The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - Fluke - How Our World Is Swayed By Chance

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on February 6th. A feature interview with the author of an extraordinary new book that explores he world of chance, chaos and why everything we do matters. He's Brian Klaas a university professor in London, England. When you hear his stories and his theories you'll be thinking about how your own life has been impacted by  "flukes". I sure did.

Hi there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Time for your Wednesday Encore episode of The Bridge. This one is from February the 6th of this year. Hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. As we said, it's Tuesday, that means feature interview time, and we've got a feature interview for you today that's really going to make you think. Do things happen for a reason, or do things happen because of a fluke? Okay, let's get to today's feature interview.

It's with a gentleman by the name of Brian Kloss, Dr. Brian Kloss. He's a political scientist at University College in London, England. He actually was born in Minnesota, Midwestern United States. Just, you know, not that far from Manitoba. So he knows things Canadian as well. But he's written a book that's getting a lot of attention around the world. It's called Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Here's what the publisher says about it.

From the evolution of human biology and natural disasters to the impact of global events on supply chain disruptions, every detail matters because of the web of connectivity that envelops us. So what if, by exploding our illusion of concept, we can make better decisions and live happy, fulfilling lives? Okay, I'm interested. You interested. Because what Dr. Kloss does is he basically looks at the flukes in our history. They may be personal, they may be big time, they may be national, international, and the impact those flukes of history have had on the way events have unfolded,

and asks the question, why? What does it mean? So we're going to talk to Dr. Kloss about that. And I think it's going to make you think. It's going to make you think about your life. And how it's unfolded. And how it is unfolding today. And things that have happened to you in the past. Things that might happen to you today,

and how they'll impact your life. So let's get at it. Here we go, Dr. Brian Kloss. I reached him in London. Well, I guess the way I want to start this is I have a great admiration for anybody who can tell a good story. And you tell great stories in this book that hook readers and listeners to you into the greater discretion on fluke, you know, chance chaos and why everything we do matters. So I want to start with a couple of these stories.

I won't make you tell them all. Don't worry, there's nothing worse for an author than getting into an interview on the book and you tell all the good stories before they pick up the book. So I won't do that to you, but I do want to tell a couple of them and they're going to be familiar to you in terms of having to repeat them. I want to start though, with the, with the one, um, about the jazz pianist in Cologne. I love this story. Tell me this. Yeah. So this is a story about the value of forced experimentation, which is something that many of us are resistant to experimenting in our lives. And this, this tells you why you should. So it's basically a story of Keith Jure, one of the famous jazz musicians, a really excellent piano player. And he comes to this concert hall in Cologne and,

you know, he's sort of got this very specific piano that he wants to play. And it's supposed to be, you know, exactly to his specifications, the tip top, you know, piano in the world and so on. And he arrives there and there's no piano. Somebody has screwed up. And all they have is this sort of rickety mess that is out of tune and old and basically only fit for an amateur to practice on. But there's only like a few hours to go before the show. So Jared has a choice to make. And one choice is he could cancel the show and disappoint thousands of people.

And the other other which he ultimately picks is to just go ahead with the rickety piano the out of tune mess and so he has to adapt his playing style to this totally different obviously worse instrument and what happens what was magical um it's the recording of this concert is the best-selling jazz album of all time still to this day and the reason for it is simply because of this unexpected confluence of a master musician with a terrible instrument and him bringing something really unexpected out of it and i think the way i use this in fluke is to explain how we always think we know exactly what we want and we always think we know exactly

where society is supposed to go and sometimes it's the forced experiments in which we find not only the most beautiful moments but also the wisdom of life okay here's story number two i'll just say one word and you'll know what i'm talking about kyoto yeah this is the opening story of fluke and it starts in in 1926 a vacation that a couple takes to ky in Japan. And, you know, they stay at this place called the Miyako Hotel and they fall in love with the city. They sort of look at the temples and the foliage just changing color and so on. And, you know, it's an experience that all of us have.

We go on vacation. We love the place. And it is sort of a soft spot in our hearts forever. Well, this soft spot mattered for history because 19 years after this vacation was taken, the husband and the couple, Henry Stimson, had become America's Secretary of War. And the target committee had sent him a memo where they said, we have decided where to drop the first atomic bomb and we all agree it should be Kyoto. Now, this was not good news for Stimson, who the generals referred to this as his pet city.

