The One You Feed - Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

In this episode, Brian Klaas explains the concept of whether things are a fluke or fate, and explores how embracing uncertainty can lead to a living a fuller life. Brian makes the case that randomness and chaos might be exactly what makes our lives matter so much, and how we tend to worship at the “Altar of Progress in the Church of Control.” We make plans, set goals, and these are good things, but we only have so much control. And Brian teaches that accepting this can be a relief, because the point isn’t to control everything, but to influence what we can. Key Takeaways: The concept of happiness derived from intrinsic values rather than material possessions and social status. The importance of thoughts and actions in shaping our lives and experiences. Exploration of chaos theory and the unpredictability of life. The idea that we control nothing but influence everything, emphasizing the ripple effects of our actions. Personal stories illustrating how random events can profoundly impact lives. The empowering nature of recognizing the influence of our choices. The tension between control and acceptance of life’s randomness. The critique of societal values that prioritize material success over personal fulfillment and relationships. Encouragement to embrace individual uniqueness and create for personal expression rather than external validation. If you enjoyed this conversation with Brian Klaas, check out these other episodes: What If You’re Wrong? How Uncertainty Makes Us More Human with William Egginton How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag Unsafe Thinking with Jonah Sachs For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, Eric here with some exciting news. I've been writing a book and it's about to be out in the world in April of 2026. The working title is How a Little Becomes a Lot and it's all about how small consistent actions, the kind that we talk about all the time on this show, can lead to real meaningful change. Right now the book is in the editing process and there's still some shaping to do, which is where you come in. I'd love your input on what to focus on, how to talk about the book, even what it should be called. If you've got a few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful to hear them. Just head to OneUFeed.net slash book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways and a behind the scenes look at what it actually takes to make a book. Editing

marathons, title debates, existential spirals, and me questioning all of my life choices at 2am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's OneYouF feed dotnet slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me, truly. I often have written about ideas around what I call the false gospel of stuff and status, where the road to happiness is paved with more stuff and higher status. I have not found that to be true. I find personally that there are things that I care about in the world that are intrinsically valuable to me that other people might not find value in whatsoever, and chasing those things has made me much happier. Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I've always hated the phrase, everything happens for a reason. It's tidy, it's

comforting, and to me it feels completely out of step with the messy, painful, and often absurd reality of life. But after talking with today's guest, Brian Klaas, I started to realize something. Just because life isn't following a script doesn't mean it's meaningless. In fact, his new book, Fluke, makes the case that randomness and chaos might be exactly what make our lives matter so much. We get into how we all continue to worship at the altar of progress in the Church of Control. We make plans, set goals, and these are good things, but we only have so much control. And Brian teaches that accepting this can be a relief,

because the point isn't to control everything, but to influence what we can. Brian also shares some wild stories, like how a cloud saved one city from an atomic bomb, and tells another that hit me especially hard, how a family tragedy led directly to his birth. Without that fluke, he wouldn't be here and neither would this episode. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed.

It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate Topher Grace stops by The Speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time. But it was like such a perfect golden time. Listen to Dose Amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and my latest interview is with Michelle Obama. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. and representing the country and the world. I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The biggest stars in country music will be taking the stage at our 2025 iHeart Country Festival. Presented by Capital One.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brooks and Dunn, Thomas Rhett. Everybody got a story to tell. Rascal Flatts. Here's a how it ends. Cole Swindell. Sam Hunt.

Megan Moroney. Bailey Zimmerman. Nate Smith. Special guest, Dasher. High Heart Country Festival. Stream only on Hulu. Saturday, May 3rd. Starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 Pacific.

Hi Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to you. Your book is called Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent

who's talking with their grandchild, and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say well which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life

and in the work that you do. Yeah, so I think the bad wolf is a response to a perceived lack of control. And I think a lot of the worst impulses that humans have are lashing out when you feel afraid of what you don't know is going to happen next to your life or you fear those consequences and therefore lash out to try to assert control and a lot of what I'm arguing is that you have to change

your worldview to accept that lack of control to embrace the influence you have over the world and that gets you closer to being the good wolf that you want to be. All right there's no way for us not to just dive into the deep end of the pool, I think, with this material. So let's just go there. You've got a phrase in the book, we control nothing but influence everything. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so it's riffing off a statement from the social scientist Scott Page. And what I think is the key takeaway here is that the world is an incredibly complex, uncontrollable entity, right?

There's 8 billion interacting people and all of those people influence our lives in small ways or in big ways, right? Some more than others. But it's constantly changing. And the ability of any one person to control the world is minuscule. We simply don't have that ability. And I think a lot of the misery that people have in modern life is that they keep trying to assert control over an uncontrollable world. And what I'm arguing is I'm taking the scientific concept

of chaos theory, which will dive I'm sure into more details, but it's taking that notion of chaos theory and saying that even in a world where you don't have control, small changes can have big effects, which means that your influence over the future of the universe and the future of your life is profound. And so it's changing the framework from one of control to one of influence. And the influence framework is both correct, and also I think much more liberating and uplifting for us to navigate. Wonderful. All right, we're going to go into that more because I think a lot about these ideas of control and influence and what's

out of our control. But I first want to start with a story maybe you could tell us about a mass murder that happened in Minnesota, I believe some time ago. Yeah, so this is a story it's actually from Wisconsin next door to Minnesota in 1905. And it's the story of a woman named Clara Maudeleine Jansen who has four children in a very short period of time, four young kids.

