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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Here in the 21st century, seems like every couple of years comes a major upheaval to the country and the world, right? What might have been once-in-a-lifetime shocks feel like they're increasing in frequency. I think it's one of the most important facts of life for the current generations.

One year into this century, we experienced September 11th, then came the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and all the democratic backsliding that came with his term in office, not to mention the democratic backsliding around the world. Then not to mention COVID, Ukraine, Gaza, all in the last four years.

A new book takes a closer look at these life-changing events and others in the recent past in the context of what's known as chaos theory and pinpoints the seemingly small moments that triggered these global events. Like how one vegetable vendor in Central Tunisia set himself on fire in protest, who remembers that? That triggered the Arab Spring, which toppled dictators in the region and unleashed all kinds of other conflict. Or how one person infected with the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan, China changed the way we live our lives for years after, or how Trump probably decided or at least possibly decided to run for president after Barrack Obama humiliated him with a joke at the White House correspondent's dinner in 2011.

Well, here to help us understand why all these upheavals might be happening now, some things to do about it, and he's also been writing and speaking out on why he thinks the media and the general public should pay more attention, not less to Donald Trump these days, is Brian Klaas, contributing writer for The Atlantic, professor of global politics at University College London, and author of a brand new book titled Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian, so nice of you to join us with a book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Brian Klaas: So nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: You write, "The 21st century has been defined by unexpected shocks, major upheavals that have upended the world many of us have known and made our lives feel like the playthings of chaos." It's not just me, things that are this big are happening with more frequency than in the past?

Brian Klaas: Yes. I think the idea of black swans a lot of people are familiar with, these rare consequential events that wallop us in our complacency. I think we've designed a world that is extremely prone to black swans more so than any period in human history. Another example in addition to the ones you mentioned in the intro was-- everyone remember when the boat got stuck in the Suez Canal. There was a gust of wind and this boat get stuck, it twists sideways. It caused an estimated $54 billion in economic damage from one boat. That was never possible before.

That's because we've engineered systems that are so hyper-optimized and so interconnected that when anything goes wrong, it can be catastrophic. There's never been a period in human history where a single boat could wipe out part of a percentage point of GDP around the world. What I think also we're thinking about is how different our lives are than everybody else who came before us.

The vast sweep of human history has been defined by effectively uncertainty in the day-to-day life where it's you don't know where your food is going to come from, you don't know if an animal might eat you. Parents and children lived in the same kind of world. They were all hunter-gatherers. It was generation to generation, things were the same. We've completed inverted that dynamic now. We have really regular local stability. In other words, our day-to-day life is extremely regular. You can go to Starbucks, it's always the same. We have routine, order, and structure in our lives, but our overall structure of the world is unstable.

Parents and children live in completely different worlds. Children actually teach technology to parents for the first time. On top of this, I think this is the kind of stuff where-- I grew up in a world without the internet, and now, we can't even imagine living without it. That has never happened before in human history. It's embedded risk into our societies in ways that are unprecedented.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you think the pace of change is because technology is changing faster than it did in the past?

Brian Klaas: I think it's a huge driver of it, and I think it also means that the ripple effects of accidents and random catastrophes are felt much faster. I also think there's a problem that we have which is that we have been taught that the solution to every problem is to optimize to the absolute limit, to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of our societies and our lives. In our lives, it's all these checklists and life hacks and so on.

I think one of the things that is worth thinking about is when you optimize to the limit, where the system is at, its absolute maximum, then when anything goes wrong, you're not resilient. The system becomes really brittle, so does your life. The Suez Canal is a perfect example of this. If there was resilience in the system in the supply chains, then it would have been okay if the boat got stuck for a bit, but because there was no slack in the system, it became catastrophic.

I think this is where-- when I was a kid, my grandfather gave me some pretty good life advice I found. It was two words, and it was avoid catastrophe. I think that's the thing that we've forgotten to learn when we build our social systems.

Brian Lehrer: Not to get wonky-- okay, yes, to get wonky, you pull from a debate in evolutionary biology between what's called contingency and what's called convergence. I think our listeners are wonky at this level. Would you break down the debate and talk about how it relates to what you've been saying?

Brian Klaas: Yes. In evolutionary biology, the contingency is this idea where a small change can have a huge effect. The convergence is where things work out in the end regardless of little perturbations and random effects.

The best examples for these in evolutionary theory are-- The dinosaurs getting wiped out by an asteroid is a perfect example of contingency because if the asteroid, which by the way was long from the distant reaches of space in a place called the Oort cloud, if that space rock had hit in a slightly different time, five seconds earlier or five second later, it might have missed the planet or it might not have made the dinosaurs go extinct. If that had not happened, then mammals would not have risen, and all of us would not exist.

