Welcome to the Bull Work Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We are almost all the way through January and we have a lot of ground to cover today.

We're joined once again by Brian Koss, Professor of Global Politics, the University College

London where he focuses on democracy,

authoritarianism, and American politics and foreign policy.

So welcome back, Brian.

Welcome from England.

Thanks for having me on the show.

I want to talk about your new mind-bending book, Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters,

which I found a little bit alarming and scary, but you claim is uplifting.

We're going to get to that in a moment.

Also, I want to talk to you about the banality of crazy.

But I blame you for this because you called attention

to an amazing exchange that took place on a local CBS affiliate television station down in Miami.

And just to set the scene for this, there is a congresswoman from South Florida named Maria Salazar who on her Twitter biography

describes herself as a five-time Emmy Award-winning journalist. I'm not sure

what that's all about, okay? So she's sitting down with one of the local legends of journalism, a guy named Jim Defiti, and she's bragging about all the money that she's brought into South Florida.

She's bragging specifically about

I got you $40 million. What I think is interesting is listen to how the

reporter here, Jim Defely, does not let this go, pointing out that, wait, you voted against the bills that provided that money.

You voted against the infrastructure bill.

You voted against the CHIPS you voted against the chips act and it goes

back and forth but in some ways I think and I think you highlighted this Brian this is

...