Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey friends, Eric here with some exciting news. I've been
writing a book and it's about to be out in
the world in April of twenty twenty six. The working
title is How a Little Becomes a Lot, and it's
all about how small, consistent actions, the kind that we
talk about all the time on this show can lead
to real meaningful change. Right now, the book is in

(00:21):
the editing process and there's still some shaping to do,
which is where you come in. I'd love your input
on what to focus on, how to talk about the book,
even what it should be called. If you've got a
few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make
this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful
to hear them. Just head to oneufeed dot net slash

(00:43):
book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways, and
to behind the scenes look at what it actually takes
to make a book. Editing marathons, title debates, existential spirals,
and me questioning all of my life choices at two
am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's oneufeed dot net
slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part

(01:06):
of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Truly.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Often have written about ideas around what I call the
false gospel of stuff and status, where the road to
happiness is paved with more stuff and higher status. I
have not found that to be true. I find personally
that there are things that I care about in the
world that are intrinsically valuable to me that other people
might not find value in whatsoever, and chasing those things
has made me much happier.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't

(02:00):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I've always hated the phrase everything happens.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
For a reason.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
It's tidy, it's comforting, and to me it feels completely
out of step with the messy, painful, and often absurd.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Reality of life.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
But after talking with today's guests Brian class I started
to realize something. Just because life isn't following a script
doesn't mean it's meaningless. In fact, his new book Fluke
makes the case that randomness and chaos might be exactly
what make our lives matter so much. We get into
how we all continue to worship at the altar of

(02:58):
progress in the Church of We make plans, set goals,
and these are good things, but we only have so
much control, and Brian teaches that accepting this can be
a relief because the point isn't to control everything, but
to influence what we can. Brian also shares some wild stories,
like how a cloud saved one city from an atomic bomb,

(03:19):
and tells another that hit me especially hard, how a
family tragedy led directly to his birth. Without that, Fluke,
he wouldn't be here and neither would this episode. I'm
Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Brian,
welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
I'm excited to talk to you. Your book is called Fluke, Chance,
Chaos and why everything we do matters. But before we
get into that, we'll start, like we always do, with
a parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's
talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness

(03:57):
and bravery and love. There's a bad wolf, which represents
things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops.
They think about it for a second. They look up
at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins?
And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd
like to start off by asking you what that parable
means to you in your life and in the work

(04:19):
that you do.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah. So, I think the bad wolf is a response
to a perceived lack of control. And I think a
lot of the worst impulses that humans have are lashing
out when you feel afraid of what you don't know
is going to happen next to your life, or you
fear those consequences and therefore lash out to try to
assert control. And a lot of what I'm arguing is

(04:42):
that you have to change your worldview to accept that
lack of control, to embrace the influence you have over
the world, and that gets you closer to being the
good wolf that you want to be.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
All Right, there's no way for us not to just
dive into the deep end of the pool, I think
with this material.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
So let's just go there.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
You've got a phrase in the book, we control nothing
but influence everything.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, so it's riffing off a statement from the social
scientist Scott Page. And what I think is the key
takeaway here is that the world is an incredibly complex,
uncontrollable entity. Right. There's eight billion interacting people, and all
of those people influence our lives in small ways or
in big ways, right, some more than others, but it's

(05:26):
constantly changing, and the ability of any one person to
control the world is minuscule. We simply don't have that ability.
And I think a lot of the misery that people
have in modern life is that they keep trying to
assert control over an uncontrollable world. And what I'm arguing
is I'm taking the scientific concept of chaos theory, which
will dive, I'm sure into more details but it's taking

(05:48):
that notion of chaos theory and saying that even in
a world where you don't have control, small changes can
have big effects, which means that your influence over the
future of the universe and the future of your life
is profound. And so it's changing the framework from one
of control to one of influence. And the influence framework
is both correct and also I think much more liberating

(06:10):
and uplifting for us to navigate.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Wonderful.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
All Right, We're going to go into that more because
I think a lot about these ideas of control and
influence and what's out of our control. But I first
want to start with a story. Maybe you could tell
us about a mass murder that happened in Minnesota, I
believe some time ago.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah, so this is a story. It's actually from Wisconsin,
next door to Minnesota in nineteen oh five, and it's
the story of a woman named Clara Madeline Jansen who
has four children in a very short period of time,
four young kids, and by nineteen oh five, I think
the oldest was five years old, and so she has
a mental breakdown at some point. We don't know exactly
what happened, but she snaps and decides, in a moment

(06:54):
of sort of tragic madness, to take the lives of
those four children herself and then to take her own life.
And she was alone at the house, but her husband
came home and discovered this horrific tragedy, probably the worst
thing that a human being can experience, seeing their entire
family wiped out. And the reason that I talk about this,
and I mentioned it early on in Fluke, is because

(07:15):
when I was twenty years old, my dad sat me
down and told me this story about the man who
came home who was my great grandfather, and the woman
who killed all of those kids and took her own
life was his first wife. He remarried after the trauma
subsided a bit about ten years later, to the woman
that was my great grandmother. And so the first thing
that I reacted to that story with was obviously shock, Right,

(07:38):
that's just an unbelievably bizarre and terrible thing to learn
about your family. But then the second thing that really
hits you over the head is that your existence is
completely predicated on this story. That if those kids didn't die,
I wouldn't exist because the lineage would be different, and
it would not have led to me right, right, And
so this is the stuff where when you start to

(07:58):
think about that, I think about how my existence is
predicated on this horrible tragedy. But then I also say
to everyone that I meet, right that every conversation I
have is also predicated on this mass tragedy, every podcast interview. Now,
people listening to this wouldn't listen to it if those
kids hadn't died. So it really affected my worldview about
how the tiniest things in the distant past even can

(08:21):
really change the trajectory of our lives, even when we're
oblivious to them.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
It's tremendously disconcerting to see this. Right, Let's stay with
the stories for a minute, because I think the stories
illustrate this point better than any other. Why don't you
tell us about Japan?

