Brian Klaas

I do try to think about how the world works.

I mean the history of the 21st century is a history of models and predictions being upended by fluky events, right?

I mean every geopolitical forecast was invalidated by 9-11.

Every financial and economic forecast was invalidated by the financial crisis.

Every regional geopolitical forecast.

In the Arab Spring, a guy lights himself on fire in Tunisia and it causes the collapse of multiple regimes and multiple civil wars.

You have the rise of Trump and Brexit.

These are massive black swan events.

And then you also have the pandemic, which there's still debate about the origin story of it.

But

No matter how it happened, whether it escaped from a lab or whether it came from an animal, it was one person in Wuhan, China getting infected by a single mutated virus.

And it changed the lives of 8 billion people for several years and also upended all the geopolitical and economic forecasts.

So I think one of the things that I grapple with is why don't we internalize the lesson?

that we have less control than we do.

I mean, you're right.

Like we keep making predictions and I go on TV sometimes to talk about politics.

And what I'm aware of is that, you know, when you get asked a question, you can't say, I don't know.

And you can't say, well, maybe it was just sort of a random accident because the way that you're expected to describe the world is a straightforward A to B line with only a few very obvious variables and they account for everything.

One of my favorite stories about this is a story of forced experimentation, where we're sort of forced out of our comfort zones and forced to deal with uncertainty.

And so Keith Jarrett, this great jazz pianist, shows up to the Cologne Opera House at one point for this big packed event.