Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Is Life Just One Big Fluke? Brian Klaas Tells Us

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with political scientist Brian Klaas about his new bestseller, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian argues that but for a few small changes, our lives... and societies could be wildly different. He gets personal on the flukes that have altered the course of his own life; discusses the many random moments that have defined history; and explains why we control nothing but influence everything… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:22 Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe,
Starting point is 00:00:57 wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Does everything we do matter? That's an open-ended question, but want to think about. My guest today, Brian Klaus, argues that but for a few small changes, our lives and societies
Starting point is 00:01:29 could be radically different. So are we a series of freak accidents? Could making that accidental phone call change the course of history and what can chaos teach us about human nature. Let's find out with Brian Klaus on today's show. So joining us now on Open Book, a fan favorite, one of my personal favorites, Brian Klaus. He is a political scientist and a writer for the Atlantic. He lives in the UK. He wrote a book called Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and why everything we do matters, which is sort of amazing when I think about it. And I think about all these little small things. And of course, over the holiday, Brian, I watched it. It's a wonderful life again.
Starting point is 00:02:15 and the wonderful butterfly effect of that movie. And you're writing about that in life. And you had a very famous and well-time book called Corruptible, which was fabulous as well. So I recommend that to all of our viewers and listeners. But we're now back with Fluke. Tell us about Fluke. Let's start with what kickstarted your thinking for this book, Brian. And welcome to the show.
Starting point is 00:02:35 Yeah, thanks for having me on. So there's a few things. There's one is sort of my research where, you know, I studied a coup at one point that happened a while ago. And you know, you have all these models that try to explain why this, why these things happen. And I interviewed this soldier and he talked about trying to kidnap an army commander during the coup. And basically it was a situation like straight out of a film where he grabbed like the pant leg of this guy and tried to grab him to kidnap him and force him to announce the coup. And basically it was a split second thing, right? He was a little bit too slow.
Starting point is 00:03:09 The army commander got away. The coup failed. And you think, you know, this was in Zambia. And Zambia's democracy almost ended on this span of a split-second change. So in my research, I came across this fairly often. In my own personal life, one of the things that I write about in the introduction is a story of a mass murder in Wisconsin in 1905. And I say my personal life because my great-grandfather's first wife unfortunately snapped and killed her four young children and then killed herself. And I put that in the book because I found that out in my mid-20s.
Starting point is 00:03:39 And I realized that I wouldn't have existed if it wasn't. for this. And quite literally, you wouldn't be listening to me if not for this, you know, sort of gruesome murder 119 years ago. And that's the way the world actually works, right? Like chaos theory is this thing where it shows how very small changes can have very profound effects. And, you know, an action in Wisconsin in 1905 or a split second during a coup, you know, our social world changes. And the pandemic is like that as well, right? You have one person getting infected with a virus in China and boom, you know, the world completely changes. So the main argument me on the book is that small changes can have enormous impacts and we systematically ignore them
Starting point is 00:04:15 in how we sort of model the world. When I read that tragedy, read about the tragedy, my dad, who unfortunately we lost last year, but at a very nice old age of 88, his father was married and she died of ovarian cancer. And so he ended up getting remarried to what ultimately became my grandmother. And so you see, it happens in different ways. It can happen from different types of illnesses or health or whatever. But we're both here so improbably, right? If you think about all the dark matter in the universe, Brian, the fact that you and I are sitting here talking to each other, that should give us grace and be grateful enough. But everything, doesn't it happen for a reason, Brian? Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where I think there's a saying that's very comforting to people.
Starting point is 00:05:00 Everything happens for a reason, but it's, in my view, not true, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of philosophy that's, what was really interesting about researching and writing this book was that when you start to think about how reality works and you start to think about all these interconnections and accidental changes and so on, it does have philosophical implications, right? And some people make sense of those through belief in God and other people don't. And I'm, I'm in the latter camp personally, but I respect people who have different viewpoints. I mean, my view is when you look at these things from a scientific perspective, like, you know, the origin of complex life, the best explanation we have for that is what I think is
Starting point is 00:05:35 the most important fluke of all time, where two billion years ago, a bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell, these tiny little cells, ended up inside of it and created mitochondria, which is the thing that powers complex life. And as far as scientists know, this happened once, right? And so, like, when I think about something like that, and, you know, you can apply this logic to markets, to politics, whatever it is in the social world as well. But when I think about that, I think, you know, look, I don't know, maybe there's just some stuff that happens. And I think that has some pretty profound and uplifting implications for how we think about our lives and the purpose of them, even without a grand design, as it were, or the idea that everything happens for a reason.
