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- [00:02]
Don Wildman
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Welcome to Just A Couple Things. It's your sister, Jessie Wu. You may know me from Wild N Out, Dish Nation, All Blacks, Ala Carte, and so many other platforms. Just A Couple Things is a podcast where we're dishing all things pop culture as well as comedic story times. Give my podcast a follow and make sure that you subscribe. Subscribe so you never miss out on an episode.
- [00:35]
Brian Klaas
ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
- [00:46]
Don Wildman
Deep in the rainforest of Brazil, the humid air hums with a chirping of cicadas, distant bird calls, the babbling of a stream running towards the Amazon, and the constant quiet dripping of moisture from leaves to the ground cover below. Amorpho butterfly. Its vivid iridescent blue wings, spanning five inches, flutters delicately between branches, landing to sip juices from decayed acai berries in the dappled sunlight. It is a fragile and elegant creature here among the massive trunks of trees, reaching hundreds of feet into the sky, and yet with a particular flutter of its wings, unseen by human eyes, indecipherable to scientists and meteorologists. A ripple of air extends outward, a minuscule force, but it joins with accumulating air currents that feed finally into the higher atmospheric systems above. Days later, a storm a continent away gathers strength. Winds build and tornado warnings blare. Meanwhile, this same butterfly flutters onward in its verdant and peaceful habitat, oblivious to any force it may have exerted. The butterfly effect, the idea that a tiny development in one location can set off a chain reaction triggering events in the world at large. A missed train, a mislaid letter, a misunderstood signal, or one all too human decision, can profoundly affect the unfolding of events in a place altogether different. It's American history hit here. I'm Don Wildman, your host. Welcome back. Human history can be viewed as one event leading to another, which leads to others in a constant phenomenon of cause and effect. That's certainly the view of most historians, I'd say, who work diligently to order events and present a coherent, defensible record of whatever happened and how it came to pass. But there is another dynamic at play in history, never mind in the whole of existence, where random occurrence is as much a factor as logical order. It's the butterfly effect that borrows from the mathematical ideas of chaos theory. Unicorn moments that just happen because they happen and then steer historical consequence in one direction or another, banal or profound, leads to all sorts of what ifs and counterfactuals that provide so many enlightening hypotheticals on how our world could be so different if one or another choice had been made, or if another door had been knocked upon, or if. Well, you get the idea. And there's a new book about this notion, and it's called, appropriately, Fluke Chance, Chaos, and why Everything We Do Matters. Written by Brian Klaas, who is a political scientist working at University College London as a professor. He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic magazine. And today, randomly a guest on American history hit. Hello, Brian, Nice to have you.
- [03:55]
Brian Klaas
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.
- [03:58]
Don Wildman
All my halcyon days living in New York City, I rode my bike chaotically through Manhattan, dreading that one car door that would randomly open my path, altering the course of my life and others. I had free will not to be an idiot on a bike in Manhattan. But it is some kind of illustration of the idea of your book that random ideas that occur and don't occur are so often the pivotal forces at work in history. What drew you to consider this notion and write a book about it?
- [04:26]
Brian Klaas
I think that there's a lot of the world that we try to explain with neat and tidy stories, right? And I'm a social scientist and social science is trying to sort of use trends and patterns and say where we're heading. And we always sort of, you know, I think we overly simplify the world to do that. And sometimes when you're writing historical narratives, the same thing happens that, oh, of course this was inevitable because the great trends of history brought us to this moment. Every time that I started to look more deeply into anything that happened, whether it was in history or a case that I was studying in my social science research, all of that sort of fell by the wayside. And it became utterly clear to me that the idiosyncratic personalities, the small decisions, the tiny little flukes were things that swayed history forever. And of course, we don't know when they're going to be consequential, Right? I mean, this is the thing, is that sometimes a tiny decision doesn't really sway history that much, and other times it redirects the course of the future forever. And I think that the sort of narratives that we build around telling stories of where we. How we ended up where we are today write that out. They pretend it's meaningless noise. And so I'm trying to correct that and argue that the small stuff really matters.
- [05:35]
Don Wildman
It's like the counterfactuals a fascinating lens through which to study history and turn it on its head. And considering the strange and pivotal moments that happen, which are all absolutely true, I mean, it's. We rely heavily, of course, on the historical inquiry that has been done for us by proud and smart individuals. But the truth is, history is as random as it comes. Every day of our lives, we know this one thing could happen in a. Another thing does. How do you organize the book? I mean, it's a series of examples of this.
