So probabilities, Neil, calculating risk gambling. Call it what you will. We all do it. Stand on a wobbly chair. Eat that food in the fridge that's been there two weeks. It's a gamble. Probabilities has its own branch of mathematics. Yeah.

1:34And it's intertwined into so much of our everyday lives. WISC and assessment for insurance, predicting extreme weather models, which has been very, very important in the last few weeks. It's baked into AI and especially that annoying predictive text program in my computer that tells me what I should be typing. And I hate it for that only. it's probability that's used in cyberspace and we do without realizing have that baked in again and we'll get to that later on in the show when our guest Alex Koshoi he's chief security strategist at Bitdefender the cyber security experts and we'll open up what it's all about where it's going what it's likely to look like going forward and our approach to risk itself so having said that neil let's let's find out more about what happens when a bunch of physicists turn up in las vegas let me preface this by saying but back in the 1980s the my community of physicists the american physical society the aps uh there's have annual meetings and one of them was scheduled for san diego uh san diego especially of late is a big convention town Comic-Con, you know, the most famous of the world's Comic-Cons takes place there.

3:01And the whole city sort of adjusts for it. There's a convention center and everything. Anyhow, the community of physicists had booked hotels and was ready. And it turned out there was a snafu where the hotel reservations failed for some reason. And I don't remember why. So here's this convention that was supposed to happen and it can't happen. So what do you do? Well, the MGM Grand, then the MGM Marina in Vegas says, we'll take you. We are the largest hotel in the country. We can take you on short notice. So the APS pivoted to Vegas, pivoted. And so that year's convention was in Vegas where people give talks and their public talks and professional talks and this sort of thing.

3:47All right. A lot of breakout rooms. It's where we sort of reconnect, especially in an era before there was much emailing going on. It's a geek fest. Geek fest. Thank you. Physics geek fest. Well, a week later, there was a headline. This is after the conference. Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. The American Physical Society has been asked to never return to the city. That's great. And so you can ask, well, did the physicists sort of know the odds and play the odds? No, they just didn't. Didn't play. Because here it is. It is the only activity where the people tell you, we are legally cheating you.

4:39Now, we just want you to know this. When you come in, the reason why we say good luck is because we already win. And the great thing is, Chuck, when you get a little bit of a run going, if that ever happens, they see you and they bring you free drinks. Well, I was going to say, any place that brings you free drinks, there's a trap somewhere. there's nobody that says hey just drink up all my liquor and uh yeah and that's all we're good no so no use the cabinet like i have some i had a party where my best friend at the time opened up my cabinet and took out a bottle of the mccallon 30 year old scotch oh right which I don't share with anybody.

5:40Okay. And proceeded to pour off my Macallan to my other friends. And I went around and picked up the glass. What the hell are you doing? You don't get to do this. So anybody giving you free liquor is a catch. That's all there is to it. So that lets you know what Vegas is up to. Nice to know. Nice to know you've let that go, Chuck. Chuck is still in therapy for many things. Yeah, many things. That is one of them. Yeah. So I thought I'd look a little more deeply into this only to discover that if you look at various branches of mathematics, of which there are many, but let me list a few. Let's go in sort of historical order.

6:22There's sort of geometry. Geometry means earth measurement, by the way. I guess that would be Greek. Geometry, earth measurement. You have geometry. You have arithmetic. You have algebra. Which is the terrorist version of mathematics.

6:43I'm sorry. Just move on. Let's keep moving. Algebra. We keep going. You can get to calculus. There's trigonometry. Whole branches of math that we remember, even if you're part of the walking wounded of those classes, we remember these from perhaps as early as middle school, certainly high school. If you sequence these, do you realize all of those branches of math were discovered, invented before it occurred to anyone to take the average of numbers okay oh interesting i see what you're saying okay yes that's weird that is that's weird when you think about that so here are these numbers you add them together divide by the total somebody had to do that first okay that didn't happen until uh when when did i have late 18th century long after calculus newton had calculus in the bag okay by the late 1600s early 1700s.