It's this second-by-second thing where if that doesn't occur, none of us are alive, humans don't exist. That's contingency. Stuff happens theory of evolutionary biology. Convergence is the ordered structure where certain things work, and other things don't. Even though there's a bit of noise, it still ends up getting you to the same place in the end. My favorite example of this is that believe it or not, our eyes, human eyes, and octopus eyes are really similar. That's because even though there's been divergence among evolution for 600 million years between these branches of life, the solution that worked, the eye, just ended up evolving twice. The idea is, yes, you've got a very different creature, but it ends up finding the same solution.

Now, I think about this in human life with something I coined as a term called the snooze button effect. Some people may have come across the film Sliding Doors. It's the same idea, where you imagine you wake up, and it's Tuesday morning, you're tired, you slap the snooze button. Then your life immediately rewinds a split second and you decide not to slap the snooze button. The question is, how differently does your life unfold? If everything changes from that snooze button, then that's a contingent moment. If your life basically unfolds in the same way, it's a convergent moment. I think it's a useful framework for thinking about social change and the way that our lives move from moment to moment.

Brian Lehrer: I see people are already starting to call in. Listeners, just going to make sure everybody has the number if you want to say anything or ask a question of Brian Klaas from University College London, author of a new book Fluke: Chance, Chaos-- Let me say it right, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. I guess that includes hitting the snooze button for another 10 minutes of sleep on Saturday morning or not.

212-433WNYC. 212-433-9692. If you want to ask him a question about the other topic that we're going to get to, I saw him on a political talk show the other day talking about an article that he wrote in October, which we'll get to on why he thinks the media is blowing it with the Donald Trump campaign in this election cycle just like the media blew it in the 2016 election cycle but in the opposite way. We're going to get to that. 212-433WNYC. 212-433-9692.

I think Alex in Woodside wants to add another big black swan event to the list that we started with of things that are so big happening so frequently in the 21st century. Alex, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Alex: I just wanted to mention the murder of George Floyd a few years ago, a horrible event. That seemed to result in such now mistrust of the police. I think if you showed folks a photo of a white police officer in a neighborhood of color that a lot of people might feel like that officer is definitely probably interested in violating somebody's rights. I just think that with Bernie Madoff, scandals didn't seem to initiate huge mistrust of financial planners, although no doubt there are many out there. Again, I do not want to, in any way, shape, or form-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I understand. Alex, thank you very much. Another way to look at George Floyd, if we're going to get into that, is that it was the culmination of a series of events over almost a decade, starting probably with the killing, even though it wasn't by a police officer per se, of Trayvon Martin, and then going to the Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, Eric Garner, examples from 2015, and the growth of Black Lives Matter gradually, and that George Floyd in 2020 was the culmination of that causing the explosion.

On the other hand, Brian, certainly there was something about George Floyd's killing, murder, as the court determined it to be, that was a flashpoint moment like none of those other ones that came before. I don't know if you mentioned George Floyd in the book.

Brian Klaas: I don't mention him in the book, but I grew up a couple miles away from where he was killed. I'm from Minneapolis originally. I think this is a contingent moment. I think there's a few things that could have gone very differently, and one of the ones that's the most obvious is if it had not been filmed. This is one of those things where the visceral nature of that killing really resonated around the world precisely because someone stopped and turned on their camera. There are people who have died in horrific ways that have not produced ripple effects in quite such a global way because there was no video footage and so on.

I think there's a whole series of links in the causal chain of events that produce black swans or major consequential rare events. If any of them had been slightly different, then the event either may not have had the same impact, or its impact would have unfolded slightly differently. I think if the George Floyd killing had happened in a different place, there might have been a different reaction to it. It's very fragile when we think about cause and effect.

What we do as humans is we always stitch narratives backwards. We say, "Oh, that happened." Of course, it was always going to happen. Here's a trend that explains it. I think the fragility of cause and effect is something that we are much more willing to discount because it's bewildering to imagine that all of these things that we think have neat and tidy explanations are actually built on a near-infinite number of random events that could have turned out slightly differently.