Starting point is 00:06:14 And you write about this, and you also write about, like, you know, this is something Marcus Aurelius wrote about 1800 years ago. There's just so many choices. It's impossible for you to get everything right. And so why be upset about that? Just, you know, forge forward and focus on the present. But you also write about a rewind. And there's a very, there's a very, very fun book from the 1970s called Rewind, I think, or replay. I'll get the title for you. But the guy wakes up in his dorm room and he's able to now relive his life, but he has some knowledge. So he bets the stock market well. And guess what happens to him? A lot of things go wrong they didn't expect. So he wants to rewind again. He does it three or four times. And then the moral of the story is,
Starting point is 00:06:54 well, you know what? Guess what? You're living as a human being. And even with perfect knowledge, you're going to get a lot wrong. What do you think of the notion of rewining your life, Brian? Yeah, so, you know, it's the opening sentence of the book is, you know, if you, if you reround your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? And it's a question about like why things happen to us, right? But what I think is really striking about this is, you know, you think about movies like back to the future or you think about, you know, anything to do with time travel. We have this viewpoint that like, you know, and there's all these short stories and Simpsons episodes that play with this idea where it's like,
Starting point is 00:07:26 if you go back in the past, don't talk to anyone, you know, don't touch anything because you might accidentally delete yourself from the future. And like, that seems totally intuitive to us. But the thing is, like, when you think about that, surely the way that the past causes the present is exactly the same as the way the present causes the future, right? Like, in other words, if you talk to people in your daily life today or if you squish the wrong bug today, it's going to create a different world, right? And I think one of the things that has happened is because the way the humans try to make sense of that complexity through modeling, right, which is basically always wrong but sometimes useful, we have this sort of like fun house mirror version of
Starting point is 00:08:00 reality reflected back at us where there's like, oh, there's only like six variables that you need to worry about. And like, as long as you like tackle those six variables, like everything will turn out fine. And I don't believe that's the way the world works, right? I mean, it's the same as, you know, like Nate Silver talks about the signal and the noise, which sometimes can be very useful in short-term, you know, decision-making. But the idea that the noise is meaningless is just wrong to me. I think that there's a huge amount of history, politics, et cetera, where, you know, the noise was actually the thing that drove it. And so the book is trying to suggest that if you have that level of uncertainty because you can never measure the noise, right? Then you need to sort of
Starting point is 00:08:34 prioritize optimizations slightly less and resilience slightly more because you need to think carefully about catastrophe and how it might emerge from unexpected places. I mean, so well said, the book that I was thinking of was called Replay by Ken Grimwood. And it was written in 1986. It's an obscure book now, but it was pretty famous 30 or so years ago. And I remember reading it. And, you know, I've made so many different mistakes in my life, you know, who the hell? knows, but the truth of it is you're going to make them no matter what. That's the trials and tribulations of being human. What single strange interaction or random event? It's a little personal, but I want you to answer it has had the biggest impact on your life. Well, I mean, the one that I talked about
Starting point is 00:09:14 early on in the book was certainly one of them. I mean, I think there's lots of stuff. You know, it's like one of the things that we do as humans is we look back on our lives and we think about those big building blocks of those decisions. And these are the really obvious ones, right? So, like, I think about the moment that I decided to go to grad school because I decided to go to England for grad school. And here, 13 years later, I'm still here. Are you doing okay with your accent, though? Or they look down upon you as, like, a former colonist. You're all right over there or no?
Starting point is 00:09:40 I'm just asking because, you know. It's funny because I think I still have, like, exactly the same accent. I'm from Minnesota originally. But, like, every so often I go on MSNBC and people like, stop putting on the fake British accent. And I'm like, I really don't think I have an act. But maybe I'm not making it. I'm not picking it. We had a clown that was the president of Tufts, and he was an Italian kid from like Wilmington, Delaware, and he came back with a British accent. I'm like, dude, you got to calm down. Okay. I mean, it's not working, you know. I mean, I do say like flat and, you know, rather than apartment, but it's just, it's part of daily life. But I think this is fascinating because, you know, my producer's from the UK. She's living here in the U.S. You're from the U.S. You're going to become a U.K. citizen. Is that a dual citizenship? Or are you going to give up the U.S. citizen?