And he took the pet city all the way to the top. He went to Truman twice, President Truman twice, and convinced him to take it off the targeting list. And so the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead because of his 19-year-old vacation. And the second bomb was supposed to go to a place called Kokura. And when the bomber arrived, it was briefly obscured by cloud cover. So they had to go to the secondary site, which was Nagasaki. And so I use this in the book to introduce the idea of chaos theory for human events and how when you think about the way the world works, we tend to believe it's these big, obvious causes that produce the effects we see around us. When in fact, this instance, hundreds of thousands of people died or lived in these cities based on a 19-year-old vacation at a passing cloud.

And I think that sort of aspect of how these small changes can produce ripple effects is a central idea to Fluke. And it's a central idea, I think, of how we should make sense of our own lives. The third one, and this will be the final one I'll get to to recount, is it's personal. It's your story in the sense of your ancestry.

Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so this is a story that I didn't know about for some time, but it's a story of a woman in 1905 in Wisconsin, a little place called Keeler, Wisconsin, where she was married to a man who was a farm worker and so on. And he goes out for the day. And when he comes back, he's greeted to a terrible sight because his wife has decided her name is Clara Modlin Jansen. And she's decided to kill her four young children and take her own life. And, you know, I assume she had a mental breakdown of some sort. Of course, we don't know. In 1905, they didn't have a lot of mental health diagnoses.

And so, you know, he comes home and sees the whole family dead. And I put this in the introduction to Fluke because when I was about 25 years old, my dad sat me down and showed me a newspaper clipping that said terrible act of insane woman. And it describes this killing. And the name there is the husband of all class. And my middle name is Paul because it's a family name enshrined by my great grandfather. And this is my great grandfather's first wife, Clara, who killed the family. Now, he remarried a few years later to what became my great grandmother. And so I had this sort of bewildering realization, not just that there was this dark chapter in our family history, but also that, um, I wouldn't exist if these kids hadn't been murdered. And,

you know, I think the thing that is the chaos theory bit of this, which I have a line, sort of a throwaway line in the book, but I say, look, you know, you wouldn't be reading a sentence or you wouldn't be listening to my voice if that mass murder hadn't happened. And that's that's chaos theory in a nutshell. Right. I mean, I think that when you think about these things, it's obviously true that I'm correct, that if these kids hadn't been killed, we would not be talking. There's no way we would be talking. But we just sort of ignore these things because it's so unbelievably overwhelming to imagine that every small decision that we make has unforeseen consequences, even in this case, 119 years in the future. You've probably got many of our listeners going, thinking through their

personal stories, their family backgrounds. I know, you know, in my case, my grandfather fought at Vimy Ridge, which was a really important battle in the First World War in April of 1917. And it was a strategic win for the Allies. But he got wounded, and he was shipped back to England, where in the hospital he falls in love with his nurse. And they end up getting married, my father is born and eventually I'm born. And so I look at it, you know, in somewhat similar ways to the way you look at back,

back at your tragic past and in your family is that if that German sniper hadn't shot my grandfather, he wouldn't have gone to England in the hospital. He wouldn't have had a child with his nurse, who was my father, and I wouldn't have been born. So, I mean, these things all have this strange twist in them. And I guess what I wonder about through these stories is how much is, how much is fluke? How much is fate? Or are they the same thing?

Yeah, thanks for sharing the story. I mean, one of the things I've been astonished by since the books come out, by the way, is how many people have these stories. I don't think I'm unique in any way. I mean, I think this is something that's just the way the world is. We have all these chance encounters that lead to humans being born. And, you know, frankly, if there was a microsecond difference on the moment of conception, even we would have different people being born. So it's this fragility all the way down. of my book is arguing is that but for these small changes the outcomes actually differ right so this is what contingency is the the official term for it in sort of academic jargon where it means if you if you change a tiny thing the the pathway and the outcome of history or of your life actually shifts what's interesting about fate is that it's it basically argues that every path

leads to the same outcome so whatever is f faded will happen no matter what the chain of events preceding it is. And if you change one of those chains in the event, in the sort of preceding chain, it will still produce the outcome because it's faded. It's inevitable, right? And I think it's completely wrong. I don't believe in fate. I do believe in contingency.