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, so this is a story from a little bit
after the mass murder I talked about. This is from
nineteen twenty six and nineteen twenty six. There's an American
couple that decides to go on a vacation and they
end up in Kyoto, Japan, and they fall in love
with the city. It's one of the most charming cities
in Japan, and they sort of get a soft spot

(08:56):
for it, the way that many people do when they
go on holiday somewhere. And this is the kind of
banal story that is very very commonplace in normal life,
except for nineteen years after this vacation took place, the
husband and the couple turned out to be America's Secretary
of War at the tail end of World War Two,
a man named Henry Stimpson, and so he ended up,

(09:18):
by happenstance, being in a very consequential place when they
were deciding where to drop the first atomic bomb, and
the Target Committee, which was a group of generals and scientists,
picked Kyoto as their top location to destroy with the
first atomic bomb at the tail end of World War two,
and Stimpson, largely because of this previous personal experience with

(09:39):
his wife, in nineteen twenty six twice met with President
Truman and convinced him to take Kyoto off the bombing list,
and so the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead
of Kyoto, and the second bomb was supposed to go
to a place called Kokura, which many people have not
heard of because it was not bombed, and the reason
it was not bombed was simply out of luck, which

(10:00):
happened because there was a brief bit of haze or
cloud cover over the bombing site when the B twenty
nine arrived, and so it diverted to the secondary target
of Nagasaki. And so this is a story of an
estimated one hundred and eighty to two hundred thousand people
dying in two cities rather than a different two cities,
because of a vacation that happened nineteen years earlier and

(10:22):
a cloud that was just at the right place at
the right time. And so when we think about why
things happen, we never think about these tiny details. We
think about the big explanations, and we don't think about,
certainly things that happened nineteen years earlier. And the point
that I try to make to people is that Henry
Stimpson had no idea he was changing the world. The
people of Hiroshima had no idea that their fate hung

(10:42):
into balance over this vacation destination. But it did. And
that's the way that that sort of everything we do
matters aspect of chaos theory is tied to influence. That
every choice we make has ripple effects that we cannot foresee.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
So I think the takeaway here is your city's tourism
board is really really important, right, Like, when people come
to your city, they need to like it, right.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
I guess the flip side of that is if he
really hated it, he probably would have loved to bomb
the city.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
So again, this is a really disconcerting idea.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
You know, it's funny. So almost everyone has that reaction
to it, and I've never had that reaction.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
I think never.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
I think the reason why I don't have that reaction
is because I think that the lie of control is
one that constantly makes us disappointed, right, this notion that
we can just tame the world. Every single moment of
our lives, we get evidence that we can't.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Right.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Things happen to us, and they're not always the things
that we want to happen to us. Now, I think
that the idea that every vacation choice you make, every
conversation you have, every time you turn left rather than right,
is reshaping the future of the world in ways that
are small or big and that you might not know.
I think that's the most exciting and uplifting idea I've

(11:54):
ever come across, because it means that there is no
throwaway moment to life, right, And so I swapped out.
When I'm starting to do the research for this and
starting to change my philosophy of life and researching the book,
I started to swap out what I thought was a
really empty and constantly disappointing framework of understanding the world
for one that is, on the face of it, really
disconcerting because everything has influence, right, but also, in my view,

(12:17):
really empowering and uplifting because there's not a moment that
we can just say is meaningless. Personally, I find that
latter viewpoint much much more empowering than the sort of
false gospel of control.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
Well, I am not a believer in the false gospel
of control, and this idea that every moment matters is
empowering except when it becomes overwhelming or frightening, because it's
one thing to think every moment matters, because I'm sort
of shaping my destiny, and I can think about the
fact that, like today, if I go to the gym,

(12:51):
it's probably more likely I'll go to the gym tomorrow,
which makes it probably more likely that I'll be healthy
in ten years. And I'm using the word probably here
on all of these things, and so that my actions,
I'm directing them in a certain direction with a belief
they're going to go a certain way, versus the idea
that I have no idea? What filling up my water

(13:12):
bottle at home instead of here at the studio today
is going like what impact is that going to have
on the world? And I think there are people who
are anxious already, who are thinking that everything they do
is so important. And I think what you're saying is
just let all that go. So how does somebody who

(13:32):
still wants to influence the world in a positive way
change their life in a positive way? How do we
work with these ideas of influence and control? This is
like a nine part question. The last thing I'll say
is when we think about controlling nothing, the obvious question
is did I not control what should I put on today?

Speaker 2 (13:52):
So hand it over to you?

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah? So you know, I think there's a few things
that I would say to that. The first is that, yes,
it is a overwhelming if you think about every choice
and you know it could be paralyzing. The idea that
any action you make is going to have an effect
on reshaping your life, which I think is true. If
you have never come across that idea before, it can
be very paralyzing. So there's a few things that I

(14:15):
tried to tell people. The first one is that you
have to still think probabilistically. So what I mean by
that is it is possible that if I went out
and planted a tree tomorrow, that in one hundred years
a child could climb that tree and fall out of
it and die, and I would have been part of
that story. Right now, that does not mean I shouldn't
plant the tree, because most of the time, planting trees

(14:37):
is good. So it's the same thing like I could
step into traffic and it could be an epiphany for
me where I have a near death experience that reshapes
my life. But I'm not going to do that because
most of the time you die, right Yes, yes, So
I still make choices in a way that is based
on what mostly happens. But I also recognize that there
is something liberating about accepting the limits of my control.

(14:59):
So for me persontionally, I have become less anxious over time,
especially since writing this book. And I had not like
anxiety in a clinical sense, but sometimes I'm worried about
stuff a little bit more. I sweated the details a
little bit more, and the way I feel now is
I just sort of feel like there's things that I
can influence more directly, things that I can't influence more directly,
and you have to just sort of accept some of

(15:20):
that limit and enjoy the ride. And that's sort of,
you know, the ethos of my life in a way
is you know, I might get cancer tomorrow. I really
hope I don't, but you know, you sort of have
to embrace that sense of enjoying the ride that you
do have because you only have one, right, It's something
that you have to really grapple with, and I think
some people I talk to really struggle with these concepts.

