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 moment that a baby is conceived, if there is any millisecond difference in that moment, a different child is born, right? Now we sort of all intuitively understand that, but if you actually think about what that means, it means that on the day of conception, if you stop to have a sip of coffee, or if you don't, you have a different kid.
But that's true for the day before and the day before that and the day before that. All of those things in our lives that culminate in that one moment when the baby is conceived had to be exactly as they were for that child to be born. This is the phrase that I borrow from the social scientist Scott Page, where he says that we control nothing, but we influence everything.
The way I sometimes describe this is imagine a world of perfect control, right? Where you could pick everything that happened in your life. It would be the most dystopian hellscape you could imagine. If uncertainty was eliminated, imagine that you knew when you were 10 years old exactly who you were going to marry. Imagine if you knew the exact moment of your death, right?
For a lot of us, it would be incredibly crippling. And the moments of creativity, of serendipity, of joy, I mean, if you think about all those moments in your life that really stuck with you, how many of them were planned beforehand to a T, right?
Even in the planned events that we have, like a celebration, a wedding, a birthday, whatever, often the stuff we remember the most is the unplanned flourish. You know, when the uncle did this unexpected thing on the dance floor or whatever. So we pretend that uncertainty is always bad. And sometimes it is. I mean, a cancer diagnosis is scary and you don't know what's going to happen.
And I'm not trying to say that that's a good thing. But pure certainty, pure control would cripple everything that's good about being a human. And so it's a mistake to try to stamp out all levels of uncertainty, all levels of chance, and all serendipity from our lives.
Yeah, so I think there's an acknowledgement that we have less control. The question is, what do you do about it? The world is uncertain. It's a scary place often. And this is where I think both our social systems and individuals themselves need to focus more on resilience. Resilience is where even if something goes wrong, even if the unexpected befalls you, you're going to be okay.
So when you think about stuff where on a personal level, you don't have control. It's the stuff where it's all about external validation, for example, what other people do in reaction to how you behave. If you have intrinsic motivation, things like passion, things like intellectual discovery, things like exploring the world, it's not contingent on how somebody else reacts to you.
It's just the thing itself. And that's more resilient. So when I think about what I've done with my own life, I do spend more time with things that have intrinsic and immediate value to me, like going out into nature, like traveling with a sort of an eye for exploration, like walking my dog because I like walking my dog.
And the sort of periods where I've felt worst often have been when I've put something out in the world and someone has said something horrible about it, and I've put all of my eggs in the sort of external validation basket. That's where I both don't have control and I'm ceding my well-being to other people.
So I sort of think that that's one of the areas where society as a whole has not learned this lesson as well because the sort of hyper-optimized social systems that we have where everything is about short-term payoff, you've got to hit your quarter three targets and so on, that short-termism is good for efficiency. It's bad for resilience.
It's bad for anticipating shocks that might come because the world is changing rapidly and is deeply uncertain.
Yeah, so one of the examples I use is a case where a Latin American country was looking at different proposals for an electrical grid. And one version of the proposal was hyper-efficient and way cheaper, and it was a single national grid. The second version had these sort of decoupled nodes at the regional level. So if you had a blackout in one area, you could sort of isolate it, right?
But it was way less efficient and way more expensive. Now, they went with the second option, the less efficient option, and the first blackout that happened, it paid for itself. Now, if you were analyzing that choice purely on the basis of short-term profits, short-term efficiency, and so on, you would never have made that choice.
But because they thought about the long-term resilience of the system, They emphasized decoupling. They emphasized mitigating risk. They thought about the what ifs. They ended up with a smarter strategy.
And I really do worry that in a moment of extreme social change and rapid technological shifting of AI and all these things, that we are thinking short term and not enough decision makers are pondering the what ifs and planning accordingly for them.
This is a fun one to talk about because I've written books in the past. This one changed my worldview completely, and I feel the happiest I have literally ever been in my life. And a lot of the reason for that is just because it's a mentality shift. It's sort of this understanding, first off, that it is unbelievably improbable that humans exist, let alone that I exist. So I feel grateful for that.
It's also that when I realized the uncertainty and the lack of control that I have over my life, I have become more of an explorer, right? I've become more of an experimenter. I try things that I wouldn't try in the past. And as a result of that, I'm sort of attuned to the serendipity that happens when something unexpected comes into my life and the joy from it.
Of course, there's unexpected setbacks too, but I'm more able to roll with them because I don't have the sense that I have to have top-down optimized control all the time.
And I think about the times in my life where I was actually probably, you know, not saddest, but not exactly my happiest, is some of the time when I was on paper the most productive with inbox zero and I was checking off, you know, every checklist was ticked. And, you know, like it sucked the joy out of life. I was on top of my sort of to-do list, but I wasn't having a good time.
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