The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas https://amzn.to/4b9ff2e Want to know what chaos theory can teach us about human events? In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas. If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind? In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different. Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents? Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives. About The Author: Brian Klaas grew up in Minnesota, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College London. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, and frequent guest on national television. Klaas has conducted field research across the globe and advised major politicians and organizations including NATO and the European Union. You can find him at BrianPKlaas.com and on Twitter @BrianKlaas

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Huxley Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go. Welcome to the show, ladies and gentlemen. It's wonderful to have you guys as well here.

As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law. She never liked you anyway, and the previous boyfriend was the one that she liked. So work harder. But what would help with getting her on your good side is to further show to your family, friends, and relatives, especially her, to go to goodreads.com fortune as chris voss youtube.com fortune as chris voss linkedin.com fortune as chris voss chris voss one of the tick tockety and chris voss facebook.com we bring you the smartest people on the show none of them are me that's why we have guests on the show so we

have some someone smart on here and as always the ceos the billionaires the white house presidential advisors the pulitzer prize winning journalists authors all the smartest minds the people that come to you and bring you their stories and if you don't learn something from these shows damn it well uh go listen to them all again so there you go anyway we have an amazing author on the show with us today he's the author of the newest book that comes out january 23, 2024. It's called Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. And I think you're going to learn some things here. You might learn about how your life works. I'm 56, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

Damn it. We have Brian Kloss, the author on the show with us today. He grew up in Minnesota. He earned his DPhil degree I believe, degree of philosophy. Is that what that means? Yeah, it's the pretentious way that Oxford calls a PhD. See, I flunked high school second grade, so I don't know these things, but this must be like an Oxford sort of lingo or something. It is indeed. He's all the way from Oxford, folks. That's how smart he is. There's a lot of smart people that

come from Oxford we have on the show. He is now a professor of global politics at the University College of London. He's a contributing writer for The Atlantic, host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, and frequent guest on national television. He has conducted field research across the globe and advised major politicians and organizations, including NATO and the European Union. You can find him on his website at brianpkloss.com and Twitter at Brian Kloss. Welcome to the show, Brian. How are you?

I'm doing really well. How are you? I am awesome. It's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the new book. Any other dot coms or websites or social media you want people to follow you on? Sure, yeah. I write a newsletter called The Garden of Forking Paths, so they can look me up that way as well.

The Garden of Forking Paths? Is that correct? The Garden of Forking Paths, so they can look me up that way as well. The Garden of Forking Paths? Is that correct? Yes, The Garden of Forking Paths. It's a metaphor that I use in the book, and it's also a short story by my favorite short story author. Yeah, there you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. Yeah, so I'm basically taking the argument of bringing chaos theory to human events and to our own lives. And I'm basically arguing that the world is swayed and diverted a lot more by accidental, arbitrary, even seemingly random forces than we often imagine. And there's this sort of standard overview that people will say, you know, the sort of smart thinking people will say, oh, you have to separate the signal from the noise. I'm focusing on the noise. I think the noise matters a lot. And I think it actually does change our lives and our societies a lot more than we imagine. So I don't agree with that

separation. And I think it's something that we would be foolhardy to ignore. So we need to delve into it. But I mean, so do you believe fully in chaos theory and as a part of life? is it is it a mixed bag now i'm in fully so the way that most people have heard of chaos theory is this butterfly effect idea right like a butterfly flapping swings and then it creates a hurricane so what what chaos theory is actually saying that the technical jargon is sensitivity to initial conditions but what this really means is that if anything small changes it can have profound effects over time. And it's the reason why we can't forecast the weather, right?

