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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Man Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Noory with

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Speaker 2: Brian Klass's book is called Fluke just came out. Brian,

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Speaker 2: is these events? Are they luck? Bad luck? Good luck?

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Speaker 2: Is it fate? What does it?

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Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean, I think luck is a huge part

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Speaker 3: of our lives. And one of the things that's really

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Speaker 3: interesting about how people interact with luck is that when

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Speaker 3: you get something positive that happens to you that's lucky,

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Speaker 3: people are willing to accept that it was sort of

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Speaker 3: a random outcome.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: So like a lot of times when people win the lottery,

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Speaker 3: they don't think it's part of some larger plan necessarily,

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Speaker 3: they just think, wow, you know, somebody had to win

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Speaker 3: and it was me. And the opposite is true when

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Speaker 3: it's bad luck. And I think there's a really interesting

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Speaker 3: thing here where when we hear, you know, when something

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Speaker 3: random happens to us it's negative, we always try to

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Speaker 3: make sense of it by having a really clear cut

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Speaker 3: narrative around it, why it happened, explaining it and so on.

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Speaker 3: And so there's some very interesting psychology research that shows

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Speaker 3: this difference of how humans engage with the idea of luck,

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Speaker 3: depending on whether it's positive or negative.

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Speaker 2: You don't believe in free will, well do you no?

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Speaker 3: But I don't think that that's something that necessarily is.

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Speaker 3: I think there are some semantics around this. So what

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Speaker 3: I basically believe in is that my brain is causing

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Speaker 3: my actions, right, So, I think there's a debate here

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Speaker 3: about whether there's something separate from your brain that is

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Speaker 3: causing you to behave the way you do. I find

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Speaker 3: that my brain is probably what's behind most of my behavior.

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Speaker 3: It doesn't mean I don't have any choices. I have

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Speaker 3: complete you know, I can make decisions, I can make

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Speaker 3: choices and so on. But there's a question about and

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Speaker 3: this is you know, one of the big philosophical debates

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Speaker 3: is whether there's something separate from your brain often which

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Speaker 3: people call the mind or the soul, that is dictating

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Speaker 3: their actions. And so, you know, I think that that's

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Speaker 3: something that the debates are going to rage through the

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Speaker 3: twenty first century as we learn more about how brains operate.

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Speaker 3: But yeah, that's my personal view that my brain and

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Speaker 3: my mind are basically the same thing.

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Speaker 2: Do you think there's a clairvoyant mechanism within our system

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Speaker 2: that allows us to make some decisions that seem to

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Speaker 2: pan out.

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Speaker 3: I don't believe in this personally, so you know, I

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Speaker 3: think there is some stuff where people feel that way.

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Speaker 3: And I think part of the reason for that is that,

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Speaker 3: you know, when we have a sort of moment where

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Speaker 3: things turn out really well, we learn from it. I mean,

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Speaker 3: our brains are our brains are derived from making patterns, right,

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Speaker 3: from learning from patterns. So one of the things I

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Speaker 3: find really interesting to think about is that, you know,

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Speaker 3: for ninety eight plus percent of the time humans have existed,

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Speaker 3: we have been hunter gatherers. That was basically up until

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Speaker 3: the last you know, sort of ten thousand years or so.

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Speaker 3: And in that period, you know, it made a lot

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Speaker 3: of sense to just sort of detect patterns. If there

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Speaker 3: was a rustling in the grass, you had better believe

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Speaker 3: there might be a saber tooth tiger there, because you

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Speaker 3: otherwise will die. And every so often there's nothing there, right,

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Speaker 3: But it doesn't really matter if you accidentally run away

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Speaker 3: way from nothing. It does matter if you don't run

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Speaker 3: away from what turns out to be a saber toothed tiger.

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Speaker 3: And so I think we get this sense that we

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Speaker 3: have clairvoyance or some of these other traits esp and

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Speaker 3: so on from trying to fit you know, this sort

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Speaker 3: of pattern detection that we have evolved to to to

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Speaker 3: sort of to explore into the messiness of modern life.

