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

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

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.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Tuesday feature interview time. Think of this. Our world is swayed by chance. Your world is swayed by chance more often than any of us think. Think about that. Think about your life. The story coming right up. 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? We'll talk about that in a second. But first, a quick reminder question of the week. What's one thing that you do or your family does to impact climate change? We're looking for your answers this week on that question. One thing that you do that impacts climate change. Get your answers in by 6 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. That's Wednesday.

Keep it short. Remember your name in the email you send. And remember the location you're writing from. And you can write to me at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. 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 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. Gloss 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 tell great stories uh in this book that hook readers and listeners to you um into the greater discretion on fluke you know chance chaos and why everything we do matters uh 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 one 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 tells you why you should. So it's basically a story of Keith Jarrett, one of the famous jazz musicians, a really excellent piano player. And he comes to this concert hall in Cologne

and he's sort of got this very specific piano that he wants to play. And it's supposed to be exactly to his specifications, the tip-top 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, you know, 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, 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 was magical.

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. OK, 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 1926, a vacation that a couple takes to Kyoto 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 and 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, it's it's personal it's your story uh in the sense of uh of your ancestry do you want to talk about that so this is a story that i didn't know about for some time but it's a it's a tragic story and it's a story of a woman in 1905 in wisconsin a

little place called keeler wisconsin where uh she was married to a man who, you know, 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 greeted with a terrible sight because his his wife has decided her name's 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 sent 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 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 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 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 fluke? How much is fate? Or are they the same thing yeah thanks for sharing this 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. Now, when you ask about fate versus fluke, there is a difference because what basically the mentality 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 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, 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, you know, there's nothing that's faded because if there was something that was even slightly different than the world would shift, then 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. 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, it's 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 asked 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-Lapalme, Winnipeg, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And all of a sudden, some guy who 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, OK, 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? I mean, that's,

that's an excellent illustration because you can see, you can see immediately there, but there's an alternative life that's possible for you in which you stay in that job. Right. And the, the, 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 more 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 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 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 is 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 yes 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 Convergence is where things sort of end up in the same place regardless. And this is where there's, 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 have 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 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 your track completely diverts from a tiny little shift and that's to me that's the beauty of pondering some of these ideas i think that like you know constantly 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 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 get, you know, I accept that and I, you know, and I concede it 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 Mark Zuckerberg, then maybe it's going to turn out better 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 sort of plan as though you're going to think about what the best way to move forward is. I mean, I obviously don't step out in front of traffic, you know, in the hope that a fluke will save me. 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 it also, you know, one of the things that I think happens is like, you know, I grew up in, I described 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 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, I know 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 have 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 that you had seen that you'd researched that you heard about and you thought this is i gotta write a book about this or was it the other way around uh where you went searching for the searching for the stories yeah i know it was it was a long-standing 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 in, I'm a political scientist by trade, even though this book, you know, 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's just like they were you know they were a jerk or whatever they had a beef with somebody in the government 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 trousers was not strong enough.

And I think to myself, OK, 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 going to have to put it into this little model that tells you, oh, of course, this is always going to happen because Zambia is, according to all of our metrics, extremely resilient as a democracy. So, you know, 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 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 a way 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 in trying to explain this to friends and so on, 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 okay. It's like a shortcut, right? The problem would arrive if you thought that Google Maps actually

was the world, right? And I think a 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 noise 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 jared story i told you the noise can sometimes produce some really positive and

wonderful outcomes um because you raise politics and because that's your primary function as a prof, political science, tell me, tell us 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 Correspondents Dinner, which is a tradition in American politics where the president gets up

and plays stand-up comedian for a night. And he has a whole series of jokes that are written for him by the White House staff. You know, there's actually joke writers 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 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 or 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 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. I don't, you know, we don't know. Maybe he still would have, maybe he still, maybe he wouldn't have, but it is part of the reason I think why Trump was so vindictive towards Obama 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 slight aside, but I think it's an interesting one, is that that evening before Obama gave the stand-up speech, he went to the White House Situation Room and ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Vinh went and told the joke. Vinh 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 quite something. Okay, we're going 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 Bridge, 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 multiple layers to this. I mean, one of them I already mentioned, which is that 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 of 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. It's the stuff that was able to dig, was able to survive the heat and the gas and all that stuff. And the stuff that 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 of various creatures, that they believe they've pinpointed the origin story of why mammals don't lay eggs, which is a key part of why we exist. And it's basically the answer, according to them, is that a single shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus 100 million years ago, and this produced plac placenta which then leads to live births now i look at that and i'm like well what if that true like creature didn't get infected you know like all of us don't exist probably because you know certainly we would be different if we were laying eggs um and i think it's highly unlikely that 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 or you tell the story about our grandparents to 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, you know, aware of its destruction and so on. But I think that this is the kind of fragility that is really

amazing to, to contemplate. And it makes you also appreciate 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 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?

Technology. 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've thankfully solved that problem, but we've inverted the uncertainty. So now what we have is a world that is constantly changing in 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, and AI in general, 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. You're going to hunt the same animals. It's 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 forage for berries. You're going to hunt the same animals. It's 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 is 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 who 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 uh in 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 where 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? If 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. There's different outcomes in each game.

But 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 apply a data analytics, 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 and because it was so much more predictable and so there was lower scores and there was 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 know, it's 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, you know, 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. There's no there's 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 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. Like no one knows, right. You have to have an answer. And I think it's because of the dynamics I'm talking about in fluke is like, we, we 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. 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 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. Thanks so much for having me on the show. It was 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 him, right? Constantly. But boy, in those moments where you do keep up with him, 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 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 and 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 just hearing for the first time, you'll find it intriguing enough to think about it in some fashion, maybe even buy the book.

Okay, that's going to wrap it up for this day. A reminder once again that the deadline for answers to the week's question is tomorrow at 6 p.m., and the week's question is, name one thing that you or your family are doing or are planning to do to impact climate change. Okay? So that's the question of the week. And there's already a selection of really interesting answers on this question.

But we'd love to hear from you and love to hear more. And especially love to hear from people who have not written before. So, so let us know what's on your mind on this issue. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com is where you would send your answers. And on Thursday's your turn, we will pick a winner tomorrow, the Wednesday encore edition.

And it's, it's a good one. Rick Mercer is our encore edition from, from a little more than a year ago. If you notice the book rankings these days, seemingly always in the top one, two, three, or four position is Rick Mercer's book, Road Stories. So, you know, we did this interview while he was writing this book. So it's an interesting one.

And, you know, we all love Rick, and we'd love to hear from him. So tomorrow is your chance to hear it again. The encore edition this week is Rick Mercer. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening today. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.