(15:41):
And I like to sort of just pretend that you
have certain aspects of life that are noise, but you know,
the interconnected nature of our lives is also really really important.
And even when you said the control aspects, so yes,
you control what shirt you wear, you don't control how
somebody responds to it, right, And like, how many times
do relationships start because someone notices an item of clothing
and then they say something nice to you, and then

(16:02):
you either have a friendship or they becomes your partner.
I mean, like all of these things where if you'd
warn a different shirt. You know, this never happens, and
so even in those details, yes, we control the little
things where we can make choices and have agency and
so on, But our lives are, you know, a symphony
of eight billion people, and some of them are much

(16:22):
more important players in that orchestra, right, Like it's clearly
the case that the people around you in closer proximity
matter more. But on the other hand, all of us
were affected by a pandemic that started by one person
getting sick in China. Right, So you know that aspect
of sort of the short term influence being more close
to you, more visible, more seeming, like the illusion of control,

(16:43):
and then all of a sudden our lives are upended
by something that happens thousands of miles away with someone
will never meet on a microscopic level of a virus.
That aspect of life is the push and pull where
we get the glimpses of how a little control. I
think we actually have a.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Couple thoughts on that. One is I often think of
this stuff in terms of two games. One is the lottery,
Like whether I get cancer between now and the end
of my life is to some degree a lottery. By
trying to do all the things that we know that
we think make you less likely to get cancer. To me,

(17:17):
is like just buying more lottery tickets. The other game
that I like to think about is backgammon. Backgammon is
an interesting game because there is a certain amount of skill,
but there's also a tremendous amount of luck, like the
dice roll, and if somebody rolls all good things, they
will beat someone who's far more skilled than them in
backgammon because they just will. And I think that is

(17:39):
a model for me that always makes sense, like there's
an element of this that I can do something about,
and I should do that.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
I love your idea of thinking improbability.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
And there's so much that I can't control, and it
brings to truth more clearly, the old Hindu idea of
our Juna and Krishna, where you're just encouraged to do
your best and let go of the results because you
just don't control those.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah, you know, the two things that come to mind.
I think your analogies are excellent in terms of these
different games. But the two things that come to mind
to this. The first one is when I think about
the most important things that have affected the trajectory of
my life in the grand scheme of it, right, And
I think I controlled exactly zero of them. So I
think this is what time period I was born in.

(18:25):
My life would be much shorter if I was born
one hundred thousand years ago, right, much worse. Also if
I was born two hundred years ago, yep. Also who
my parents were, and you have issues of how my
brain works, right, if I don't have a mental illness
or anything like that, that would constrain me. And also
where I was born. So one of the places that
I do some research in, for example, is Madagascar, where

(18:45):
the average person lives on less than five hundred dollars
a year. And I think to myself, if I was
born in that society, I don't care how skilled I am,
I don't care how great my parents are. I am
in a rough position. I'm not going to be on
this podcast, right, I'm still going to be rural Madagascar,
probably without electricity. So the things that I think have
most affected my life trajectory, none of them were things

(19:07):
that I had any influence over. So that humbles us
in a way that I think gives you the freedom
to take less credit for your success. But also less
blame for your failure, and to me, that's a much
healthier way to live. Right. I haven't really sort of
flushed this out, and I didn't talk about this in Fluke,
But the more I've thought about the ideas in the book,
the more I think that we live in the most
luck prone era in all of history. And the reason

(19:30):
I say that is because if you take somebody who
lives in complete isolation, right, so a hermit in the woods,
luck has way less of an influence on their life
because they're completely independent from the rest of society, right, Like,
maybe there's some luck with what foraging they get up
to or whatever, but like, basically other people have a
much lower influence on that person. If you take the

(19:52):
modern world, in which it's the most interconnected system that's
ever existed, where economics, politics, public health, all these things
are affected by these massive numbers of people and we
have limited control over them. I think our lives are
swayed by things we don't control more now than ever before,
precisely because of that interconnection, right. And the logical conclusion

(20:13):
of that is that we have less control over things
that we did in the past, but more influenced because
the ripple effects of our lives are much greater than
that hermit. Right, the hermit might still have some influence,
but it's going to be probably smaller and probably less
immediate if they truly are alone. Whereas you know, you
can really make an impact on the world as a
single person today, because the ripple effects can go global

(20:38):
very very quickly. I mean, whether it's a social media post,
a pandemic, or just you know, starting a movement, whatever
it is, all these things are possible in ways that
simply were not possible even five hundred or fifty years ago.
And so I think that the analogies you're using, they've
dialed up the luck scale, which comes with the influence factor.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
You've got some great lines in the book, like motivational
posters tell you that if you set your mind to it,
you can change the world. I've got some good news
for you. You already have congratulations or you matter. That's
not self help advice, it's scientific truth, right, these ideas
that everything happens. And I talk about this a fair
amount that like we do a lot of things, I

(21:34):
think that put good out into the world and we
never get to see it like it ripples in ways
that we just don't know. And I tell this story
about somebody who went through one of my programs because
I just love this little story. So this person heard
a lesson I did on generosity. So they were at
their local supermarket. They were in their normal line. There's
a woman who is the checkout girl. She never smiles,

(21:56):
she always seems unhappy. And this woman goes up to
her and says, hey, I always get in your line
because you just get everybody through it so much faster.
And this woman just lights up like a Christmas tree, right,
And then she says, oh, well, would you.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Tell my boss that?