- [06:05]
Brian Klaas
Well, it sort of builds the narrative sequentially through a series of sort of claims, right. So the first one is that the world is much more swayed by the arbitrary and the accidental than we imagine. And I start with a story about the atomic bomb, which I think we'll probably get to in a moment. So I won't talk about that yet, but I sort of am illustrating that this is something where throughout history, these accidental changes have happened. And then I explain why it happens. And the reason why it happens is because of chaos theory, which is effectively that when you have a complex interconnected system which we all live within, right? We live within the system of 8 billion interacting humans, that what somebody does halfway around the world, even somebody long dead, can have a ripple effect that affects the trajectory of our lives. And of course, we were extremely clearly illustrated this point a couple years ago when the pandemic hit, because one person getting infected in Wuhan, you know, changed the world. And of course, history operates like this too, where you can have, you know, the World War I example, which we can talk about as well, of a single person getting assassinated, and then all of a sudden you have millions of deaths. So that aspect of interconnection is really important to the book. The sort of ripple effects of our actions and the sort of unforeseeable consequences of small behavioral changes and so on. And then I try to argue why we pretend otherwise, right? Why our brains have basically evolved to draw in neat and tidy stories about how the world works. And of course, you know, it would be really boring and annoying to read history books that don't have a narrative because our brain has evolved to crave it. So, like, what would you do? You, you know the story of World War II and it's just a list of facts. You need to stitch them together. But I think that even though that's the way we make sense of the world and it's the way we make sense of history, I think it's important for us to understand that it's a bias, right? It's called narrative bias. And it's something where we misunderstand the world if we overly clean up the sort of details of history and make them fit into these sort of neat and tidy boxes. And then there's sort of the philosophy of this, right, the sort of questions about how much can we know about the world, how much can we forecast the future if history pivots on the tiny details? Maybe this is one of the reasons why the 21st century has been a series of calamities that have sort of blindsided us because we like to pretend that we know what's happening and we know the cause and effect relationships. But if the tiny little details are changing the world, then in some ways it's going to be impossible to forecast the future. And that's something that I think flies in the face of some of the hubris we have around things like AI and so on, where people imagine, oh, we're just one data model away from knowing what's coming next. And I basically argue that that's not true.
- [08:45]
Don Wildman
It's a difference of generations, too. I mean, thanks to media, we have so much saturation of all these moments, of all these thoughts and random ideas are going on all the time in front of us. Whereas in older generations, such as at World War I, you would have gotten that through the news and the newspaper and one broad headline and trusted that that was indeed the event. Part of the feeling of our times is being all too aware of the many possibilities that are going on thanks to human beings taking part. Brian, our audience is obviously a UK US audience, and so I want to start with one of those stories and how a kind of obscure aspect of this relationship happens back in the Revolutionary War times and before the development of the British Navy had so much to do with the exploitation of resources on the North American continent. That has a huge play in this whole relationship, doesn't it?