Starting point is 00:10:23 Yeah, I passed the test a couple months ago. So you have to take a citizenship test. I passed that. And yeah, I'm on my way. So it's a couple weeks away probably. It was one of the questions who won the Revolutionary War? That probably wasn't on the citizenship test, right? No, it was one of the thing.
Starting point is 00:10:39 It was funny, actually. I mean, some of the questions were factually wrong. Like, there was one question that was supposed to be stupidly easy, which was who first unified England was an Alfred the Great or Charles Darwin. And I actually am a history nerd. So I was like, it's Ethel Wolf, Alfred the Great's grandson. But that's not one of the choices. I didn't want to argue with person, but the point is, yes, I finally, I've passed the test,
Starting point is 00:10:58 and I think I'm doing all right. Yeah, right. You got to be, you don't want to be too smart for your own good. Yeah. You got some brilliant insights into this thing, okay? I am a snooze button smasher, okay? And I probably hit that button. I say, oh, no, no, another nine minutes and another nine minutes.
Starting point is 00:11:15 Tell us about why hitting the snooze button has a pretty big impact on your life. Yeah, so what I'm trying to draw on, that's part of the thing. that I did in this book was trying to synthesize lessons from science with how we can understand ourselves, right? And so there's this big debate in evolutionary biology about how change happens. I think this is really important for anyone who cares about markets, politics, whatever it is in history, et cetera. And in evolution, there's this debate between what's called contingency and convergence. So the contingency stuff is where you make a small change and everything turns out different. So like the best example in evolution is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, right?
Starting point is 00:11:49 because basically, you know, if that hadn't happened, humans probably wouldn't have existed. Convergence is the opposite. It's like the ordered trajectory, right? And this is where like small changes happen, but like you end up in the same place in the end. And one of my favorite examples of this is if you look at the eye of an octopus and you look at the eye of a human, they're actually extremely similar. Even though we've evolved, you know, 400 million years ago, we split on the evolutionary tree. Like nature just solved the problem the same way because it works, right? And this is the same in human society. Like sometimes you have inventions that arrive at the same time. Now, I use. use this for what I call the snooze button effect to say, is your life going to follow the same
Starting point is 00:12:23 track or is it going to radically diverge from this five minutes that you sleep? Right. And we don't know. That's the point, right? Like, we can never see the world in which our life had, you know, sort of tested in the A world where it's like you didn't hit the snooze button and then the B world where you did. But I think one of the things that is worth considering is that there are a lot of things that change with five minutes, right? You meet different people that day. You might get to a car accident or not. You might end up having someone say something to you that changes your thinking on a subject. And these are what I call the invisible pivot. So when I was answering your question before about the sort of stuff that's important to me, probably I don't know. I mean,
Starting point is 00:12:58 the answer is I probably don't know what the biggest thing that has been the fluke in my life, because I'm just totally blind to it, where maybe I almost died or maybe I almost met someone of a huge consequence or something almost ruined my life and I avoided it. And I'm just totally unaware of it because we can't go back. And I think that snooze button effect idea is one that is important to think about because it means that, you know, sort of the moment-to-moment stuff we do is actually important, even if we'll never see the alternative world we might inhabit. It's fascinating because on a tragic note, a close friend of mine, went to the Red Sock Yankee game on the 10th of September at Yankee Stadium. And unfortunately that night, there was a
Starting point is 00:13:38 thunderstorm and the game got interrupted in the third inning, a result of which he left Yankee Stadium, drove home, and got home early enough where he decided to take the 6 a.m. train into New York City to deposit himself on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. Had the game been played, had the weather not been rainy, he would have got home after midnight. He would have taken the 9 a.m. train as opposed to the 6 a.m. train. And he would be here. Of course, Howard Lutnik very famously took his son to kindergarten orientation. And so he wasn't in the office on the 11th of September and so on and so forth. And so this is why I think your book is so fascinating. It gives us so much to think about. You know, the guys from Black Rock, they came to see us at Skybridge and were lowly Skybridge and they're very large BlackRock. But they wanted to launch a Bitcoin trust and converted into their ETF. They had no outside investors. And their committee said, if you can't get an outside investor, we don't want to pursue it. And so anyway, make a long story short, we gave him the money. They ended up pursuing it. Looks like they're going to get this ETF alongside of others, but I think Black Rock's influence helped it. And again, I'm not patting Skybridge on the back.