Speaker 1 (22:11):
And so this woman goes and tells your boss and
the boss is like, that's so great to hear. I've
been trying to decide who's going to be employee of
the month.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
I'll do that.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
It gives her a bonus. Now the boss is happy,
the woman's happy. You imagine her going home to her family.
All this stuff.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
These ripples that go go, go go.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
That example allows us to see the first couple of them,
but so often we just don't see any of them.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
But they're there.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
The two things, well, there's one of them is a
story from the book. So there's an amazing story that
I came across and I was like, this just illustrates
this so perfectly. Where a man went out to see
off the coast of Greece and he's swimming and he
got sucked out by a riptide and so for twenty
four hours he was missing. And you know, the overhall
majority of times that people go missing in the ocean

(22:54):
for twenty four hours, the outcome is very very bad, right,
And this guy, as he was about to drown, a
soccer ball popped into view on the surface of the
waves and he clung onto it. It's still an air
in it, and he was able to use it to
float to survive. And so already this was one of
these stories of like, wow, this this amazing thing happened.
The soccer ball arrived at just the right time. But
as they were recovering this on the Greek news, this

(23:15):
woman was watching it and I sort of like to
imagine her dropping her coffee or whatever, you know, she
sees this report. But the reason she was astonished by
this is because she recognized the soccer ball and her
kid had kicked it off a cliff ten days earlier.
Eighty miles away, and they had thought absolutely nothing of this,
because this happens every so often. You know, you lose
a ball, it's fine. They went out and bought another one,

(23:37):
but it turned out that on the waves it drifted
at just the right moment and saved this guy's life, right,
And so like these are the kinds of things where
when people see the story, often what the takeaway they
take is what an amazing coincidence? Right? My takeaway is
that is how the world is working. One hundred percent
of the time, you just don't know, and every so

(23:58):
often you get these glimpses like this person did, where
it's just so obvious and it pulls back that illusion
of control. The other very flippant thing that I sometimes
say is can you name Albert Einstein's great grandmother? And
everyone says no, of course not, and I say, well,
she didn't realize she was very important, but she was, yeah,
because if she didn't exist, Albert Einsteinism exists, right, right.

(24:19):
So I think there's this aspect where every individual matters.
They might not know that they matter in the short run,
they might not know they matter in the long run.
But if it's not you it's someone else, and that
changes the universe in some way, sometimes good and sometimes bad.
But the idea of meaninglessness, which I think a lot
of people feel in the twenty first century, is in
my view, scientifically nonsense. It's not true.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, you're coming at this from sort of the scientific angle.
A lot of things that I bring in are coming
from more of a spiritual tradition angle. And if you
look at Buddhism and even Daoism, which predates Buddhism, this
idea is just baked in, right, This idea of Tick
not Hahn called it inner being. And you know the
classic story he tells is, you know, in this piece

(25:02):
of paper I have here is also the sun and
the rain and the clouds, and the person who cut
down the tree, and the person who made the lunch
of the person who cut down the tree. I mean,
I could go on and on. I don't need to,
but that all of that is right here, and to
your point, that's the universe all the time. There's a

(25:23):
line from someone who studies the Tao that I love,
which is that basically life is consumatory relatedness, right, That's
all it is. It's countless causes and conditions that we
can't even begin to imagine that have come together to
create this moment. And what you're pointing us at is
that if you can let go into that, then you're

(25:46):
part of sort of a sparkling, mysterious, amazing thing.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
It's funny because I think for a long time, and
you know, without going too much in the weeds of
the history of science, the scientific Revolution, and had a
very simple assessment of how things happened, right, and it
seemed like we could tame the world if we just
got the right equation and sort of the Isaac Newton
sort of idea. What I'm dabbling with is ideas of

(26:12):
chaos theory and what are called complex systems, which actually
are much more i think amenable to ideas that underpin
a lot of the religions you're talking about in Eastern philosophy, right,
And that's because the central idea in complex systems is interconnectedness.
It's that one change in one part of the system
affects another part of the system, which is very much

(26:32):
at home in a lot of Eastern philosophy. There are some,
you know, more top down Western ideas in religion, especially
when you overlay it on individualistic culture like the United
States has in spades, which give you this idea of
what I call the illusion of control, that if you
just do things to sort of bludge in the world
the way you want it to be, then you will

(26:54):
eventually create the outcome you want. And I think a
lot of the philosophical ideas that underpin things like that
is are talking about the interconnectedness of literally everything. I mean,
one of the problems is that when you start saying
these sorts of words in traditional scientific communities, you sound like,
you know, sort of a mystical figure. I think what
you're just trying to do is say, like, how do

(27:15):
we apply these ideas in a context from my perspective
as an academic, where we can test them or sort
of theorize about them. But it's not a million miles
away from the philosophical underpinions of religions, certain religions, and
so I think to me, it's also obvious, right, like, well,
I don't think it is possible to truly believe that
we are individuals who have control over the world. That

(27:35):
idea does not make sense to me when you scrutinize
it for more than a second. Yeah, So I'm very
amenable to the idea as you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Just on substack this morning, there was an article by
a psychologist, Paul Bloom, which was about another article by
a psychologist Michael Inslickt, and the basic idea was you
could perform some of these studies in a laboratory, but
that doesn't mean they translate in any way, shape or
form out into the world itself. And it's not that

(28:04):
doing some of these things in the laboratory is always
a waste of time, That's not it. Because I think
science moves forward in two ways, right. It moves forward
often by isolating something, reducing it down, figuring out how
this little thing works, and that can be valuable, and
it only becomes more useful when you realize how that
thing fits into a bigger system that, as you're pointing out,

(28:28):
is hopelessly complex.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
One of the hallmarks of science is replicability, right that
if you do the same experiment twice, it will produce
the same results. And I think the problem when you
get into a complex system is that is not always true. Right.
If Henry Stimpson went on vacation to Osaka, Japan, that
would not necessarily lead to the deaths of one hundred
thousand people in one city versus another. If the timing