Because if the measurements or the model is even a tiny bit wrong, I mean, like one millionth of a degree wrong, then the model will be wrong with what the weather is going to look like after 10 days. That's what chaos theory is for our own, you know, which we recognize very easily. Now, the way that I think the world works is that this is constantly happening. It's just that we're oblivious to it. And, you know, the easiest way I can describe this is whenever we think about time travel, right, and you have science fiction and so on. The warning that people will tell you is, you know, if you go back in time, don't talk to anybody, don't squish any bugs, because you might totally change the future, right? You might delete yourself from the future. But but the problem is we don't think about that in the present like we don't imagine that like we're constantly reshaping the future with everything we do but of course cause and effect

operates exactly the same way in the past as it does in the future so chaos theory is something we accept when we think about time travel it's not something we accept when we think about the present and i think the present is where we're wrong i think that i think that's happening constantly we're constantly changing the trajectories of our future. We're just completely blind to it because we can't see alternative pathways that we might have taken. There you go. So throughout the book, you're going to sell this concept to us and see how we, and the examples that support it. Give us a little bit of history about yourself. How did you grow up and what led you down some of the paths and to write and study some of the things you've done?

Yeah. So I grew up in Minnesota, born and raised in Minnesota, very statriotic, I like to say. You know, I loved my childhood and so on. And I started studying politics and that's ultimately what led me to get a PhD in politics. But the thing is, you know, actually the origin story of this book comes from probably when I was about 25 years old, when my dad sat me down and told me this story is about a story about a tragedy. And it was in 1905 in a little farmhouse in Wisconsin. And this this woman who probably had postpartum depression, they didn't have a name for it in 1905. But that's probably what was going on. She snapped, she had had a mental breakdown and she had four young children and she she killed them and then she took her own life and i put this in the in the introduction to fluke because this is my great-grandfather's

first wife and he came home to the farmhouse and the whole family is dead and he remarries ultimately to my great-grandmother right so i have I have this moment, I'm totally oblivious to this for my whole life until I'm in my mid-20s. My dad shows me this newspaper clipping, terrible act of insane woman, what it says in the headline. And I realize that this is the only reason I exist, right? That but for this mass murder in Wisconsin 119 years ago, I don't exist. You're not listening to me if this doesn't happen, right? This is chaos theory in action. It's chaos theory for me personally too, everything in my life every joy every setback and so on is directly derived in part from you know this tragedy of four children losing their lives 119

years ago and i think you know this is the way the world actually works like she of course could never have anticipated that her actions would be to me being on the chris voss show but that is part of the story, right? Wow. That's kind of dark. She pulled that off just to get you on the show, man. There's easier ways to get on the show. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, the publicist was very pleased, I'm sure, but it's... No, I mean, but this is the way the world works. I think that we pretend otherwise. We have like sort of neat categories for how we imagine our lives unfolding with these building blocks of really big decisions. And actually, you know, we're, I had nothing to do with this, but it's, it's certainly central to the story of my existence. So I think, you know, this is the stuff where my,

this part of my upbringing then, you know, leads to an awareness of this and it starts to sort of affect my thinking because I start to feel a little bit like an accident of history that makes you start to think a little bit differently about the world and so on. And this is what the book derives from. There you go. Now, what are the oppositions that scientists or people that think about this stuff? What does the opposition hold and why do they discount or oppose or argue against the chaos theory? Yeah, that's a great question. So the way I like to describe this is there's two competing ideas in science, particularly in the field of evolution,

between what's called contingency and convergence. And contingency is very easy to understand. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is a contingent event because if that asteroid had been one second delayed, then humans probably wouldn't exist, right? It wiped out the dinosaurs is a contingent event because if that asteroid had been one second delayed then humans probably wouldn't exist right it wiped out the dinosaurs in just the right way and then mammals rise and humans emerge and so on so anything's a little bit different there the whole world is completely different convergence is this idea that like things just sort of work out and there's order in the world so one of my favorite facts from science is that if you were to take an octopus's eye and

you put it next to a human's eye, they're actually almost the same. And that's because like evolution just solved the problem of vision twice the same way, because it just works like we can see, right? And so can the octopus. So the idea of this is, okay, yeah, chaos theory may divert things and so on. But you ultimately get to the same place in the end the same way that the octopus and the human ended up with the same eye so it's like this these two competing concepts about order and disorder right like the asteroid is that like you change this one thing and the whole world ends up different and that's more aligned with sort of chaos theory and the convergence people are more like yeah okay but like ultimately there is some order you know, if you make an eye made out of plastic, it's never going to work. You won't be able to see anything.

