We control nothing, but we influence everything | Brian Klaas: Full Interview
Become a Big Think member to unlock expert classes, premium print issues, exclusive events and more: https://bigthink.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=yt_desc “It’s a true fact, but a bizarre one, that the reason why hundreds of thousands of people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than Kyoto and Kokura, is because of a 19-year-old vacation and a passing cloud.”
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Up next, Why does it feel like the world is falling apart? ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLm6dC34gYk
00:00:00 Chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters
00:00:19 Understanding flukes
00:05:06 Contingent convergence
00:05:26 What is a concrete example of a ‘fluke?’
00:08:57 Invisible pivot points of life
00:13:05 Does everything happen for a reason?
00:14:54 The history of ideas
00:19:33 The delusion of individualism
00:23:05 How can science help us understand flukes?
00:27:40 Convergence vs contingency
00:28:48 How do ripple effects define our lives?
00:33:18 The Butterfly Effect
00:38:28 What are the ‘Basins of Attraction?’
00:47:00 How do we define the research model of social change?
01:00:14 What is the upside to uncertainty?
01:10:06 What is your position on free will?
01:17:26 What do we get wrong about ‘The Concept of Genius?’
01:23:59 Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?
Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/extreme-flukes/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
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About Brian Klaas:
Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, an affiliate researcher at the University of Oxford, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is also the author five books, including Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (2024) and Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (2021). Klaas writes the popular The Garden of Forking Paths Substack and created the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, which has been downloaded roughly three million times.
Klaas is an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, elections, and the nature of power. Additionally, his research interests include contingency, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science and social science, and complex systems. In addition to Fluke and Corruptible, Klaas authored three earlier books: The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy (Hurst & Co, 2017); The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy, (Oxford University Press, 2016) and How to Rig an Election (Yale University Press, co-authored with Professor Nic Cheeseman; 2018).
Comments
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@TheKirky
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
what. a. fool.
@TheHumanSystem77
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This is such a powerful distinction: control is often an illusion, but influence is real. Maybe psychological maturity begins when we stop trying to control every outcome and start paying closer attention to the patterns we can actually shape — our attention, our reactions, our choices, and the meaning we give to experience.
@adverse7704
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Is the idea of calling events too complex to fathom 'random' another flaw of human perception?
@halldorherm
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This is the cheapest version of "science" or "thinking big" possible.
"Give me two documented events and with perfect hindsight I will find how they connect to each other"
@ADRIFTHIPHOP
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
THAT MAN DIDN'T EVEN RETURN THE SOCCER BALL TO THE KIDS THAT SAVED HIS LIFE???
@jojoJunesJourney
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Regarding Elon Musk, 💯 % agree. Love this episode. I'm engineer with a PhD in termodinamyc, and almost everything that was talked we study about complex systems. Entropy is the GOAT of Caos Theory 🙃
@jojoJunesJourney
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
All of this applies 💯 % to AI models. Incredible 👏👌
@taylorlauren8145
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Me watching from potosi 😲👀
@drsandhyathumsikumar4479
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
So much bravery so much clarity 🎉🎉 wow and gratitude
@jamesgrace1934
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
this ninja a genius.
@squaretriangle9208
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
24:00 Groundhog Day is contingengy with a lot of individual choice then
I think he's not right about individualism and contingency, contingency and the tapestry of life don't counter the individualism argument, we have agency and control to a certain and varying degree, look at the Ukraine war, if Zelensky had accepted the American offer to leave the country and went into exile, he didn't….
@sasanrahmatian312
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Everything he says is correct, but he does not complete the story. Every decision is made in an environment of constraints. So these flukes create a lot of constraints, but how the actor RESPONDS to these constraints in the light of his/her objectives is still a matter of decision making and strategy. That guy had to come up with a clever and convincing strategy to convince President Truman not to drop the atomic bomb on Kyoto. THAT was not a fluke; it was wisdom.
@dinochiesa3787
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
1:21:23 regarding Elon Musk, and using Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as a counter example, showing that he is not “a genius” , or that he is not as smart as he thinks he is. That seems to stem from a wrongheaded idea of Musk‘s goal in acquiring Twitter. Professor Klaas observed correctly that the value of Twitter the enterprise decreased significantly after Musk acquired it, and cited that as evidence of failure. But that’s wrong.
