Are you feeling emotionally stuck? Here’s how to get past it (w/ Yowei Shaw)

What if your hardest emotional challenges could be solved by talking to a stranger? A person who has gone through the exact same situation or something very similar. That’s the premise of Proxy, a podcast that investigates your niche emotional conundrums with host Yowei Shaw. In this episode, Yowei and Chris talk about the power of knowing you’re not the only person going through something, however specific. Whether it’s losing your job, a friend breakup, or an alternate version of your life that you can’t let go of, Yowei has a method to make it all make more sense. Featured guest Follow Yowei Shaw on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/yoweishaw/, Patreon https://www.patreon.com/cw/ProxyPodcast, and at yoweishaw.com/ https://www.yoweishaw.com/Listen to Proxy https://pod.link/1746433334 with Yowei Shaw Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:33Speaker 01

  which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. It should feel like you're being seen and heard and valued. Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P A R L O A dot com.

• 2:03Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest, Yowei Shaw, is one of the most respected writers, producers, and hosts in audio. I feel really confident saying that. But all of her talents and abilities and accomplishments and accolades, all of that couldn't help her from losing her job at NPR's Invisibilia. And here's a clip of Yowei talking about how it felt to lose that gig.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I'd been with Invisibilia for seven years. Worked my way up from producer who did admin to reporter-producer to senior reporter-producer to co-host. I felt really lucky to get paid to do the thing I loved, making stories about ideas and emotions, stories that I hope helped our listeners understand how to navigate the world. I love my team. I love my job. So I knew that getting laid off was gonna hurt. But I was not prepared for how much it hurt and how long the hurt lasted. I was not prepared for how the layoff turned me into someone I didn't recognize. I mean, objectively, I knew I had it about as good as it gets.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I got severance. I had savings. I didn't have kids. I had a partner. I had parents I could rely on if things got really bad. And I knew the layoff wasn't about me. NPR had made a strategic shift, and shows like mine were part of the new strategy. They specifically told me it was a business decision and had nothing to do with my performance. So why did I keep cycling through old mistakes, wondering what I could have done differently? Why did it feel like NPR was rejecting everything about me? Why did I want to hide from everyone? Why was myself worth on the floor? And here was the difficult part. No one in my life had been laid off before. So while my friends and family tried to be supportive,

• 3:55Speaker 02

  they all had trouble understanding exactly what I was going through, which made it hard for them to give me the advice and comfort I needed. I just felt really alone.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  And that's where my new show comes in.

• 4:09Chris Duffy?

  Yowei's new show became Proxy, a groundbreaking podcast where Yowei practices what she calls emotional investigative journalism. She tries to get to the bottom of how we feel about a situation and why. On Proxy, guests talk through their emotional conundrums, and Yowei finds them the perfect stranger to talk to, the person who can help them get less stuck. Today on our show, Yowei is going to talk to us about the power of conversations, about what it means to investigate our emotions, and about how radical a change it can make to realize that we are never the only one going through something. We're going to get into all that and so much more after this quick break.

• 4:58Chris Duffy?

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• 5:40Chris Duffy?

  environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:51Speaker 03

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• 6:49Chris Duffy?

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• 7:34Chris Duffy?

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• 7:53Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. We're talking with Yowei Shaw today about how to understand our emotional conundrums and why we're never the only one going through something.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Yowei Shaw, and I am an emotional investigative journalist.

• 8:06Chris Duffy?

  Let's start with what is an emotional investigative journalist?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  So I think of myself as an investigative journalist, but the thing I'm investigating is not politics or corruption. It's feelings. So if someone comes to me with an emotional mystery, like... How is it that I can't forgive my mom even though I really want to? Or why do I, as an introvert, dread hanging out with my extroverted friends? Then I, as the reporter, use my skills to try to find an answer. I look to research from sociology, psychology, I talk to practitioners. But probably the most important source is usually another human being that's just been through the same thing and lived to tell the tale.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  I think of myself like on the emotions beat.