And by 1905, I think the oldest was five years old. And so she has a mental breakdown at some point, we don't know exactly what happened, but she snaps and decides in a moment of sort of tragic madness to take the lives of those four children herself and then to take her own life. And she was alone at the house, but her husband came home and discovered this horrific tragedy, probably the worst thing that a human being can experience seeing their entire family wiped out. And the reason that I talk about this and I mentioned it early

on in Fluke is because when I was 20 years old, my dad sat me down and told me this story about the man who came home who was my great-grandfather. And the woman who killed all of those kids and took her own life was his first wife. He remarried after the trauma subsided a bit about 10 years later to the woman that was my great grandmother. And so the first thing that I reacted to that story with was obviously shock, right? It's just an unbelievably bizarre and terrible thing to learn about your family. But then the second thing that really hits you over the head is that your existence is completely predicated on this story, that if those kids didn't die, I wouldn't exist because the lineage would be different and it would not have led to me, right?

And so, you know, this is the stuff where when you start to think about that, I think about how my existence is predicated on this horrible tragedy. But then I also say to everyone that I meet, right, that every conversation I have is also predicated on this mass tragedy, every podcast interview. People listening to this wouldn't listen to it if those kids hadn't died So it really affected my worldview about how the tiniest things in the distant past even Can really change the trajectory of our lives even when we're oblivious to them. It's tremendously disconcerting to see this, right? Let's stay with the stories for a minute because I think the stories illustrate this point better than any other

Why don't you tell us about Japan? Yeah, so this is a story from a little bit after the mass murder I talked about. This is from 1926 and 1926 there's an American couple that decides to go on a vacation and they end up in Kyoto, Japan and they fall in love with the city. It's one of the most charming cities in Japan and they sort of get a soft spot for it the way that many people do when they go on holiday somewhere. And, you know, this is the kind of banal story that is very, very commonplace in normal life. Except for 19 years after this vacation took place, the husband and the couple turned out to be America's Secretary of War at the tail end of World War II, a man named Henry Stimson. And so he ended up by happenstance being in a very consequential place when they were deciding where to drop the first atomic bomb.

And the target committee, which was a group of generals and scientists, picked Kyoto as their top location to destroy with the first atomic bomb at the tail end of World War II. And Stimson, largely because of this previous personal experience with his wife in 1926, twice met with President Truman and convinced him to take Kyoto off the bombing list. And so the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of Kyoto. And the second bomb was supposed to go to a place called Kokura, which many people have not heard of because it was not bombed. And the reason it was not bombed was simply out of luck, which happened because there was a brief bit of haze or cloud cover over the bombing site when the B-29 arrived. And so it diverted to the secondary target of Nagasaki. And so this is a story of, you know, an estimated 180 to 200,000 people dying

in two cities rather than a different two cities because of a vacation that happened 19 years earlier and a cloud that was just at the right place at the right time. And so, you know, when we think about why things happen, we never think about these tiny details. We think about the big explanations. And we don't think about certainly things that happened 19 years earlier. And the point that I try to make to people is that Henry Simpson had no idea he was changing the world. The people of Hiroshima had no idea that their fate hung into balance over this vacation destination.

But it did. And that's the way that that sort of everything we do matters aspect of chaos theory is tied to influence that every choice we make has ripple effects that we cannot foresee. So I think the takeaway here is your city's tourism board is really, really important, right? Like when people come to your city, they need to like it, right? I guess the flip side of that is if he really hated it, he probably would have loved to bomb the city. So again, this is a really disconcerting idea. You know, it's funny. So almost everyone has that reaction to it.

I've never had that reaction. Never, huh? I think the reason why I don't have that reaction is because I think that the lie of control is one that constantly makes us disappointed, right? This notion that we can just tame the world. Every single moment of our lives, we get evidence that we can't, right?

Things happen to us. And they're not always the things that we want to happen to us. Now, I think that the idea that every vacation choice you make, every conversation you have, every time you turn left rather than right is reshaping the future of the world in ways that are small or big and that you might not know, I think that's the most exciting and uplifting idea I've ever come across because it means that there is no throwaway moment to life. And so I swapped out when I was starting to do the research for this and starting to change my philosophy of life and researching the book, I started to swap out what I thought

was a really empty and constantly disappointing framework of understanding the world for one that is on the face of it really disconcerting because everything has influence right but also in my view really empowering and uplifting because there's not a moment that we can just say is meaningless Personally, I find that latter viewpoint Much much more empowering than than the sort of false gospel of control well, I am NOT a believer in the false gospel of control and this idea that every moment matters is empowering, except when it becomes overwhelming or frightening.

Because it's one thing to think every moment matters because I'm sort of shaping my destiny. And I can think about the fact that like today, if I go to the gym, it's probably more likely I'll go to the gym tomorrow, which makes it probably more likely that I'll be healthy in 10 years. And I'm using the word probably here on all of these things. And so that my actions, I'm directing them in a certain direction with the belief they're going to go a certain way versus the idea that I have no idea what filling up my water bottle at home instead instead of here at the studio today, is going like, what impact is that going to have on the world? And I think there are people

who are anxious already who are thinking that everything they do is so important. And I think what you're saying is, just let all that go. So how does somebody who still wants to influence the world in a positive way change their life in a positive way? How do we work with these ideas of influence and control? This is like a nine part question. The last thing I'll say is when we think about controlling nothing, the obvious question is, did I not control what shirt I put on today? So hand it over to you. Yeah, so you know I think there's a few things that I would say to that. The first is that yes it is overwhelming if you think about every choice and you know it could be paralyzing. The idea that any action you make is going

to have an effect on reshaping your life, which I think is true. Yes. But if you have never come across that idea before it can be very paralyzing. So there's a few things that I try to tell people. The first one is that you have to still think probabilistically. So what I mean by that is, it is possible that if I went out and planted a tree tomorrow, that in a hundred years, a child could climb that tree and fall out of it and die. And I would have been part of that story, right? Now, that does not mean I shouldn't plant the tree because most of the time planting trees is good. So it's the

same thing. Like I could step into traffic and it could be an epiphany for me where I have a near death experience that reshapes my life, but I'm not going to do that because most of the time you die, right? So I still make choices in a way that is based on what mostly happens. but I also recognize that there is something liberating about accepting the limits of my control. So for me personally, I have become less anxious over time, especially since writing this book. I had not like anxiety in a clinical sense, but sometimes I worried about stuff a little bit more.