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Speaker 2: Brian explain what chaos theory is.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, this is this is an amazing thing. So chaos

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Speaker 3: theory is is, you know, it's completely validated by science,

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Speaker 3: but we very rarely think about it in our in

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Speaker 3: our ordinary lives. So we all know about it from

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Speaker 3: the weather. And that's how it was originally discovered was

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Speaker 3: the meteorologists behind it basically ran a simulation and he

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Speaker 3: changed things very very slightly. I'm talking like a trillionth

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Speaker 3: of a degree in temperature, and all of a sudden,

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Speaker 3: the weather systems a week or two later would turn

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Speaker 3: out radically different. And this this is where the origin

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Speaker 3: of the saying, you know, a butterfly flaps its wings

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Speaker 3: can cause a hurricane, and this sort of idea of

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Speaker 3: the butterfly, if I comes from. Now, what I think

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Speaker 3: is important to think about is how this applies to

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Speaker 3: our own world. Right, So you know there's so many

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Speaker 3: things in our own lives where when we think about

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Speaker 3: time travel. For example, it's very obvious to most of

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Speaker 3: us that if you were to travel back in time

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Speaker 3: and change something, you could radically reshape the future. Right,

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Speaker 3: if you go back a million years and you squish

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Speaker 3: the wrong bug, maybe things will turn out really differently.

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Speaker 3: Maybe you'll delete humans from the future and so on

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Speaker 3: by accident. But we don't tend to think about this

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Speaker 3: way in the present, which is very odd because of

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Speaker 3: course the present in the past works the same way.

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Speaker 3: And so you know, to me, one of the things

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Speaker 3: that's beautiful about chaos theory is that you are constantly

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Speaker 3: reshaping the future with everything you do, what you say,

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Speaker 3: who you talk to, the way you behave. Now, some

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Speaker 3: of those effects might not be obvious to us, they

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Speaker 3: might not change things for a long time. But the

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Speaker 3: story I told you before about how I'm derived from

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Speaker 3: this tragic mass murder in Wisconsin in nineteen oh five,

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Speaker 3: that's chaos theory and action. Right, you have this thing

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Speaker 3: that happen and in you know, we're talking George, you know,

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Speaker 3: one hundred and nineteen years later. That's what chaos theory is.

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Speaker 2: And you should not have been here.

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Speaker 3: Well, that's possibly true. I mean, that's One of the

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Speaker 3: things that I think is an interesting feature of Flukes, right,

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Speaker 3: is that you end up looking at these things and

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Speaker 3: there's a lot of the world that feels quite random,

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Speaker 3: quite accidental. You know, when you look at battles in history,

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Speaker 3: when you look at change over time, there are a

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Speaker 3: lot of small things that have been slightly different. And

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Speaker 3: that's why, you know, one of the one of the

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Speaker 3: chapters I have in the book is called how changing

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Speaker 3: Anything Changes Everything, And it's this idea of interconnectivity and

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Speaker 3: ripples and all these effects that we can have just

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Speaker 3: by by the very nature of our behavior. And yeah,

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Speaker 3: I mean I do feel a bit accidental. I mean

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Speaker 3: I am the byproduct of a chain of offspring that

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Speaker 3: was produced by a tragedy, and so you know, it's

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Speaker 3: hard to make sense of your own, you know, sort

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Speaker 3: of existence in that in that way. But I think

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Speaker 3: all of us to some degree are predicated on Flukes.

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Speaker 2: Brian, Do you think i'll higher power steps in and

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Speaker 2: alters these things?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's you know, it's one of the things. It's

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Speaker 3: one of the great mysteries of life that humans have

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Speaker 3: grappled with for forever, right, is why things happen and

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Speaker 3: you know personally, I'm not I'm not a believer, but

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Speaker 3: it is something where you know, I think that when

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Speaker 3: you look at the complex nature of reality, you have

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Speaker 3: to examine this and try to figure out an explanation.