Directly increasing the value of the company was never Musk‘s goal when he acquired Twitter. He has plenty of money, and his other companies (SpaceX, Tesla) hold much more potential for increasing his wealth directly. Twitter is media; billionaires want, and now seem to need, a way to influence public opinion. See the Murdoch family, and Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post . The value of Twitter to Musk is as a vehicle for Musk to exert influence on the public discourse, and spread his views far and wide.
Seen through that lens, the acquisition of Twitter was a huge success.
Professor Klaas is very smart, and presents his ideas very effectively. This is the one thing he does not get right.
@HKS286
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This is liberating because we don't need to force fit a rationale for everything that happens There's chaos that we need to acknowledge sometimes embrace and move on.
@HKS286
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
What a profound, nuanced argument. And very very solid
@CowdreyC
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
You are wrong sir what Elon did with Twitter was to save free speech and he knew he would lose lots of money.
@JamesWanjetu
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Black swans
@lst9701
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This guy is bullshitting so bad
@ollio22
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
it's a statistical fact that in any high enough dimensional space, it's possible to find an interesting or explanatory subspace. That is trivial, but when you add emotion, like this guy, trivial stuff can start to feel meaningful.
@reinhardrinaldo350
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I listened until Wuhan.
If you believe that then you are actually not very smart.
@daria6162
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Many years ago, there was a fire at a shopping center in my hometown. My mother and grandmother worked there. My mother was supposed to go to work, but she stayed late because a friend stopped by for coffee. And she survived. My grandmother had the day off, but she decided to come in to pick up some things. She died there. Later, a newspaper published a short profile of each of the several dozen people who died; most of them were there by chance. Since then, I've thought about this topic constantly. And I act as if every action in my life were my last.
@costescuu7
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
❤
@Shouldofkeptthemustang
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I have always looked at the world as a series of cause and effect events. The randomness comes from us not knowing how our cause and effect event is influenced by other’s cause and effect events.
On the existence of a higher being: I think our mathematically perfect world and the fact that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 m/s2 makes me a believer. For me science and God are not mutually exclusive.
@scrimmybingus790
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Hard to see somebody who is seemingly so smart have such a biased worldview
@rotorfix
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This fact of life hits home hard. I was involved in two bizarre butterfly effects that ultimately resulted in the death of my sister who I loved more than anyone.
I had no way of knowing what would lead to what, but I can’t help but still feel some guilt and shame. You just never know what sort of profound effects your seemingly trivial and innocent choices might have on others.
@getreadywithmemamma
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This just collapsed into hmmmmmm for me. 😂. My brain 🧠 predominantly thinks like this, my primary cognitive function is NE or extroverted thinking. 💭 Growing up I realized that if Hitler and the Japanese had not built an airstrip in my father’s hometown of Lapang, Thailand then my father would have never have been too poor to go to school since they also killed the world economy and set Thailand into a poverty spiral. This made it so my father had to wait an extra year to enter school and then he skipped three grades making him younger than his class and causing a stir up of anxiety and debilitating bowel issues that then made him have to sit out a year of medical school. The Vietnam War created a vacuum of American physicians since a lot had perished in the war and the need for a brain drain in the surrounding countries to America that brought my father half way around the world. His roommate had a crush on my mother’s roommate who was runner up for Miss America with her piano playing ;). And my parents met and fell and love. 💗 My
Mother would never have been here if the potato 🥔famine in Ireland hadn’t happened oh and if Queen Victoria hadn’t ignored the famine prior than my Irish great great great grandfather never would have traveled to America and started a three generation of firefighters streak in the Cullen Clan. I happened to go to college and to meet my husband since one of my father’s friends visited us when I was applying to colleges and told me to apply there. I think like this all of the time since NE, or extroverted intuition casts a web out to the universe and uses data points to feel out reality and to keep those closing and opening doors both open and closed. I love “Closing Doors” I watched that film like 7 times since I love thinking about what if. Life is a huge what if and that’s why it is miraculous. 😂😊😮❤🎉
@sarahklaas1111
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I am glad I came across this, interesting stuff
@RalphHinkleyGMH
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This gentleman does a lot of cherry-picking to both support his own arguments and devalue concepts he doesn't personally value. It undermines much of what is overall an interesting and valuable theory.
@imperfekt7905
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I think I’ve tried to express very similar ideas when I was discussing the relationship between probability and randomness, and how people overestimate the effect of their intentions and actions on outcomes they are trying to achieve.