• 8:58Chris Duffy?

  I love that description. I also love your show, Proxie. I think it is so interesting and different. And I think one of the things that is cool about it is you're investigating emotions, but you're not trying to do therapy.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  No, no, that is an important disclaimer. Thank you for saying that.

• 9:16Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  I am not a mental health professional. It is not therapy. We're not trying to fix anyone.

• 9:22Chris Duffy?

  Well, the other thing, though, that I think is so interesting about the conversations that happen on the show is a lot of times it is people working through something that has to do with someone else, often an important person in their life, but they're not putting it on that person. Instead, it's the person understanding by someone who is not in their life, what they actually feel more deeply.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes I think a stranger outside of your direct situation can help you see the situation more clearly and also help you hear what they have to say with less defensiveness because they don't have like all the baggage that your actual person does.

• 10:09Chris Duffy?

  I have two things that I wanted to ask you about. One is kind of like a headier philosophical, personal thing. And then the other is just a really practical one, which is When I was thinking about my own version of of proxy, right?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I mean, do you have a niche conundrum?

• 10:24Chris Duffy?

  Well, I don't think

• 10:25Speaker 02

  You would like investigated by proxy?

• 10:27Chris Duffy?

  I don't think it's niche, but I want to share this thing with you to kind of hear how you would think it through. I had a really close friend and we are no longer friends. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And I have unpacked them in therapy and gone to it, you know, discussed it many times. And it's been several years. And I still feel this lingering openness and sadness that this person is not in my life anymore. And I think part of it is, you know, we have a lot of structure for a breakup that is romantic. And I just don't have that much structure for a friend where you are no longer together. And that's something that I struggle with and I don't really have the answers to.

• 11:09Chris Duffy?

  But I wonder, like, talking to someone else who had been through that exact same thing, right? Maybe that would be helpful in some way. And so I'm just curious, your initial reactions to like my specific experience?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  I would ask you a lot more questions about what went down in their friendship. Because I think that it would be important to know, like, was it a ghosting situation? Was it like a betrayal? Like, I would want to know, like, exactly what happened? What kind of thing broke it up? And then I would try to look for a proxy, I think, on the other side. I would probably go looking for someone who could stand in for your friend. But it would need to be people who are like interested in the other perspective.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Like, it can't just be like a proxy who's like, Chris is a terrible person. And I'm, he's like, I don't ever want to talk to him again. I will never heal from, like, he's a terrible person. He shows me that the world is like a terrible place, you know? Like, it needs to be someone who's like interested in like what went down. And like, maybe they don't want to reconcile with the friend, but they need closure. And they're not, they don't just have like a black and white way of thinking about it. Then like, I might go to a researcher who has studied friend breakups and has like a lot of insights to share that could be helpful to you. And like any listener going through a friend breakup, who's also, I mean, this is like the ideal,

• 12:49Speaker 02

  who's also gone through friend breakups themselves. Whenever we turn to a researcher, we really want them to have lived experience too.

• 12:56Chris Duffy?

  It's cool. That's really cool to hear you think it through. One of the episodes you recommend people start with, if they're just new to proxy, is called Bisexual Wife Guy. And it's this, this very sweet man who has separated from his wife because she came out and understood her sexuality in a different way. And they separated. He's trying to process that, but he doesn't want to process it through her. He doesn't feel like it's appropriate. And so he gets to have this conversation with someone who he's never met before, but who was in a similar situation.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my old boss. That was like the rare instance where we get an email from a listener and I know exactly who the proxy is going to be. Because usually it like takes a lot longer to find the proxy. Yeah, that was a really interesting episode because it felt like, like, I hadn't realized before that proxy conversation, how meaningful the process could be for the proxy as well. It's like this reciprocal process, you know? So like George has questions he wants to ask of his ex-wife that he can't, that he's going to ask Hannah, the, the proxy.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And then Hannah never got to have the conversation with her ex-husband. And so she got to ask him all these questions and also say these things that she never got to say to her ex. So that was like a real, I don't know, like magical moment where I was like, ah, this is, this is pretty smart, this proxy. It's smarter than I even, than I'd even planned.