I sweated the details a little bit more. And the way I feel now is I just sort of feel like there's things that I can influence more directly, things that I can't influence more directly. And you have to just sort of accept some of that limit and enjoy the ride. And that's sort of the ethos of my life in a way is I might get cancer tomorrow. I really hope I don't. But you sort of have to embrace that sense of enjoying the ride that you do have because you only have one, right?

It's something that you have to really grapple with and I think some people I talked to really struggle with these concepts and they'd like to sort of just pretend that you have certain aspects of life that are noise. But you know, the interconnected nature of our lives is also really, really important. And even when you say the control aspects, so yes, you control what shirt you wear, you don't control how somebody responds to it, right? And like, how many times do relationships start because someone notices an item of clothing and then they say something nice to you and then you either have a friendship or they becomes your partner. I mean, like all of these things where if you'd worn a different shirt, you

know, this never happens. And so even in those details, yes, we control the little things where we can make choices and have agency and so on. But our lives are, you know, a symphony of 8 billion people. And some of them are much more important players in that orchestra, right? Like, it's clearly the case that the people around you in closer proximity matter more. But on the other hand, all of us were affected by a pandemic that started by one person getting sick in China, right? So, you know, that aspect of sort of the short term influence being more close to you, more visible, more seeming like the illusion of control. And then all of a sudden, our lives are upended by something that happens thousands of miles away with

someone we'll never meet on a microscopic level of a virus. That aspect of life is the push and pull where we get the glimpses of how little control I think we actually have. A couple thoughts on that. One is I often think of this stuff in terms of two games. One is the lottery. Like whether I get cancer between now and the end of my life is to some degree a lottery by trying to do all the things that we know that we think make you less

likely to get cancer to me is like just buying more lottery tickets. The other game that I like to think about is backgammon. Backgammon is an interesting game because there is a certain amount of skill but there's also a tremendous amount of luck like the dice roll and if somebody rolls all good things they will beat someone who's far more skilled than them in backgammon, because they just will. And I think that is a model for me that always makes sense. Like, there's an element of this that I can do something about, and I should do that. I love your idea of thinking and probability. And there's so much that I can't control. And it brings to truth more clearly the old Hindu idea of

Varjuna and Krishna where you're just encouraged to do your best and let go of the results because you just don't control those. Yeah, you know, the two things that come to mind, I think your analogies are excellent in terms of these different games, but the two things that come to mind to this, the first one is when I think about the most important things that have affected the trajectory of my life in the grand scheme of it, right? And I think I controlled exactly zero of them. So I think this is what time period I was born in. My life would be much shorter if I was born a hundred thousand years ago, right? Much worse also if I was born 200 years ago. Also who my parents were and

you have issues of how my brain works, right? If I don't have a mental illness or anything like that, that would constrain me. And also where I was born. So one of the places that I do some research in, for example, is Madagascar, where the average person lives on less than $500 a year. And I think to myself, if I was born in that society, I don't care how skilled I am, I don't care how great my parents are, I am in a rough position. I'm not going to be on this podcast, right? I'm still going to be in rural Madagascar, probably without electricity. So the things that I think have most affected my life trajectory, none of them were things

that I had any influence over. So that humbles us in a way that I think gives you the freedom to take less credit for your success but also less blame for your failure. And to me, that's a much healthier way to live, right? I haven't really sort of fleshed this out. I didn't talk about this in Fluk, but the more I've thought about the ideas in the book, the more I think that we live in the most luck-prone era in all of history. And the reason I say that is because if you take somebody who lives in complete isolation, right, so a hermit in the woods, luck has way less of an influence on their life because they're completely independent from the rest of society, right? Like maybe there's some luck with what foraging they get up to or whatever. But like basically

other people have a much lower influence on that person. If you take the modern world in which it's the most interconnected system that's ever existed, where economics, politics, public health, all these things are affected by these massive numbers of people, and we have limited control over them, I think our lives are swayed by things we don't control more now than ever before, precisely because of that interconnection, right? And the logical conclusion of that is that we have less control over things that we did in the past, but more influence because the ripple effects of our lives

are much greater than that hermit. The hermit might still have some influence, but it's going to be probably smaller and probably less immediate if they truly are alone. Whereas you can really make an impact on the world as a single person today because the ripple effects can go global very, very quickly. I mean, whether it's a social media post, a pandemic, or just, you know, starting a movement, whatever it is,

all these things are possible in ways that simply were not possible even 500 or 50 years ago. And so I think that the analogies you're using, they've dialed up the luck scale, which comes with the influence factor. It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast, Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70s Show castmate Topher Grace stops by the Speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time.

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And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You've got some great lines in the book, like motivational posters tell you that if you set your mind to it, you can change the world. I've got some good news for you. You already have congratulations or you matter. That's not self help advice. It's scientific truth. right? These ideas that everything happens. And I talk about this a fair amount, that like, we do a lot of things, I think, that put good out into the world. And we never get to see it. Like, it ripples in ways that we just don't know.