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Speaker 3: And I think, you know, there's a lot of people

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Speaker 3: in different realms who are trying to answer these questions

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Speaker 3: from totally different ways. I mean, physicists are trying to

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Speaker 3: explain it through the behavior of atoms and molecules and

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Speaker 3: so on. You know, the elogians are trying to explain

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Speaker 3: it through God and so on. What I think is

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Speaker 3: amazing is that there's this central question of the human

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Speaker 3: experience that we don't have an answer to. And you know,

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Speaker 3: the sort of nature of causality and why things are

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Speaker 3: occurring in our lives is something that I think is

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Speaker 3: going to be forever the great puzzle that most deivates

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Speaker 3: human thought. And that's one of the beautiful things about

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Speaker 3: a world in which, you know, eight billion people can

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Speaker 3: answer that question in eight billion different ways.

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Speaker 2: Brian tell us the story of the Civil War in

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Speaker 2: three discarded cigars.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is in eighteen sixty two, before the

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Speaker 3: Battle of Antietam, known as the Bloodiest Day in American history,

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Speaker 3: and this is a case in which a basically a

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Speaker 3: Confederate spy or messenger is bringing the marching orders of

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Speaker 3: the army and he's wrapped them around three cigars and

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Speaker 3: they fall out of his satchel, and so one day

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Speaker 3: there's a Union soldier who is sitting down to rest

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Speaker 3: next to a hedgerow, and he finds these cigars and

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Speaker 3: he unwraps them and he sees the orders and they,

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Speaker 3: you know, they basically give him incredible intelligence about what

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Speaker 3: the Confederate Army is about to do. Now it's signed

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Speaker 3: at the bottom, and he needs to know whether the

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Speaker 3: signature is fake because he doesn't want the whole army

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Speaker 3: to march on fake orders. So he brings them to

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Speaker 3: a general, and the person outside of the general's tent

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Speaker 3: probably the one person in the Union Army who knows

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Speaker 3: the signature is real because he worked as a bank

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Speaker 3: teller before and he had seen that signature of the

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Speaker 3: Confederate general who signed them hundreds and hundreds of times

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Speaker 3: previously before the war, so he instantly knew that the

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Speaker 3: order's real. And therefore the Union Army marches and meets

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Speaker 3: the Confederate Army at Antietam, and it's a critical turning

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Speaker 3: point in the Civil War. It stops a lot of

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Speaker 3: the Confederate momentum. And so you think about this and

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Speaker 3: you think, you know, what might have happened. Well, Britain

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Speaker 3: was thinking about recognizing the Confederacy in eighteen sixty two.

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Speaker 3: If Antietam had unfolded differently, maybe they would have Maybe

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Speaker 3: it would have had a resounding effect on the war.

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Speaker 3: And so you think about, you know, these battles of

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Speaker 3: history pivoting on something so arbitrary as three discarded cigars,

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Speaker 3: found it just the right moment and then passed on

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Speaker 3: to the one person who could actually discern that the

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Speaker 3: signature was genuine. It's quite an extraordinary level of small

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Speaker 3: changes that had big impacts.

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Speaker 2: Now there's no question it's happening. Question is why what

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Speaker 2: makes these happen?

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Speaker 3: And this is something where my interpretation of this is

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Speaker 3: that I think we're we're partly the four you know,

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Speaker 3: the play things of some pretty random forces. I mean,

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Speaker 3: I think in the universe there are a lot of

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Speaker 3: things that arbitrarily happen, and you know, I think we

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Speaker 3: are allergic to explanations that are random. We we we

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Speaker 3: are basically creatures that do not accept randomness very easily,

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Speaker 3: and it makes total sense. I mean, when something happens

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Speaker 3: to you, you want to say, here's why. There's a

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Speaker 3: lot of things that are invisible to us that I

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Speaker 3: think we can't explain. And when I say that, I mean,

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Speaker 3: you know, the invisible pivots that I was talking about before,

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Speaker 3: the ways in which our lives are unfolding differently from

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Speaker 3: small changes whether you turn left or right when you

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Speaker 3: leave a supermarket, and you might meet different people and

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Speaker 3: end up you know that that has sort of a

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Speaker 3: ricochet effect where those people introduce you to other people

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Speaker 3: and eventually you meet your spouse, right, So you know,

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Speaker 3: I think there is stuff where when we are bewildered

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Speaker 3: by these extremely unusual occurrences that we can't make sense of,

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Speaker 3: it is easy for us to come up with neat

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Speaker 3: and tidy explanations. Personally, I find some beauty in the chaos.