Brian Lehrer: Tony in Windsor Terrace wants to talk about chaos theory. Tony, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Tony: Hi, Brian and Professor. Sounds like a really interesting book. I was curious to hear your thoughts on conspiracy theory across the political spectrum. Seems like chaos and conspiracy theory might be related in some ways, wanting to come up with a simplified equation for everything when the scary truth is no one is in charge, everything is chaotic, entropy. [onomatopoeia]

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a theory of everything, Brian, that includes both chaos theory, random event theory, as you've been describing it, and conspiracy theories, which, of course, there's so much in the news and in our culture?

Brian Klaas: I do. In fact, it is in the book. I talk about conspiracy theories in Fluke. The reason for that is because the human brain has evolved to be a pattern detection machine. We are exceptionally attuned to things that have relationships and when randomness occurs, we're basically allergic to it. There's an author I admire immensely named Jonathan Gottschall who wrote a book called The Storytelling Animal. What he says about conspiracy theories, which I think is highly persuasive, is that when small or random events happen and they have consequential impacts, we always look for a story.

The conspiracy theorist's secret weapon is they have a really good story. It's usually wrong, [chuckles] but it's very interesting. QAnon is totally crazy, but QAnon is a very good story. It would be a thriller if it was made into a film. What you have is you have a brain that has evolved to detect patterns and the debunkers are saying there's no pattern.

What's really fascinating, the psychology of this, is that you will ask conspiracy theorists about something that had a small random cause like, for example, Princess Diana being killed in a car accident, and people who believe in conspiracy theories around that death will simultaneously say that she is still alive and also that she was killed by the British government. Both of those things cannot be simultaneously true, but they would rather have a secret pattern than an explanation that seems so banal as a random car accident.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel in Riverdale wants to maybe push back on one of the concepts that you've laid out so far. Daniel, you're on WNYC with Brian Klaas. Hello.

Daniel: Hi. Hello. Less than pushback, but more just curious. Earlier you said that making systems more efficient also could make them more susceptible to be brittle. I guess just intuitively that I am having trouble and maybe could use more explanation on that or-

Brian Klaas: That's a great question.

Daniel: -why would they be more brittle just because they're more efficient?

Brian Klaas: It's not that efficiency is bad, it's that you get to a point where the system becomes less resilient because absolute has its maximum limits. There's a thing I write about in the book called the Sand Pile Model, which is a subset of physics. It's very easy to understand though. It's you imagine you take a grain of sand and you start to add more grains of sand, and the pile builds up. It gets really tall, a whole bunch of sand in a big pile. At some point, one extra grain of sand is going to cause that pile to collapse. It's on the, what's called the edge of chaos. It's basically at the limit. Now, if the sand pile is slightly smaller, then each additional grain is not going to cause an avalanche. It's a little bit more resilient.

What I'm saying is that a lot of our social systems and economics or just-in-time supply chains and so on, they've hit the point where they're so efficient that the sand pile is at its absolute maximum. Then when some random accident occurs, like the Suez Canal being blocked by a boat, everything is a cascade and there's this avalanche and the system breaks down. It's not that efficiency itself is bad, it's that if we dial it down just a little bit, then the system, like the sand pile, can be slightly more resilient to shocks.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel, I hope that clarifies. Was Donald Trump's election in 2016 a fluke in the way you use the word fluke in the title of the book?

Brian Klaas: It's both. There's usually elements where there's order and trends and long-term patterns, and then there's also contingent events. The anger over immigration in the United States, the anti-establishment backlash, these are long-term things that are part of trends. Trump's election, though, could have gone slightly differently if, for example, the FBI investigation had not been reopened shortly before the election. That was partly triggered by Anthony Weiner.

Brian Lehrer: The investigation into Hillary Clinton, yes.

Brian Klaas: Exactly. If that had not happened, then perhaps the election would have gone slightly differently. If the election had taken place a week earlier or a week later, maybe there would have been a different outcome. That, in addition to the hypothesis that some people have suggested that you mentioned in the intro of was Trump's decision to run triggered by being humiliated by a joke from Barack Obama in 2011, we don't know.

The point that I'm making here is I think there's lots of times where small changes can have big effects. Of course, nobody really believes that the world would be the same if Hillary Clinton had won. Just the possibility of that I think is so profound that it's worth grappling with these chains of flukes that might have led to the current moment.

Brian Lehrer: Let me make a segue here to the article that you wrote in the fall which you can tell me whether it's relevant to the book, in your opinion, or whether it's just another thing that you think about. In October, you published an essay critiquing how the media have been covering Trump versus Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election, and you wrote about "the banality of crazy" and how you think it's warping the way Americans think about politics in the Trump era. Where would you like to enter that?