And I tell this story about somebody who went through one of my programs, because I just love this little story. So this person heard a lesson I did on generosity. So they were at their local supermarket, they were in their normal line. There's a woman who is the checkout girl, she never smiles, she always seems unhappy. And this woman goes up to her and says, Hey, I always get near a line, because you just get everybody through it so much faster. And this woman just lights up like a Christmas tree. Right? And then she says, oh, well, would you tell my boss that?

And so this woman goes and tells her boss. And the boss is like, that's so great to hear. I've been trying to decide who's gonna be employee of the month. I'll do that. It gives her a bonus. Now the boss is happy, the woman's happy. You imagine her going home to her family.

All this stuff, these ripples that go, go, go, go, that example allows us to see the first couple of them. But so often we just don't see any of them, but they're there. Yeah, the two things, well, there's one of them is a story from the book. So there's an amazing story that I came across. And I was like, this just illustrates this so perfectly, where a man went out to sea off the coast of Greece, and he was swimming. And he got sucked out by a riptide. And so for 24 hours, he was missing. And the overall majority of times that people go missing in the ocean for 24 hours, the

outcome is very, very bad, right? And this guy, as he was about to drown, a soccer ball popped into view on the surface of the waves and he clung onto it. It's still an aeronet and he was able to use it to float and survive. And so already, this was one of these stories of like, wow, this amazing thing happened. The soccer ball arrived at just the right time. But as they were covering this on the Greek news, this woman was watching it. And I sort of like to imagine her dropping her coffee or whatever, you know, when she

sees this report. But the reason she was astonished by this is because she recognized the soccer ball and her kid had kicked it off a cliff 10 days earlier, 80 miles away. And they had thought absolutely nothing of this, because this happens every so often, you know, you lose a ball, it's fine. They went out and bought another one, but it turned out that on the waves,

it drifted at just the right moment and saved this guy's life, right? And so like, these are the kinds of things where when people see the story, often what the takeaway they take is what an amazing coincidence, right? My takeaway is that is how the world is working 100% of the time, you just don't know. And every so often you get these glimpses like this person did where it's just so obvious and it pulls back that illusion of control. The other very

flippant thing that I sometimes say is, can you name Albert Einstein's great grandmother? And everyone says, no, of course not. I say, well, she didn't realize she was very important, but she was. Because if she didn't exist, Albert Einstein doesn't exist, right? Right. So I think there's this aspect where every individual matters. They might not know that they matter in the short run, they might not know they matter in the long run. But if it's not you, it's someone else, and that changes the universe in some way, sometimes good and sometimes bad. But the idea of meaninglessness, which I think a lot of people feel in the 21st century, is in my view, scientifically nonsense. It's just not it's not true.

Yeah, you're coming at this from sort of the scientific angle. A lot of things that I bring in are coming from more of a spiritual tradition angle. And if you look at Buddhism and even Taoism, which predates Buddhism, this idea is just baked in, right? This idea of Thich Nhat Hanh called it inner being. And, you know, the classic story he tells is, you know, in this piece of paper I have here is also the sun and the rain and the clouds and the person who cut down the tree and the person who made the lunch of the person who cut down the tree. I mean, I could go on and on. I don't need to. But that all of that is right here. And to your point, that's the universe all the time. There's a line from someone who studies the Tao that I love, which is that basically life is a

consumatory relatedness, right? That's all it is. It's countless causes and conditions that we can't even begin to imagine that have come together to create this moment. And what you're pointing us at is that if you can let go into that, then you're part of sort of a sparkling, mysterious, amazing thing. It's funny because I think for a long time, and you know, without going too much in the weeds of the history of science, the Scientific Revolution had a very simple assessment of how things happen, right?

And it seemed like we could tame the world if we just got the right equation, sort of the Isaac Newton sort of idea. What I'm dabbling with is ideas of chaos theory in what are called complex systems, which actually are much more, I think, amenable to ideas that underpin a lot of the religions you're talking about in Eastern philosophy, right? And that's because the central idea in complex systems

is interconnectedness. It's that one change in one part of the system affects another part of the system, which is very much at home in a lot of Eastern philosophy. There are some, you know, more top-down Western ideas in religion, especially when you overlay it on individualistic culture like the United States has in spades, which give you this idea of what I call the illusion of control, that if you just

do things to sort of bludgeon the world the way you want it to be, then you will eventually create the outcome you want. And I think a lot of the philosophical ideas that underpin things like Taoism are talking about the interconnectedness of literally everything. I mean, one of the problems is that when you start saying these sorts of words in traditional scientific communities, you sound like, you know, sort of a mystical figure. I think what you're just trying to do is say, like, how do we apply these ideas in a context from my perspective as an academic, where we can test them or sort of theorize about them. But it's not a million miles away from the philosophical underpinnings of religions, certain religions. And so I think to me, it's also obvious, right? Like, I don't think it is possible to truly believe that we are individuals who have control over the world. That idea does not make sense to me when you scrutinize it for more than a second. Right? Yeah, so I'm very amenable to the ideas you're talking about. by a psychologist Paul Bloom, which was about another article by a psychologist Michael Inslicht.

And the basic idea was you could perform some of these studies in a laboratory, but that doesn't mean they translate in any way, shape or form out into the world itself. And it's not that doing some of these things in the laboratory is always a waste of time. That's not it, because I think science moves forward in two ways, right? It moves forward often by isolating something, reducing it down, figuring out how this little thing works. And that can be valuable. And it only becomes more useful when you realize how that thing fits into a bigger system that, as you're pointing out, is hopelessly complex.