So what I'm saying is basically, there's nothing that's faded because if there was something that was even slightly different, then the world would shift. And this is where that third part of the subtitle, why everything we do matters comes in that even small actions, you know, turning left instead of right out of a shop, you meet different people, but the world is different from that. Right. And so I mean that statement quite literally. I think some people look at that and they think, Oh, some BS,

you know, aspirational phrase. I mean, it's literally how reality works. I think that when we do anything, it produces ripple effects and we can't see them. But, you know, this is where the sort of fate dialogue is slightly loggerheads, because as I say, it's sort of this idea that the outcome is predetermined and the chain of events is unimportant. My argument is the inverse of that. It's that the chain of events is super important. And if any of them shifts even a tiny, tiny bit, the outcome will change. I don't want to bore you with my stories, but let me tell you, let me tell you another one, because it's, it draws on a lot of the things you just said. When I finished my education, which was not successful, I didn't go to university, I didn't even finish high school, but I ended up in northern Manitoba, north of where you grew up in Minnesota, up in Churchill, Manitoba on Hudson Bay.

And I ended up working for an airline, a small little airline that was moving some passengers, but mostly freight up and down into the Arctic. And I was 19 years old. Most of the time what I was doing was loading baggage and loading freight. And occasionally they'd ask me to help them out with ticket sales, the passenger counter. And one day they said to me, announce the flight on the PA system because we're really too busy with passengers. So I went over and I did the, you know, Transair flight 106, Thompson, the pond, Winnipeg, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.

And all of a sudden, some guy was in the waiting room, comes over and he says, Hey, you've got a good voice. You should be in radio. I'm the manager of the station here, the little radio station in Churchill, and I can't get anybody to work the late night shift. Would you be interested? And I grabbed the idea and, you know, started and, you know, 50 years later, you know, I was in one of the top jobs in newscasting in the country. Now, people look at me and say, first of all, I can't tell that story to journalism students because, you know, they revolt in the room when they hear that. But you go, okay, was that just luck? Was that turning left instead of turning right? Was it fate that it was going to

happen at some point because somebody allowed me to have a good voice. So is that just another one of the similar kind of stories that you tell or is there more to it than that? I mean, that's an excellent illustration because you can see immediately there that there's an alternative life that's possible for you in which you stay in that job, right? And everything is different. And I think there's a few things I would say about that. First is that those things are the ones that are visible to us, right? So some people have seen the film Sliding Doors, but I sort of riff on it with this phrase I call the snooze button effect,

where I say you sort of imagine, you know, you slap the snooze button one morning when you're tired, and then your life rewinds and you don't slap the snooze button and you get out of bed your world is going to be different and maybe on that day you know you maybe you got sick you don't go into work you don't have the guy recognize you your voice and then you don't end up in radio right so that would have been a complete invisible pivot where you would never have known that this discovery of your voice was was waiting out there to change your career forever so a lot of the stuff that changes our lives is invisible. It's stuff that we simply cannot know about because we only get one glimpse of what reality

could be like, and that's our life. But the other thing I said, I use this framework in the book that can help make sense of these ideas, which is called contingency versus convergence. And just very briefly to explain this sort of idea, contingency is where some small change happens and everything turns out differently. So like the asteroid that hit the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, it was a great experience of this illustration of it, because if it had been delayed by five seconds, it probably wouldn't have killed the dinosaurs and all of human history

wouldn't exist. Right. So that's, that's contingency. Um, and it's a space rock that just you know sort of change creates the possibility for humanity convergence is where things sort of end up in the same place regardless and this is where there's you know my example from evolution that's an interesting one is if you look at an octopus's eye and you look at a human's eye they're actually almost identical because evolution found the same solution to the problem twice. Just because it works really well. Our eye is very effective in navigating the world. Now, this may sound far away from your example,

but it's not because your voice was good, right? So at some point, somebody else might have said, you should go on the radio. And that would be convergence. So if you were going to end up as one of the top broadcasters in the country, regardless whether you got discovered on that day or not, that would be a convergent outcome because it was inevitable based on the characteristics that you had. And you

might've just had a slightly different pathway to get there. If that moment of discovery was the one that determined whether you spent your entire life in Churchill, Manitoba or not, then it's a contingent event. And the problem is I can't tell you which one it is. I mean, that's, we have no way of knowing, but I think it's the right framework to analyze these things, because there is regularity and order. And there are systems where things might, you know, you might leave the station a little bit later, but you'll still stay on the same track in life. And there's other things where you're trying to completely diverts from a tiny little shift. And that's to me, that's the beauty of pondering some of these ideas. I think they're like, you know,, this is happening to all of us. And what is the thing that most people intuitively understand is