• 14:32Chris Duffy?

  I totally agree. And I think, you know, it makes me think about this idea, which is that.

• 14:37Chris Duffy?

  You know investigative journalism is about finding the truth, like an objective truth. And a lot of these conversations that you are now doing are about emotional truth, right? Like, can you give us a little bit about how you think about truth and emotional truth and objective truth, whatever that might be?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I think that emotional truth tends to get a bad rap these days because people are like, well, that's not factual. That's just how you feel about the situation. You know, the story your nervous system is telling about what happened. But I think we know by now emotional truth drives a huge amount of human behavior. There's a bunch of research that actually shows that, you know, once your brain comes up with an emotional story of what happened, your brain's really good at like discounting any evidence that doesn't conform to that story. So when people are arguing about the facts, quote unquote, often what they're fighting about is like the emotional truth of the event.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  And so that's why on Proxy, I really wanted to take emotional truth very seriously. And instead of, you know, arguing with somebody's emotional truth, we find a proxy who can help you understand the emotional reality of the situation. For example, we did this episode about a mom whose kids had cut her off and she didn't understand why. And instead of trying to investigate the facts of the estrangement, we paired her with a daughter who had cut off her own parents. And I think hearing that perspective from someone who wasn't her own kid accusing her of being a bad mom helped her be less defensive and, you know, be open to hearing that emotional

• 16:25Speaker 02

  perspective, the emotional reality of what it's like to need to estrange from your own parents. And this is where the ethics policy comes in. So that's why whenever we're dealing with a conundrum or conflict that involves more than one person, we anonymize because, you know, that would be a problem if we weren't anonymizing people's, you know, details.

• 16:50Chris Duffy?

  I think it's important too to note that you have a lot of respect for like the idea that there are facts and reality. There's an emotional story, but there's also a factual story that's really important. I really love Proxi. I think it's so great. And when I listen to it, it is so nuanced and special. And I think if I just think about the idea without having listened to it, I have this kind of reflexive thing of like, but that's navel gazy. That's like, we're focusing on the emotion. We like, we get so stuck in our own feelings. We need to get outside of our head a lot. But what I realized listening to the show is so much of this is people feeling like they are the only ones who have experienced something, feeling really alone. And that your show in such a vital way breaks

• 17:35Chris Duffy?

  through that so that people understand that whatever they are experiencing, someone else has experienced something quite similar.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  My hot take is that I think we need more emotional investigative journalists because I think that if we paid more attention to the emotional dynamics beneath our problems, not just personal, but like political, social, like literally every problem, there's emotional dynamics going on. And there's like all these disciplines of scholars who study those emotional dynamics. There's like a whole sociology of emotions. There's like a science of emotions. There's history of feelings and those scholars never get any play. So I just would like to make the point like, I really respect traditional journalism. And obviously, it's not a, it's not a good time for journalists in general. But I would also like us to pay

• 18:27Speaker 02

  a little bit more attention to emotional dynamics when we're reporting on like hard fact news or whatever. If you are feeling alone with a problem and you're not talking to anyone about your problem, then you are literally just tunneling, tunneling, tunneling into the same interpretation of your problem. And it's hard to break out. And that's why on Proxi, I'm trying to report on feelings, bring a different perspective where

• 18:58Speaker 02

  You know, you can, you can talk to a researcher who's studied your issue and has like context to share like for why you're feeling so bad. So you're like, oh, I'm not, I'm not such an alien. It's, I don't have to blame myself. Or you can talk to people who've lived through the same thing for an outside perspective. It's really just like, you know, taking the regular things we do as a journalist, talking to sources and just like applying that to emotional conundrums. But I do think like, if you're just kind of stuck looking at your own emotions and not sharing and not getting support and not talking to anyone else, I think it can be navel gazy and not super helpful.