One of the hallmarks of science is replicability, right? That if you do the same experiment twice, it will produce the same results. And I think the problem when you get into a complex system is that is not always true, right? If Henry Stimson went on vacation to Osaka, Japan, that would not necessarily lead to the deaths of a hundred000 people in one city versus another, if the timing had even been slightly different. If he was appointed the Secretary of War six months later, he would not have played this role, right? So you can't say that if we just replay this exact same sort of scenario, but we only change one or two things, that it will play out in the same way. The idea of chaos theory is that if anything is even a tiny bit different,

it can play a very, very big role. And so when I think about these concepts about how they fit in with science, the lab is not as interconnected, not as complex, it's deliberately designed to avoid all of those things that many people treat as noise. But actually I argue, noise often is the stuff that dictates outcomes, right? These tiny little details of a split second change or all of us have experienced this in our lives, I think, at some point where you have these moments where you sort of realize, ah, if I had just done that one thing, none of

this would have happened. And of course, the crucial point is not that you dwell on that specific decision, it's that you're aware that that is happening all the time, and you're just oblivious to it. Right? That's the much more profound idea that I think chaos theory tries to convey in a scientific literature, but actually it applies a lot to humanity as well. When you're talking, I just had an insider thought that I've never had. I doubt that it's new, new to the world. You've probably thought of it as you call yourself a disillusioned social scientist. If you try and replicate a psychological experiment, say three or four years later, the whole culture

and thought process of how people view psychology could be really different by then. And so there's so many things that have changed in the broader world and about how people view the world, that of course those things may come out differently. Yeah, and that is why it's important when they do replication studies in psychology, it's important to have large numbers of people and also to do them repeatedly. Because the most solid findings do stay the same, right? And there are some very solid findings that you can take 500 people in this place or that place, you do the same study, they have the same reaction, right? There's a lot of psychology literature and I would argue a lot of social science literature

where it's not done that way and it's relatively small numbers of people, relatively contingent on the context and then we conclude that it is a big finding. And so the reason I'm a disillusioned social scientist is because I think there are some of these findings we have which if you did repeat them and you did take into account context you might find something different. And so it's not to say that we shouldn't do the research, it's just to say that you have to be so careful about context and all those other parameters that might change. Yeah, it's interesting as a person who has done a lot of one-on-one coaching with people and run programs, part of my job is to help people make the changes in their lives they

want to make. And early on in that, I thought, oh, okay, I'll just teach them X, Y, Z, have them do A, B, and C, and they're on their way. And I quickly realized like, okay, that clearly doesn't work. Because people are so different. You just can't apply the same thing to everybody and think it's going to come out the same way. And that humility is important to recognize that there are things we can say probabilistically,

going to give you a better chance at this or that, but everybody's different. And I've often said that one of the mysteries that haunts me, I'm a recovering heroin addict, is why some of us get sober and others don't. And I look for a reason or reasons. And after I read your book, part of me just relaxed a little bit and went, maybe there's not. I mean, it's not to say that there aren't any reasons or there aren't contributing factors, but that in an individual case, there just may be no answer. Like you just

never know. It's not like if I got to talk to God, he would be like, Oh, it's because X, Y, Z, A, right? You'd have to unravel the entire universe. Yeah. You know, for me, that's one of those areas where, again, I find it quite liberating, because I think that sometimes people who have bad things happen to them, sometimes it is comforting to try to come up with a reason. But other times there is no reason. And the search for it is crippling, because it's just not going to exist, right? So I'll tell the short version of the story. But basically, one of the people who I had the pleasure of meeting after I published the book and wrote about him a little bit

was a man who went to New York City for a conference and he was delayed in his flight and his coworker was supposed to meet him for dinner and they ended up meeting for breakfast the next morning because he had gotten in so late. And she provided him with a gift that was a Monet tie. So, it's a tie with a painting of a Monet and she knew that he loved this. So, it's just a nice gesture from a colleague, right? And he decides that he's so touched by this gesture of kindness that he's going to go back to his hotel room, change his shirt so he can wear the Monet tie with something that isn't hideously clashing. And so, she goes up to the conference and he goes to

the hotel room to iron the shirt. And while he's ironing the shirt, he sees out the window as the first plane hits the World Trade Center in New York, right? Because the conference is in New York City and it's held on like the hundredth floor. And so in this moment, she dies as a result of this and he survives because of this tie and changing his shirt. And I had written about this, I knew his story, he'd spoken a little bit about it publicly. But when I met him, the most profound thing he said to me was that the crippling guilt of survivors guilt that happened afterwards, which really upset him and affected his life in a very big way for a couple years, was because everybody said the same thing. Everything happens for a reason. And he said the burden that put on him that his coworker Elaine was supposed to die and he was supposed to live was so crushing,

right? Really upset his life. Whereas if you just say, look, you know, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, she did something nice for you and you survived by an accident. That in a way, you know, was liberating for him. And so I think to me, it's one of those aspects, I haven't had such a close call with death like that. But I think for many people to get that sense of the constant search for explanations and reasons can really, really derail your life and accepting that you are in some ways just an accident, the way I feel very much to be an accident because I'm derived from a mass murder To me it takes a weight off my shoulders, you know accidental things happen arbitrary things happen

And that's why I say, you know the enjoying the ride mentality is sort of the best and most liberating way you can deal with that That's an incredible story I was able to tell after like talking to you for like two minutes that you indeed had a mass murder in your family It's just in your personality. I think I just I just kind of saw it It's funny you say that cuz like bizarrely my my grandpa who you know was more directly effective than this It was his dad that found out the you know found the family He had a very dark line where he said, you know that branch of the family tree severed itself So we're not related to them.

So yeah, mass murder gene would not have been passed down if it did exist. But the trauma that he experienced, I'm sure was horrific. So. Yep. It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast dos amigos Wilmers friend and former that 70 show castmate Topher Grace stops by the speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and Reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like what will this experience become and you go you're having the best time But it was like such a perfect golden time Listen to dos amigos on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the World on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug thing. Benny the Butcher.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcast. Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcast. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests

trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the god-damnedest love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone and my thought was, this is the most important phone call

I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This everything happens for a reason thing always kind of drives me crazy too, because I don't know. People who have that belief, I'm actually often jealous of, because they seem to have a comfort in things.

If I could believe it, I think I might, but I can't. Right? So I have no choice but to sort of operate on the other. What I think is interesting about this, there's a companion phrase to everything happens for a reason, which is that everything happens for the best or something like that, right? And I think that is also nonsense. I think you can invert that phrase though and get something useful out of it, which is that you can make the best out of everything that happens. I don't think it's that the thing that happened has meaning in and of itself, but you can

make it meaningful with how you choose to respond. I don't know that me being a homeless heroin addict at 24 will ever, we don't know why. There's no real thing there. And I don't believe it happened for a reason, like I was appointed to some higher purpose. But I do believe that I was presented an opportunity in which I was able to give that thing meaning by what I did in an ongoing way. And I think that's the more actually compassionate view of suffering. Because as soon as everything happens for a reason, you reference the secret in the book, which drives me crazy. Because if you follow that thing to its end, everything happens for a reason, you have to come to terms with the fact that as you and I are talking right now, like some child is being hideously abused for a reason, and

the child somehow attracted that to themselves, I find to be sort of morally repugnant. I agree with this completely. And I think that my issue is also that it breeds complacency around questions of justice. Because if you look at something that's a gross injustice, you can just say everything happens for a reason. If you say that some things are the culmination of an arbitrary set of forces, or that some people are inflicting harm on a child and we need to stop that, then those things don't have some sort of grand moral arc to them and they require action, right? That you need to save the child.

One of the most interesting interviews I did around the ideas that I was grappling with in writing the book was actually with a Christian podcast that I was talking to a person who's a very devout Christian, and I'm personally not religious. But what was striking about this was that he was actually much more okay with some of the ideas I had said because his idea of providence in which everything does happen for a reason because in his view God was dictating things meant that he would never know the reason, right? And because it was completely unknown to him, he sort of just said, I have to just try to do my best in life, you know? And I was thinking to myself like, okay, I have a very different philosophical framework

from this person, but I'm thinking from chaos theory, okay, I have a very different philosophical framework from this person. But I'm thinking from chaos theory, that due to the fact that these tiny little tweaks in life can culminate in really big changes over time, I will never know or understand some of the reasons why things happen to me. I also feel like I should just try to do the best in life because I don't have control. And so there's a weird sort of horseshoe, right? Where the origin for me is the Big Bang in physics. That's where I'm thinking about the sort of framework of how these things, you know, work. For him, it was a sort of divine

presence dictating everything in the universe. But the acceptance of a lack of control ended up with us at the same point, right? Yeah. And so, this is where, again, you both operate probabilistically. You don't know what the right strategy is necessarily going to be, even if you think God is testing you. So you just try to do the thing that you think is best. And that's what I do, right? I try to do the thing that I think would be best.

And then I hope the ripple effects of my life play out in a good way as opposed to a catastrophically bad way, but I will never know. And that's the interesting aspect of accepting the limits of control, I think, that can exist in multiple worldviews. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating that this person arrives at the same place, which is I believe it's all happening for a reason, but I can't know the reason. You describe this a couple of different ways in the book, sort of religiously, which I love. You say, this makes us devoted disciples of the cult of because, or we worship at the altar of progress in the Church of Control. Those are great examples of how that worldview is

almost religious in its belief. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, you know, I mean, I grew up in the United States, and I think the United States has a very strong sense, and in some ways, this has probably helped American economic growth and so on, but it has a very strong sense that you are the master of your own destiny, right? The sort of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, this sort of aspect of if you work hard, you'll get what you deserve and so on. And so as a result of that, you know, I was really hit over the head, I think, with messages

that if anything bad happened in my life, it was my fault because I am the master of my own destiny. And if I just have a setback, I should just work harder. I also think that this discounts structural problems in society, problems with things we can't control like mental illness, setbacks from other people doing harm to us, etc., that you continually sort of beat yourself up when something goes wrong. And so I do think there's almost the sort of devotional, disciple aspect to this, what I think is a myth that we're masters of our own destiny, what I call the illusion of control or the delusion of individualism. And to me, it was liberating to get out of that mentality and to start to think about the things that I have influence over, the role my life plays in changing the lives of other people, but also accepting that I don't need to pretend that

those things are true anymore. Something that you've said before really made me think of this is that when you were talking about coaching people, right, I also look back at my life and all the things that I was told I was supposed to want. And then I can imagine that I was, you know, going to go to someone to say, how do I get there? And there's been loads of times in my life where the things that I thought I wanted were not the things that actually were good for me, right? And so, you know, how did I discover that? Well, often by accident, right? Like where I didn't try to do something, I stumbled into something and found that I loved it or that I was passionate about it.

And, you know, I often have written about ideas around what I call the false gospel of stuff and status, where the road to happiness is paved with more stuff and higher status. I have not found that to be true. I find personally that there are things that I care about in the world that are intrinsically valuable to me that other people might not find value in whatsoever. And chasing those things has made me much happier. So that's the other flip side of this sort of disciple aspect of searching for control is that it's often what other people think you want. And that is, to me, is just another one of the myths of that sort of cultural aspiration.