(28:53):
had even been slightly different, if he was appointed the
Secretary of War six months later, he would not have
played this role. Right, So you can't say that if
we just replay this exact same sort of scenario but
we only change one or two things, that it will
play out in the same way. The idea of chaos
theory is that if anything is even a tiny bit different,
it can play a very very big role. And so

(29:14):
when I think about these concepts about how they fit
in with science, the lab is not as interconnected, not
as complex. It's deliberately designed to avoid all of those
things that many people treat as noise. But actually, I argue,
noise often is the stuff that dictates outcomes. Right, these

(29:34):
tiny little details of a split second change, or all
of us have experienced this in our lives. I think
at some point where you have these moments where you
sort of realize, ah, I just on that one thing,
none of this would have happened. And of course the
crucial point is not that you dwell on that specific decision,
it's that you're aware that that is happening. All the time,

(29:55):
and you're just oblivious to it. Right. That's the much
more profound idea that I think chaos he tries to
convey in a scientific literature, but actually it applies a
lot to humanity as well.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
When you're talking, I just had an insider a thought
that I've never had. I doubt that it's new to
the world. You've probably thought of it. As you call
yourself a disillusioned social scientist. Is that if you try
and replicate a psychological experiment, say three or four years later,
the whole culture and thought process of how people view
psychology could be really different by then. And so there's

(30:29):
so many things that have changed in the broader world
and about how people view the world that of course
those things may come out differently.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yeah, And that is why it's important when they do
replication studies in psychology. It's important to have large numbers
of people and also to do them repeatedly, because the
most solid findings do stay the same, right, And there
are some very solid findings that you can take five
hundred people in this place or that place, you do
the same study that have the same reaction. Right. There's
a lot of psychology literature and I would argue a

(30:58):
lot of social science literature where it's not done that way,
and it's relatively small numbers of people, relatively contingent on
the context, and then we conclude that it is a
big finding. And so the reason I'm a disillusioned social
scientist is because I think there are some of these
findings we have which if you did repeat them and
you did take into account context, you might find something different.

(31:21):
And so it's not to say that we shouldn't do
the research. It's just to say that you have to
be so careful about context and all those other parameters
that might change.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, it's interesting. As a person who has done a
lot of one on one coaching with people and run programs,
part of my job is to help people make the
changes in their lives they want to make. And early
on in that I thought, oh, Okay, I just teach
them X, y Z, have them do A, B and
C and they're on their way. And I quickly realized, like, Okay,

(31:51):
that clearly doesn't work. Because people are so different. You
just can't apply the same thing to everybody and think
it's going to come out the same way. And that
humility is important to recognize that there are things we
can say probabilistically, I'm going to give you a better
chance of this or that. But everybody's different. And I've
often said that one of the mysteries that haunts me

(32:13):
I'm a recovering heroin addict, is why some of us
get sober and others don't. And I look for a
reason or reasons. And after I read your book, part
of me just relaxed a little bit and went, maybe
there's not I mean it's not to say that there
aren't any reasons or there aren't contributing factors, but that

(32:34):
in an individual case, there just may be no answer.
Like you just never know. It's not like if I
got to talk to God he would be like, oh
it's because X Y z A right. You'd have to
unravel the entire universe.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah, you know. For me, that's one of those areas
where again I find it quite liberating because I think
that sometimes people who have bad things happen to them.
Sometimes it is comforting to try to come up with
a reason, yeap. But other times there is no reason,
and the search for it is qrickly because it's just
not going to it's not going to exist, right, right,

(33:06):
So I'll tell the short version of the story. But basically,
one of the people who I had the pleasure of
meeting after I published the book and wrote about him
a little bit was a man who went to New
York City for a conference and he was delayed in
his flight and his coworker was supposed to meet him
for dinner, and they ended up meeting for breakfast the
next morning because he had gotten in so late, and

(33:27):
she provided him with a gift that was a money tie.
So it's a tie with a painting of a mona,
and she knew that he loved this, So it's just
a nice gesture from a colleague, right, And he decides
that he's so touched by this gesture of kindness that
he's going to go back to his hotel room change
his shirt so he can wear the mone tie with
something that isn't hideously clashing. And so she goes up

(33:48):
to the conference and he goes to the hotel room
to iron the shirt. And while he's ironing the shirt,
he sees out the window as the first plane hits
the World Trade Center in New York, right, because the
conference is in New York City, and this is it's
held on like the hundred floor, and so in this moment,
she dies as a result of this, and he survives
because of this tie and changing his shirt. And you know,

(34:08):
I had written about this, I knew his story, he'd
spoken a little bit about it publicly. But when I
met him, the most profound thing he said to me
was that the crippling guilt of survivor's guilt that happened afterwards,
which really upset him and affected his life in a
very big way for a couple of years, was because
everybody said the same thing, everything happens for a reason.
And he said the birden that put it on him

(34:30):
that his coworker Elaine was supposed to die and he
was supposed to live, was so crushing, right, really upset
his life. Whereas if you just say, look, you know,
she was in the wrong place at the wrong time,
she did something nice for you and you survived by
an accident, that in a way, you know, was liberating
for him. And so I think, to me, it's one
of those aspects I haven't had, you know, such a

(34:53):
close call with death like that. But I think for
many people to get that sense of the constant search
for explanations and reasons can really really derail your life.
And accepting that you are in some ways just an
accident the way I feel very much to be an
accident because I'm derived from a mass murder. To me,
it takes a weight off my shoulders. You know, Accidental

(35:15):
things happen, Arbitrary things happen, and that's why I say,
you know, the enjoying the ride mentality is sort of
the best and most liberating way you can deal with that.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
That's an incredible story. I was able to tell, after
like talking to you for like two minutes, that you
indeed had a mass murder in your family. It's just
in your personality.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
I think.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
I just I just kind of saw it.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
It's funny you say that because, like, bizarrely, my grandpa,
who you know, was more directly effective than this, because
it was his dad that found out that you know,
found the family. He had a very dark line where
he said, you know, that branch of the family tree
severed itself, so we're not related to them. So yeah,
mass murder gene would not have been passed that passed down,
but the trauma that he experienced I'm sure was horrific.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
So yep, this everything happens for a reason thing always