- [09:39]
Brian Klaas
Yeah, it does. And it depends how far you go back, right? Because there's sort of. There's this period where Britain is not always an island. I mean, it eventually becomes an island 8,000 years ago when this landslide in Norway created a tsunami that permanently cut off, or at least up until now, cut off Britain completely and made it an island. And that is of course, one of the reasons why the navy is so important to British history. And then once you develop naval superpowers in the sort of British Empire, you need a lot of trees because you need to build the ships. And so what happens during this period as the navy rises in Britain is that they basically decimate a lot of the old forest trees. And they just, you know, they. There's this voracious desire or tall timber. And so the British landscape is forever changed. I mean, it's still. There's still remnants that you can see in terms of how different and deforested it is, because the Royal Navy in the 18th century took in an estimated 1.2 million trees down in order to build these ships. So there's this sort of unmet demand. And all of a sudden people realize the answer is America. And they think, okay, we've got this huge continent, these enormous, what they called cloud kissing pines in places like Connecticut. And so, you know, the settlers began to cut these trees down because, of course, they're really good for building houses, but the king wants them to build ships. And so they have this sort of moment where the finest specimens were supposed to be reserved for the king. And they made this sort of etching onto the bark with what was called the king's mark, this broad arrow shape that was imprinted on these trees with three blows from a hatchet. And it was marked as the king's trees. Right. And of course, this produces an illicit trade because the settlers in America want to use these trees, and they sort of hope they can get away with it. Now, eventually, this all comes to a sort of showdown because the resentment between the king claiming the trees and the settlers wanting them in the colonies, they eventually have this big sort of showdown in. In a place called the Pine Tree Tavern in New Hampshire. This happens in April of 1772, and the king, sort of, you know, enforcer, gets attacked by this violent mob. And so this spurs what's called the Pine Tree Riot. And it's the hidden story that many people don't know about that's sort of this precursor to the Boston Tea Party. It's one of these parts of sort of an. An initial defiance of the crown in America. And because they were treated with a relatively light slap on the wrist, it emboldened those who wanted to sort of challenge the sort of royal power. And so it's viewed as one of these sort of catalysts of the Revolutionary War. And when you think about this, I mean, if we. If we sort of zoom out from what's going on here, there's this aspect in history where to tell this story, you need to have the history of sort of Doggerland, this aspect of why Britain gets cut off and becomes an island. You have to have the story of empire. You have to have the story of the sort of Geography of Britain's forests, the geography of America's forests, the colonization of America. And then this little trigger, which is the pine tree riots, along with the sort of resentment and the need for trees, and all of them combine. Right. And the reason I tell stories like this is because any one of these factors being different might have created a different trigger for war. I mean, eventually, you may have had the Revolutionary War anyway, but it might have started differently. And, of course, one of the things that I think is really profound about this example is that the initial American Navy sailed under a white flag with a pine tree on it. And so if you look it up, you'll see this as this is the first naval flag for the United States. And it's because of this attempt to sort of seize the American trees for the Royal Navy. And, you know, when I was writing this part of the book, I didn't have time to go into a lot of the details, but the ripple effects of this continue because you have things like Captain Cook then goes on these expeditions, and, you know, his. His ship breaks off the coast of Hawaii and he gets killed. And part of that may be because they lost the supply line. You know, it's. It's. It's tied to this, questions of supply lines for tall trees and whether you have good timber and all these things. So every story around naval history in this period is somehow linked to this question of supply lines around trees, and we sort of take for granted. Okay, now let's look at the naval battle, and there's this hidden set of factors that we just totally ignore that are lurking below the surface.
- [14:03]
Don Wildman
I love this. The hidden stories is what really fascinates me. I go on and on about them with my wife at the dinner table. She's appreciative and not. It is a favorite thing of people interested in history to kind of find the unusual roots of events. And this speaks directly to that with this added dynamic. That's fascinating. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email@ahhstoryhit.com we'd love to hear from you. Are you struggling to think of gifts for loved ones this Christmas? It can be so hard sometimes. This Christmas, give the gift that truly keeps on giving. A lifetime membership to Rosetta Stone. It's perfect for anyone looking to learn or improve their language skills. Rosetta Stone is the trusted expert with more than 30 years of experience and millions of users and it offers 25 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean and Arabic. It's convenient and flexible learning anytime, anywhere. Learn on the go with a mobile app or at your desktop on your schedule. The Lifetime membership has all 25 languages for any trips or language needs in life. That's lifetime access to all 25 language courses Rosetta Stone offers for 50% off. It's a steal. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. Today, American History hit listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit www.rosettastone.com historyhit. That's 50% off for unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Am I making myself clear? Redeem your 50% off at www.rosettastone.com historyhit today for yourself or as a gift that keeps on giving.
- [16:06]
Brian Klaas
Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, leading experts and academics delve into our distant past and discover secrets thought lost to the sands of time. Join me Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History hit.
- [16:51]
Don Wildman
Moving on to the Civil War, one of the most interesting things has to do with a box of cigars, isn't it?