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Speaker 3: I think there is some randomness in the world. I

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Speaker 3: think there is some chaos. I think the butterfly effect

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Speaker 3: does matter, and I think it's cool to live in

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Speaker 3: a world where you know, the smallest act can have enormous,

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Speaker 3: enormous consequences.

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Speaker 2: Why does this seem to work more for some people

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Speaker 2: and not others?

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Speaker 3: Well, I think I think it works for all of us.

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Speaker 3: I think some people are more blind to it than others, right,

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Speaker 3: I think that the chaos theory is not something that

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Speaker 3: is arbitrarily just happening to some people and not to others.

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Speaker 3: I think it's happening to all of us all the time.

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Speaker 3: I think there are people who are more or less

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Speaker 3: aware of it and more or less thinking about it, right,

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Speaker 3: I mean, you know, for me, when I the story

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Speaker 3: that I keep coming back to just because personally relevant

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Speaker 3: to me about this this uh, this terrible tragedy. You know,

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Speaker 3: I was oblivious to this until the mid twenties, my

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Speaker 3: mid twenties, when my dad showed me this newspaper clipping,

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Speaker 3: and I think that's the kind of thing where you know,

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Speaker 3: I lived my life anyway, right, I mean I had to,

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Speaker 3: I had I had no idea this was the origin

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Speaker 3: story of my existence. So the question then becomes, you know,

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Speaker 3: what are we oblivious to? And I think this is where,

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Speaker 3: you know, what I was trying to do in the

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Speaker 3: book is to say, let's let's stare right into the

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Speaker 3: face of this chaos and this randomness and this uncertainty

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Speaker 3: and think about it and what it means for our

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Speaker 3: lives and what it means for our societies. And I think,

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Speaker 3: you know, it's a really rewarding thing to do that,

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Speaker 3: because it gives you different perceptions of how you make

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Speaker 3: sense of your own existence.

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Speaker 2: Where do you get the book Fluke?

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Speaker 3: Anywhere anywhere books are sold. It's a it comes out

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Speaker 3: in bookshops on Tuesday, so it's it's it's the January

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Speaker 3: twenty third, So anywhere that you can buy a book,

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Speaker 3: you can buy Floup And.

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Speaker 2: Of course without giving away the ending, But basically, what

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Speaker 2: is your comp what is your theory?

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Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think that the best way to

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Speaker 3: think about the world is to think about the idea

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Speaker 3: of we have an illusion of control. We can't control anything,

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Speaker 3: but we influence everything. And I think that is a

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Speaker 3: really empowering takeaway. That we don't know how our actions

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Speaker 3: are going to play out, We don't know how they're

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Speaker 3: going to affect other people or change the world. But

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Speaker 3: I quite literally mean it when I have that third

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Speaker 3: part of the subtitle, which says, and why everything we

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Speaker 3: do matters? I literally think that every single thing that

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Speaker 3: every single person does changes the future. And I think

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Speaker 3: that's an incredibly uplifting and empowering message for people to

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Speaker 3: think about.

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Speaker 2: Brian, you talk about the paradox of the swarm. What

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Speaker 2: is that?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is a really interesting idea about modern society.

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Speaker 3: And I'm talking about this because humans are much more

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Speaker 3: like a swarm than we ever have before. So you

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Speaker 3: think about how modern society is super interconnected globally, you know,

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Speaker 3: whether it's in our economies or our societies, et cetera.