(36:28):
kind of drives me crazy too, because I don't know
people who have that belief. I'm actually often jealous of
because they seem to have a comfort in things. If
I could believe it, I think I might, but I can't, right,
so I have no choice but to sort of operate
on the other What I think is interesting about this,
there's a companion phrase to everything happens for a reason,
which is that everything happens for the best or something

(36:49):
like that, right, And I think that is also nonsense.
I think you can invert that phrase, though, and get
something useful out of it, which is that you can
make the best out of everything that happens. I don't
think it's the thing that happened has meaning in and
of itself, but you can make it meaningful with how
you choose to respond. I don't know that me being

(37:11):
a homeless heroin addict at twenty four, well, ever, we
don't know why. There's no real thing there, and I
don't believe it happened for a reason, like I was
appointed to some higher purpose. But I do believe that
I was presented an opportunity in which I was able
to give that thing meaning by what I did in
an ongoing way, and I think that's the more actually

(37:34):
compassionate view of suffering, because as soon as everything happens
for a reason, you reference the secret in the book,
which drives me crazy, because if you follow that thing
to its end, everything happens for a reason. You have
to come to terms with the fact that, as you
and I are talking right now, like some child is
being hideously abused for a reason, and the child somehow

(37:56):
attracted that to themselves. I find to be sort of
morally repugnant.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
I agree with this completely, and I think that my
issue is also that it breeds complacency around questions of justice,
because if you look at something that's a gross injustice,
you can just say everything happens for a reason. If
you say that some things are the culmination of an
arbitrary set of forces, or that some people are inflicting
harm on a child and we need to stop that,

(38:22):
then those things don't have some sort of grand moral
art to them, and they require action, right that you
need to save the childe One of the most interesting
interviews I did around the ideas that I was grappling
with in writing the book was actually with a Christian
podcast that I was talking to a person who's a
very devout Christian and I'm personally not religious. But what

(38:42):
was striking about this was that he was actually much
more okay with some of the ideas I had said,
because his idea of providence in which everything does happen
for a reason, because in his view, God was dictating
things meant that he would never know the reason, right
and because it was completely unknown to him, he sort
of just said, I have to just try to do

(39:03):
my best in life, you know. And I was thinking
to myself, like, Okay, I have a very different philosophical
framework from this person. But I'm thinking from chaos theory
that due to the fact that these tiny little tweaks
in life can culminate in really big changes over time,
I will never know or understand some of the reasons
why things happen to me. I also feel like I

(39:23):
should just try to do the best in life because
I don't have control. And so there's a weird sort
of horseshoe right where the origin for me is the
big bang in physics. That's where I'm thinking about the
sort of framework of how these things you know work
for him. It was a sort of divine presence dictating
everything in the universe. But the acceptance of a lack
of control ended up with us at the same point, right,

(39:45):
And so this is where again you both operate probabilistically.
You don't know what the right strategy is necessarily going
to be, even if you think God is testing you.
So you just try to do the thing that you
think is best. And that's what I do, right, I
try to do the thing that I think would better,
and then I hope the ripple effects of my life
play out in a good way as opposed to a
catastrophically bad way. But I will never know. And that's

(40:07):
the interesting aspect of accepting the limits of control. I
think that can exist in multiple world views.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating that this person arrives at the
same place, which is I believe it's all happening for
a reason, but I can't know the reason. You describe
this a couple of different ways in the book, sort
of religiously, which I love. You say this makes us
devoted disciples of the Cult of because or we worship
at the altar of progress in the Church of Control.

(40:32):
Those are great examples of how that worldview is almost
religious in its belief Say a little bit more about that.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Yeah, you know, I mean I grew up in the
United States, and I think the United States has a
very strong sense and in some ways this has probably
helped American economic growth and so on. But it has
a very strong sense that you are the master of
your own destiny, right, sort of pulling yourself up by
the bootstraps, this sort of aspect of if you work hard,
you'll you'll get what you deserve and so on. And

(41:02):
so as a result of that, I was really hit
over the head. I think with messages that if anything
bad happened in my life, it was my fault because
I am the master of my own destiny, and if
I just have a setback, I should just work harder.
I also think that this discount structural problems in society,
problems with things we can't control, like mental illness, setbacks

(41:22):
from other people doing harm to us, et cetera. That
you continually sort of beat yourself up when something goes wrong,
and so I do think there's almost the sort of
devotional disciple aspect to this. What I think is a
myth that were masters of our own destiny what I
call the illusion of control or the delusion of individualism.
And to me, it was liberating to get out of

(41:43):
that mentality and to start to think about the things
that I have influence over the role my life plays
in changing the lives of other people, but also accepting
that I don't need to pretend that those things are
true anymore. Something that you've said before it really made
me think of this is that when you were talking
about coaching people, right, I also look back at my
life and all the things that I was told I

(42:04):
was supposed to want, and I can imagine that I was,
you know, going to go to someone to say how
do I get there? And there's been loads of times
in my life where the things that I thought I
wanted were not the things that actually were good for me, right,
And so you know how did I discover that? Well,
often by accident, right like where I didn't try to
do something, I stumbled into something and found that I
loved it or that I was passionate about it. And

(42:27):
you know, I often have written about ideas around what
I call the false gospel of stuff and status, where
the road to happiness is paved with more stuff and
higher status. I had not found that to be true.
I find personally that there are things that I care
about in the world that are intrinsically valuable to me
that other people might not find value in whatsoever, and
chasing those things has made me much happier. So that's

(42:50):
the other flip side of this sort of disciple aspect
of searching for control is that it's often what other
people think you want, and that is, to me, is
just another one of the myths of that sort of
cultural aspiration.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Right, there's two really big points that you hit on
there that maybe we can go in order, although we'll
probably tangent off somewhere else if I know how I
do things. But the first is this idea of how
much agency or control do we have? And I think
this is an important thing to think about, because we

