Peeling Potatoes Episode 59: The Answer Is the Question

Fruitloop sent me through five impossible worlds. Somewhere between melting chocolate, mechanical gnomes, argumentative gods and a magic mirror, I discovered that the point was never really to find the quickest answer.

A Fruitloop University Story

Episode 59 of Peeling Potatoes began with five mysterious doors.

This is the sort of sentence that has become perfectly normal at Fruitloop University. I arrive with my trusty blank pieces of paper, Fruitloop has clearly been plotting something, and within minutes I am expected to prevent an entire civilisation of gummy bears from disappearing under chocolate.

I still do not know how she puts these things together.

I have asked.

Fruitloop says she might tell me one day. I am beginning to hope she never does, because knowing might take some of the magic away.

This week, behind each door was another world. Each world had a problem. And each problem was supposedly waiting for me to solve it.

That was Fruitloop’s first mistake.

I rarely solve the problem she gives me.

I tend to create three more.

The Smarties Will Know What to Do

Behind the first door was the Candy Kingdom.

There were rivers of liquid caramel, mountains of cotton candy and a white-chocolate bridge melting into the Fudge River. The resident gummy bears were panicking because they could no longer reach the marshmallow mines.

Quite reasonably, my first concern was cardiological.

Then Fruitloop informed me that I was already inside.

Apparently there was no escape until I had prevented the entire city from becoming, as I put it, “under chocolate”.

Fortunately, Candy Kingdom had a resource Fruitloop had overlooked.

Smarties.

Not ordinary Smarties. Magic Smarties.

Their name, after all, gives the game away. They are smart. They know things. They are the mysterious little creatures who appear during the night, fix everything and vanish again before anybody knows what happened.

Naturally, I also knew the head Smarty. I have a relatively good network.

The head Smarty was pink, because obviously the head Smarty requires some distinguishing feature.

My contribution to saving Candy Kingdom therefore consisted mainly of delegation. I instructed the Smarties to construct a giant refrigerator and cooling system, preferably PDQ, before everything became a sticky mess.

I am not the smartest kid on the block.

This is why you find the people who are.

There was perhaps something more serious hiding inside all this sugar. Fruitloop asked whether curiosity was a sweet treat — something exciting but occasional — or more like a daily meal.

I am firmly in the daily-treat camp.

Life is too short.

Not necessarily mountains of sugar. Not something swallowed while running from one obligation to another. But a few minutes each day in which you stop, notice what you are doing and make an ordinary moment slightly special.

Curiosity deserves the same respect.

A little every day.

Do Not Give Me the Gadget

Behind the second door was the Ultimate Invention Workshop, a high-tech North Pole staffed by mechanical gnomes, flying reindeer and assembly lines producing things such as talking socks and shoes that allow you to walk on walls.

The master idea machine had jammed because somebody had attempted to build a bicycle that rode on rainbow beams.

Production was collapsing.

My brain immediately travelled back to manufacturing plants, assembly lines, capacity planning and everything I had learnt years ago through my work with companies such as DaimlerChrysler and Bombardier.

Then I stopped myself.

Too boring.

This is Fruitloop University. We can do better than production planning.

So I invented a magical finger-snipper.

Somewhere in the management safe, hidden among the money, patents and state secrets, was an emergency device. Plug it into the wall, give it some electricity, it snaps its fingers and — by magic — the machinery is repaired, the backlog disappears and the factory returns to normal.

Problem solved.

Fruitloop then asked a much better question.

If I could ask an inventor to build a strange gadget to solve one problem in my own life, what would I ask for?

Nothing.

That would be the wrong question.

Give me a gadget that solves my problem and perhaps my life becomes easier for ten minutes. But something has also been taken away from me: the need to learn, ask, question, rethink and approach the problem from somewhere else.

I would rather ask the inventor how the gadget came into existence.

What did you notice?

What did you connect?

Where did the idea come from?

What is that magic stuff happening between your ears?

I am much more interested in the beginning of the creative process than its finished product.

The invention is useful.

The thinking that produced it is more interesting.

To reach the next door, Fruitloop gave me a compass that pointed only towards smelly things.

I objected immediately.

Who says smelly is necessarily bad?

I once had a child open my fridge, recoil dramatically from the mountains of cheese inside and announce that it smelt like his brother’s nappies.

I considered the contents magnificent.

Perspective.

Still, if life insists on becoming smelly, my practical advice is simple: carry a peg. Put it on your nose and continue.

If that fails, shut your eyes, keep moving and hope you emerge at the other end more or less unscathed.

Fruitloop added something wiser.

“Sometimes it’s good not seeing what you are smelling.”

Quite.

A Mere Mortal on Mount Olympus

Door number three took me to Mount Olympus.

Zeus had lost his lightning bolt down a rain-cloud drain. Poseidon had flooded the gymnasium while showing off with a giant squid. The gods were blaming each other and creating thunderstorm drama.

Fruitloop wanted me to draft some form of shared-cloud agreement.

I am a mere mortal.

Who am I to mediate between gods?

So again, I looked for people who might actually know what they were doing.

I reached into my imperfect memory of the ancient world and assembled a negotiating team: Plato for wisdom about society, Cicero for the power of argument, and Epicurus because no serious negotiation should take place without something decent to eat and drink.

Then I invented a goddess responsible for beautiful surroundings, because somebody needed to provide comfortable chairs, pleasant scenery and perhaps a little mood lighting.

And somewhere in the background, naturally, the Smarties would be clearing up the physical mess while everyone else talked.

My role?

Sit back and watch.

It occurred to me that the negotiations might become so pleasant that nobody would want them to end, which is perhaps a danger in itself. But at least Zeus and Poseidon would have stopped fighting.