- [16:57]
Brian Klaas
This is one of my favorite stories because there may be a few people who know the first part of this story, but the second part of it I had never seen written about. I found it in a very obscure journal article and it's just unbelievably fascinating because the fate of the United States does genuinely pivot on a complete accident involving three cigars. So this goes back to 1862 and what you have happen is you have this person who is in the Union Army. His name is Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Regiment. And at 9am on September 13, 1862, it's a Saturday morning, he sits down to rest, right? They're marching these long days as part of the sort of army's movements, and he sits down next to a fence row and he stretches himself out and all of a sudden this thing catches his eye and he looks at it and it's a sheet of paper and he unwraps it. It turns out there's three cigars inside this sheet of paper. But in the paper, what is written is. It says, confidential Headquarters, army of Northern Virginia, September 9, 1862. Special orders 191. And so what Barton has accidentally discovered is the marching orders of the Confederate army, which have fallen out of a satchel of one of the messengers. And this is like the most priceless intelligence you can possibly get when you're in the middle of a war, because it's about to tell you where the Confederate army is going. And this, if you know the Civil War dates, September 9, 1862, is not far before one of the most consequential battles, and indeed the bloodiest day in American history, of the battle of Antietam. And so what happens, basically, is they sort of have this conversation in the Union army of okay, we found these cigars. It seems too good to be true, right? We accidentally came across these sort of these special orders. So how do we know they're genuine? Because if we're going to move the Union army and have the whole battle plan change based on this intelligence, we need to know this is a real order and not some sort of, you know, gambit by the Confederates to trick us. So they look at the document or the document signed by a guy named R.H. chilton by command of General Robert E. Lee. So this, you know, okay, it seems plausible. And so Barton, you know, sort of sends this up the chain of command. The letters go to the Union tents, and they go to a general named Alpheus S. Williams. And outside of the tent, you know, this is one of these periods where the generals all have their sort of assistant outside the tent to sort of, you know, filter out what's worth the general's time. And the guy who was filtering this day was named Colonel Samuel Pittman. And Pitman reads this, and he instantly knows that the orders are genuine. And this is the second part of the story. This is the part that I absolutely love. So the reason Pittman knows that they're real is because we worked before he joined the army as a bank teller in Detroit, Michigan, and he was the paymaster for the U.S. army. And as a result of that, what he had to do was process checks that were signed by people in the military. And it turned out that Pittman had seen Chilton's signature literally thousands of times before the war broke out. So he happens to be the one person in the Union army who can look at the signature and say, yes, that's actually the right guy. This is a real set of Orders and so on. And so he conveys this information, the Union army changes its mind and moves and meets at the Battle of Antietam again, this huge showdown. Now, the Battle of Antietam is not a decisive Union victory, but it stops the Confederate momentum. It's a critical moment in the war. And because of it, a lot of historians will argue that Antietam is sort of the thing that was the catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation, that Lincoln felt, you know, more emboldened to do this, but more even more critically. There's a relatively good argument you can make that the Confederates were about to get recognized or that the British government was thinking about recognizing the Confederacy because of the momentum they had in the war. And it sort of gave the British government pause, right? They said, eh, let's wait and see. Because this battle seems to suggest that this is not going to be a decisive Confederate victory in the war. Of course they wanted the cotton and so on. So it's one of those aspects where when you think about this, it's this critical moment where if Antietam or something like it had been another really decisive Confederate victory, you know, how different the world could be. I mean, imagine that this had led to a cascade in which the Confederates actually won. It's not impossible to imagine that. And of course, everything about history would differ because you'd have two countries. I mean, there's so many things that would be different. I mean, World War I would maybe not have happened the same way. World War II would not have happened the same way. So you start to think about this stuff and it's really seductive.
- [21:38]
Don Wildman
Forget about that special relationship that we have with, you know, that starts to be born at that time.
- [21:44]
Brian Klaas
Yes. Yeah. And it all pivots on these three cigars and the guy taking a rest at just the right time. I mean, it's an amazing, amazing story.
- [21:52]
Don Wildman
So haphazard, yet so meaningful and all because some guy needs to smoke. That's really what it's about. The story about the atomic bomb that we referenced earlier is very personal to me. And talk about fluky moments of time. My father was a recruit or volunteered for World War II early on. He became an anti aircraft instructor for so many years throughout the American South. Finally, he was one of those soldiers on those boats waiting for Operation Overlord, which was to attack the home islands of Japan. He always said to me, you're here, Don, because the atom bomb dropped. That was his sort of catchphrase to all of his kids. Because of course he didn't have to attack but that story has an interesting root here in your telling, having to do with the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. How so?