that they're making big decisions when they do so deliberately, like when they choose where to go to university or not. Right. And I think what is bewildering, but true is that you are constantly doing this. Every single thing that you choose to do is changing the pathway through life. And I have this metaphor that I riff off of from the short story author Borges, the Argentinian called the garden of forking paths. And I basically say, you know, he has this metaphor where it's like, as you take a step forward, the paths available to you move, they shift, right? But you still have to take a step forward through life. And this is the way that life works. Every time you take a step forward, a different set of paths are available. And I think it's just happening constantly and infinitely to literally every

person on the planet, which is an amazing thought, but one that I think we ignore because it's nicer to imagine that we're in control of everything and we just need to make a few big wise decisions and everything will turn out all right. I can see how my story was a fluke. I, you know, I accept that and I, you know, and I concede it. But a lot of people feel that their their outcomes in life are based on the strategy that they set up. So a good outcome can lead to a good or sorry, a good strategy can lead to a good outcome. Just as bad strategy, one assumes could lead to a bad outcome. So how do you fit that in with the fluke theory yeah so i think there's a few things one is that you still use probabilistic

reasoning to navigate a world that can be swayed or upended by flukes so the way i'll describe this is like you know if you're trying to figure out whether you'd be better off you know going to harvard or not going to harvard you might want to use the probabilistic reasoning. If you don't have any better information available to you, right now, if you're, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, then maybe it's going to turn out better if you, if you drop out. I mean, who knows, those are the flukes where you have something that turns out really, really successful, even though the probabilities are actually against you dropping out. And so you sort of take that as it were with a bit of probability and a bit of

sort of hunch, right? You sort of think, well, maybe this isn't for me. Maybe the probabilities don't describe, you know, describe my pathway through life. But the problem is that I think that when we think that way exclusively and we don't have room for uncertainty, we do make big mistakes because lots of people had very smart strategies going into 2020 and all of them were blown up by a pandemic that was started by a single person getting infected by a single mutation of one virus in China. So, you know, I think that there's this aspect to life that appreciates both,

right? You, you sort of plan as though you're going to think about what the best way to move forward is. I mean, I, I obviously don't step out in front of traffic, you know, in the hope that a fluke will save me. It's, it's a stupid way to live. But at the same time, I have this sort of recognition of the power of uncertainty and the accidental and arbitrary forces that are, that are affecting our lives. And that makes me a sort of plan a bit more for resilience rather than for a pure optimization, because, you know, I can't control a lot of stuff. I have this line in the book I refer to a lot where I say we control nothing, but we influence everything. And I think that letting go of control actually makes you a smarter decision maker. But also, you know, one of the things that I think happens is like, you know, I grew up in I describe the modern United States as probably the most individualistic culture that has ever existed in human history.

I mean, it's incredible. It's like all the stuff that I call the delusion of individualism on steroids. You know, if you're rich, it's because you deserve it. If you're poor, it's because it's your fault for not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. And all these myths, I think basically create this toxic mentality that you're to blame for your failures and everything that goes well for you is purely up to your own success, right? And your own hard work and deserving and so on. And I just don't, I don't believe that's true. I mean, I think about the things that have led to being in a position where I can have a conversation with someone like you and, you know, it's where I was born, when I was born, the fact that I had supportive parents, the fact that my brain was healthy and structured in a nice way. And so I mean, all these things I had nothing to

do with, no saying that whatsoever. They are by far the strongest predictors of success in my life. So the way that I feel about these things is yes, you strive, like you try to do things that are going to make your life better. But I also have been able, and this is something that's changed for me in the last three years, since I started researching and writing this book, I've been able to let go a bit more, you know what I mean? Like where it's like, there's some stuff that like, I can have a smart strategy and it still might not work. And there's some other stuff where I might've done something really stupid and it just turned out okay. And I accept that I'm along for the ride a bit more than I used to be. Right. I, I had a, I was a bit more of a control freak

three years ago than I am now. And I think it makes me happier to just sort of say there's, there's stuff I can't control and that's, that's okay. Let me, seeing as you raised it, I, I wondered as I was reading all this material on your book and, and the things you were suggesting, I was wondering like where, what was the genesis of Brian Kloss's idea to write this book. I mean, did you have all these, like an accumulation of flukes that you had seen, that you'd researched, that you heard about, and you thought, this is, I've got to write a book about this. Or was it the other way around,

