Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the effects of randomness are produced by interconnectivity and we have created a hyper-connected world. And so one of my favorite examples of this is the thing where many of you will remember a couple of years ago in 2021, this little gust of wind tips this boat sideways in the Suez Canal and it blocks global trade and it caused something like $50 billion of economic damage.
from one boat, from one gust of wind, right? And the reason that was possible was because we had optimized all of our systems to the absolute limit such that this tiny little chance event could debilitate global trade.
And so we see this with the pandemic where a single mutation of a single virus infecting the human in Wuhan shuts down the world almost instantaneously over the span of several weeks because of this hyper-connectivity. So there've been pandemics in the past but they didn't have quite so wide-ranging or quite so rapid of effects.
So we've engineered this world that is extremely sensitive to chance events, constantly changing in these profound and upsetting ways all of the time, and I think that's partly by design.
there's all sorts of areas in the social world where we are told to squeeze every ounce of inefficiency out of the system. This is true for our lives as well, right? The life hack approach is to always get that little extra 1% of efficiency into your life. And the problem is that that means that there's a cost to it, which is resilience.
Because if you are optimized and absolutely efficient to the limit, the system or your life becomes brittle. It becomes one where there's no give. So when something inevitably goes wrong, as it always does, there's no ability to absorb it. And all of us sort of know this with our daily schedules, right? I mean, if you pad something by 10 minutes, it's less efficient.
But when something goes wrong or you get stuck in traffic, you end up still being on time. And what we're basically doing on a social level is we're taking out that buffer. We're saying the buffer is evil because it's inefficient, which is why when you sort of think about the last 25 years of global history, it's a series of these sort of small changes that have created cascading catastrophes.
And it's why I think we all have this sense that the world is constantly falling apart at a quicker pace than usual. I think it is partly because it is.
Yeah, so this is where I sort of put myself in the sort of perspective of a hunter-gatherer living 200,000 years ago, right? Their world was extremely unstable and unpredictable day to day because they didn't know if a predator would eat them. They didn't know if their crop would fail or if their gathering would fail.
They didn't know if they would have their next meal or if they would die in childbirth, right? Really scary stuff happening all the time. but their overall world never really changed. So you think about generation after generation, if you know how to hunt and you know how to gather, you can teach your kids and they're gonna have the exact same strategy for life.
So parents taught children how to live and it was very stable across generations. Now, think about our world. We live in a world that is hyper-optimized and seemingly stable day-to-day. Google Maps tells you how long it's gonna take you to get to work and usually it's pretty close. You click a button on Amazon and the package arrives at the right time or at least on the right day.
We have these sorts of illusions of control that exist from systems that are seemingly extremely stable on the day-to-day. At the same time, The overall structure of our world has radically changed. I mean, the internet didn't exist when I was a kid, at least not for most people. AI didn't exist for most people until a year or two ago.
You have all these macro level changes, computerization, all this sort of stuff, smartphones. And it's created this dynamic that's really unique in human history where children teach their parents how to navigate the world rather than the reverse.
So this is where I think we have engineered a system, a sort of upside down world, different from all of the humans that came before us, where the Starbucks will never change, but the rivers will dry up and our democracies might collapse. And when you think about that, it's the inversion of what we want. What we want is sort of the serendipity and unexpected joy of flukes in our daily life.
Meanwhile, we want the overall superstructure of the world to be pretty stable and reliable. And I think we've sort of inverted that. And it's something that's a great challenge for the 21st century to resolve.
So the snooze button effect is a term I've coined, which is trying to showcase how our lives are constantly being diverted by the choices we make in our daily existence. So imagine that tomorrow you wake up and you slap the snooze button because you're a little bit tired. Now imagine that your story of your life rewinds by five seconds, and in this version, you don't slap the snooze button.
You get out of bed. Now, it is completely obvious to me that your life will unfold at least somewhat differently depending on these two versions of events, because you will have different encounters that day with different people. Your conversations will go differently. And the ripple effects from that will emanate out throughout your life. The little tiny changes will add up.
And so when I think about the snooze button effect, it's a reminder that, yes, I don't have control. I don't know how the effects of that choice will play out. I find this incredibly liberating and incredibly empowering. And there's two reasons for that.
One is that it's liberating because it means that with a little bit less control, I should take less credit for my success and less blame for my failure. The stakes are a little lower because I'm not the sole author of the story of my life. There's countless authors that are constantly writing little bits of my story.
But it's also extremely uplifting and I think empowering because it means that there is no moment of our lives that is a throwaway moment. There's not a single moment of our existence that doesn't matter because every single moment is producing these ripple effects. And even when we're unaware of them, they matter.
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