• 19:42Chris Duffy?

  So in this podcast, you're diving deep into a niche emotional problem someone's having, and then you offer them this proxy, just to step back for a second. So that people, if you're not familiar, you know, you offer a proxy. So it's someone who has had a really similar experience and they're going to help guide a stranger through their conundrum that is related. So how do you think about the best way to find a proxy for someone? What's the, what's the process of discovering a proxy?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes it just falls in my lap and I'm like, I know someone who exactly went through that. That never, that only, this only happened once, though. I've only gotten lucky once.

• 20:18Chris Duffy?

  So sometime, not sometimes.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Sometime. Other than that, I really just rely on my usual tricks as a long form journalist. And I scour memoirs, I scour personal article, like personal essays, news articles. I do a lot of creative Googling. I talk to researchers, practitioners. I just make a ton of calls and try to find people who are like in the ballpark. And then once I find those options, then I do a careful vetting process where, you know, we do a pre-interview and I just like ask them a bunch of questions to see, like, does their set of experiences line up enough emotionally?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  And like fact patterning with our guest. And then I'm also like checking to see like, are they asking me follow up questions? Like, are they like giving like, how are they holding space in even this call with me? And that's usually a good indicator of like how they'll do in an actual proxy conversation. And then the other part is like just enthusiasm. Like, sometimes I've found someone who I think would be really, really great, but they just, they just don't get the idea. Or they're just too busy or like, you know, for any number of good reasons, they're not like jazzed about doing it.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  And I think it's really important for the proxy to actually want to get something out of this experience too, so that it actually feels reciprocal. Because at the end of the day, even when our proxy is like a therapist or like a researcher or like somebody with like professional expertise, not just lived experience, I want it to feel like a conversation between two peers. Like you just happen to sit at a bar next to someone who has like the exact right experience for the thing you're going through. And then you just start talking, you know? It's not a workshop, it's not a training, it's not a coaching session.

• 22:23Chris Duffy?

  We're going to be right back with more from Yowei after this quick ad break.

• 22:31Chris Duffy?

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• 23:13Speaker 01

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• 23:55Speaker 01

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• 24:28Chris Duffy?

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• 25:00Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. Today, we're talking with Yowei Shaw about how to sort Through and understand our emotions, even the tough ones. And one of the things that I admire the most about Yowei is how open and vulnerable she is with even her hardest moments.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  One day last March, I was sitting in my home office with my cat by my feet.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  I braced myself as I clicked open my work email.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Ah, there it is.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Honestly, I feel nothing.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Okay, now the tears are coming.

• 25:43Chris Duffy?

  In one of your very first episodes, you talk about the the pain and the stigma and the emotional roller coaster ride of being laid off from your job, a job you really cared about, invisibilia. I mean, you have like this incredible audio of you hearing that you're you're being laid off and you're crying and you're you're really distraught. I mean, this is being a in audio journalist, you knew that this was an emotionally important moment. So you were recording yourself. But you you talk about how there's one moment where your husband hears you find out that this project that you've been working on that was like the big thing post layoff that mattered that it got canceled. And you're wailing so loud that he runs in naked from the shower because he thinks something like he thinks it's a disaster because he's never heard you like that.

• 26:28Chris Duffy?

  I have never been in that exact situation, but I had such a vivid memory of in one of the hardest times in my life, I was applying for this job. I had written a packet to apply for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver as a writer. And I had worked so hard on these jokes and everything was going bad. And I had like a person on the inside who was recommending me. And I just felt like it's lined up for me to get this job. And I was so in my head, I had built this other future, right? And then I found out I didn't even get to the next round. I didn't even get to like the interview round. And I wept so unbelievably hard.

• 27:11Chris Duffy?