So like it's that, that possibility is just ruled out. So, you know, there's debate about this and the degree to which these things actually matter. I think they matter a lot, but I think that there is some disagreement about the, you know, how much chaos theory can explain the trajectory of our existence. There you go. I would, a good example be like, say I'm driving down the road and I'm having a bad morning. Cause I don't know, my coffee maker didn't work. So I'm kind of in a bad mood.

Somebody cuts me off in traffic. I honk at them, flip them off. And I don't know, maybe I cut them off or, you know, whatever it is. So I,

I passed down my shitty sort of little mood. Cause my coffee maker won't work. Well, that person gets really angry. They go to, I don't know know wherever they go to they they end up picking a fight with somebody and somebody gets shot or maybe they go to jail or something is that is that a that like a simplistic sort of example of maybe flowing chaos theory yeah no i mean that definitely is one i mean the way i describe this i talk about this idea in the book called the sneeze button effect and it's sort of

like you know you imagine that you wake up and you feel tired. So you hit the snooze button and then your life rewinds five seconds and you don't hit the snooze button. And the question is what, what differs, right? Does your life take on a different trajectory? Well, if you're delayed by five minutes, you know, you will meet different people that day and that will affect your trajectory in some ways. Right now, the thing, the thing that I think is obvious about this, where people, you know, go from being sort of skeptical to being like, okay, yes, I accept this, is when you think about the moment of conception for a baby, right? So the second, I'm not going to get too graphic here, but the second that a baby is conceived,

if you change a millisecond of that moment, a different human gets born, right? Now, if that makes sense, then it also makes sense that if you took a sip of coffee that day, or didn't, you've made a different human, right? Now, that is true for cause and effect throughout everything we do. I think this is the point that I'm trying to make is like, it's to get to the point where you conceive the baby at exactly that instant, everything about your life had to be as it was. So if you hit the snooze button once, you're going to have a different kid. And I think the reason that we don't think about this

is because it's bewildering. So we just pretend like things get washed out. I don't think they get washed out. I think that we are constantly changing our lives and every word we use, every conversation we have slightly changes the trajectory we have through our existence. We're just completely blind to it because we can't see the alternative. So this is know, this is the kind of stuff where I think

when I talk about the conception thing, people are like, oh yeah, that's obviously true because it's going to be a slightly different, you know, a slightly different moment and a slightly different baby. And a different person being born is going to change the world in some way, sometimes big, sometimes small, but it's not unimportant. And this is where I think it blows my mind to think this way, but I also think it's just logically true. So I would tend to agree with you. I, I, you know, there, there are times where I've been like, Hey, I'm going to go to the store. I'm going to go do something in the car. And I'll be like, I don't want to go right now and put it off five minutes or you put it off. And then you, you, you, you drive, you take the drive and you miss a car

accident by by a millisecond so maybe you miss it by a few minutes and you're like what if i had been here a few minutes ago i left a few minutes earlier would i have been in the wrong place at the wrong time in fact that's a lot of people say so you you were in the wrong place at the wrong time well maybe you weren't in the wrong place the wrong time you were just at that moment and there's not really a destiny to it do does does that sort of play into it you know i'm an atheist there are people that believe that there's a god in the sky and he's got like a plan or something and if you've seen things i'm not sure what kind of plan that is or he's smoking crack but jokes aside you you know they they believe that there's somebody there's a hidden hand that's moving everything and we all know it's the illuminati really

and aliens but and so when things happen people try to attribute it to some sort of paternal patriarchal sort of mastermind in the sky who's you know know, like, I'll give you an example. I remember the horror of the Southern Baptist Church that was shot up by that racist young man years ago, and he stalked and killed those parishioners, and he let one woman live so that she could glorify and tell his story in a sick way and the woman came out and was telling everybody that god chose her as the one to live and you know thank god you know he he wanted he had a plan for me i think is what she said and i'm like it's pretty sick and twisted like god just said fuck you to the other people so do you find that sometimes people mix there's some sort of purpose in life or maybe that's the delusion that we mix some sort of well somebody

has a somebody has a plan somewhere and we just have to live it sort of thing with yeah so you've hit the nail on the head i think with some of these ideas because there's there's there's this mantra like everything happens for a reason which is stitched on pillows and stuff. But like, you know, a lot of people believe this only when negative things happen. And there's a ton of psychology research that validates this, right? So like when people win the lottery, they're like totally happy being like, yeah, it was just totally random. I just got lucky. But when bad things happen, like the human mind is allergic to randomness. It's impossible for us to cope with this.