Starting point is 00:14:49 It's a incidental coincidence, but it fits so relevantly into your story and the snooze button. Yeah, I was going to say about I have a story in the book as well about 9-11. And it's an amazing story where basically this guy gets given a tie from a coworker. He's really, really kind to him at the breakfast on the morning of September 11th. And it turns out the new tie, you know, it doesn't match his outfit. So he goes to iron a different shirt to put the tie on, says I'll catch up with you in 15 minutes. She goes up to the conference and gets killed and he survives. And it was a random act of kindness that saved his life, right?
Starting point is 00:15:23 And she died having done that. And there's a deeper lesson here as well as the sort of curiosities and tragedies that you can tease out from this. I mean, one of the points I always make is you mentioned the thunderstorm on September 10th, September 11th, you know, it blindingly blew sky. And you think about variables that we model, right? Like when we try to figure out why things happen, like you always come up with the big ideas, the big variable. And so we talk about al-Qaeda, rightly, you know, all these things, the geopolitics. If there had been a thunderstorm on September 11th, it would have been a different story possibly
Starting point is 00:15:51 because you might have had some delays in the flights. You know, some of them might not have gotten off the ground at the same time. You might have had some of that, you know, if you had a different group of passengers on flight 93, would they have stopped the attack? And I can tell you, you know, the world would be different if the White House or the Capitol had been destroyed. And so you think, you know, these little things of just switching the same event on a different time or a different place and all of a sudden the world shifts. And I think there's this weird obsession for that idea you said before of how everything happens for a reason that we want to sort of cram things into this neat and tidy story.
Starting point is 00:16:21 The world is just really messy, right? And that's why we keep on getting these black swans walloping us and blindsiding us because, you know, chaos theory and action means that if you try to tame the world by just focusing on like six or seven variables in a model, it's not going to work. It's brilliant. And I appreciate everything that you put in there because it provides us perspective. And January is the season for this sort of contemplation. Let's talk a little bit about being a devil's advocate for a second. This is another thing you write about in the book. People may argue that there's a higher power and they have religious beliefs.
Starting point is 00:16:51 And also there's the consideration of the laws of physics. What do you say about those topics? Yeah, I mean, so I'm not personally a believer, right? And I think there's something that you can appreciate even as a non-believer about the sort of mystical uncertainty of the world, right? And there's so many things we don't understand. And they're not like, you know, AI. There are things like, what is consciousness and what's, what produces us? Like, we don't have an answer to that question. We don't understand how matter operates because, you know, even though quantum mechanics has given us some tools to sort of study these things and to
Starting point is 00:17:22 experimentally verify some predictions around them, none of us have any idea what's going on. I mean, there are a series of very smart physicists who believe in what's called the many world's theory, which is that the world is infinitely branching into an infinite number of universes in which there's an infinite number of views and also an infinite number of worlds that don't contain you, right? That should give us pause where I think there's a certain level of sort of certainty that that is foolish to have when you try to answer these big questions. But I think, you know, one of the core questions that Fluk's trying to answer is sort of, you know, it's probably what I would have titled the book if I wasn't trying to sell it, is why do things happen? Right.
