Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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 U.S., the Union would have won the Civil War anyway because it had structural advantages or the U.S. 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 history. Right. And so 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. Right.
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 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 the vacation histories of US government officials or the cigar locations of various armies and so on. 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.
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. So 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.
Yeah, so I'll talk about 9-11 briefly and then 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 9-11. And his colleague gave him the gift of a new tie on the morning of the conference 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 what he really got upset about when I talked to him, his name's 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 put 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 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 9-11 that also 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 person there that we think might be bin Laden. But we don't know.
You know, 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 jokes. 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 a few hours later. Extraordinary amounts of sort of steel nerves to tell jokes when you're gambling your presidency.
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