Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

On this episode, we'll get a fascinating look at how our lives are constantly being swayed by small, seemingly insignificant decisions.

Our guest is social scientist Brian Class, who studied how seemingly inconsequential actions

have life-changing consequences.

Brian is a professor of global politics at University College London and the author of the book

Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

Brian, we thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me on the show. I'm looking forward to it.

Your book is titled Fluke. So what's your definition of a fluke?

Yeah, so normally flukes are positive, and I'm taking a slightly wider view of them, which is basically seemingly accidental or arbitrary, sometimes even apparently random events that are contingent.

And contingent basically means that if something small had changed, the outcome could be radically different.

So that's the sort of idea. It's these things

that we don't necessarily always recognize, but that divert our lives or divert our societies in

profound ways. So in your view, then, how has the contingency of timing shaped major historical

events? Are there good examples you can give us? Yeah. So the book opens with a story from a couple that goes to a vacation

in Kyoto, Japan in 1926, and the husband and wife fall in love with the city. And 19 years later,

this seemingly doesn't matter. It's just a vacation for a couple. But 19 years later, the husband,

the man is named Henry Stimson or H.L. Stimson, he's now the Secretary of War

for the United States government, and he's in charge of the targeting decision for where to drop

the first atomic bomb. And the generals all pick Kyoto, this city rather that he loved. And so he has

...