Starting point is 00:17:55 I mean, like, when we try to think about our lives, when we try to think about, you know, cryptocurrency, whatever it is, like, we're trying to answer that question of causality. And some people answer it with God. And some people answer it with the sort of more sterile forms of physics and so on. I give this what I think is the best scientific explanation for the dynamics that we see in modern society and how we got here and so on. But I'm also extremely respectful of people who have different views on this because the hubris to say these are settled questions is just it's the symbol of a fool because
Starting point is 00:18:24 they're not settled, right? Even scientists are hyper aware of the limits of our understanding. I mean, I love it. That's why I asked you about it. Let's talk about the single man or the single woman theory in human history. We've had the likes of Lincoln, Churchill. America seems to get the right leader at the right time. It seems like once in a while we get the wrong leader, but generally we've been pretty lucky, whether it's a Roosevelt, Franklin, or Teddy, a Lincoln, a Reagan. Obviously, the UK, the Brits had Churchill when they needed. him. Does this stuff make a difference? And what are some of the things that you think caused the rise of Donald Trump that were butterfly-like? You know, I mean, I think, I can think of some,
Starting point is 00:19:05 but give me some of the flukes. So question one, do you believe in that theory? Yeah. And question two, how do hell do we get Donald Trump? And obviously, I'm partially to blame for that. But how do how do we get him? And how to hell do we get rid of him? Well, on the second one, I'll let you off the hook with some of the flukes that you were definitely not responsible for. But on the first question, I mean, look, political science, for example, my discipline for a long time, basically tried to have this sort of savvy viewpoint of saying, oh, it's the presidency that matters, right? The president is constrained. Like, the institution is what matters, not the person.
Starting point is 00:19:34 Like, you know, leave the cable TV host to write the biographies of Lincoln. We understand the real way that this works with the institution. Donald Trump obliterated that. I mean, nobody thinks that the world would be the same place if Hillary Clinton won in 2016. I mean, it's an absurd viewpoint, right? So obviously it's the case that individuals in positions of power matter enormously for reshaping the world. Now, for how we got Trump, I mean, there's all the sort of standard explanations, but I'll go for the flukes. So there's two of them that come to mind.
Starting point is 00:20:01 One of them, and I don't know whether this is true, but it's a hypothesis, is that Trump was swayed or potentially influenced by deciding to run for president in 2011 at the White House correspondence dinner when he was humiliated by Obama telling that joke. But the one that I talk about in the book that I think is a fun and interesting way of thinking about history is, Believe it or not, there's a link between Trump's defeat in 2020 and the Cretaceous period when velociraptors were on the earth. And the reason I say that is because that many million years ago, there was an inland sea on what is now the United States. And the coastline was basically Georgia, what is now Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, right? And the phytoplankton that lived on the coastline of that ancient inland sea during the time of the dinosaurs, all the phytoplankton died as the sea dried up. And they gave this super, super fertile soil, what was then known as the black belt, because it's really dark rich. soil made from this phytoplane. This is where when slaves were brought to the United States and slave
Starting point is 00:20:54 people were brought to those areas where that inland sea was. And if you look at the 2020 election map, county by county, what you will see because African Americans tend to vote more for Democrats than Republicans is you will see the map of that inland sea is why Donald Trump lost Georgia, because you can actually map it on the coastline. And it corresponds almost perfectly because this sort of geological accident, you know, tens of millions of years ago, having an impact on the demographic patterns of American society today and affecting our elections. It's an extraordinary thing where the more you look for this stuff, the more you find these bizarre accidents of history that end up swaying our world. I want people to read your book because there's a fragility to chance. There's a fragility to life,
Starting point is 00:21:34 of course. And, you know, it's amazing. And but listen, you know, there's one other thing that did happen is President Obama asked Vice President Biden to stand down. He had cut a deal with the Clintons in 2012, their support in exchange for him clearing the way for her candidacy in 16. And so Biden did stand down. There was that very famous speech in the Rose Garden where he was going on and on. Had he not stood down, he may have beaten her in the primaries. And I don't think there would have been a Donald Trump because he would have beat him like a drum like he did in 2020. All right.
Starting point is 00:22:06 We're at the point in the program. I've come up with five words for all my famous authors after reading their books. I'm going to say the word. You think of something. You tell us what it is. Okay. You ready? Chance.
Starting point is 00:22:17 Chance is a contingent event that could have turned out otherwise, and it's usually for an arbitrary or random reason. Chaos. Chaos is the theory that small changes over time can have enormous effects, and the subset of this is the butterfly effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause a hurricane somewhere else. Contingency. Contingency is those pivot points in life where basically our world teeters between two possible options, and the contingent event is the one that diverts us. between the two. Consequences. Consequences are where contingent events matter. So some contingencies are relatively meaningless, at least over the short term. Others completely upend our world. What about the word fluke? This is a difficult one because it captures a lot. It's usually defined as a
Starting point is 00:23:04 positive, and I don't use it exclusively that way, but it's a random or chance or arbitrary occurrence that has outsized effects on the world. And very often people use it as a positive. There, there are flukes, I think, that can also have seemingly positive consequences that turn very bad later. So I use it in the broadest possible sense. Well, listen, I find you to be fascinating. You're wickedly smart. And when is the next book? I've got to get it on my calendar.
