This is not a cactus.
And I know what you're thinking.
Of course, it is.
It looks like just like a cactus.
It has all the cactus qualities.
It’s got the spikes, it's got the arms, it's got the dry dusty landscape.
This is classic cactus.
And while up until quite recently, I would have completely agreed with you,
unfortunately, this is not a cactus.
It’s called the euphorbia candelabrum, and I’m making this video
because I lost a bet to my wife on whether or not this was a cactus.
When I was seventeen years old, I moved to Japan to teach kindergarten.
Which, I recognize is a strange direction to take this episode.
But please bear with me.
I had this one classroom.
And at the end of the day in Japan, even as young as three years old,
you have to act as janitors, and I as your teacher have to sort of act as the janitorial manager
forcing these little three-year olds to clean up the room.
Which was both kind of strange because I certainly didn't grow up cleaning my room.
But also absolutely hilarious.
Because they're like this tall and they've got the little mop and they're running around...
Anyway.
The point being.
One day, I had this student, three-year old named Kazuki.
I called him Kazucheese because he was like this tall and he looked like a mouse
and spoke like a mouse, had this really high-pitched voice.
Completely irrelevant to this story, but kind of funny.
Anyway, so it was Kazucheese's turn to clean the floor this one day.
And cleaning the floor essentially means getting handed a wet rag, sticking your little three-year old butt in the air
and just running along the floor.
Sort of back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth until the entire wood paneling is clean.
And it was Kazucheese's, I don't know, fiftieth time of doing this.
This was definitely not his first go at the floor.
But for whatever reason, this one day he decided he was going to stick his tongue out behind the rag
and as he ran up and down, he was going to lick the entirety of the floor of this room.
As a seventeen-year old janitorial manager, I did not have a lot of desire to stop this.
It was hilarious. It was really funny to watch.
And I probably should have in retrospect, but at the time, absolutely didn't.
And so when Kazucheese was done licking the entire floor, I was sitting there in the corner.
I don't know, handing him one of his juice boxes or something laughing at him.
And I said to him, Kazucheese, what the hell man?
Why did you just lick the entirety of this room?
And he looked at me and said something that all joking aside I will never forget.
He looked up and said, I just didn’t know what it tasted like.
When we first got to Ethiopia, my wife and I had a big debate about the cactus.
I knew she was going to be right, she’s always right, but I decided to stand my ground anyway.
Because we’ve been married for ten years and that’s what you do.
But also because this was a cactus.
I’d seen it, and I believed it.
I was wrong, but I had believed it.
The world around us is constantly in flux.
The continents have crashed and split and crashed again.
The mountains have risen and crumbled back to dust.
Forests have turned to desert and ocean.
There is no stable universe.
But even in this giant churning sea of change, nature has rules.
Patterns are inevitable.
The euphorbia candelabrum is not a cactus, but it might as well be.
Because despite growing an entire world away from the ancestors of cacti,
it has existed under similar conditions, with similar pressures, and similar reasons to be.
The same factors that led to the rise of spiky armed succulents in the Americas
led to a similar rise here.
Brothers from another mother.
Or in the terms my wife explained it to me, convergent evolution.
But I’m not a scientist, as I’m sure you well know and I’m not here
to explain to you how Darwinism works.
Or for that matter the laxative qualities of euphorbia.
Which is true, by the way.
No, I want to talk about expectations.
Because eventually there comes a time when you stop licking floors and just start imagining
that you know what they taste like.
I grew up in Texas during my formative years.
The type of years where adults feel the need to point out plants and tell you what they’re called.
There are only so many of those years, and I was in Texas for all of them.
To me, the euphorbia was a cactus because I grew up with cactus.
It was an experience I’d already had.
I expected I knew what I was looking at, because I’d looked at something like it before.
In effect, I’d licked a floor just like this one, and it'd tasted like cactus.
One of the most useful and damning tools our brains have is the ability to provide inference.
We can abstractly imagine what something will be like in the future simply by
stitching together completely different situations from the past.
Looks are deceiving, and the fewer experiences we’re using to build that puzzle
the weaker our inference will be.
Expectations ruin us.
They make us stop digging deeper.
They make us think we’re smarter than we really are.
They make us get into pointless debates with our wives.
Which we lose, by the way.
No, I can only imagine that on that day in Japan that floor tasted gross.
But the only person who knows in reality is Kazuki.
Because for all the experience I'd had until that point in my life,
I wasn’t willing to give that one a go.
And because of it, I was bested by a three-year old, I was bested by my wife.
What can you do.
This is Rare Earth.
You happy? You happy Kata?
It's not a cactus. It's a euphorbia candelabrum.