It's very, very difficult for many people to deal with it. Now, I think the thing that's interesting about this, and this is where, you know, I'm also not a believer, right? But one of the things I find really interesting is like when you look at the scientific evolution of human beings, one of my favorite studies, this came out like a year or two ago, was the scientists doing DNA analysis have evaluated that like the reason why humans or why mammals in general give live births, like why we don't lay eggs is because this creature that was a little bit like a shrew a hundred million years ago got infected by a mutated retrovirus and it created placenta, right? Now, the reason I'm telling you this is because this is,

if this did not happen, it's likely that mammals would not exist. Like all of human history is derived from this one shrew. Now the flip side of this is, okay, if happen it's likely that mammals would not exist like all of human history is derived from this one true now the flip side of this is okay if you are a believer this this is where i sort of you know i'm somewhat skeptical as i'm like if you are a believer would you say that god decided that the way to make a human was through the shrew being infected by the retrovirus now it's possible right there's a there an explanation there, but it is seemingly random to me. It's like pretty arbitrary. I thought it was the apple in the tree. This is where, I mean, you'd have to throw out all the science, right? I mean, this is the, but yeah, I mean, but this is the question, right? I think there is a great mystery. I'm

not trying to be facetious because I'm not someone who judges people who have different viewpoints on this than me, but there is a great mystery. I mean, scientists have a sense of the Big Bang and so on, but there's evidence coming out that is challenging various parts of cosmology and so on. And I think we don't know. I think there's a lot of stuff we don't know. What I would say, though, is that regardless of whether there's some sort of grand cause to these things. I think the effects of small changes are profound sometimes. And that provides a challenge to our worldview, because most of us have this sort of mythology of, you know, the American dream, for example, it's like, you know, oh, if you just do

these three things, then you'll be rich, and you'll be happy. And it's no, like, that's not the way the world is. So I think there's this sort of like myth of modern Western modernity, which I, you know, is around this idea of oh you can control everything you're the main character everything that you want to do is up to you and then like you actually peer at reality and you're like there's a lot of stuff you have absolutely no control over and so the mantra i have in fluke is i say we control nothing but we influence everything and that's the sort of idea of this of the book in a way there you go that's why people can say well i'm going to manifest stuff and sometimes they do sometimes they don't i mean i think it was george carlin said prayer

works 50 of the time uh the you know i mean there's an intentionality there that you you focus on if you want more money and you go hey god can we get some more money you probably tend to focus the brain the reticular acupuncture system the brain will focus on what you'd ask it to so it'll be like hey let's let's figure out some, maybe some more money. And I think you kind of touched on my question I had in the can for why do we fear it? Why do we have issues with it? You know, you mentioned that, you know, we kind of hope to feel like we have some sort of balance in our life. I mean, going through life, feeling like you're constantly whipped by the winds of the universe.

Probably doesn't sound like a fun place to be. And at least I suppose we have some sort of ego base where we kind of feel like we're in control of shit for a certain degree. Yeah. So there's, there's two things I would say that the first is that evolution has made our brains pattern detection obsessed. So there's,

there's, there's a survival advantage that has encoded into our brains, a over eager pattern detection obsessed. So there's a survival advantage that has encoded into our brains a over eager pattern detection process, by which the idea of randomness is just something we're not adapted to. Because, you know, the easy way of understanding this is if there is a rustling in the grass, and you think, oh, that's probably random, and it turns out to be a saber tooth tiger, you die. But if there's a rustling in the grass and it is a saber-toothed tiger and you run away, then it's better to have the false positive as a risk, right? So it's better to over-detect patterns

than to under-detect them for survival. But that has created an evolutionary holdover where now when there is genuine randomness, we inscribe causation and meaning to it, which is part of the reason why conspiracy theories exist. Because sometimes random stuff happens and we would rather have a story right now and and sorry to cut you off there but i want to make a point but also that's why people have a hard time believing reality like the the horror of some events are so overwhelming yeah you almost have to