where you went searching for the stories? Yeah, no, it was a longstanding germination, I'd say. And there's a couple of different threads. One is the family story I told you, right? So I feel like an accident of history. And the more that I looked into this, I think that humanity is an accident of history. But let's set that aside. So on the personal side of things, what my PhD was, and I'm a political scientist by trade, even though this book dives into lots of stuff with science and philosophy and so

on, my actual job is I'm a political scientist and my PhD was looking at the causes of coups, right? Military takeovers, which are extremely rare, highly consequential events that are almost impossible to predict. And what was happening was I was like looking at the world through the prism of social science research, which is all these quantitative models and neat equations and everything fits together. And here's the,

here's the variables that cause coups and all this stuff. And then I was like going to these places and speaking to the soldiers and the generals and the two worlds were not aligned. Right. So like I would talk to a general or a soldier and the reasons they would have were highly interpersonal, often based on personality flaws. It was just like they were, you know, they were a jerk or whatever. They had a beef with somebody in the government and they wanted to overthrow them. But the one that really stuck out to me, I mentioned briefly in the opening chapter, which is I interviewed these soldiers

who were trying to kidnap the army commander in Zambia to carry out a military takeover. And it was a pretty smart idea, but they basically grabbed him by the trouser leg in the middle of the night as he was trying to climb over this compound wall to escape from them and in a split second he slipped through their grasp because their grip on his his trousers was not strong enough and i think to myself okay like

zambia's government was basically a microsecond away from collapsing and you know i look at that and i'm thinking you know this is totally arbitrary and now i'm gonna have to put it into this little model that tells you, oh, of course, this is always going to happen because Zambia, according to all of our metrics, is extremely resilient as a democracy. So I've described myself in the book as a disillusioned social scientist because I would basically go out into the world, see all the messiness, see these flukes. And then I would go to conferences and everyone has put it into this really simple equation and said, here is everything. And all the noise as it were is to be ignored. And so, you know, I, I've sort of had both sides of this, the personal and the professional. And I just, I think that a lot of us drift through life thinking the world works away that I find to be alive. And I think it's particularly true now because models are driving most of our world. Right. I mean, there's so many things in economics, politics, et cetera, that are derived from models.

And it's like, you know, the way I describe it and try to explain this to friends, I'm like, if you're driving around and you're looking at Google Maps, if you understand that Google Maps is not actually the real world, you're OK. It's like a shortcut. Right. The problem would arrive if you thought that Google Maps is not actually the real world, you're OK. It's like a shortcut, right? The problem would arrive if you thought that Google Maps actually was the world. And I think a lot of the times, like economics and so on, mistakes the model for the actual economy. And, you know, this is the stuff where I'm trying to sort of push back on that and say, I think there's a series of philosophical problems when we think about the world this way, when we discount the noise, which is what the clever people tell us, right? Like ignore the, ignore the noise, focus on the signal. Fluke is sort of an antidote to this and saying the noise is where a lot of the action is. And it's worth not just paying attention to, but actually celebrating because things like that Keith

Jarrett story, I told you the noise can sometimes produce some really positive and wonderful outcomes. Because you raise politics and because that's your primary function as a, as a prof political science, tell me, tell us the, the Obama Trump story. Yeah. So this one is slightly speculative. I can't confirm that it's the sole reason why this happened, But in 2011, there's this extraordinary event that I think historians are going to pour over for a long time. And it's the White House and so on and one of the joke writers comes up with a joke where donald trump is the target and he's sitting in the room and obama says something to the effect of you know i'm really having an easy time as president making these easy decisions whereas what keeps me up at night is imagining being donald trump where i've got to ponder the hard stuff like who to fire on

celebrity apprentice right the reality TV show. And of course, the joke is that, you know, Trump, for all his self-importance, is this lightweight. He doesn't actually have to deal with real stuff. He's just, you know, he's on a TV show. Now, the camera pans to Trump and he's just seething in his chair. I mean, you can tell this has gotten under skin. And as we all know, with Trump, ego is a big part of his life, right? So there's a hypothesis that people around Trump have raised with some good reason, I think, that he decided to run for president that evening. And this is possibly the origin story of the Trump