@georgemcconnell5405
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
God i love big think. There have only been a few videos that I wasn't inherently interested in and even those are still enthralling.
@soldier_of_love
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Reminds me of the book or movie, The 5 people you meet in heaven. It shows how everyone influences each others lives. Makes me want to read the next book to see if there's any more profound insight by the author.❤
@CeciliaSandoval-q4f
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
There is a spiritual aspect to life, twice I should have got into a car accident and somehow I came out at the end unscathed.
@xEp1cxSPorTZ
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
brain klass is an idiot
@gregzaks6649
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
If you are poor it is your own fault, mostly. Do you know people who stayed poor and waited for hand outs all their life? I do. I also know there are some misfortunes that can happen to anyone, those flukes you are talking about, but generally everything comes back to balance and order, as you say.
@gregzaks6649
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
This is just so childish! You seem to be saying hey I have just discovered that this is all an accident, the world is bad and bad things will happen to us all, everyone look how clever I am! The self help is not an illusion, it helped me enormously. You seem to be forgetting one fundamental thing THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS HOW YOU FEEL. (Unless you like being miserable, that is).
@gregzaks6649
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
When we think the world is controllable and predictable, this gives us the feeling of stability and enables us to get on with our lives. What good does it do to us to realise that it might be a mirage? It certainly doesn't improve anything and makes things worse, why strive to believe things that make you uncomfortable 😅
@Մարգո-ե8ջ
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Too many words, and still no explanation.
“ We are not there yet”.
Maybe we need to admit,that we will never be able to explain, maybe we need to say, that there is Divine intervention.
@DianaStevens42
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
All I take from this is how evil Americans are.
@Subvertgenoc
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
We are all changing the past right now. The future we are headed into is a brand-new future, that we haven't seen before, and that's why we don't remember it.
@OfWavesAndWinds
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
My father was born in 1942 – a third child of older parents who had him just so my grandpa wouldn't be drafted to fight WWII. So he & therefore I wouldn't exist if there was no WWII. Go figure. 🫢
@MsKilly1
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I think this is showing a big divide between American's default philosophical position and British. I'm sure most British or Europeans wouldn't start from the premise that we're in total control of our lives and we can plan for everything and everything happens for a reason.
This certainly never was my or anyone I know, default philosophy. Shit happens, surprise happens. No one is owed success. All we can do is stack the odds in our favour. So his argument is just annoying.
@neil47412002
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
Dr Klass, you seem like a genius to answer all those questions with logic. I'm a fan!
@neil47412002
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I totally agree with you on Elon Musk, who is greedy, marginally talented, and lucky. Think about it. What business owner would go political and support a party that wants coal and gas? Liberals supported and bought his Teslas, and yet Musk supported the party that lives in the past and wants tradition over innovation. Nevertheless, many people believe Musk is a genius.
@AlexAetM
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I think Brian is wrong. Chaos theory doesn't say that everything happens for a reason. And scientific data doesn't say that either. Unpredictability and causelessness are two completely different things. Noise isn't causeless, even though it's unpredictable. Science still doesn't know for certain whether processes are truly random. Probability or randomness don't reflect a fundamental lack of cause, but rather the impossibility of prediction at this stage of knowledge's development.
But here we simply need to distinguish between teleology — the "destiny" that leads a person to a specific, known outcome, planned, for example, by the gods — and causality. Causality stems not from the predetermination of a future outcome, but rather the opposite: the present is completely determined by the past.
And if teleology has no practical meaning and truly leads to error, then causality, on the contrary, is the foundation of the scientific method.
My point is this. I believe, and not without reason, that our illusion of control isn't just profound, it's all-encompassing. We don't create the future; the future already exists, determined by causalities that, like tram tracks, lead from the past to the present and into the future. Our actions are also determined by causalities within and outside of us, but so subtly and unpredictably, so numerous, that we simply can't trace them all with our current level of knowledge and the precision of our instruments. This isn't an absence of causes or a coincidence. It's the difficulty (or even impossibility) of prediction.
@MarceloAlmeidaDias
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
so wrong about Musk. lololol
@Sunshineperspective
June 6, 2026 at 11:05 am
I love this talk. It is wonderful that he is willing to step forward and share his story, so that it can help others to put their own difficult experiences into perspective.
☀️🦋💜💜💜🦋☀️
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