Brian Klaas, welcome to the show.
BRIAN KLAAS, AUTHOR, "FLUKE ": Thanks for having me here.
ISAACSON: Your new book is called "Fluke." The subtitle is "Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters." Let's start by just explaining, what is a fluke?
KLAAS: A fluke is a highly consequential event that happens by chance or is arbitrary or random. And so, I argue in the book that our world is shaped by these and our lives are shaped by these much more than we imagine, but we just pretend otherwise because it's much nicer to imagine that we have neat and tidy stories to make sense of our world and our own lives.
ISAACSON: Well, one example I think you use is the Arab Spring, a Tunisian vendor. Explain how that does that.
KLAAS: Yes, so you've got a sort of moment in the Middle East in late 2010, where there's a lot of people who are pretty angry at their dictatorships. And all of a sudden, one of those angry people decides to light himself on fire in Central Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi. And this spark creates a conflagration that basically consumes the entire Middle East, leads to several regimes collapsing, and then also, the Syrian civil war, which hundreds of thousands of people died in.
And so, when you think about this, you think about, you know, would this have happened but for this trigger in Tunisia? And I think this is the sort of way that our world works, is partly between order and disorder, where you have these trends and these sorts of aspects where you get towards what's called the tipping point or the edge of chaos, and then a single thing can tip you over that edge and create an extremely consequential event that shifts how the world works.
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