- [22:39]
Brian Klaas
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those stories that I think it really makes clear that when we tell history, we always focus on the sort of obvious factors, and this one is really not obvious. So Henry Stimpson goes on vacation. He's a US Government official at the time. He goes on vacation, basically, in this tour of Asia, to kyoto, Japan, in 1926. And some. Some incredible historians have done this work to track down. They went to the Miyako Hotel near the rail yards of Kyoto, and they found the room number and everything. I mean, they went to the records because the Miyako Hotel still exists, and they found, you know, the actual ledger where he stayed. And the reason they did this is because 19 years later, Henry Stimson ends up as America's Secretary of War, and he's sort of the chief civilian in charge of the targeting decision for the first atomic bomb. And the. The generals and the scientists and the civilians sort of are together on the. What's called the Target Committee, and they come up with a list of recommendations for where to drop this bomb. And they agree that Kyoto is the best pick. And the reason they argue this is it's got a airplane factory. It's a historic capital. It's got propaganda value. It hasn't been destroyed that much during the war. So it sort of will demonstrate the destructive power of the first atomic bomb. And Stimson, fortunately for the residents of Kyoto, liked Kyoto. He sort of was seduced by the city and the sort of beauty of it, the history of it. And he also didn't want to have this destruction of this cultural heritage site. So the generals start to call it his pet city because he starts talking so much about how they can't bomb it, they must not bomb it. And he twice meets with President Truman to convince him to take Kyoto off the list. And eventually Truman relents. And so the first bomb goes to Hiroshima instead of Kyoto because of this vacation that was taken 19 years earlier. And the second bomb is supposed to go to Kokura. That's the primary target on August 9, 1945. And because of a passing cloud where they basically couldn't see the target site, they end up going to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki, of course. And, you know, there's a sort of element where when you look at the Miyako Hotel, on the target plans, they drew up bombing sort of target maps and so on, and the bullseye for where they plan to drop it is the rail yards right next to where the Myakka Hotel still is today. And so you sort of wonder, you know, the psychology of this moment where Stimson is looking at these maps. He's remembering this trip with his wife 19 years earlier. He chooses to act. And so we don't know what would have happened differently if they had bombed Kyoto and Kokura instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But one thing that we do know is it would have changed the fate of science. And I didn't put this in fluke, but it's an interesting aspect of it, is that if you've ever heard of, for example, the F scale for tornadoes, that's named after Ted Fujita, and he was in the bombing site that was supposed to be dropped at the time, likely been incinerated. So, I mean, there's all these ripple effects, right? The science of tornadoes. And one of the main figures of modern meteorology probably would have been incinerated. Of course, we don't know who was incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That might have changed the course of the 20th century. And so that's the sort of great what ifs is, is that Japanese history would have been different. Of course, the US probably would have won the war either way. But the course of Japanese history and the ripple effects, when you swap 180,000 people out for a different 180,000 people, it changes the future. And all of it can be traced back to this one tourist couples decision and a passing cloud on August 9, 1945.
- [26:10]
Don Wildman
My assumption had always been that Kyoto was spared because of the important spiritual factor. You know, it's. It was the traditional capital of Japan in the day and back to the Shogun days, I guess. And. But you, you point out an interesting facet of things, that this was also the University of Kyoto. There was so much scholarship done there. It's such an intellectual center. So if that had been incinerated, just speak clinically about it, you know, you would have ended up losing an enormous amount the brain trust of future Japan, really, and so much of the world.
- [26:40]
Brian Klaas
What's interesting is there are some potential references to the idea that this was viewed as an upside in the target committee's thinking because they knew that the scholars who survived and the sort of educated population would instantly know that this bomb was different and would convey it to the rest of the country and say, look, you know, you have to surrender. So whether that was fanciful thinking or not, but all these little details, I mean, they're fascinating to ponder tragedies, of course, but they're ones where, you know, just when. When you have such consequential moments, the little, tiny aspects of human history are written in the margins.
- [27:15]
Don Wildman
There's also a phrase that comes from the Kokura's luck, which is a traditional thing to say about people getting away with something and that was taken from the city, being avoided or bypassed.