7:55Calculus, people. And now someone later on says, hmm, let me sum these numbers together and divide and see if that means anything. Well, that's early statistics. And there are books as late as the 1800s that believed, these are official math books that describe how you can influence the outcome of a certain set of probabilities because they believed that was the case because probability and statistics was not yet properly formulated as an authentic and bona fide branch of mathematics right point is why is that so how is it that people we in our species can say we need calculus and there's no probability okay there must be some something absent in our brain wiring that prevents us from thinking natively in this space yeah it's it's it's called heuristic hubris it's that's who we are because outcomes are what we want them to be right not what the math says and we still do that we still do that we still do it to this day are we not hardwired neil to calculate risk as a survival mechanism well okay so if you speak with sort of evolutionary biologists, they will frequently, and I think without much debate, tell you that we do make certain assessments.

9:29For example, if this will take us to an aspect of how the brain works, but consider there's something that repeats multiple times and you learn that, and it hurts you. Then you say, well, let me not do that again. So then you don't, and then you avoid it. So this is simple. So this is the act of how repeated occurrences decide for you what the future is going to be. All right? And this matters for survival. My favorite survival fact is how we put order on things, even if there's no order there. That has extraordinary consequences. Oh, yes, athlete. Let's look at how it might have begun. So we're in the Serengeti and you don't want to get eaten by a lion.

10:17And there's the grass, you know, the, the, the amber grass is blowing in the breeze. And you say to yourself, I wonder if there's a lion there. In fact, I think there is. Let me go check. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. This will summarily remove sort of the curiosity gene. Yeah. In because you don't get to have children to be curious. If it is a lion. If it is a lion. You don't get to have curious children to the extent that curiosity is inherited. Okay. So it turns out we are better off thinking there's a lion in the grass. Right. Whether or not there is. and then going in the opposite direction than not thinking there's a line in the grass, missing it and having it beat us.

11:11But consider that we think there's a line in the brush, whether or not there is one, and that's the genes that got protected. Okay, so this is pattern recognition. We will see patterns even if there isn't a pattern there. We can put a set of random dots. Right. And you say, oh, I see this and I see that. You must have done that on purpose. Clouds. Because I see it. and your life experience overrides the mathematics of what just happened and or your life expectations or your life belief system yeah overrides the pattern recognition neil is the probability that that will happen as you say from experience and we use this in sport a lot from from analyzing gameplay so let me bring this to the present we have this feature in our brain wiring to detect patterns even if they aren't there because that was in the interest of our survival.

12:04We're not making those same decisions anymore about whether we might get eaten by a lion, but that brain feature remains within us. And we see patterns in everything. And we think because we see a pattern that the pattern is real. Even we think the absence of patterns is a pattern. You had a roulette table. And I said, why do you keep betting on seven? It's due. It's due It's crazy And I say how do you know it's due Because the roulette table shows you the previous 10 rolls Okay spins Or the previous 20 and you don't see a 7 there It's due No it's not due Take a freaking probability class It's not due the same way the Washington Generals Are not due to beat the Harlem Globetrotters Yeah How about that I don't know what they're called now I don't know.

12:57It's like 40 years ago. Made up now. So this notion that because it hasn't happened recently, it's bound to happen in your next bet is how casinos make money. Casinos exist to exploit these frailties of the human brain wiring. They exist for that purpose. Which goes back to the point you had about magicians. the casinos know more about how you think than you do yes and they manipulate that obviously and it's completely manipulated and like like chuck said they tell you that going straight up hey by the way we're gonna cheat you today enjoy yourself right cheated is that why they call las vegas lost wages lost wages yes yeah yeah and and so by the way, as a scientist, we know how important probability is to separate your own bias on what is going on in the world from what is objectively going on in the world.

14:00So every year I was in school, we had some element of probability and statistics taught related to the aspect of the sciences that we were addressing. So I would say all told, I might've had eight years of probability and statistics. Yet, if you look at a school curriculum, it's not there at all. At all. Now, will you grant me one conspiracy theory? Depends which one it is. No. See, Chuck believes in me. He just says, go out. If he doesn't like it, he's going to slam you down. Okay. There it is. You know, the state lottery systems? Yes. Do you know how they get funding for that? and what they, you know, there's tax levied on that.

