Michael: A study of top economics journals found that up to a quarter of published results showed signs of data manipulation. There's a famous saying in statistics: if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. Kevin: That’s a terrifying thought. You’re telling me a chunk of what we think we know about the economy might just be a forced confession? Michael: It’s a perfect setup for what we’re talking about today. What if our entire reality works the same way? What if we’re constantly torturing the world to make it confess to a story that makes sense to us, when the truth is just… chaos? Kevin: I feel like you just pulled the rug out from under my entire worldview. What are we getting into? Michael: That's the central question in Brian Klaas's fantastic new book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Kevin: And Klaas is the perfect person to write this. He's a political scientist who studies democracy and authoritarianism, so he's used to looking for big, orderly systems. But here, he's arguing the opposite. Michael: Exactly. The book has been widely acclaimed, even winning major awards, but it's also been polarizing. Some readers find its message about randomness a little unsettling, which is exactly what we're going to dive into. Kevin: Okay, I’m hooked and slightly nervous. So where do we even start with a world built on randomness? Give me the most mind-blowing example.

Michael: Let's go back to 1945. World War II is ending, and the US is deciding where to drop the first atomic bomb. The Target Committee, a group of military strategists and scientists, has a top target: the city of Kyoto. It’s an intellectual hub, it has wartime factories, and destroying it would be a massive psychological blow to Japan. Kevin: A logical, cold, military calculation. Michael: Completely. But one man on that committee, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, has a problem with it. He vehemently objects. He goes directly to President Truman and argues that Kyoto must be spared. And Truman agrees. Kyoto is removed from the list. Kevin: Why? Did he have some strategic insight the others missed? A moral objection to hitting a cultural center? Michael: Nothing so grand. It turns out that in 1926, nearly two decades earlier, Henry Stimson and his wife had taken a vacation to Japan. They spent part of their honeymoon in Kyoto. He had fond memories of the city's temples and gardens. And that personal, sentimental connection, a fluke of his travel history, saved the city and hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants. Kevin: Hold on. You are seriously telling me the fate of an entire city, one of the most significant military decisions in human history, came down to a man's honeymoon? That feels… wrong. It's too arbitrary. Michael: That's exactly Klaas's point! We crave these rational, weighty explanations for big events. We want the cause to match the scale of the effect. But often, the cause is just a fluke. And the story gets even crazier. With Kyoto off the list, Hiroshima becomes the primary target. The second bomb is slated for the city of Kokura. Kevin: I’ve never heard of a bombing in Kokura. Michael: Because it never happened. On August 9th, the bomber, Bockscar, flew over Kokura, but the city was obscured by clouds. After three passes, running low on fuel, the pilot made a decision. He diverted to the secondary target: Nagasaki. A momentary break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed them to drop the bomb. Kevin: So, a honeymoon saved one city, and a patch of bad weather doomed another. That is absolutely staggering. It’s like the ultimate ‘Sliding Doors’ moment, but for entire populations. Michael: It is. And Klaas uses this to introduce two competing ways of seeing the world. The first is 'convergence,' the idea that history has a general direction, and even if small things change, the big outcomes would be roughly the same. Maybe another city would have been bombed, but the war would have ended similarly. Kevin: That’s the more comforting view, right? It suggests there’s some order to things. Michael: It is. But the other view is 'contingency,' which is what this book is all about. It’s the idea that our world is full of these pivot points, these flukes, and a tiny change can send history careening down a completely different path. The sparing of Kyoto is a story of pure contingency. Kevin: It makes you wonder about all the invisible pivots, the near misses we never even knew happened. But is this just a wild, one-in-a-billion story, or does this kind of thing happen more than we think?