- [27:25]
Brian Klaas
Yeah, I mean, the people in Kokura didn't know that they were the target until it was declassified. I believe it was, like, two decades later. So, of course, you know, all of a sudden they declassify this thing, and all of a sudden the residents of Kokura have been told you very narrowly escaped being Nagasaki. I mean, just an incredible, incredible facet of history.
- [27:56]
Don Wildman
So much of what we're talking about here are wartime stories, which, of course, have these dramatic pivotal moments. I imagine there's many more examples of flukes in history that have not to do with war, right?
- [28:08]
Brian Klaas
Yeah, of course. I mean, war is one that's obvious because you can imagine so easily how if the victor had changed or if the destruction had been different, that the consequences would be enormous. I mean, one of the arguments that I'm making is that, you know, these things have really long tails. And one of the aspects that I think is really difficult for us to grapple with when you think about history is whenever I point these aspects out, you know, these tiny details of the cigar or the vacation that Stimson took, the people who push back against me will say, well, yeah, but like the US The Union would have won the Civil War anyway because it had structural advantages, or the US would have won against Japan because they would have dropped the bomb elsewhere. And of course, you know, that's probably true. There's some aspects of this that are probably true. But the point that I make is the way you lose conflicts, the way that history unfolds is not just a series of discrete events. Right. It's not like the war is now over and now we enter a new chapter of history. The way the war ends affects the way the next war begins, or it affects the way the economy recovers. Right. If Kyoto is not part of Japan's economy, Japan in the 20th century maybe has a different path. Right? And so the. The argument that I'm making is that the wars are the most obvious, but everything matters, right? That these little details are always reshaping history, and it's just these little glimpses we get when we can actually make the counterfactual make sense. That is why I use warfare very often in illustrating the points.
- [29:32]
Don Wildman
How much of this idea, having written this book, do you understand is baked into the decision and policy decisions that people are making on the ground? Like the idea of creating contingencies. Let's see. All the possibilities here is obviously part of any planning situation, but in government thinking, analysis of choices that presidents have to make, especially in wartime, you have to consider all the possibilities. Has this increased over time as people have realized these things?
- [30:00]
Brian Klaas
I think it's the opposite, unfortunately. And I think it's the opposite for two reasons. I really worry about this. This is where I go into the social science hat a little bit. But the two reasons I think this has gone the wrong way first is because we have so many data tools at our disposal that, you know, an AI is going to amplify this, that people begin to believe the data can predict the future. And we can't. We just simply can't. Because you can't model every possible contingency of history. I mean, you would never put in your model, you know, the vacation histories of U.S. government officials or the cigar locations of various armies and so on. Right. So as a result of that, I think there's a false hubris that we have when we look at the world and, you know, I'm part of this as a social scientist, where you sort of have these models and you say, this is what's going to happen. Here's the trends, the economists forecast all these things, and we're very often wrong. So I think that aspect is problematic. And the second aspect of this is that I think the world has become less stable because it's more interconnected, Right? Sure. So in other words, the cigar story quite obviously changed American history, and over time, that would have ripple effects for the rest of the world. The problem is a pivotal moment in China now affects Americans, and a pivotal moment in America now affects people in Zimbabwe. Right. So, like, because of the interconnectivity, I think we have more risk that is harder to navigate. And so I wish we had decision makers that were constantly thinking about sort of resilience and contingencies. I really worry that our sort of overconfidence is one where we haven't actually learned the lessons of history.
- [31:36]
Don Wildman
Good fortune has so much to do with it as much as free will. The last story we'll cover here, there's a huge amount of fluke and happenstance having to do with 9 11. I was in New York at the time. So many stories of friends who decided not to go that day or got late, you know, got stuck in traffic. Any number of Fluke moments for people surviving or not surviving tragically. But you make a point about the bin Laden raid, which, you know, comes years afterwards as a result, and how the planning of that relied on so many things falling into place. And boy, if they hadn't worked out and we hadn't gotten bin Laden and some horrible thing had beside what happened took place, what might have sprung out of that is almost unthinkable.