believe like 9-11 it was i mean it was horrifying and there's lots of other examples that people turn it into into conspiracy theories because they can't deal with the the horror or the the randomness of it maybe yeah no it's it's it's absolutely a coping mechanism and i think you know this is why i don't i don't want to criticize it too much as a coping mechanism because i think it's very it can be very comforting i you know, if something terrible happened to me where I got a cancer diagnosis, for example, it's really difficult to just think, okay, my cells just randomly ended up producing cancer. That's, you know, it's not comforting. It's comforting to think there's a reason this happened to me. So, you know, I think there's stuff like that where

it is, it is potentially a useful mechanism to make sense of things, but it's not, I don't think it's strictly true. I think sometimes random things just happen even when they're bad yeah but you know the other thing that i would say about this is i think that we are conditioned and probably have some innate tendencies to want to have like a cosmic purpose yeah and i don't think i don't think i do i like i i think that if i am derived from like a shrew-like creature getting infected 100 million years ago and a mass murder in w Wisconsin 119 years ago and so on. And like the dinosaurs getting wiped out by a space rock that if it had been a second slower, I wouldn't exist. You know, like this chain of arbitrary things.

I think I'm basically an accident of the universe. And that makes me feel like, you know, maybe the best thing to do is just to try to like make other people's lives better and enjoy the ride. And you know, that, that's something that as I was writing the book, I really did change my worldview quite a lot. Cause I think I was very much, I sort of write about like the checklist existence and so on. And I was living this right. Sort of here are like the 10 things I have to do today in order to like have a good day. You know, I think now it's just sort of like, I don't know, maybe if I walk my dog and have a nice day and try to help someone. I don't get hit by a meteor today. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that I think I just realized like that was enough for me. And I think that's something where this is where I find it

really actually uplifting and helpful to accept the limits of control. Because when you have the mentality that you have to control everything, it's for a purpose. It's for fulfilling your ambition in life and so on. It's not, you know, humans are striving beings. Like we should strive to do things better. There's no question about that. And you shouldn't just give up on life or whatever. But I think like the metrics we use

sometimes are not about enjoyment or fulfillment. They're often about money and status and all these other things that like actually sometimes make us feel a little more empty. So, you know, without going all, you know, Eastern guru on you, I just think that there is, I think there's an aspect of this

where if you accept you're a cosmic accident swayed by a lot of things out of your control, it actually frees you up to focus on stuff that you actually enjoy more. I think it does too. I mean, being an atheist, being able to accept that, hey, I believe that there's something in this afterlife, and

I have the time and space between birth and death to do what I can, and enjoy what I can, and live what I can. And so that's what I'm going to do. And there's some people in a religion that believe that if you think that way, then, well, you're just going to go murder and kill and, you know, pillage

and everything else. But we do that on Fridays around here. But the rest of the time, you know,age and and everything else but we do that on fridays around here but the rest of the time you know we follow the golden rule and you know we certainly can't have a medieval society that doesn't work out well if everybody just does what they want so you know you know you play within the lines when it's not friday but this makes sense one of the examples used in your book was a couple going on vacation yes and 100000 people to die. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is the opening story of Fluke. And it's basically the story of this couple that goes to Kyoto, Japan in 1926 on a vacation. And they do some sightseeing, and they absolutely fall in love with the charm of the city.

You know, it's one of these experiences. You go on vacations. Oh, I've got a soft spot for this city now forever. Now, the reason this matters is because 19 years later, the husband in the couple ends up as America's Secretary of War. His name is Henry Stimson. And the target committee, which is in charge of deciding where to drop the atomic bomb, has picked Kyoto as its number one target.