(43:24):
have some amount of agency and we have some amount
of our lives are the way they are based on
what has come before. And I think that it's really
tricky to get that balance because I use myself as
an example just because it's the easiest thing to use, right,
But if I were to have believed that my genetics

(43:47):
and my family and my upbringing and all that meant
I was destined to die as an addict. That would
have been a problematic view. At the same time, had
I believed that I was just a bad person because
I was doing this and didn't see all those other
factors would have also been a harmful belief. And so

(44:09):
somewhere in there is this triangulation on this idea of well,
there is some amount of control in here, and to
your point, there's a lot that's not under my control.
And I just love the line that you've used a
couple times, which is like, how do I do my best?
But I think if you can hold both those views
at the same time, it allows you to go a

(44:32):
little bit easier on yourself, to relax a little bit,
but also stay in sort of the driver's seat of
your own life.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
I've talked several times about chaos theory and chaos. That
word is the opposite of order, right, It's the opposite
of control. All of our lives lie between order and disorder.
Everything that's the entirety of our life. There's bits that
are ordered and structured and that we have some predictability about.
There's other bits where just things just wallop by out

(45:00):
of the blue, and we have no idea that it's
going to hit us. And the difficulty is that I
think a lot of people respond to that middle ground
that is life by thinking if I just got closer
to the order, then everything would be okay, right, but
it's never going to happen. That's the point that I say,

(45:20):
is like, yes, you just you know, personally, I think
that the times where I've felt the worst in my
life are when I've been trying to impose order on
something I can't, And the times that I felt sometimes
the best is where I've sort of accepted that disorder
and just enjoyed the moment. You know. There's an example.
I took this from very good philosopher I like his
work a lot called hartmut rosa sociologist. He has this

(45:42):
phrase called resonance, which I think a lot of people
would sort of recognize this moments where you just feel
sort of just wonderful in the moment. And the point
he makes, which I he has a little line where
he says something to the effect of, you know, even
in life's planned celebrations, it's the unplanned flourishes that we
remember the most. And so I think about, you know,

(46:04):
those moments of celebration. It's like everybody thinks about like
their wedding day, the birthdays, anniversaries, all these sort of
big milestones, and then you tell stories about them, and
it's usually the stuff you did not expect, where somebody
did something really funny or just really heartfelt, and that
stands out, whereas if you just try to say that
you know this is going to happen at ten o'clock,

(46:24):
this will happen at ten oh five and so on,
it sucks the joy out of it because there's no
unexpected uncertainty. And so, you know, I think we would
be utterly crippled as a species if we were fully certain,
and if we were fully uncertain, both things would be
terrible for us. But living in that middle space is
actually where you have the best of both worlds. And
so that's where I really do disagree with a lot

(46:45):
of the people who just say you have to control
your life. I think a world of complete control would
be dystopian. I think it would be horrifically terrible. Yeah,
And I like the uncertainty that I have to navigate,
even though uncertainty brings tragedy sometimes it's the price of
a life that I think is enjoyable and exciting.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Precisely, that life where you knew everything that was going
to happen and you got everything that you want would
be a very dead life. And again, if we believe
this idea that most of us don't actually even know
what's best for us, it would be a problematic life. Right,
the same for me, Like, if I'd gotten all the
things that I thought that I wanted, my life would

(47:24):
look very different. You know, this is obviously some bias,
but who knows what it would be like. But it
wouldn't be like this, right, It wouldn't be like this,
And this is kind of what is and I think
that's a really good place to be. I want to
go back to what you said a minute ago about
what'd you call it? The gospel of stuff and success?

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Stuff and status?

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, stuff and status.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
Okay, so let's just take that at face value to say, Okay,
this idea that if we get more of this or
we get more status, we're going to suddenly be happy,
let's just say that's not true. Why do we continue
to believe that? Like I've heard that line and said

(48:06):
it and thought about it. A thousand times at least,
And I've seen through that delusion a thousand times. And
yet my first book is going to be published in
a year, and I am thinking very much about how
many copies it sells and all of that. Right, So
I know that if it sells ten thousand copies versus

(48:26):
twenty five thousand copies, I'm not fundamentally going to be
a happier person because if I sell twenty five thousand,
I'm suddenly going to be like, well, why didn't I
sell fifty thousand? So I see through this illusion. Goodness gracious,
it is persistent, and it just comes roaring right back
in why do you think.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
It's a great question? My argument on how to deal
with this is I coined this phrase after the book,
so it's one of the ones that didn't make the
cut because I didn't come up with it until after
it was published. But I try to argue in favor
of people and passion rather than stuff and status, which
is nice alliterative.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
Phrasing, yep.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
And the issue with people and passion versus stuff and
status is that people and passion, by which I mean
relationships and things that you care about deeply that are
individual to you. Those are not easily quantified. They're not
easily measured.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Right.

Speaker 3 (49:12):
Stuff and status are extremely easy to measure, and they
are also things that in a social community are very
easy to have relative rank. Right, So you can understand
whether someone has a bigger house than you, You can
understand whether someone makes more money than you. You can understand
if they are above you in the corporate higherarchy. You
cannot understand whether someone has a better relationship with their

(49:32):
son or their father or a friend. You cannot understand
whether they have a deep satisfaction from the fact that
they really enjoy woodworking or walking their dog. Right, And
so when I think about this stuff like I have
had a tremendous amount of joy from going for hikes
with my dog, with loved ones, etc. And there is

(49:53):
absolutely no metric that is tied to that, right, but
I feel good? And so what does that culminate towards
what am I striving towards? You know, that's the other
aspect of really striving creatures. We try to always embtter
our position, and you know, walking the dog doesn't do
anything on an objective level to quote unquote better my
position in society. It might fulfill me. But the thing
is so funny about this to me is that it's

(50:15):
so obvious when you put it in the framework of
a finite life and the idea of death and so on,
that you're going to look back on your life. I mean,
I have never ever encountered someone who has been asked
the question of, like, what did you value most of
you know in your life in old age? And they
say the moment I got the promotion and the ferrari,
you know what I mean. It's just like, those things

(50:35):
are not if you really love them, if they make
you happy. It's not saying that you shouldn't chase things
that are important to you. It's that you have to
make sure that you're motivated, in my view, intrinsically, which
means that if there were no other people on the planet,
would you still value this? And for me, a lot
of the things that I've started doing more of the
answer is yes, And a lot of the things I've
started doing a lot less of the answer is no.