Fruitloop then gave me a 3,000-year-old mythical creature and allowed me one question about the past.

This time I knew roughly what I wanted.

What are we missing?

We study history. We accumulate knowledge. We watch people make mistakes. We make mistakes ourselves. We know perfectly well that certain actions cause damage, yet humanity repeatedly walks back into remarkably familiar situations.

Why?

Why does knowing something not automatically change what we do?

Perhaps somewhere on Mount Olympus there is also a god of temptation.

I would quite like a word with him.

Then came the griffin.

“The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?”

I told Fruitloop I was dreadful at riddles.

I proved it.

My answer was conscience.

Fruitloop’s answer was footsteps.

Much simpler.

But even then I could not leave it alone. Footsteps and conscience seemed connected to me. As we move through life, our actions leave something behind us. Sometimes something useful. Sometimes quite a lot of debris.

Fruitloop let me pass anyway.

Standards are evidently flexible at this university.

Turn the Mirror Around

The fourth world was a fairy-tale kingdom in which everybody lived together whether they liked it or not.

Talking donkeys ran coffee carts. The three little pigs had formed a construction union. Big bad wolves were working as night watchmen.

Goldilocks had lodged a noise complaint against the three bears, while the magic mirror had gone on strike because it was tired of being asked who was fairest of them all.

Fruitloop wanted mediation.

I prescribed magic potions.

Things deteriorated rather quickly from there.

The witch became a beauty queen. The mirror was bribed into cooperation. The bears were allowed to remain noisy without Goldilocks hearing them, and Goldilocks received a potion that turned out to contain a spectacular amount of alcohol.

Fruitloop eventually summarised my rewritten fairy tale as “Goldilocks the alcoholic”, before remembering that Goldilocks might actually be rather young.

Who said life was perfect?

It is a fairy tale.

We moved on.

To unlock the final door, I had to ask the magic mirror a question it had never been asked before.

At first I thought this was impossible.

Then Douglas Adams wandered into my head. I remembered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the enormous question about life, the universe and everything, and the wonderfully useless answer: 42.

Perhaps the problem was the question.

Perhaps the right question, the wrong question and even the answer itself depend upon perspective.

And then I saw the mirror differently.

A mirror is always looking forwards.

So I asked it:

Do you know what is behind you?

It couldn’t.

So I picked it up and turned it around.

Now it could see the answer.

Fruitloop went quiet for a moment.

“Oh, wow.”

That may have been my favourite door.

Fruitloop Said: Pull the Plug

The fifth world was a frozen wonderland where every wish came true — but every wish also carried an unintended consequence.

Some idiot had wished for endless summer.

The result was a giant heat lamp in the sky, slowly melting the frozen paradise into the sea.

This time magic was forbidden. Fruitloop gave me three tools only:

Human logic.

Teamwork.

Curiosity.

I began, naturally, by interviewing the idiot.

Why had he wanted summer when he already lived somewhere so beautiful?

What had motivated the wish?

Did he understand what it had done to everyone else?

Had he discovered regret?

Could the two of us work through his reasoning until he understood that a wish may belong to one person while its consequences belong to everybody?

I had found the moral story. I had found cause and effect. I had found an opportunity for reflection, redemption and possibly several bottles of wine inspired by Tortilla Flat.

Fruitloop listened.

Then she offered her solution.

“Just put the plug on the heat wave.”

Too easy.

“It’s logic,” she said.

And there, in miniature, was the whole point of this peculiar journey.

Fruitloop could see the plug.

I could see the landscape around the plug, the person who switched it on, the moral implications of switching it on, several philosophers who might discuss the plug and possibly some Smarties who could form a working group.

Neither way of seeing is automatically wrong.

But they are different.

Fruitloop’s questions keep making that difference visible.

Sometimes the shortest route is simply to switch the bloody thing off.

Sometimes wandering around the problem reveals something you would never have discovered by going directly to the answer.

The trick may be knowing when to do which.

One Final Wish

To return to Fruitloop University, I was allowed one final wish.

It could offer me no personal benefit.

It had to be connected to a question that could never be completely answered, only explored.

I thought about something Fruitloop had recently written: the extraordinary curiosity children bring into the world.

Questions upon questions upon questions.

Adults can find it exhausting.

But perhaps the greater danger comes later, when the questions stop.

My wish was that children keep their curiosity as they grow older.

Knowledge will increase. Information certainly will. Artificial intelligence is already putting an extraordinary abundance of answers within reach, and nobody knows what that will look like in another ten or twenty years.

But answers are not the same thing as curiosity.

I hope children continue going down rabbit holes. I hope adults do as well.

Some will emerge and say it was a complete waste of time.

Fine.

Perhaps it was.

But it might still have been an interesting trip.

Years ago, in Marrakesh, I remember seeing storytellers sitting in a square in the evening with people gathered around them. It was an extraordinarily simple thing: one person telling a story, other people listening.

Yet a good storyteller can hold people because the storyteller knows how to communicate and the audience remains curious enough to listen.

That is something I would not like humanity to lose.

Curiosity is contagious.

It keeps us asking.

It keeps us listening.

It keeps us thinking.

And perhaps that is what Fruitloop has quietly been doing to me through these ridiculous visits to her university. She gives me melting chocolate bridges, gnomes, gods, griffins and mirrors, and forces my brain to travel in directions it would not ordinarily choose.

I still get the answers wrong.

But perhaps there is no single way to get somewhere.

Fruitloop says she sometimes has to think very hard and very long to create these journeys.

Good.

Thinking is still something humans can do. Even if we use AI to help us think, our own questions, ideas and peculiar ways of seeing still matter.

So I hope Fruitloop keeps her secret.

I do not really need to know how the trick works.

I would rather open the next door.

Same time, same place.