So Stimson is like, no, I don't want this to happen because I went on vacation there. So he meets with President Truman twice. Holy shit. And he gets Kyoto taken off the list. So the first bomb goes to Hiroshima instead. And the second bomb is supposed to go to a place called Kokura. And when the bomber arrives at Kokura, Boxcar, the second bomber, there's briefly a cloud that comes over Kokura and they can't see the target. So they'd get diverted to the secondary target which is nagasaki so you know when you think about these things like we always have these ideas that like these there's a neat and tidy story that everything can fit into but the reality was a 19 year old vacation on a cloud is why these two cities were incinerated rather than

two other cities and there's a saying even in modern japan today called kokura's luck this is the city that avoided being destroyed by a cloud and it refers to when you unknowingly escape disaster so you're told because like for a very long time kokura did not know about this right it was only when they declassified the documents that they realized that they were one cloud away from the entire city being destroyed that is that's making my hair stand on end but And you think of the lives of all those people that have come since then, kind of like your story of the murder of the family, all the lives, all the children, all the stuff that branches out from that. I'll go one up on that because I have this story actually in Fluke.

I was telling you about contingency and convergence, right, this idea before. There's a very famous scientist named Motukamura who was instrumental in coming up with some ideas that have reshaped evolutionary theory. And in 1945, he tried to avoid getting conscripted into the Japanese army. So he entered the University of Kyoto. And this guy who is like one of the main drivers

of sort of the randomness and evolution research would have been incinerated if these people had not gone on vacation 19 years earlier, because he was right near where they were going to drop the bomb. And so, you know, there's all these things we couldn't possibly imagine it. The guy who was, I think his last name is Fujitsu. He was one of the guys who was one of the main weather researchers who had breakthroughs in understanding storms. And that's what the F in the F1, F2, F3, F4, F5 tornado scale is named after. He was also in Kyoto. So, you know, it's like one of these things where you just sort of think that there's aspects of this where we just couldn't possibly imagine what would happen. And this is where when I was talking to a friend of mine, there was a historian i was talking to when i was writing the book and he was like yeah okay but if they drop the bomb on kyoto or hiroshima or kokura or nagasaki like the u.s was still going to win the war right

and i'm like yeah but do you not think that the world would be a little bit different if 200,000 different people had died it's like yeah i think it would so yeah that that's the way where i think we impose we impose categories and outcomes that i think are sort of irrational because there's a binary. Either you win the war or don't, but the way you win the war affects history. And I think that's something we're often oblivious to. There you go. Jesus, I hit the snooze button this morning when I woke up. I normally don't, but I just wanted more time.

And wow, it makes me wonder. It's almost like a gambling clock. Should I hit it three times and I'll survive today? Or maybe if I hit it twice, I'll get hit by a bus. Holy shit. I think it's bewildering, but the sort of takeaway from it isn't that different from how you live your life anyway, other than feeling empowered, feeling like things are important. But you can't control it, right?

The one thing that I will say though, that I didn't mention previously that I think is a cool idea that's related to chaos theory is like, and this helps for people who are feeling down, for example, right? Everything good in my life has been directly caused

by the worst moments in my life because they couldn't coexist without each other, right? There's an unbroken chain of causes and events. And obviously that is true because a mass murder is what produced my joy. So like there's an unbroken chain of causes and events and obviously that is true because a mass murder is what produced my joy so like there's a there's an unbroken chain of cause and effect up to that point i find that really comforting so like when i have a terrible time or something awful i'm dealing with i'm like yeah okay but like everything good in my life that is in the future is going to

be derived from this moment now that's sort of i think that's a nice idea anyway there you go i mean that's the way to frame it and think about it because i mean yeah if you if you think about i was kind of joking around with maybe i should hit the suze button again so i survived today you could go mad with that sort of thing and you know live your life enjoy your life you know uh every day above ground is a good is a good day i remember i was complaining with i was complaining when i hit 50 on facebook i was like oh god i hit my birthday today i hit 50 pose me and i was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek about it as i am but you know somebody wrote me and they said you know chris you should probably serious yourself up a little bit there's a lot of people probably millions of people that wanted to be 50 that never made it to 50.

So maybe you should just kind of have some gratitude. And, man, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm like, I should probably shut the hell up. Yeah, I see their point. I mean, I think it is something where the other thing that I think about this stuff is our world is just like really weird, right? Like what we were talking about before, like the shrew gets infected and then mammals get, you know, like we just live in this really weird world. And I think it's sort of just sort of funny.