Brian Klaas: I don't think it's particularly related to the book, but it's something that I do think about. It's a piece that I wrote for my newsletter which is called The Garden of Forking Paths. It's basically this idea that in the past-- I can speak from personal experience. I live in the UK and in 2017 when Trump would tweet anything, I mean literally anything, my phone would ring and the BBC or a different news outlet would want to talk to me about American politics.

Now Trump can literally say things like, "Hey, maybe we should shoot shoplifters, or maybe the top general, Mark Milley, should be executed for treason." There's all these things that he floats all the time and the phone doesn't ring. The reason it doesn't ring is because we've gotten numb to the craziness. This is what I call the banality of crazy. I think I looked into this in detail.

When Trump proposed executing Mark Milley, it was covered in the New York Times three days later on page 14. I submit to you that there is never a period in American history where if a presidential hopeful, the leading contender from their party, had suggested killing the top general in the United States, that it would not be the biggest headline and news story for weeks. The delay of three days, this is the numbing factor.

My worry is that we have grown so accustomed to the stuff that Donald Trump says that then the totally unusual and dangerous rhetoric is then put up against something on the Democratic side, which I do not think is roughly equivalent. I looked at this in Google search results in the news, there were more stories written about Commander Biden, Joe Biden's dog, biting someone around the same time as the story where Trump had said, "Maybe we should shoot shoplifters." I submit to you that these are not of equal importance in the history of the United States, and yet there was more coverage for the novelty of the dog bite rather than the regularity of these incendiary statements.

Brian Lehrer: I want to note that you acknowledge that you get pushback online, and frankly, so do we. This is attention on this show as well as elsewhere in the media for what's the right place on this spectrum to be? You've received pushback in many cases when you've called out Trump's language that you find dangerous. People tell you not to amplify it because that just spreads the rhetoric.

I don't know where the right place is to be honestly on that spectrum. I hear those things like shooting shoplifters, and [unintelligible 00:20:50] "We have to talk about this," but then if we talk about it, people say, "You're just giving Trump more oxygen." I don't know. I think you believe that the answer to that question is different in 2024 than it should have been in 2016.

Brian Klaas: Yes. I think the dynamics have completely changed. I do think there was a mistake in 2016 where there was the unbridled Trump show on most of the major news networks like CNN and so on. One estimate is that it was billions of dollars of free airtime. The reason I think that was a mistake was because at the moment that he was doing that, he was pulling very, very low. The question that the media has to ask itself is, what are the stakes of this story? Is this a leading figure? He wasn't, he was an entertaining figure. I think it was a mistake to amplify him and give his message the juice that it needed in order to become the top leader of the Republican party.

Nowadays, he is the leader of the Republican Party, so you can't just ignore him. The stuff that he says might actually become policy. On top of that, when you don't cover things like him saying, "I'm going to shoot shoplifters," then what happens is that people start to forget the insanity of the Trump years, and they start to remember some of the good bits, and they forget some of the bad bits.

You start to get this false equivalence where it's like, "Oh, let's talk about the complaints we have about the current administration," but we're not hearing all these things from the extreme rhetoric. Now, his base is hearing these things, and that's the thing that worries me, is the calls for violence and so on. They're getting through to people who are on board with that. If we ignore it, I think it's going to blindside us in a really dangerous way.

My personal view is that there's been a shift in how the media needs to think about these topics from 2016 when he was a fringe candidate originally, and they amplified him to now when he is the de facto leader of one of the two main parties in the United States. Therefore, the stuff he says is of high consequence to every voter and every citizen in the country.

Brian Lehrer: Is there any evidence that shows that covering Trump and his outrageous statements and frightening statements works? Because during the presidency, when Trump was president, the media covered many of his remarks like good people on both sides after Charlottesville, and there were his press briefings during the early days of the pandemic when he would say these crazy things like, "Inject yourself with bleach," maybe that's the answer."

Did we see his approval ratings impact after the media did say, "Look what he said when he was president?"

Brian Klaas: Yes. The two moments that were the worst for Trump's polling were after the Charlottesville comments that he made the very fine people one. When he was front and center for the COVID briefings with the injecting disinfectant and all this type of stuff, it was unfiltered Trump, and people were like, "This is not great. This is a real serious problem." Those quotes, the very fine people, Americans know that quote.

My interpretation of this is that this is something where when the unfiltered Trump rhetoric that is really extreme and dangerous does filter through to people, it does change some minds. Now, we know that it's not going to change a lot of minds. The Trump base is rock solid, and he's going to win probably 40% of the vote no matter what if he's on the ballot. I think the 2024 election is going to come down to whether there is a shift of three to five percentage points in the middle.