  And the thing that made me really understand that moment differently is you and your husband are talking about it and you say, Some version of that was the scaffolding that was holding everything else up. It wasn't really about this project. It was about the grief of losing your job and all the stress and everything else. And he gives the parallel of when he cried so deeply about an older cat being put down, which is actually about his grandfather, who he hadn't grieved. I just had never so clearly seen that experience of my own articulated. And I wasn't even a guest on the show. This is just as a listener. So I wonder if there's, there's some way that people can really access deep understandings of themselves just through listening to other people talk about their issues.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Thank you for sharing that. And I'm sorry you went through that team layoff, not getting what you want solidarity. I'm holding.

• 28:02Chris Duffy?

  I mean, also, it's like so funny because in retrospect, I'm like, oh no, you didn't get a job writing for an HBO show. So sad, Chris. But it's like, in the moment, it felt, it felt like life or death. And now I'm like, oh yeah, that was not really about that really, was it?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kind of feel similarly about my layoff now, now that I've healed. Well, so when I got laid off, I felt really bad. And then I felt really bad about feeling so bad because I was like, shouldn't I know better? Like boo hoo, I lost this job. Like I, I don't have kids. We got severance. We had a really good union contract. Like I had about as good of a layoff as you could have.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And I just, I felt embarrassed. I felt ashamed, like the double whammy of the shame. And then when I started looking into like the research around layoffs and like some of the narratives we have about layoffs, it really made a lot of sense, like why I was feeling so bad. And it just like put, took the pressure off. It made me feel less. It helped me stop blaming myself. The main thing I learned was talking to this sociologist, Hofer Sharon, who studies long-term unemployment. And he talks about how our culture really personalizes work.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  You know, not just like through our identity, through the myth of meritocracy, but also our hiring system is very personalized. You know, it's all about like the interview and whether you're a good fit for the team. And so when you get laid off here, as opposed to like some other country where, you know, the culture and the hiring system is really like, it's much more bureaucratic, the interview doesn't really matter, it's really about checking boxes and it's more formulaic. Like, in those places, people don't blame themselves as much when they get laid off. They're mad at the system. Whereas like, in the US, like, it makes sense why we would blame ourselves and feel terrible

• 30:10Speaker 02

  for all of these reasons. That was really freeing, you know, to realize the context of what was happening and that I wasn't alone. So that's like the context piece, you know, which I think really helps. But then there's also the like, listening to somebody else who has, who has been through a similar thing, tell their story. And I was noticing in these proxy conversations, there's like this moment of magic that happens in every proxy conversation that works, where like, the two people really see each other and they hear each other. And then, like, after that moment, everything starts flowing.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  They trust each other, the guest is able to take an insight from the proxy. And when that moment doesn't happen, that moment of recognition, emotional recognition, then like- It's not going to work. Like, the conversation is stilted, people don't trust each other, and then we have to find another proxy. And so that has really taught me, like, the importance of emotional recognition in, like, the stories that we tell and the conversations that we're having with people. One of the reporting quests that I've been going on is like, so what is going on in these proxy conversations?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Like, why did you, Chris, feel so viscerally seen in a situation that actually is not your exact situation? You know, like, what is that about? And so I've been, like, reading a bunch, talking to, like, researchers, and like, there, it turns out there's like, a few core emotional processes that happen in healing, emotional healing. So, one process is telling the story of what happened. So telling a coherent story and organizing all the, like, fragmented bits and feelings you're having, just telling a coherent story about what happened helps. You feel better.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Having another person recognize your experience, that also helps. Hearing a new perspective that helps you reinterpret your experience, that's another thing that helps. So, proxy conversations, I think, they bring all three of those processes together. I think what's unique about the proxy conversations is that it's happening between two people who share the lived connection to the issue, which makes the recognition and perspective taking just like, you know, to the nth degree, like, on steroids, you know? Because it's like embodied perspective taking. And so, I'm still trying to figure it out, honestly, but that's where I'm at so far.

• 33:02Chris Duffy?