presidency is that if this joke doesn't get told, maybe Trump doesn't decide to run. You know, we don't know. Maybe he still would have. Maybe he still maybe wouldn't have. have, but it is part of the reason I think why Trump was so vindictive towards Obama and his, in his presidency. A lot of his presidency was obsessed with trying to undo the things that Obama did, even if he didn't care about the policy very much. Now, the reason I say historians are going to pour over that, and this is sort of a slightly, a slight aside, but I think it's an interesting one, is that that evening before Obama gave the standup speech, he went to the White House Situation Room and ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Vin went and told the joke. Vin went back to the Situation Room and saw Osama

bin Laden get killed. I mean, it's an extraordinary night in how American history has unfolded one way or another. And that's the kind of stuff where flukes play an outsized role yep that was great something um okay we're gonna take a quick break i'll be right back with dr brian claus right after this and welcome back you're listening to uh the, Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, and on your favorite podcast platform. And we have the author of Fluke, Dr. Brian Klaus, joining us from London, England, where he teaches at University College. Okay, a couple more questions. You mentioned before the break that humanity was a fluke in effect.

What do you mean by that? Yeah. So there's, there's multiple layers to this. I mean, one of them I already mentioned, which is that the, the origin story of the rise of mammals comes from a giant space rock that was unleashed by a place called the Oort cloud having a small oscillation 66 plus million years ago and then flying towards the earth and hitting the planet and it hit in such a way off the Yucatan peninsula that it was in this really gypsum rich rock in the ocean which created this toxic gas and the surface temperature the

earth goes up to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is where dinosaurs die, but it's also the origin story of the rise of mammals. And so one of the things that I think is really extraordinary to think about, but evolutionary biologists have verified this, is that basically everything we see around us either could dig 66 million years ago or could swim.

And everything else died. The stuff that was able to dig was able to survive the heat and could swim and everything else died. It's the stuff that day that it was able to dig, was able to survive the heat and the gas and all that stuff. And the stuff that was able to swim was a bit insulated from it, but most everything else died out. And so you think about that and you think everything else is the sort of descendants of the diggers and the swimmers. It's incredibly arbitrary. We are as well. Right. And so, you know,

I think this is something where when you think about it that way if the if the asteroid had been a second a minute 10 minutes later you know it wouldn't have hit the earth and dinosaurs might still be in existence and all of human history you know the ancient romans to the none of that exists so i think that's part of it the other one that i think is really extraordinary is uh there's new evidence from from biologists as well looking at the genomes uh various creatures that they believe they've pinpointed the origin story of why mammals don't lay eggs uh which is a key part of why we exist and it's basically the the answer according to them is that a single shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus 100 million years ago, and this produced placenta, which then leads to live births. Now, I look at that and I'm like,

well, what if that shrew-like creature didn't get infected? All of us don't exist, probably, because certainly we would be different if we were laying eggs. And I think it's highly unlikely that humans would have evolved in that way. But it's also, you know, just in a more direct way. Like you think about, okay, so I tell the story or you tell the story about our grandparents, our great grandparents. That chain doesn't end, right? It keeps going back in time. And eventually, six million years ago, there's something called the chimpanzee human last

common ancestor, which is the closest thing that is basically the umbrella species for chimps and humans. And if those two primates didn't mate, we wouldn't exist, right? I mean, these are the things where I just think the fragility of this, you get at some point there was a worm-like creature that is the origin of all of us. And if it gets squished or eaten, you know, maybe we don't all exist. So I think that basically the more you look at this stuff, other things would exist, right? There would be evolution of other creatures.

But I think for my exact being to exist on this planet is just a house of cards built on an infinite number of houses of cards. And that to me is like really wondrous and wonderful to think about. It doesn't mean that there would be something, maybe there'd be something better than humans. I don't know, right? Maybe there'd be a species that's more like, like you know aware of its destruction and so on but but i think that this is the kind of fragility that is really amazing to to contemplate and it makes you also appreciate um the life we have because richard dawkins has this phrase in some of his writing where he talks about the unborn ghosts right all the possible people or all the possible creatures that could have existed,

but for these small changes and, you know, we get to live. And I think that to me is, you know, people say, do you become nihilistic? When you think about these ideas, it's the exact opposite. I think I've won the universe's lottery in the biggest possible way and I get to enjoy life. And that's what it's all about. Love what if questions you know what if this had happened or that had happened um technology we you know we've gone through this incredible spurt in the last what 10 15 20 years where everything's different

everything's changed you can't even predict what it'll be like next year because things are changing so rapidly. What's that done to these theories? Yeah, so it's amplified them. It's put them on steroids, basically. And I think the reason why I describe this, and I think this is something we all needed to contemplate a bit as people who live in a very strange world, is that the past is less predictive of the future than ever before in history, right? Because the world is changing faster than ever before in history. So the way I describe this in the book is I say, look, in the distant past, like in the hunter-gatherer age, which is the overwhelming majority of humanity's story, if you had a 24-hour clock that was human existence, 23 plus hours would

be hunter-gatherer period, right? Now, in those days, people navigated uncertainty. They had to deal with flukes, but the flukes were in their daily life. It was like, am I going to die of starvation? Is an animal going to eat me? You know, where am I going to get my next meal? We thankfully solved that problem, but we've inverted the uncertainty. So now what we have is a world that is constantly changing and how it operates in general, right? The sort of sense of how the world operates.

But the day to day life is super regular. Like you can go to a Starbucks anywhere in the world and get the same drink and you can have Amazon deliver something with precision to your house and it's highly, highly predictable, right? But this is a trade-off that I think is somewhat dangerous

because it's like, it gives us the illusion of predictability, control, regularity in our day-to-day lives. At the same time, democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up and the world is shifting more rapidly than ever before the ai stuff is the stuff that gives me pause in this because you know machine learning is basically an ai in general is is based on a principle where you have past data in order to train a model to interpret some

problem going into the future. And if the past is less predictive of the future than ever before, then there's more of a danger that you create a model that's wrong. So, you know, in the hunter gatherer period, you actually had pretty good past prediction of future outcomes because if your kid was a hunter, sorry, if you were a hunter gatherer, your kid was going to be a hunter gatherer. And it was exactly the same. You're all, you're going to forage for berries.'re going to hunt the same animals not that different you know i'm even in my own lifetime i grew up without the internet and you know it's indispensable now and what is going to be the experience of being a human in 20 years i mean

none of us really know and i think that's the stuff where technology has embedded more systemic risk which is part of the downside of flukes, right? Like the downside is that when random things occur, if the system is not resilient, it can create catastrophic cascades. And I think, unfortunately, that is part of the reason why I think, and this is my own diagnosis, so I could be wrong, but it's part of the reason why I think we've engineered a world in the 21st century that is defined to a large extent by these catastrophic shocks. I mean, I think about the last 25 years and we had in a very short time period, you know, 9-11, the Iraq war,

the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, a perfect example of a fluke where a guy lights himself on fire in Central Tunisia and the world goes aflame. Then you have Trump, Brexit, the pandemic, now the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. I mean, it's just like we have all this idea that our world is more stable than ever before because it feels stable in the day-to-day existence. But, like, the history of our geopolitics are more unstable, I think, than ever before. And technology, in my view, is only going to amplify those problems. Last question, and you'll find this strange, although perhaps not so. It is Super Bowl week, and the American, and not just American, Canadian too, and other parts of the world,

are kind of focused on this game, right? And you go, okay, so how does all this impact things like sport, professional sport, with the huge amounts of money that are bet on it, predictive nature of sport in the sense that there are those who use, they claim, science in some form to predict outcomes. How does that work for you? Yeah, I like the S's.

I actually do talk about this briefly in Fluke. And sports are a really excellent illustration of a system in which data analytics are extremely well-suited for it, but that is totally different from the way that our lives and our world actually works. And that's because we live in what I call open systems. There's a huge number of possible outcomes.

There's not very well-defined rules. There's 8 billion players or 8 billion teams, right? Whatever you want to take the sports analogy in sports, you have a very strictly defined set of teams. It's limited. The rules are the same all the time and you repeatedly do the same game with different, you know, there's different outcomes in each game, but like over time, it's much more like a coin flip where you can sort of understand the possible solutions to, to the game. And this means that analytics are really, really good. And this is where I talk about this, this concept of money

balling, which is from baseball. I'm a huge, both baseball and American football fan, but in, in, in baseball money balling was where they they apply data analytics to the field. You know, the Brad Pitt film highlights this, the Michael Lewis book about it. And it worked really, really well. It started to have these outcomes where you could predict what to do, where to move the players

to maximize the likelihood of getting an out and so on. The problem was, and I wrote about this in Fluke, is I said, I think they optimized for the wrong thing because what they did was they made the game boring. They made the game unexciting because it was so much more predictable. And so there was lower scores and there were fewer rallies and so on

and less home runs. And when you think about that, it was like, well, what was the sport actually for? They optimized for performance and then the viewership started to decline. So what did they do? Well, in the last baseball season, they un-moneyballed part of the game. They banned some of the things that the data analytics told them to do because it would make the game more exciting. So I think this is another lesson that actually has this sort of resonance for larger issues

that I'm talking about in the book, which is, you know, maybe efficiency and optimization on these metrics isn't the answer to all of life's problems. Maybe having pure efficiency and data-driven outcomes actually sucks out some of that uncertainty of life that we like. And, you know, it's sort of a dual lesson, right? If you have a closed system, then yes, you can use analytics very effectively. If you're doing cancer diagnoses, I really hope they're using AI and every possible analytic tool to diagnose things because it's a closed

system. But you get into trouble when you either falsely diagnose an open system and pretend it's a closed one, or when you misunderstand what the point of a system is. And for sports, the point of the system is excitement and enjoyment. It's not having two

spreadsheets playing each other on the field. Are polls the same in a way? Well, no, actually. So polls, I think, are a bit different because they're trying to capture. They're pretending they exist in a closed system, but they don't. So what always maddens me, I look at the polls for the Biden-Trump race, for example. And, you know, I have no idea who's going to win in November. Anyone who's being honest has absolutely no idea.

I mean, you can have all the information at your fingertips. You still don't know. Now, the issue here, and I think the one that is where people misunderstand these problems, is they're applying these ever-greater data analytics to a question that is literally unanswerable because the world is going to be different in November than it is in February. And I know, you know, in 2020, when you look at the polls, the coronavirus pandemic had not spread much beyond China at that point, right? There's a few cases in Italy in February of 2020. It defined the presidential election. So if you were using data analytics in February of 2020 to predict Biden versus Trump, then it's a really stupid thing to do because the world is

fundamentally different several months later when the election actually happened. And so, yes, I mean, the polls provide you a snapshot for the wrong question. They tell you if the election was held today, who might win? That's not the question that's going to be asked. The question is who's going to win the actual election. And so that slippage is one that I think causes us to make some problems in assessments and predictions of the world. And I think that that's something where just like, you know, it's a useful thing to do to just accept. I don't know. Sometimes, you know, I'd like, I, I do punditry. I go on, you know, various TV shows every so often. And like, I'm always hyper aware that I can't say that. I can't just say like, I don't know. No one knows. You have to have an answer. And I think it's because of the

dynamics I'm talking about in fluke is like, crave ordered structured reasons for everything. And sometimes ordered structured reasons don't exist or the world might shift in an unexpected way. And yet, like when we turn on the TV, what we get is we get the model based, really obvious answer. Oh, yes. Here's the thing that explains everything. And I sit there sometimes on TV and I'm like, I want to say, I don't know. It's honest. I literally don't, you know, but it's the conventions of modern society is that the second you do that, you never get the call back. So it's sort of the way that, the way the world works, unfortunately, is that we have to pretend we know even when we don't. That's a good sense of certainly some of the ways the media works these days. And some of the,

some of the ways the media keeps getting itself in trouble. Listen, it's been a great conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you. I'm so glad you, you agreed to have a chat with us. Take care. Good luck with the book.

I don't think you need it. It's all over the place. So enjoy the moment. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. It's great to chat to you. Okay. Take care. I know, I know he talks fast and he talks fast in such fascinating terms, but you're trying to keep up with them, right? Constantly. But boy, in those moments where you do keep up with them,

it really is interesting. And you really think through, well, obviously, as you saw that I did, you think through your own life and how it's been impacted by flukes or whatever way you choose to describe them. But I, you know, I really enjoyed that discussion. The book is called Fluke. The subtitle is Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. It's published by Simon & Schuster. You can find it anywhere. You can find it literally anywhere.

Obviously, any bookstore, online bookstore in Canada, US, UK, you name it. It's quite the discussion point and has a lot of people interested in what Dr. Brian Kloss is saying. And once again, he's in London. He's at University College in London. And that's where he kind of hangs out. But you'll see him and hear him a fair amount in the days, weeks, months ahead because he's becoming a popular figure to talk to on programs like this. And I'm glad, hopefully, for those of you who are just hearing for the first time, you'll find it intriguing enough to think about it in some fashion,

maybe even buy the book. Hope you enjoyed that encore edition of The Bridge. Brian Kloss, our guest from London, England, the author of Fluke. And that's it for our summer encore edition on this Wednesday. That program was from our February 6th episode. Hope you enjoyed it.