14:47Do you know where that money goes to typically? Well, they tell you that it's for education. Education. Let's assume that's true. Let's even assume that's true. So it's for education. And I said, oh, that's good. Public education, you know, K through 12. And then I looked at the curricula across the country of what is taught. And probability, if it's taught at all, is only an elective. It's not a fundamental part of the math curriculum. And so it occurred to me that as long as they don't teach probability in school, you are susceptible to playing the lottery. Which funds the school. Which funds the school.

15:29Playing for your education. If they talk probability, it could be the end of the state lottery system. Well, yeah, because anybody who knows something about probability does not play the lottery. As a matter of fact, my father used to tell me, take a dollar a day, the dollar you would play the lottery. Start right now and just take that everyday dollar and put it in the bank. And through compound interest, it will take 20 years, but you will hit the lottery. That's good. people trying to assess their health or their security based on risk, risk factors. And I think in the book, there are people who smoke knowing that there's a risk of cancer.

16:15Yeah. And I think if you're an active smoker, there's a one in eight chance that your tombstone will say died of lung cancer. And so then I thought, let me glorify that up a bit and say, okay, Okay, instead of you just taking that risk, let's do it this way. Today, everyone who lights up a cigarette, one in eight of them, on that first puff, their head will explode and they'll fall over in a pile of blood on the pavement. And if that is not you, you get to smoke for the rest of your life without cancer. Would you take that risk? Well, what brand of cigarettes are we talking about? The exploding kind.

17:00exploding. So, so what I tried to do in the book was re jigger the risk into something that might be a little more tangible, a little more devastating for you to hear, even if the numerics remained the same, just to try to get at the fact that our brain is not wired for this to happen. So yeah, Gary, it's, it's sad. Even I drive by casinos and it's like, man, I'm sad for our brain wiring and for the education system that doesn't address that fact. Drive past a casino, Neil. How often is the car park full? Full. All the time. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. That's why you got to be an especially bad business person to lose money if you own a casino.

17:49Or in a movie where George Clooney turns up with some friends.

17:56Ocean's 11, 12, and 13. 14. 15, 20, whatever they're up to now. Yeah, the franchise just keeps paying off.

18:13I'm Jasmine Wilson, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

18:28so neil i mean we're programmed we're hardwired but how do we get here what's the probability of actually us existing being alive being born now do you mean like having a mother like mine and making it to adulthood or do you mean like being conceived at all well let's let's start with conception oh okay and then move through the laundry list obviously humans have no trouble making more humans right eight billion in the world will put an asymptote probably to 10 billion in the coming decades so having a person of any kind is not the issue here we can ask the question what are the chances of you specifically you harry o'reilly having been born.

19:16And so we look at your, your genetic code. And a way to address that is how many possible configurations of that genetic code exist. Wow. And you're the one that's you. Yes. Okay. So you can do that. Now, you know, there's lots of ways that they arrange and many of them, you can, it makes a human, but it's not entirely viable where you have like three arms and two heads or whatever. So if you remove all the ones that create oddly different but still living humans, okay? And so we talk about what we call a normal human. There are different ways you can estimate this, but we think it's one in a billion trillion trillion.

20:08That's not even a number. What you just said. It's not even a number. It's what a kid says, right? It's a billion, million, trillion.

20:24But there's a lot of configurations. The point is, the total number of humans who have ever been born, you can estimate that, is about 100 billion. That's a round number, but that's about what it is. So you can ask if 100 billion humans have ever been born, yet we have the capacity to make a billion trillion trillion humans, a vanishingly small fraction of all humans who could ever exist, have ever been born. Interesting. So what are the chances of you showing up once again in this genetic code? The answer is never. It's never, okay? Because of how much larger the total number of possibilities are compared to anything we will ever create on this earth.

21:19So you are alive. You, Gary O 'Reilly, are alive against stupendous odds. And I take the posture in the book that because of this, life should be cherished. Agreed. And by the way, even if you did show up again in the genetic code, there's no reason to think it would be you. No. It would look exactly like you. But we've done these experiments. They're called twins. We have identical DNA. And you're not the same person. You have independent thoughts. Okay? You even have different fingerprints, turns out. So the clone experiment doesn't require a machine to wonder how that's going to turn out. People said we shouldn't have clone machines because we'll clone people for their organs.