  It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of time, both as a comedian and so professionally, but also personally, thinking about about humor, right? Like I wrote this book about humor. And one of the things that I always say about it is that like, when you laugh with someone else, you are so locked in, in that you both are in that same moment. It's really present, but also you know, like, they see that thing the way that I see it. I'm not the only one that sees it. And so, you know, so often when we're laughing hard, we say something like, that's so true, or like, oh yeah, I never thought of it that way. But then the laughter means that there's this connection. And this is kind of in some ways, that same thing of, oh my gosh, they actually understand. I'm not the only one that sees it that way. So it's not necessarily resulting in laughter, but it is that same kind of a connection.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  It reminds me of this research finding I found in neuroscience, where when you're listening to someone tell a story, your neural circuits get aligned. When you're telling a joke and I laugh because I see the world the same, like I feel seen in the way you are observing the world or whatever. Like, I wonder if like, that's also a moment of like, our brains being linked, you know? And like, seen and like, I think that recognition is so, so important. And that's why like, being alone with your feeling, that is, I think,

• 34:29Speaker 02

  it's just really, it's dangerous, you know? And like, I think that's like, the one thing that I have learned from doing this show, is like, no matter how specific somebody's conundrum is, no matter how weird or, you know, niche they think it is, like, there is probably someone else out there who gets it. And you don't have to feel so alone. You know, there's probably support groups. You don't have to just like, write into my show. I mean, please write into my show. That'd be great. But also, there are support groups. There are all these support groups out there that I think proxy is sort of trading on the mechanics of why that works. We're just doing it in podcast form.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  And I think that that is something people could try, is going to a support group.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And sticking around, even if it is awkward, you know, for a while, until you find someone, you know, you click with.

• 35:27Chris Duffy?

  It's interesting to think about what you do and what I do as podcasters, because I think people often feel a very intimate connection. You know, people often call this like the parasocial relationship. Parasocial is often kind of thought of in a negative way. I wonder if there's a version of the proxy that is like the positive sort of parasocial, where you cannot necessarily have to have the one to one, direct, in-person relationship and still get something out of emotionally connecting with this other person.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I guess you could argue that it is a kind of parasocial relationship. But I guess since there's strangers meeting for the first time, maybe it's like a really fast parasocial relationship developed like

• 36:14Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A really fast real relationship.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Forty minutes. So when I started working on the show, a friend was like, oh, proxy conversations, you know, that's a thing in restorative justice, right? There is a tradition in restorative justice where if the survivor, victim and the offender don't want to like meet for that healing conversation, maybe because they're just like not ready to take accountability, maybe because like the survivor feels like too traumat- like feels like that would be too traumatizing to them, maybe somebody's dead. Sometimes a proxy will be used. Somebody who has like experienced the same harm, either as like the victim or the offender.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And so there's like this whole world of like proxy conversations that are really, really intense. So I talked to this woman the other day who'd experienced sexual harm. And she couldn't talk to the person who did it.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Because he wasn't willing to take accountability. So like, she told me about this proxy conversation she had with this guy who committed a similar sexual harm. And like, she says that like she got what she, like she got the apology she needed. And like, there was something. Really healing about just like, hearing this person who didn't do the thing to her, but take remorse and take accountability and say like, this should never have happened. I'm so sorry. It is a kind of parasocial relationship, but like, she's getting to have a positive experience with the person, with like, a stand-in that can like, help

• 38:04Speaker 02

  rewrite her meaning of what happened, you know?

• 38:09Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  I don't know if it counts as parasocial, but it just made me think of that.

• 38:12Chris Duffy?