- [32:20]
Brian Klaas
Yeah. So I'll talk about 911 briefly, and then the, the bin Laden raid. I mean, I think one of the stories I have in Fluke is a really moving personal story of a man who went to a conference that was supposed to be held in the World Trade center on 911 and his colleague gave him the gift of a new tie on the morning of the conference as a. As a sort of token of appreciation or whatever. And the tie didn't match his shirt that he was wearing, so he went back to iron the shirt. And when he went back to iron the shirt, she went up to the conference and was killed when the first plane hit the World Trade center. And he survived and she didn't. So her act of kindness is what caused her to die, unfortunately, is very, very sad. And one of the things I just wanted to talk briefly about, the philosophy of the history that you get from a story like that is that, you know, what he really got upset about when I talked to him, his name is Joseph Lott. And when I talked to him about this, what he said is that everybody told him the same thing, which was that everything happens for a reason, as though there was this grand plan to why he was supposed to survive and she was supposed to die, which puts so much pressure on him. Right. This idea that there was some preordained plan. And so this is where I think the sort of aspects of how we tell history matter. Because if you emphasize some of the accidents, then it's, you know, there's. There's some things that just happen. They're not just. They're not morally valuable. It's just sometimes you give a gift of a tie and you die. And history works the same way sometimes where sometimes the bad guys win. And it's not because they were righteous, it's because of accidents. Right. There's a point around 911 that also is. It illustrates, I think, that broader lesson of history. Now, with the bin Laden raid, of course, one of the points I make is that you're trying to navigate what's called radical uncertainty, which is where you have no idea. I mean, nobody in America knew whether bin Laden was in that house. Right. They had a guess. The CIA had sort of made an analysis. And they said, you know, there's a, there's a person there that we think might be bin Laden, but we don't know. You know, and this is one of the things that's really extraordinary about this moment in American history, is that that night was so incredibly consequential in several different ways. One is that Obama goes to the White House correspondents Dinner, which is basically where the President tells Jo jokes, right? They do sort of stand up, and he has ordered in the Situation Room all the preparations to be made for this raid. And after he does stand up, he goes back to the Situation Room and watches them kill Osama bin Laden. I mean, a few hours later, extraordinary amounts of sort of steel nerves to tell jokes when you're gambling your presidency.
- [34:51]
Don Wildman
Well, it's also one of the most infamous performances at a White House correspondent's dinner because he, he roasts Donald Trump, which is the, you know, they kick off to so much.
- [35:00]
Brian Klaas
Yeah, this is the other bit, right. There's, there's some confidence of Trump that say that that was the night he decided to run for president and wanted to contest for the 2016 election. So, you know, whether that's true or not, we don't. We'll never know. But it's, it's one of these intriguing aspects of history. We have Obama gambling his presidency as he's telling jokes, maybe inspiring Donald Trump to enter the political fray. And then, of course, you know, one of the helicopters crashes, one of the Blackhawks crashes. During the raid, they managed to kill bin Laden successfully. But it's, you know, I mean, they didn't know. There was no way to know. And one of the things that happens when you have moments like this is that you tell history with the benefit of hindsight. Of course they were going to succeed. It's SEAL Team 6 in the CIA, right. But it could have gone very wrong. The Pakistan government might have noticed earlier and scrambled fighter jets. I mean, there's all these things, and I think when we encounter the stories of history, we know how they end. That's the area where, if you write a book about World War II, it's impossible to inhabit a world where something else happens, because we know what actually happened. And forever, our sort of interpretation of events is biased by that, what actually occurred. And we can never go back to that moment like Obama did on that fateful night where he genuinely didn't know what was happening.
- [36:14]
Don Wildman
It's a very refreshing idea. It's a neat way of turning events a bit sideways and looking at them differently, but it's a very serious book. I have to say I was really compelled by your writing and yet it's so readable and so it's a fascinating experience. From a social science aspect of this, how to analyze things and think of the data involved in understanding this stuff is really interesting. The book is called Chance, Chaos and why Everything We Do Matters. It is written by the author who has been with us, Brian Klaas. Thanks so much, Brian.
- [36:44]
Brian Klaas
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
- [36:46]
Don Wildman
Hello folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content like Mysterious Missing.
- [37:00]
Brian Klaas
You can trust podcasts to deliver results for your business. 80% of podcast listeners say they'll consider a brand recommendation by their favorite host. Even more impressive, 88% have taken action because of a podcast ad. If you're looking to connect with highly engaged audiences, now's the time to dive in. Download podcast Pulse 2024 for all the latest insights and see how podcast ads can drive real results for you.
- [37:28]
Don Wildman
Colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.