(50:57):
Other people care about that, but it doesn't really make
me happy. And that's extrinsic motivation or external motivation, right,
So all of society is built around external validation, and
all of what makes us happy is built around internal motivation.
And that's the paradox of how to navigate it, because
obviously the ability to do things that you like is
tied to being able to have enough money, for example,

(51:17):
that you're not stressed. So it's not that they're completely separate.
It's not that it's important to just jettison them and
all of us should live in the woods and be
subsistence farmers. It's that you have to calibrate it so
that you understand which thing is a means and which
thing is an end right. And if your entire life
is means where you're trying to get somewhere and you
never enjoyed the end, then you've basically mortgage your life

(51:39):
for a goal that never comes. And I worry that
there's a lot of people who are doing that because
they're on the gospel of stuff and status and they
never understand what it's for. They're just playing the game
until they die. So it's a bleak way of saying it,
but I think there are people who are living that life.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
Back to some of our earlier points, we are creatures
that are wired up a certain way. We are wired
up to look at status and hierarchy. It's embedded in us.
So it's not bad that we do that because I
don't think you cannot do it. And I think we
can also recognize, oh, that way is not the path

(52:16):
of fulfillment and happiness. And I think it gets further
muddled because so many things end up being both. You
write a book, there's a big intrinsic motivation in it,
whatever it is for you. You like writing, or you
have a message you want to get out to the world,
or whatever the intrinsic thing is, and you're going to
measure it extrinsically. I talk about this podcast all the time.

(52:36):
I can get caught up in it's not as big
as X, and it's not as big as why and
is it going to pay the bills? And because those
are all realities when I live in that world. Though,
I'm not happy when I reorient and say, oh, I
do this because I get to talk to really interesting people, right.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
I just love doing this.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
I get to put something out there that countless people
tell me has helped them. I get to to interact
with my friend Chris around he's our editor, around something
I love. And when I get back to that framing,
the job comes alive in a different way. And so
for me it's sort of I feel like I'm always
sort of lured over this way towards status and stuff,

(53:15):
and I have to keep turning my attention back to
people in passion.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
If I'm being honest about this stuff, I'm not some
guru who's immune from these things, right, Like, there's no
way in which even if you say these things, that
you are immune from these aspects of the rat race.
And when the most recent book, Fluke came out, I
was refreshing review sites. I have read every review of
the book, I think that's on the internet. There were
times where people set some really mean stuff. Other people,

(53:39):
the majority of them, set some very wonderful things, right yep.
But some people set some really mean stuff, and the
mean things sort of stuck with me, of course, and
I had to sit with it for a little bit.
And the two things that were important to realize that
have totally made me immune from this. One of them
is realizing that I would have written the book if
no one read it, because I cared about it and

(54:00):
wanted to do it. And it was a profound experience
and sort of understanding what I thought about the world.
So that's the first part, right, that I would do
it if no one read it. That's intrinsic motivation. And
the second thing that I think is also important and
does go to a lot of different domains, is you
don't write a book or whatever it is that you
do professionally, personally, whatever. You don't write a book for

(54:20):
the person who hates it. You write the book for
the person for whom it's going to change their world.
And if that person experiences this in a positive way.
I will take a thousand people who think I'm an
idiot and hate the book because I didn't write it
for them, you know. And so there's an aspect to
this where I think that parable really applies to lots
of other parts of life. You can't make something that

(54:40):
is going to be universally celebrated or universally affecting in
the same way if it's creative, whatever it is, but
you do it for the people who it empowers and
changes their worldview and makes them think differently, and that's enough.
And so, you know, I think there's so much of
that aspect where we're trying to be universalizing. We want
it to be one hundred percent of people. It's impossible,

(55:01):
but it's still it's still worthwhile if those things make
a difference, and also if you find them personally fulfilling.
And it's made me a lot more comfortable with the
horrible comments that people make online when you are an author,
because you know the majority of them are actually very positive,
and those are the people for whom I was spending time,
you know, sitting in front of a laptop and really
trying to get this right.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up.
You and I are going to continue in the post
show conversation where we're going to see what we cover.
We might cover the idea that probability theory works well
in certain contexts but fails catastrophically, and others understanding the
difference between risk and uncertainty. And we may discuss the
mating habits of spiders and why you might want to

(55:41):
do more of this in your own life. So we'll
see what happens in the post show conversation listeners if
you'd like to get access to that conversation all of
the other post show conversations special episodes that I do
just for you and you want to contribute to the
podcast because we can always always always use your support.
Go to oneufeed dot net slash join Brian. Thanks again,

(56:04):
I've really enjoyed this. I loved the book. I think
your substack is outstanding.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
What's it called.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
It's called the Garden of Fourking Paths. It's an idea
that's also in Fluke as well.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, you're a great writer across the board, so I
encourage people to check that out.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
And thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Thanks for having me on the show.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Thank you so.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
Much for listening to the show. If you found this
conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I'd love for you
to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person
to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We
don't have a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity,
but we have something even better, and that's you. Just
hit the share button on your podcast app or send

(56:41):
a quick text with the episode link to someone who
might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together
we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank
you for being part of the one you Feed community.

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Host

Eric Zimmer

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas