Is Life Just One Big Fluke? Brian Klaas Tells Us

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47Does everything we do matter? That's an open-ended question, but one to think about. My guest today, Brian Kloss, argues that but for a few small changes, our lives and societies could be radically different. So are we a series of freak accidents? Could making that accidental phone call change the course of history? And what can chaos teach us about human nature? Let's find out with Brian Kloss on today's show.

1:21So joining us now on Open Book, a fan favorite, one of my personal favorites, Brian Kloss. He is a political scientist and a writer for The Atlantic. He lives in the UK. He wrote a book called Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, which is sort of amazing when I think about it. I think about all these little small things. And of course, over the holiday, Brian, I watched It's a Wonderful Life again and the wonderful butterfly effect of that movie. And you're writing about that in life. And you had a very famous and well-timed book called Corruptible, which was fabulous as well.

1:56So I recommend that to all of our viewers and listeners. But we're now back with Fluke. Tell us about Fluke. Let's start with what kickstarted your thinking for this book, Brian. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So there's a few things. One is sort of my research where I studied a coup at one point that happened a while ago. And you have all these models that try to explain why these things happen. And I interviewed this soldier and he talked about trying to kidnap an army commander during the coup. And basically it was a situation like straight out of a film where he grabbed like the pant leg of this guy and tried to grab him to kidnap him and force him to announce the coup.

2:34And basically it was a split second thing, right? He was a little bit too slow. The army commander got away, the coup failed. And you think, you know, this was in Zambia and Zambia's democracy almost ended on this span of a split second change. So in my research, I came across this fairly often. In my own personal life, one of the things that I write about in the introduction is a story of a mass murder in Wisconsin in 1905. And I say my personal life because my great grandfather's first wife, unfortunately, snapped and killed her four young children and then killed herself. And I put that in the book because I found that out in my mid 20s.

3:09And I realized that I wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for this. And quite literally, you wouldn't be listening to me if not for this group, you know, sort of gruesome murder 119 years ago. And that's the way the world actually works, right? Like chaos theory is this thing where it shows how very small changes can have very profound effects. And, you know, an action in Wisconsin in 1905, or a split second during a coup, you know, our social world changes and the pandemic is like that as well, right? You have one person getting infected with a virus in China and boom, you know, the world completely changes.

3:40So the main argument of the book is that small changes can have enormous impacts, and we systematically ignore them in how we sort of model the world. When I read that tragedy, read about the tragedy, my dad, who unfortunately we lost last year, but at a very nice old age of 88, his father was married and she died of ovarian cancer. And so he ended up getting remarried to what ultimately became my grandmother. And so you see, it happens in different ways. It can happen from different types of illnesses or health or whatever, but we're both here so improbably, right? If you think about all the dark matter in the universe, Brian, the fact that you and I are sitting here talking to each other, that should give us grace and be grateful enough.

4:24But everything, doesn't it happen for a reason, Brian? Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things where I think there's a saying that's very comforting to people. Everything happens for a reason, but it's, in my view, not true, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of philosophy that's... What was really interesting about researching and writing this book was that when you start to think about how reality works and you start to think about all these interconnections and accidental changes and so on. It does have philosophical implications, right? And some people make sense of those through belief in God and other people don't.

4:51And I'm in the latter camp personally, but I respect people who have different viewpoints. I mean, my view is when you look at these things from a scientific perspective, like, you know, the origin of complex life, the best explanation we have for that is what I think is the most important fluke of all time, where 2 billion years ago, a bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell, these tiny little cells ended up inside of it and created mitochondria, which is the thing that powers complex life. And as far as scientists know, this happened once, right? And so like, when I think about something like that, and you know, you can apply this logic to markets, to politics, whatever it is in the social world as well.

5:28But when I think about that, I think, you know, look, I don't know, maybe there's just some stuff that happens. And I think that has some pretty profound and uplifting implications for how we think about our lives and the purpose of them, even without a grand design, as it were, or the idea that everything happens for a reason. And you write about this and you also write about like, you know, this is something Marcus Aurelius wrote about 1800 years ago. There's just so many choices. It's impossible for you to get everything right. And so why be upset about that? Just, you know, forge forward and focus on the present.

6:00But you also write about a rewind and there's a very fun book from the 1970s called Rewind, I think, or Replay. I'll get the title for you. But the guy wakes up in his dorm room and he's able to now relive his life, but he has some knowledge. So he bets the stock market well. And guess what happens to him? A lot of things go wrong that he didn't expect. So he wants to rewind again. He does it three or four times. And then the moral of the story is, well, you know what, guess what? You're living as a human being. And even with perfect knowledge, you're going to get a lot wrong. What do you think of the notion of rewinding your life, Brian?

6:33Yeah. So, you know, that's the opening sentence of the book is, you know, if you rewound your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? And it's a question about like why things happen to us, right? But what I think is really striking about this is, you know, you think about movies like Back to the Future, or you think about, you know, anything to do with time travel. We have this viewpoint that like, you know, and there's all these short stories and Simpsons episodes that play with this idea where it's like, if you go back in the past, don't talk to anyone, you know, don't touch anything because you might accidentally delete yourself from the future.

7:03And like, that seems totally intuitive to us. But the thing is, like, when you think about that, surely the way that the past causes the present is exactly the same as the way the present causes the future, right? Like, in other words, if you talk to people in your daily life today, or if you squish the wrong bug today, it's going to create a different world, right? And I think one of the things that has happened is because the way the humans try to make sense of that complexity through modeling, right? Which is basically always wrong, but sometimes useful. We have this sort of like funhouse mirror version of reality reflected back at us where there's like, oh, there's only like six variables that you need to worry about.

7:34And like, as long as you like tackle those six variables, like everything will turn out fine. And I don't believe that's the way the world works, right? I mean, it's the same as, you know, like Nate Silver talks about the signal and the noise, which sometimes can be very useful in short-term, you know, decision-making. But the idea that the noise is meaningless is just wrong to me. I think that there's a huge amount of history, politics, et cetera, where the noise was actually the thing that drove it. And so the book is trying to suggest that if you have that level of uncertainty, because you can never measure the noise, right, then you need to sort of prioritize optimization slightly less and resilience slightly more.

8:08Because you need to think carefully about catastrophe and how it might emerge from unexpected places. I mean, so well said. The book that I was thinking of was called Replay by Ken Grimwood, and it was written in 1986. It's an obscure book now, but it was pretty famous 30 or so years ago, and I remember reading it, and I've made so many different mistakes in my life. Who the hell knows? But the truth of it is you're going to make them no matter what. That's the trials and tribulations of being human. What single strange interaction or random event, it's a little personal, but I want you to answer it.

8:41It's had the biggest impact on your life. Well, I mean, the one that I talked about early on in the book was certainly one of them. I mean, I think there's lots of stuff. It's like one of the things that we do as humans is we look back on our lives and we think about those big building blocks of those decisions. And these are the really obvious ones, right? So I think about the moment that I decided to go to grad school because I decided to go to England for grad school. And here, 13 years later, I'm still here. Are you doing okay with your accent though? Or they look down upon you as like a former colonist.

9:09You're all right over there or no? I'm just asking because, you know. It's funny because I think I still have like exactly the same accent. I'm from Minnesota originally. But every so often I go on MSNBC and people like, stop putting on the fake British accent. And I'm like, I really don't think I have an accent, but maybe I'm an intonation. I'm not picking it up. We had a clown that was the president of Tufts and he was an Italian kid from like Wilmington, Delaware. And he came back with a British accent. I'm like, dude, you got to calm down. Okay. I mean, it's not working, you know? I mean, I do say like flat and, you know, so on rather than apartment, but it's just, it's part of daily life.

9:41I think this is fascinating because, you know, my producer is from the UK. She's living here in the US. You're from the US. You moved to the UK. You're going to become a UK citizen. Is that a dual citizenship or are you going to give up the US citizen? Yeah, I passed the test a couple months ago. So you have to take a citizenship test. I passed that. And yeah, I'm on my way. So it's a couple of weeks away probably. It was one of the questions who won the Revolutionary War that probably wasn't on the citizenship test, right? No, it's one of those things. It was funny, actually. I mean, some of the questions were factually wrong.

10:12Like there was one question that was supposed to be stupidly easy, which was who first unified England? Was it Alfred the Great or Charles Darwin? And I actually am a history nerd. So I was like, it's Ethel Wolf, Alfred the Great's grandson. But that's not one of the choices. And I didn't want to argue with person. But the point is, yes, I finally I've passed the test and I think I'm doing all right. Yeah, right. You don't want to be too smart for your own good. You got some brilliant insights into this thing, okay? I am a snooze button smasher, okay? And I probably hit that button and I said, oh, no, no, another nine minutes and another nine minutes.

10:46Tell us about why hitting the snooze button has a pretty big impact on your life. Yeah. So, what I'm trying to draw on, it's part of the thing that I did in this book, was trying to synthesize lessons from science with how we can understand ourselves, right? And so there's this big debate in evolutionary biology about how change happens. I think this is really important for anyone who cares about markets, politics, whatever it is in history, et cetera. And in evolution, there's this debate between what's called contingency and convergence. So the contingency stuff is where you make a small change and everything turns out different.

11:15So like the best example in evolution is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, right? Because basically, you know, if that hadn't happened, humans probably wouldn't have existed. Convergence is the opposite. It's like the ordered trajectory, right? And this is where like small changes happen, but like you end up in the same place in the end. And one of my favorite examples of this is if you look at the eye of an octopus and you look at the eye of a human, they're actually extremely similar. Even though we've evolved, you know, 400 million years ago, we split on the evolutionary tree, like nature just solved the problem the same way because it works, right?

11:44And this is the same in human society. Like sometimes you have inventions that arrive at the same time. Now I use this for what I call the snooze button effect to say, is your life going to follow the same track or is it going to radically diverge from this five minutes that you sleep, right? And we don't know. That's the point, right? Like we can never see the world in which our life had, you know, sort of tested in the A world where it's like you didn't hit the snooze button and then the B world where you did. But I think one of the things that is worth considering is that there are a lot of things that change with five minutes, right?

12:14You meet different people that day. You might get into a car accident or not. You might end up having someone say something to you that changes your thinking on a subject. And these are what I call the invisible pivot. So when I was answering your question before about, you know, the sort of stuff that's important to me, probably, I don't know. I mean, the answer is, I probably don't know what the biggest thing that has been the fluke in my life, because I'm just totally blind to it, where maybe I almost died, or maybe I almost met someone of a huge consequence, or, you know, something almost ruined my life, and I avoided it.

12:41And I'm just totally unaware of it, because we can't go back. And I think that snooze button effect idea is one that is important to think about, because it means that, you know, sort of the moment to moment stuff we do is actually important, even if we'll never see the alternative world we might inhabit. It's fascinating because on a tragic note, a close friend of mine went to the Red Sox Yankee game on the 10th of September at Yankee Stadium. And unfortunately, that night there was a thunderstorm and the game got interrupted in the third inning, a result of which he left Yankee Stadium, drove home, got home early enough, where he decided to take the 6 a.m.

13:18train into New York City to deposit himself on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. Had the game been played, had the weather not been rainy, he would have got home after midnight. He would have taken the 9 a.m. train as opposed to the 6 a.m. train, and he would be here. Of course, Howard Lutnick very famously took his son to kindergarten orientation, and so he wasn't in the office on the 11th of September, and so on and so forth. And so this is why I think your book is so fascinating. It gives us so much to think about. The guys from BlackRock, they came to see us at Skybridge and we're lowly Skybridge and they're a very large BlackRock, but they wanted to launch a Bitcoin trust and convert it into their ETF.

14:00They had no outside investors and their committee said, if you can't get an outside investor, we don't want to pursue it. And so anyway, make a long story short, we gave them the money. They ended up pursuing it. Looks like they're going to get this ETF alongside of others, but I think BlackRock's influence helped it. And again, I'm not patting Skybridge on the back. It's a incidental coincidence, but it fits so relevantly into your story and the snooze button. Yeah. I was going to say about this. I have a story in the book as well about 9-11, and it's an amazing story where basically this guy gets given a tie from a coworker who's really, really kind to him at the breakfast on the morning of September 11th.

14:39And it turns out the new tie, you know, it doesn't match his outfit. So he goes to iron a different shirt to put the tie on, says, I'll catch up with you in 15 minutes. She goes up to the conference and gets killed and he survives. And it was a random act of kindness that saved his life, right? And she died having done that. And there's a deeper lesson here, as well as the sort of curiosities and tragedies that you can tease out from this. I mean, one of the points I always make is you mentioned the thunderstorm on September 10th, September 11th, you know, it blindingly blew sky. And you think about variables that we model, right?

15:10Like when we try to figure out why things happen, like you always come up with the big ideas, the big variable. And so we talk about Al Qaeda, rightly, you know, all these things, the geopolitics. If there had been a thunderstorm on September 11th, it would have been a different story possibly because you might have had some delays in the flights. You know, some of them might not have gotten off the ground at the same time. You might have had some that, you know, if you had a different group of passengers on flight 93, would they have stopped the attack. And I can tell you, you know, the world would be different if the White House or the Capitol had been destroyed.

15:36And so you think, you know, these little things of just switching the same events on a different time or a different place, and all of a sudden the world shifts. And I think there's this weird obsession for that idea you said before of how everything happens for a reason, that we want to sort of cram things into this neat and tidy story. The world's just really messy, right? And that's why we keep on getting these black swans walloping us and blindsiding us because, you know, chaos theory and action means that if you try to tame the world by just focusing on like six or seven variables in a model, it's not going to work.

16:04It's brilliant. And I appreciate everything that you put in there because it provides us perspective. And January is the season for this sort of contemplation. Let's talk a little bit about being a devil's advocate for a second. This is another thing you write about in the book. People may argue that there's a higher power and they have religious beliefs. And also there's the consideration of the laws of physics. What do you say about those topics? Yeah, I mean, so I'm not personally a believer, right? And I think there's something that you can appreciate even as a non-believer about the sort of mystical uncertainty of the world, right?

16:37And there's so many things we don't understand. And they're not like, you know, AI. They're things like, what is consciousness and what produces this? Like, we don't have an answer to that question. We don't understand how matter operates because, you know, even though quantum mechanics has given us some tools to sort of study these things and to experimentally verify some predictions around them, none of us have any idea what's going on. I mean, there are a series of very smart physicists who believe in what's called the many worlds theory, which is that the world is infinitely branching into an infinite number of universes in which there's an infinite number of yous and also an infinite number of worlds that don't contain you.

17:09Right. Like that should give us pause where I think there's a certain level of sort of certainty that that that is foolish to have when you try to answer these big questions. But I think, you know, one of the core questions that Flux trying to answer is sort of, you know, it's probably what I would have titled the book if I wasn't trying to sell it is why do things happen? I mean, like when we try to think about our lives, when we try to think about, you know, cryptocurrency, whatever it is, like we're trying to answer that question of causality. And some people answer it with God and some people answer it with the sort of more sterile forms of physics and so on.

17:40I give this what I think is the best scientific explanation for the dynamics that we see in modern society and how we got here and so on. But I'm also extremely respectful of people who have different views on this because the hubris to say these are settled questions is just it's the symbol of a fool because they're not settled. Right. Even scientists are hyper aware of the limits of our understanding. I mean, I love it. That's why I asked you about it. Let's talk about the single man or the single woman theory in human history. We've had the likes of Lincoln, Churchill. America seems to get the right leader at the right time.

18:13it seems like once in a while we get the wrong leader, but generally we've been pretty lucky, whether it's a Roosevelt, Franklin, or Teddy, a Lincoln, a Reagan, obviously the UK, the Brits had Churchill when they needed him. Does this stuff make a difference? And what are some of the things that you think caused the rise of Donald Trump that were butterfly-like? I mean, I can think of some, but give me some of the flukes. So question one, do you believe in that theory. And question two, how the hell did we get Donald Trump? And obviously, I'm partially to blame for that. But how the hell did we get him?

18:47And how the hell did we get rid of him? Well, on the second one, I'll let you off the hook with some of the flukes that you were definitely not responsible for. But on the first question, I mean, look, political science, for example, my discipline for a long time, basically tried to have this sort of savvy viewpoint of saying, oh, it's the presidency that matters, right? The president is constrained, like the institution is what matters, not the person. Like, you know, leave the cable TV host to write the biographies of Lincoln, we understand the real way that this works with the institution. Donald Trump obliterated that.

19:14I mean, nobody thinks that the world would be the same place if Hillary Clinton won in 2016. I mean, it's an absurd viewpoint, right? So obviously, it's the case that individuals in positions of power matter enormously for reshaping the world. Now, for how we got Trump, I mean, there's all the sort of standard explanations, but I'll go for the flukes. So there's two of them that come to mind. One of them, and I don't know whether this is true, but it's a hypothesis, is that Trump was swayed or potentially influenced by deciding to run for president in 2011 at the White House Correspondence Dinner when he was humiliated by Obama telling that joke.

19:45But the one that I talk about in the book that I think is a fun and interesting way of thinking about history is, believe it or not, there's a link between Trump's defeat in 2020 and the Cretaceous period when velociraptors were on the earth. And the reason I say that is because that many million years ago, there was an inland sea on what is now the United States. And the coastline was basically Georgia, what is now Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, right? And the phytoplankton that lived on the coastline of that ancient inland sea during the time of the dinosaurs, all the phytoplankton died as the sea dried up.

20:14And they gave this super, super fertile soil, what was then known as the Black Belt, because it's really dark, rich soil made from this phytoplankton. This is where when slaves were brought to the United States and slave people were brought to those areas where that inland sea was. And if you look at the 2020 election map, county by county, what you will see, because African Americans tend to vote more for Democrats than Republicans, is you will see the map of that inland sea is why Donald Trump lost Georgia. Because you can actually map it on the coastline, and it corresponds almost perfectly because this sort of geological accident, you know, tens of millions of years ago, having an impact on the demographic patterns of American society today and affecting our elections.

20:52It's an extraordinary thing where the more you look for this stuff, the more you find these bizarre accidents of history that end up swaying our world. I want you people to read your book because there's a fragility to chance. There's a fragility to life, of course. And, you know, it's amazing. And, but listen, you know, there's one other thing that did happen is President Obama asked Vice President Biden to stand down. He had cut a deal with the Clintons in 2012, their support in exchange for him clearing the way for her candidacy in 16. And so Biden did stand down. There was that very famous speech in the Rose Garden where he was going on and on.