22:07And I'm thinking, do we do that with twins today? Do we purposefully have twins to take out their organs? No. Why would we behave any differently with a cloning machine than we do in the presence of twins that already walk among us? Point is, you're never going to get another Gary. And so armed with that information, that cosmic, that scientifically informed cosmic perspective, we should treat life as the most cherished thing on earth. And not enough people do, leading to all manner of misery and bloodshed and war and in this world. And I wonder if people really knew the statistics of this, if we treat each other more kindly and more considerably than we do.

22:53Depends on how much you like war and bloodshed, you know. Oh, some people. Some people are into that, you know. Not in their own bloodshed. Right. No, that's the point. Yeah. It's so funny. You're such a scientist because you actually went at that from the DNA configuration perspective, which I find fascinating. Because I thought about this, like, I think everybody thinks, like, you know, could there ever be another me or how many, like, what did it take for me to get here? and I looked up the average number of viable sperm in an ejaculate, which is somewhere around 200 million. Yeah, half a billion typically.

23:32Yeah, somewhere around there. Or it could be, yeah, somewhere. And that means that for just me in that one batch. Mm-hmm. You're one in 200 million. I'm one in 200 million just in that one little batch. forget the other batches that we don't even want to say what happened to them you know i'm just saying like you know dad was once a teenager he was once 17 yeah you know but that alone gives you an idea of just how hard it is for a human being to come to existence. Right. And that's another angle that probability takes you into the rarity of who you are as an individual. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, Gary, did I hit all the points you were looking for?

24:27Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if we go and do every single one, we are going to be here for another day. All right. So, Gary, where else are we going to take this? All right. So, we look at our everyday lives and without realizing it, we are calculating. as we've discussed, and it's kind of like baked into a number of things. We are living our lives online. Some people conduct a whole part of their life online. They'll have maybe a dozen, 10 or so online accounts, which they manage, which means passwords, which means protection, which means security, all those things, and the probability of all the bad stuff, probability of it being okay.

25:07So I think what we need to do is speak to someone who's really at that cutting edge of cybersecurity. And for that, we have our dear friends at Bitdefender, the cybersecurity experts. And we have Alex Koshoy. I can't believe that's how you pronounce it. If you've got it wrong, I'll stand in a corner. He is their chief security strategist. So this guy is a guy who doesn't just try and look after things. he will go after botnets with Europol or Interpol and bring them down. They're on a large-scale level as well as the personal level. So there's a whole different range of how they operate, which I think could be very fascinating, and add another facet to how probabilities are entwined into our lives.

25:58Yeah, because lately when I choose a password, it tries to tell me whether it's a good password or a bad password and presumably there's some risk factor calculated to assess that otherwise why would it know anything at all like one two three four is a bad password i mean there's there's information that you have right that's in the public domain for instance your birthday maybe the probability of something bad happening is greater so we need to speak to that expert and neil here is alex alex hey welcome to star talk hi neil hi guys thank you hey you have the bad assest title of anybody ever it's made up no one just made up chief give me the title again chief what chief security strategist chief security strategist We should salute, shouldn't we?

26:56So Alex, let me start with a couple of questions here. The word risk is related to probability and statistics. People think they understand risk. Generally, they don't. Or what they do understand is not the full story, typically. But they're making decisions about their lives, about their health, their wealth, and their security based on their understanding of risk. So Alex, in what way does the probability of a cyber attack fold into your decisions and your job? Yeah, this is, as you were talking earlier, because I've been listening, the probability of somebody being attacked, I would say it's biased.

27:38From my perspective, it's 100%. Everybody will be hacked or attacked or scammed at one point or another. But we also did a study a few years back and all the respondents in total, like 76 % of them said, I don't think somebody will target me. I don't have enough money. Why would I be of any interest? Super false. That's not how things are going in the cybercrime industry. they're practically attacking everybody and it's probability and precents of who actually says and accepts that link and clicks on that button and that's the next step so i'm pretty sure gary neil chuck you've been targeted by a scam at least once in the past two years i put ten thousand dollars on that okay yeah of course can i have that ten thousand dollars i've actually targeted people in scams.