Right. There's two really big points that you hit on there that maybe we can go and order, although we'll probably tangent off somewhere else if I know how I do things. But the first is this idea of how much agency or control do we have? And I think this is an important thing to think about because we have some amount of agency and we have some amount of our lives are the way they are based on what has come before. And I think that it's really tricky to get that balance because I use myself as an example

just because it's the easiest thing to use, right? But if I were to have believed that my genetics and my family and my upbringing and all that meant I was destined to die as an addict, that would have been a problematic view. At the same time, had I believed that I was just a bad person because I was doing this and didn't see all those other factors, would have also been a harmful belief. And so somewhere in there is this triangulation on this idea of, well, there is some amount of control in here,

and to your point, there's a lot that's not under my control. And I just love the line that you've used a couple times, which is like, how do I do my best? But I think if you can hold both those views at the same time, it allows you to go a little bit easier on yourself, to relax a little bit, but also stay in sort of the driver's seat of your own life. I've talked several times about chaos theory, and chaos, that word, is the opposite of order, right?

It's the opposite of control. All of our lives lie between order and disorder, everything. That's the entirety of our life. There's bits that are ordered and structured and that we have some predictability about. There's other bits where just things just wallop us out of the blue and we have no idea that it's going to hit us. And the difficulty is that I think a lot of people respond to that middle ground that is life by thinking if I just got closer to the order, then everything would be okay, right?

But it's never going to happen. That's the point that I say. It's like, yes. You just, you know, personally, I think that the times where I felt the worst in my life are when I've been trying to impose order on something I can't. And the times that I felt sometimes the best is where I've sort of accepted that disorder and just enjoyed the moment. You know, there's an example, I took this from a very good philosopher, I like his work a lot called Hartmut Rosa, sociologist. He has this phrase called resonance, which I think

a lot of people would sort of recognize as moments where you just feel sort of just wonderful in the moment. And the point he makes, which he has a little line where he says something to the effect of, you know, even in life's planned celebrations, it's the unplanned flourishes that we remember the most. And so I think about, you know, those moments of celebration, it's like, everybody thinks about like their wedding day, the birthdays, anniversaries, all these sort of big milestones. And then you tell stories about them. And it's usually the stuff you did not expect where somebody did something really funny or just really heartfelt. And that stands out. Whereas if you just try to say that, you know, this is going to happen at 10 o'clock, this will happen at 10.05 and so on. It sucks

the joy out of it because there's no unexpected uncertainty. And so, you know, I think we would be utterly crippled as a species if we were fully certain and if we were fully uncertain. Both things would be terrible for us, but living in that middle space is actually where you have the best of both worlds. And so that's where I really do disagree

with a lot of the people who just say you have to control your life. I think a world of complete control would be dystopian. I think it would be horrifically terrible. Yeah. And I like the uncertainty that I have to navigate, even though uncertainty brings tragedy sometimes. It's the price of a life that I think is enjoyable and exciting. Precisely. That life where you knew everything that was going to happen and you got everything that you want would be a very dead life. And again, if we believe this idea that most of us don't actually even know what's

best for us, it would be a problematic life, right? The same for me. Like if I'd gotten all the things that I thought that I wanted, my life would look very different. You know, this is obviously some bias, but who knows what it would be like, but it wouldn't be like this, right? It wouldn't be like this. And this is kind of what is. And I think that's a really good place to be. I want to go back to what you said a minute ago about what you call it, the gospel of stuff and success? Stuff and status, yeah. Stuff and status. Okay. So let's just take that at face value to say, okay, this idea that if we get more of this or we get more status, we're going to suddenly be happy.

Let's just say that's not true. Why do we continue to believe that? Like I've heard that line and said it and thought about it a thousand times at least. And I've seen through that delusion a thousand times. And yet my first book is going to be published in a year. And I am thinking very much about how many copies it sells and all of that, right? So I know that if it sells 10,000 copies versus 25,000 copies, I'm not fundamentally going to be a happier person. Because if I sell 25,000, I'm suddenly going to be like, well, why didn't I sell 50,000? So I see through this illusion, goodness gracious, it's persistent, and it just comes roaring

right back in. Why do you think? It's a great question. My argument on how to deal with this is I coined this phrase after the book, so it's one of the ones that didn't make the cut because I didn't come up with it until after it was published. But I try to argue in favor of people and passion rather than stuff and status, which is nice, a alliterative phrasing.

And the issue with people and passion versus stuff and status is that people and passion, by which I mean relationships and things that you care about deeply that are individual to you, those are not easily quantified. They're not easily measured, right? Stuff and status are extremely easy to measure. And they're also things that in a social community are very easy to have relative rank, right? So you can understand whether someone has a bigger house than you.

You can understand whether someone makes more money than you. You can understand if they are above you in the corporate hierarchy-run. You cannot understand whether someone has a better relationship with their son or their father or a friend. You cannot understand whether they have a deep satisfaction from the fact that they really enjoy woodworking or walking their dog. When I think about this stuff, I have had a tremendous amount of joy from going for hikes with my dog, with loved ones, etc. And there is absolutely no metric that is tied to that, right? But I feel good. And so, what does that culminate towards? What am I striving towards? You know, that's the

other aspect, we're really striving creatures, we try to always embed our position. And, you know, walking the dog doesn't do anything on an objective level to quote-unquote better my position in society. It might fulfill me. But the thing that's so funny about this to me is that it's so obvious when you put it in the framework of a finite life and the idea of death and so on that you're going to look back on your life. I mean, I have never ever encountered someone who has been asked the question of like, what did you value most in your life in old age? And they say, the moment I got the promotion and the