Michael: That's the perfect transition. Klaas argues it happens constantly, because our world is a complex adaptive system. He uses the metaphor of a 'human swarm,' like a swarm of locusts. No single locust is in charge, but their collective interactions create these massive, unpredictable patterns. Our interconnected society works the same way. Kevin: A human swarm. I’m picturing Twitter, or maybe Black Friday shoppers. A chaotic mess. Michael: Exactly. And these systems often exist in a state of what scientists call 'self-organized criticality.' It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the analogy Klaas uses makes it crystal clear: a sandpile. Kevin: Okay, I’m listening. A sandpile. Michael: Imagine dropping grains of sand one by one onto a table. For a long time, a cone just forms and gets bigger. The system is stable. You add a grain, the pile grows by one grain. But eventually, the pile reaches a critical state. The slopes become so steep that the next grain of sand you add might do nothing… or it might trigger a massive, unpredictable avalanche. Kevin: And you can't know which grain will be the one. Michael: You can't. The system has organized itself to the edge of chaos. Klaas argues that our modern world is a giant, critical sandpile. And he gives this incredible ecological example: the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Kevin: I’ve heard about this. It’s amazing. Michael: In 1995, they reintroduced just thirty-one gray wolves. A tiny change in a massive ecosystem. But it was the final grain of sand. It triggered what’s called a 'trophic cascade.' The wolves didn't just hunt elk; they changed the behavior of elk. Kevin: The elk got scared and stopped hanging out in the open, right? Michael: Precisely. They stopped overgrazing the vegetation along the riverbanks. So, the willows and aspen trees grew back. And because the trees grew back, beavers returned. They hadn't been there for decades because there was no wood for their dams. Kevin: And the beaver dams change the rivers! Michael: Yes! The dams created new ponds and marshlands, which became habitats for fish, amphibians, and songbirds. The reintroduction of a few dozen wolves literally changed the physical geography of the park. The rivers changed their course. A small push triggered a system-wide avalanche of change. Kevin: Wow. So the 'fluke' isn't just the event itself, but also the state of the system. Europe in 1914 was a critical sandpile, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the final grain of sand that triggered World War I. Michael: You've got it. And in our hyper-connected, ruthlessly optimized world, almost everything is a critical sandpile. The 2008 financial crisis started with dodgy mortgages in one country. A single viral tweet can start a global movement. We've engineered away all the slack, putting us permanently on the edge of an avalanche.

Kevin: This is where it gets a little unnerving for me, and I know from the reviews that some readers felt this too. If the world is this chaotic, teetering sandpile, what's the point? It feels like we have no control. Why does the book's subtitle say 'Why Everything We Do Matters'? It feels like it should be 'Why Nothing We Do Matters.' Michael: Because our brains are lying to us. This is the final, crucial piece of the puzzle. Klaas argues that we are 'storytelling animals.' Our brains are allergic to randomness. They have a powerful 'narrative bias.' Kevin: We need things to make sense. We need a plot. Michael: We’re desperate for it. The novelist E.M. Forster made this great distinction. He said, "'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot." Our brain automatically supplies the 'of grief.' We can't help it. We see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. Kevin: Like seeing faces in clouds, or getting superstitious about a 'lucky' shirt. Or believing a basketball player has a 'hot hand' when statistically, it's just random streaks. Michael: Exactly. Klaas says the first step is to just accept the randomness. To stop trying to force a neat narrative onto a messy world. The second step is to realize the profound difference between control and influence. In a complex system, you can't control anything, but you influence everything. Kevin: What’s the difference? That sounds like a semantic game. Michael: It’s everything. Think about the story of Ivan, the tourist swept out to sea in Greece. He was about to drown when a soccer ball floated by, saving his life. He had no control over that. But ten days earlier, two little boys on a beach miles away had accidentally kicked their ball into the ocean. Their small, random act had no predictable outcome, but it influenced the world in a way that saved a man's life. Kevin: Huh. So their action mattered immensely, but not in a way they could have ever planned or controlled. Michael: That's the core idea. Every action we take, every word we say, is a new grain of sand being dropped onto the pile. It’s a butterfly's wing flap. We can't know if it will do nothing or if it will trigger an avalanche, good or bad. But it adds to the system. It changes the web of connections.

Kevin: So the takeaway isn't nihilism. It's not that we're powerless. It's a different kind of agency. It’s not about grand plans and predictable outcomes, but about the ripples we create. Michael: Yes. The book's final message is a powerful reframe. Klaas reminds us that we are the products of 13.7 billion years of cosmic flukes. Our very existence is wildly, beautifully improbable. The fact that you and I are here, having this conversation, is the result of an unbroken chain of survival and chance stretching back millennia. Kevin: And if you changed one tiny thing in that chain—if one of our ancestors had turned left instead of right—we wouldn't be here. Michael: We wouldn't. And because the world is so interconnected and sensitive, every choice we make, every act of kindness, every moment of cruelty, every creative idea, ripples outward in ways we can never fully trace or predict. That's why everything we do matters. It all becomes part of the great, unfolding, chaotic story. Kevin: It's a call to embrace what the poet John Keats called 'negative capability'—the ability to exist in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. It makes me wonder, what small, seemingly insignificant thing have I done today that might have some unforeseen ripple effect? Michael: A great question for all of us to reflect on. And it's a perfect place to leave it. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What's a 'fluke' that changed your life? Find us on our socials and share your story. We read every one. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.