Starting point is 00:23:31 You're thinking about something? Yeah, but it's like I'm in the brainstorming phase. I mean, one of the things you do as a writer is you kick around 10 ideas and you, you know, you basically convince yourself they're all bad. So I'm in that stage where I don't have a good idea yet. All right. Well, when I get to the UK, I'd love to buy a beer or pub, a warm. beer. I mean, these people drink warm beer. It's hard to understand, but it's fine. It seems like
Starting point is 00:23:51 you're very comfortable over there. You know, I do love the UK. For whatever reason, they get my sense of humor over there, so I enjoy being there. But God bless you. The title of this book, Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. And you are a lovely man. And good luck with your new citizenship in this great new country that you've spent 13 years in. God bless. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. So Brian is written an incredibly thought-provoking book, and I was thinking about some of the flukes in my life. So I'd like to share one with you guys. I was exhausted.
Starting point is 00:24:31 It was the end of a very arduous day at Harvard Law School. And I had two introductory interviews left that I did not want to go to. And when I got back to my dorm room, one of those interviews was Goldman Sachs. I had already got a job offer from a law firm. So this is my third year in school, and I was accepted for an introductory round interview with Goldman, and I have to tell you I was a hair's breath away from not taking the interview due to exhaustion and due to a feeling like why the hell would they hire me. And so that minute of self-doubt was glimmering with me.
Starting point is 00:25:10 And then one of my buds, one of my roommates turned to me and said, you're being ridiculous. Get your ass up off the couch, get your suit on, and go down there and see these Goldman guys. you may learn something. And so I did that. I had my suit on. I got my bicycle. Just ride around on a 10-speed bicycle back then. And I went to the interview. And the interview went very well. And I ended up getting a job at Goldman's. Just imagine the fluke. My whole course trajectory, the career, the people I met would have been radically different if I didn't take that interview. I just think it's very apropos to what goes on in life. And I think the big message from Brian and the message from the story that I'm telling you is take the risk, do the extra thing.
Starting point is 00:25:49 make the extra phone call, be present for the extra half hour or so. Who the hell knows? Maybe really good things can happen. If I had never worked in the White House, probably wouldn't have this podcast. You probably wouldn't know who I am. I probably wouldn't have had the psychologically minded experiences in my life that have made me more sensitive and more attuned to other people. Imagine that.
Starting point is 00:26:12 Imagine how that would have sucked if I didn't have that experience. And of course, I love hosting this podcast, and you wouldn't be listening, you wouldn't know who the hell I am, so I'm grateful for that as well. Thank you for joining us on today's show. All right. You want to be on the show, Ma? You know, you're a star. My guest today is a guy named Brian Klaus.
Starting point is 00:26:43 He wrote a book called Fluke, and so he believes in something called the butterfly effect, meaning we meet people that could end up being our spouses. We go to a certain school. We meet somebody, and therefore we have certain kids because of that. And there are certain things that we do that are sort of fluke. that ordained the destiny that we have. Do you believe that? Right.
Starting point is 00:27:21 Okay, but let me ask you this question. You've made certain decisions in your life that have directed you, right? Like, I have told the story where I almost didn't go to a Goldman Sachs interview. If I didn't go to that interview, of course, I never would have worked there. Right. So you... Oh, my God. You would probably...
Starting point is 00:27:45 Go-goots. It had no impact on my life. I took it to shut you up, okay? Right. You're talking about the New York State Bar. I failed it the first time. You went crazy. And I went and took it the second time to shut you up.
Starting point is 00:27:58 But I never practiced. But I never practiced. My God. But I never practiced law, ma. Okay. All right. Thanks, ma. You're always ready to have a little kid.
Starting point is 00:28:41 I've been tricked, Ma. You know, I've been tricked. I went to go work for the nut. Let me ask you a different question. Okay. Has anything fluky or coincidental happen? you that may have changed your life in a certain way. Rather not say, all right, you have that right.
Starting point is 00:28:59 All right. Love you, baby. Okay, love you, Mom. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review.
Starting point is 00:29:18 If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, It's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at Plus 1, 917, 909-29-296. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.

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