Ferrari, you know what I mean? It's just like, those things are not if you if you really love them, if they make you happy, it's not saying that you shouldn't chase things that are important to you. It's that you have to make sure that you're motivated in my view intrinsically, which means that if there were no other people on the planet, would you still value this? And for me, a lot of the things that I've started doing more of, the answer is yes. And a lot of things I've started doing a lot of less of, the answer is no, other people care about that, but it doesn't really make me happy. And that's extrinsic motivation or external motivation, right? So all of society is built around external validation and all

of what makes us happy is built around internal motivation. And that's the paradox of how to navigate it because obviously the ability to do things that you like is tied to being able to have enough money, for example, that you're not stressed. So it's not that they're completely separate. It's not that it's important to just jettison them and all of us should live in the woods and be subsistence farmers. It's that you have to calibrate it so that you understand which thing is a means and which thing is an end, right? And if your entire life is means where you're trying to get somewhere and you never enjoy the end, then you've basically mortgaged your life for a goal that never comes. And I worry that there's a lot of people who are doing that

because they're on the gospel of stuff and status and they never understand what it's for. They're just playing the game until they die. So it's a bleak way of saying it, but I think there are people who are living that life. Back to some of our earlier points, we are creatures that are wired up a certain way. We are wired up to look at status and hierarchy. It's embedded in us. So it's not bad that we do that because because I don't think you cannot do it. And I think we can also recognize, oh, that way is not the path of fulfillment and happiness. And I think

it gets further muddled because so many things end up being both. You write a book, there's a big intrinsic motivation in it, whatever it is for you, you like writing, or you have a message you want to get out to the world or whatever the intrinsic thing is, and you're going to measure it extrinsically. I talk about this podcast all the time. I can get caught up in it's not as big as X and it's not as big as Y and is it going to pay the bills and because those are all realities. When I live in that world though, I'm not happy. When I reorient and say, oh, I do this because I get to talk to really interesting people, right? I just love doing this. I get to put something out there that countless people tell me has helped them. I get to interact with my friend Chris around, he's our editor,

around something I love. And when I get back to that framing, the job comes alive in a different way. And so for me, it's sort of I feel like I'm always sort of lured over this way towards status and stuff. And I have to keep turning my attention back to people and passion. If I'm being honest about this stuff, I'm not some guru who's immune from these things, right? Like there's no there's no way in which even if you say these things, that you are immune from these aspects of the rat race. And when the most recent book, Flute, came out, I was refreshing review sites. I have read every review of the book,

I think, that's on the internet. There were times where people said some really mean stuff. Other people, the majority of them said some very wonderful things, right? Yeah. But some people said some really mean stuff. And the mean things sort of stuck with me. Of course. And I had to sit with it for a little bit. And the two things that were important to realize that have totally made me immune from this, one of them is realizing that I would have written the book if no one read it because I cared about it and I wanted to do it and it was a profound experience in sort of understanding

what I thought about the world. So that's the first part, right? That I would do it if no one read it. That's intrinsic motivation. And the second thing that I think is also important and does go to a lot of different domains is you don't write a book or whatever it is that you do professionally, personally, whatever.

You don't write a book for the person who hates it. You write the book for the person for whom it's going to change their world. And if that person experiences this in a positive way, I will take a thousand people who think I'm an idiot and hate the book because I didn't write it for them. You know, and so there's an aspect to this where I think that parable really applies to lots of other parts of life. You can't make something that is going to be universally celebrated or universally affecting in the same way. It's creative, whatever it is.

But you do it for the people who it empowers and changes their worldview and makes them think differently and that's enough. And so, you know, I think there's so much of that aspect where we're trying to be universalizing. We want it to be 100% of people. It's impossible, but it's still worthwhile if those things make a difference and also if you find them personally fulfilling. And it's made me a lot more comfortable with the horrible comments that people make online when you are an author, because you know, the majority of them are actually very positive. And those are the people for whom I was spending time, you know, sitting in front of a laptop and really trying to get this right. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the

post show conversation where we're going to see what we cover. We might cover the idea that probability theory works well in certain contexts but fails catastrophically in others, understanding the difference between risk and uncertainty, and we may discuss the mating habits of spiders and why you might want to do more of this in your own life. So we'll see what happens in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to that conversation, all of the other post show conversations, if you'd like to get access to that conversation all of the other post show conversations special episodes that I do just for you and you want to contribute to the podcast because we can always always always use your support go to one you feed.net slash join

Brian thanks again I've really enjoyed this I loved the book I think your sub stack is outstanding what's it called it's called the garden of forking. It's an idea that's also in Fluke as well. Yeah. You're a great writer across the board. So I encourage people to check that out. And thank you so much. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you.

Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community. It's nostalgia overload as Wilmer Valderrama and Freddy Rodriguez welcome another amigo to their podcast, Dos Amigos. Wilmer's friend and former That 70 Show castmate,

Topher Grace stops by the Speakeasy for a two-part interview to discuss his career and reminisce about old times. We were still in that place of like, what will this experience become? And you go, you're having the best time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was like such a perfect golden time.

Listen to Dos Amigos on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and my latest interview is with Michelle Obama. To whom much is given, much is expected. The guilt comes from, am I doing enough? Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist. So let's unpack that.

Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. Listen to On Purpose with J Chetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The biggest stars in country music will be taking the stage at our 2025 iHeart Country Festival

presented by Capital One. Ladies and gentlemen, Brooks and Dunn, Thomas Rhett, Rascal Flatts, Cole Swindell, Sam Hunt, Thomas Rhett Rascal Flatts Cole Swindell Sam Hunt Megan Moroney

Bailey Zimmerman Nate Smith Special guest Dasha Stream only on Hulu Saturday May 3rd Starting at 8pm Eastern, 5 Pacific