28:37But the thing is, there's a sophistication to the scam. Because if someone comes in and this has happened to me, they take a very small amount to begin with. And if you don't notice it and let it skip through your bank statement, they come back in and go, grab. No, there's an opportunity to that. You can invest in this particular business. You put like, you know, $10 and you receive a return $50. and then they tell you if you put more you'll get more so you put 10 grand nothing comes back how about that wow okay so it's a con game yeah it's not just a cyber attack all in cyber there's somebody has to communicate with you correct in your confidence and then so there's just another con game then it's a shell game you know you're moving those shows around there's a whatever the stone underneath it is but all these things happen now in the cyber world so yeah about whatsapp telegram instagram facebook things that you actually use every day and these platforms are actually challenging you into spending more and more hours in front of them so when the scammer shows up in your platform you you already believe that this has already been vouched it has been like a check if it's safe or not.

29:57So you already have like a 50 % bias to do it, right? To fall for it. So our familiarity with these platforms, with our time spent on a screen, that familiarity breeds the complacency. Is that what you're saying? I'm sorry, guys. I hate to interrupt. But as you can see, I got to answer this call. It's potential spam. so you know that it's just coming in right now so you know that hilarious clearly that's a scam i hope somebody tried to get something from me yeah the idea is that when you received like an anonymous call from a number you don't know or an email from somebody you don't really know you're like yeah it's probably a scam i'm gonna ignore it like you have your phone with potential scam but when you receive these ads directly to a platform that you trust you've been using it for years the chances of you being biased and ignore Neil as you're saying the probability of being scammed you're you pass the bias are so much higher like oh so I received this ad on Instagram to buy a ticket to some concert okay maybe Taylor Swift because it's super in the news right now and it's so much cheaper than the actual prices and it's on this instagram or facebook or whatever you'll buy it oh wow and if you read the news it's about at least a million or more on every concert a million dollars yep on every concert per country per country per concert yeah that's a very good business yep so now a lot of bands a lot of bands use one particular outlet we all spend our time doing PhDs and research

32:12so can i ask what why do they want your emails like i get a lot of emails from i i just delete them because there's either nothing in the body or it's a link and i'm like okay everybody who knows me knows i'm not opening any links so i just i just delete it why would you want to get my email list? You hear people say, oh, I got hacked. My email list got hacked. What is the value in an email list? Okay, so if I get a single email address, I can search known databases of passwords associated with that email address. Oh my god. That companies or other leaked databases. So I have your email address and now I have a list of passwords that you use on different websites oh what i can go further anyone else scared right now with those passwords dude you're freaking us alex you're freaking us out oh my god alex this is terrible shut up now i don't want to hear anything more from you i'd rather live in my blissful if you want you can give me your email addresses and i can do this search for you no no no no no you can't you've already said trust me right now you got my email so wait a minute first they get your email then they get the passwords and what else can they do i mean what's the next step well there are many steps later on because i can see if these passwords are still working so getting into your various accounts i can also see if you have the same password to a different email address that I don't know about like your business email or your yahoo email that you used 10 years ago and you didn't change a password and I can see all your previous girlfriends from when you are 17.

34:09How about that? There are so many possibilities if you work in a company and email and passwords works I can use those to connect to your I don't a VPN account, launch a ransomware attack, make some billions out of it. Okay. Mental note, change all email passwords. Every password I must change. Change it every day. Every day. We see hacks. We see data leaks and breaches. And it seems to be one a week almost. And I know you do this. You fight these bad actors daily. And thank God that people like you are out there. but are we not now kind of desensitized and people are to the point where it's going to happen so what the hell have we lost that sensitivity to the impact that this could make uh yes but not with the right mindset for this conclusion because yes there are news of cyber attacks literally every day so when i wake up and read the news at least one hack per day right so people are reading this and they're like, yada, yada, yada, not going to happen to me.