Like, you know, it's just sort of, it's just so bizarre. And all you can really do is just sort of make the most of what you get. And I think that's basically, you know, it's really very banal advice, but I think it's also just true. Like there's nothing else that you can do. So you might as well enjoy it. And we're all here today because the mom had a headache but dad gave her back rub and yeah somehow he worked that whole thing out i mean i i saw a joke this year i think it was on mother's day and like really we should be celebrating fathers because

if if dad hadn't hadn't pushed the envelope we probably wouldn't be here anyway. But, you know, I grew up in a cult, and the cult's teaching was that God chose each of us to come to this planet the times we were supposed to come to this planet, which totally defies, you know, what we talked about with, you know, maybe Dad just gave a good back rub that night. And, you know, it defies science and everything else. I mean, when you think about how many, I mean, I don't know how many millions of sperm are going at the egg when that happens. And stuff, I mean, just the odds or just the odds of whatever. I just wish there was a take back sometimes where you could be like, can we return this one? I'm just kidding. That's my fourth child. So anyway, any further thoughts that we might have missed or you want to tease out to people on the book as we go no you know i mean i think i think there's a

lot of you know historic events where this is like really invisible but actually is very important and the kyoto story is just one of them they're throughout the book the the other thing that i think is is worth highlighting is that because the world is so uncertain and so complex and so weird and bothering to navigate one of the lessons in that is experimentation is a really smart idea right i think one of the things that happens is if you have this sense of control and you have the sense of certainty then you should optimize the absolute limit and efficiency is your like major driver right because like you already know exactly what you want and like you just might as well go get it if you accept uncertainty and a lack of control and so on, then you should try new things more.

You should experiment more. And this is the kind of stuff like evolution also has a lesson to teach us here, because all of the amazing life forms and problem-solving ways that evolution has produced surviving creatures throughout history has come from experimentation. So try these things. oh, it worked. Oh, we made an eye. That's amazing. Now the thing can see and it's going to survive more. So, you know, my attitude towards this is a lot of modern society and a lot of what we're told is just optimize everything.

It's like the life hack existence. Everything has to be exactly this way, right? And I think if you dial that down a little bit and dial up the experimentation, I think it's actually a much smarter way to navigate the uncertainty of life and an ever-changing society. There you go. Kind of like what was in Emerson, 10,000 attempts to create the light bulb sort of thing and that sort of deal.

Yeah. Well, and also, I mean, when it comes to invention, I mean, a lot of the best inventions that have ever been produced were produced when the person stopped trying to invent. The Wright brothers came up with their idea for the plane when they were having a picnic and they saw some buzzards. And Galileo came up with the idea of a clock pendulum when he was sitting in a cathedral and saw a swinging chandelier. So it's often this stuff where I think we try to force

things and control things and sometimes letting go. There's a section, the acknowledgement section of fluke has a little ode to my dog and it's not really that it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek but it's also like true because a lot of my most creative ideas in writing came when i walked him when i was like okay i can't write today i don't have any good ideas and i just step away from the computer go out for a walk and then you know that's when the idea comes to me so i think i think relinquishing control is not the worst thing in the world basically yeah because you really don't have it anyway right for the most i mean it's just an acceptance of the way the world is really i'd rather open reality than in some sort of fantasy mode where where you know

i have some sort of weird thing that actually probably limits my ability to operate in reality, I suppose. Well, I think, you know, the thing that really struck me over the head, you know, I'm a political scientist by trade. And one of the places I do research is Madagascar. It's one of the poorest countries in the world. And one of the things, you know, like 40% of the island has electricity. The average person's living on like less than $2 a day. When I go there, I sort of think to myself, like, what if I had been born here? Right. I don't care how talented I could be. I don't care, you know, how hardworking I could be. Like I would still be in rural Madagascar, right? Like just, it's a, it's a place that's like, so the thing is we always tell ourselves, oh, we deserve our success.