I think this is the kind of stuff where when you hear a presidential hopeful talking about executing generals and shooting shoplifters, not to mention being a dictator on day one and so on, there's a certain number of people who look at that and say, "Maybe that's not a good idea." They're not probably the MAGA base, but they're the people who in Wisconsin and other swing states like that will probably end up deciding the election. I think it's where the media has an obligation regardless to inform people about the stakes of this election.

Jay Rosen, who's at NYU, talks about this, and he says, "The stakes, not the odds." I talk about the magnitude of a story rather than the balance of a story. I think if it's an important story, you have to cover it. The guy who might be president saying, "We're going to kill people for petty crimes," I think that's an important story.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in here that might help you tie what's in your Trump article to what's in your book. I think it's Pedro in Bergen County. You're on WNYC. Hi, Pedro.

Pedro: Oh, hi Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I love the interview. I just want to bring up a question. You mentioned at one point that part of your theory is called the Garden of the Dividing Forks or something like that.

Brian Lehrer: One sec. Just so everybody comes along with us that, that's the name of your newsletter, Brian.

Brian Klaas: Yes, it's called The Garden of Forking Paths. It's named after a short story by Borges in 1941.

Brian Lehrer: Ah, which Pedro recognizes, right?

Pedro: Yes. That's exactly why I'm calling. It's Jorge Borges, also in Argentina. It's interesting, I think, I don't know, I just wanted to get your reflection on this because Borges is known as a writer who talks about PAOs, fluke, probability, all these-- Chance is a big issue, a big theme in Borge's literature and short stories. I was just wondering if this is something that informed your title. Actually, I cannot see how it did not, in other words. Anyway, I wanted to get your--

Brian Lehrer: Pedro. Thank you.

Pedro: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You've already said that it did inform the title of your newsletter. Do you want to elaborate on it a little bit?

Brian Klaas: I do. It's actually a central theme in the book Fluke as well because I use this analogy of The Garden of Forking Path to saying all of us are in this garden, and every step that we do isn't just changing which pathway we're on. It's changing which pathways are available to us. Everything we do slightly changes the world, and as we navigate these forking paths, we have to decide where to take our next step, but each step we take changes the paths available.

I think this is something where when you think about social change, the world is constantly changing. We have these models that imagine it's a very neat and tidy story, but I think it's not just our paths that are being affected, it's everybody else's. I think this is where-- our lives are so interconnected, our societies are so interconnected that I use this metaphor of The Garden of Forking Paths to capture that idea of constant flux with every decision that is made in the world.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, don't you love our listeners and the fact that there was somebody out there who got the Borges reference in your newsletter title without being told?

Brian Klaas: I am not exaggerating, this is the smartest interview that I have ever done. I'm amazed. The questions for the college show, that was amazing. I loved it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: That is too nice. I will come back around to try to tie your article on your newsletter to the book with a closing question about political punditry. We are seduced by pundits and data analysts soothsayers who are often wrong, but rarely uncertain. I love that phrase about the pundits. This is true in sports talk and sports journalism too. They're often wrong, but rarely uncertain. How would you like to see coverage of the upcoming election unfold?

Brian Klaas: I would like people to say that we don't know more often. I go on television sometimes. I was on MSNBC this morning, for example, and one of the things you cannot say is I don't know, but sometimes you don't. I don't know what's going to happen in the election. I think that this bias that we have to always infer that there's a neat and tidy story with clear-cut reasons for why things happen causes us to gravitate towards simple explanations that lead us astray.

To me, I'm a political scientist. I study this stuff professionally. I have no idea who's going to win the 2024 election. It's impossible to say, and that's because the world is going to change drastically in the next 10 months or so, and anyone who tells you, "Oh, I know exactly what's going on," they're just lying to you. It's impossible. We don't know what's going to happen. I wish that there was a bit more humility in forecasting and a bit more recognition that chaos theory tells us that the ability to predict the future is a pipe dream. We're not going to be in that world where we can imagine the future quite clearly.

Brian Lehrer: It's another good one by my lights because some of the listeners know and have heard me do this when an expert guest answers I don't know to a question that I ask or a listener asks. I often praise them and say, "I'm so happy when somebody is willing to say I don't know rather than fake it because they're afraid of looking bad if they say I don't know." That's a good place to leave it with Brian Klass, that's K-L-A-A-S, contributing writer to The Atlantic, Professor of Global Politics at University College London. His new book is titled Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Thank you so much.

Brian Klaas: Thanks for having me on.

 

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