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Speaker 3: And one of my favorite examples of this, which is

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Speaker 3: like a locus swarm, right, a locus swarm in scientific study,

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Speaker 3: what they see is that if a single locust flits

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Speaker 3: one way rather than another, the entire direction of the

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Speaker 3: swarm can change. In an You probably seem this with

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Speaker 3: birds or with schools of fish, right, where one fish

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Speaker 3: moves in the whole school again direction. Now, in human society,

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Speaker 3: we have made a swarm, and that means that small

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Speaker 3: changes can have enormous impacts, more than ever before. So

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Speaker 3: my favorite example of this is you remember that boat

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Speaker 3: that got stuck in the Suez canal Right, it's like

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Speaker 3: this gust of wind, It's one boat, its twists sideways,

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Speaker 3: gets lodged in the canal, and it causes fifty four

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Speaker 3: billion dollars in economic damage globally. Right. And if you

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Speaker 3: think about that, and that to me is the paradox

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Speaker 3: of the swarm. We have this really regular seeming life, right,

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Speaker 3: you know, you go to Starbucks and it's always the same,

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Speaker 3: So everything feels very, very ordered, but then a gust

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Speaker 3: of wind can wreak havoc on the global economy. And

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Speaker 3: so the paradox of the swarm is this idea that

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Speaker 3: we've set up these systems where we feel in control,

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Speaker 3: we feel like there's order, and then the smallest changes

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Speaker 3: can wreak complete disorder and havoc and up end our

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Speaker 3: lives in an instant. And I think that's one of

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Speaker 3: the things that modern society has engineered that did not

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Speaker 3: used to exist, you know, say five thousand years ago,

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Speaker 3: when our societies are simply just less connected than they

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Speaker 3: are today.

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Speaker 2: Do we create these flukes bry in ourselves or do

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Speaker 2: they just tappen?

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Speaker 3: Well, I think we've engineered a world where they become

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Speaker 3: more likely, Right, And that's related to what I was

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Speaker 3: just saying about the paradox of this forum is that

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Speaker 3: if you have a world in which you can instantly

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Speaker 3: communicate with other people, in which your transactions can cross borders,

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Speaker 3: in which our economies are interplined, then small changes in

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Speaker 3: one place can affect everybody else much faster. Now the

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Speaker 3: pandemic is the perfect example of this, right, So one

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Speaker 3: person gets infected in Wuhan and the entire world is

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Speaker 3: upended for the years. And so this is the kind

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Speaker 3: of stuff where you know, to me, I think that

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Speaker 3: we have created a world that is more prone to flukes.

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Speaker 3: I'll put it that way.

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Speaker 2: How small must these changes be to affect our lives?

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Speaker 3: They can be incredibly, incredibly small. One of my favorite

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Speaker 3: examples from modern scientific research is using genetic testing and

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Speaker 3: looking at evolutionary patterns and salon. What they have found

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Speaker 3: is that the origin story of placenta and therefore live

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Speaker 3: births and the origin of mammals, they think, has been

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Speaker 3: traced to a single shrew like creature that got infected

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Speaker 3: by a virus one hundred million years ago, and this

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Speaker 3: changed the development of the species in a way that

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Speaker 3: ultimately leads to humans. Now, some people look at that

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Speaker 3: and say, Okay, this is evidence of some sort of

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Speaker 3: divine intervention, you know, for me it was. It's sort

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Speaker 3: of a random accident, but it's still one of those

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Speaker 3: things where I mean, it's a single creature, a single animal,

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Speaker 3: one hundred million years ago, and modern science seems to

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Speaker 3: suggest that this was an important part of the origin

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Speaker 3: of humanity. So the changes can be tiny, I mean,

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Speaker 3: the gusts of wind, the cigars discarded, the cloud cover

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Speaker 3: over Kokura and Japan that leads to Nagasaki getting bombed.

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Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be big at all. And this

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Speaker 3: is one of the things that's so profound about this idea,

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Speaker 3: I think, is that the stuff that we don't think about,

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Speaker 3: the minor changes we make in our lives, can actually

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Speaker 3: have enormous ripple effects that are unforeseen and unforeseeable in

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Speaker 3: changing our world.

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