I'm like, I did not choose when I was born. I did not choose where I was born. I did not choose who were my parents. I didn't, I didn't choose my brain. I didn't choose anything. And yeah, okay, within those constraints, I've tried to make the most of my life. But those are some pretty big constraints. And I had nothing to do with them. So it's a sort of strange thing to think that way. You see this in the hustle culture and stuff like that, where you too could be a billionaire if you just maybe do these five things and i think i've i think i heard elon musk say it once but i think i think somebody said you maybe it was the amazon guy but you the luck is so much a part of it and probably the chaos theory of it you know the right being at the right place the right time in the moment i can think of

times in my life where sometimes the biggest seminal changes and redirections of my life that that enrich my life and maybe maybe the darkest moments too as you mentioned earlier have been the biggest changes in my life that have either made it actually made it better the dark times you know you you learn something from them and you make something better of it yeah you know so i actually have a there's a brief section fluke where i talk about this this relationship between luck and wealth and there's an amazing study that was done by these economists and physicists working together where they make this sort of fake world and they have you know a distribution of talent and so on which is like a standard distribution in other words it's sort of like a bell curve so the biggest group of talent is around the average. And there's a really small group of

extremely talented people and a really small group of extremely untalented people. And then into this model, they inject luck, right? Now, luck is like a lightning strike. It just hits wherever. And what they found was that every time they ran the simulation, the richest person in the model was almost always from right around the middle. And that's because there's the most people there. So the lightning is going to hit in the middle. It's not going to hit the extremes, right? Because there's so few people at the extremes. So every time they reran these simulations, it's always like the really, really talented people and the really untalented people. Yeah, there was a correlation a bit. But like the richest person in the simulation was the

one who was like moderately talented, but got lucky twice. And I think this is, I think it's very firm logic that you're going to have luck hit most often around someone who's of medium talent, just because, you know, out of 8 billion people, there's about six and a half billion people who are of medium talent, you know? So it's like, that's, I think this is something where when we infer backwards, we always think, oh, they must have been a genius. And it's, well, there are a lot of people who had really smart ideas that didn't get rich. And there's a lot of really stupid people who did get rich. So you can't over-infer based on some accidental outcomes that you should follow the pathway of the rich person. There you go. I remember reading one of my first big books I read on politics was Schlesinger's book, Schlesinger's book, 1000 Days on Kennedy. And when you read

how Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then you saw how well Nixon handled things, you have to wonder, you know, I used to sit as a kid and I'd be like, Jesus Christ, what if Nixon had won the election? What if the Kennedys had the mob stuff all the ballot boxes? I'm just kidding, people. It's a theory. When Nixon brought us to the brink of the end, there were certain aspects of John F. Kennedy's mind that kept that from turning into oblivion and us exiting from the race. If you read the details of it, we came down to the wire.

So, you know, yeah, the course of human history, the course of governments and everything else, it's really interesting to think about. There's something else I had, but it's lost now. Anyway, give us your final pitch out to people who are at the book and on the show and dot coms where they should go to get it. Yeah, so the book Fluke is available anywhere you buy books. Support your local bookshop if you can. And my newsletter is called The Garden of Forking Paths. I write about

various topics related to Fluke on there all the time. So check that out. And if you're more politically minded, my Twitter is at Brian Kloss, but I mostly tweet about politics. So if you don't like politics, don't follow me on Twitter. I saw some of your prior books that should be interesting coming with the coming election yes indeed yeah so there you go i'll be reading those i just do i have a savior democracy joke but oh i remember the joke i had the joke i had was that you know when you look at elon musk and how lucky he is at forming so many corporations and everything else you know it's it stacks and people like why does it stack but that lightning thing kind of explains it. It also probably explains why Nick Cannon somehow seems to keep breaking condoms

with 15 kids. So I don't know what that's about. Well, Elon Musk applied for a job at Netscape and got rejected, and the world might be a very different place if he'd gotten hired. Yeah, he got fired from PayPal, too. Yeah, I did, yeah. There you go. Anyway, thank you very much, Brian, for coming to the show.

This has been really insightful. I had a great great time and i loved your jokes as well so thanks chris i appreciate it thank you very much sir folks order the book wherever fine books are sold fluke chance chaos and why everything we do matters january 23rd 2024 order it while you can i picked up the audiobook on pre-sale So give it out to your friends and neighbors, especially the crazy ones, and maybe they'll understand the world a little bit better. Or maybe they'll just think they'll come up with something more conspiracy.

Anyway, thanks so much for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chatschristmas, LinkedIn.com, 4chatschristmas, Christmas, one of the TikTok and all those places. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And I should have asked out.