  I'm curious what you've learned about honesty and self-awareness through this process, because so much of what is required to have a conversation or to get useful advice or takeaways from someone else's experience is to actually understand your own experience and what you're feeling.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  I think what can be missing is like, having outside perspectives that help you not just be self-aware, but sort of like, I don't know what the word would be, but like, more collectively aware of your situation, you know? Like, it's so easy to get stuck in your like, one interpretation of what's going on and to feel like, that's the only, that's the only thing, that's the only possibility. Most of the people that come to the show are like, incredibly self-aware already, so that's sort of like, the baseline, but it's like, are you willing to consider other perspectives and integrate them into how

• 39:12Speaker 02

  you think about what's going on? I think that's, not everyone's ready to make that jump, because that, I think that does take a level of humility and also like, openness. Like, are you ready to like, hear some things that might be challenging or might, you know, question the way that you're thinking about things and also might be helpful, you know? Not everyone is ready to like, consider new possibilities. And that's also something that we think about on the show when we vet people, is like, have you already gotten like, a bunch of resources? Are you seeing a therapist? I like to think of ourselves as like, we're like, the third or fourth responders. You know, like, we're like, a

• 39:56Speaker 02

  year out after the thing happened.

• 40:00Chris Duffy?

  I think there's also-

• 40:03Chris Duffy?

  You know, a big piece in our culture that is, does not want nuance. It does not want things to be messy or unresolved, right? It wants clear, easy answers. It wants black and white. It wants, here's these three simple tips that your doctor doesn't want you to know to kill belly fat. Right? Like, it's like that, that style of processing the world is really dominant. And I think when people are left with these like lingering questions or the lingering uncertainties or unresolved pieces, that there's no space for that.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  I like to think of what we're doing on the show is hopefully, is hopefully modeling a different way of like connecting with other people and like relating to your own stuff.

• 40:48Chris Duffy?

  Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like the modeling, a different way of connecting with people? How would you articulate that, that connection?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Well, not blaming anyone, I think is number one. I think that's like, one of the first things that we look for when we're vetting guests is like, are you in a place where you're not blaming the other person for what happened? You understand that things are complicated and like, they had probably a lot of, there's a lot of reasons that they did what they did. And you wanna understand more. And I think that like uncertainty and humility and like openness and wanting to help other people

• 41:39Speaker 02

  is how I would, I feel like that's what I would, like, that's what we're trying to model. And being respectful, but also like real with each other. Like, that's something that I, I tell people, like, you can push back in these proxy conversations. You can interrupt, you can challenge, you can be like, I don't actually understand what you're saying. Like, can you make it clear to me? Like, or like, I disagree, but like, we're gonna keep things respectful.

• 42:06Chris Duffy?

  It's interesting, you know, thinking about the arc of proxy and what you've done and what you're continuing to do. You started with examining your own emotions and complicated ways of dealing with the grief and the uncertainty and the pain and the self reevaluation after a layoff. Did you feel like, oh, I am perfectly suited to unpack this? Or did you feel the kind of like flailing, what am I doing? Or both, or something totally different?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Well, honestly, I've been relying on this trick of reporting on your feelings for years. Like, I was, sorry, NPR, that I was like healing on your dime, but like, you know, a lot of the stories that I did at invisibilia were like born out of personal conundrums, like niche emotional conundrums that I could not get answers to from the people in my life because I felt alone with it, no one could relate, and also not from my therapist, you know? Like, the therapist was helpful, but also like, I was still, there's still an emotional puzzle that I needed to crack. And so I found the process of doing a story and talking to experts, looking for research

• 43:18Speaker 02

  to help explain the context of what I was going through, and talking to other people who'd been through the same thing, like, I was like, oh, every time I do this, by the end of the story, I magically feel better. And so I wanted to like, give that to other people because I was like, I think that there is like, um, there is a hole here to be filled that people can avail themselves of using, you know, a microphone, using like, research skills. And honestly, like, having the guise of like, like, I'm a reporter, we're doing a podcast episode, like-

• 43:59Speaker 02

  It helps sometimes to have a container like that, to ask these questions that maybe you wouldn't normally ask, or, you know, yeah, to get this researcher to talk to when like you're a la- like when you're not a reporter. Like, I think of what we do on the show at the end of the day is like service journalism. Like, I think one of my kinks, journalism kinks, is probably like, I like to be useful. I want to help. And so I feel like, yeah, maybe we're like, providing a service that is not being provided at the moment.

• 44:34Chris Duffy?

  It seems clear to me that you feel this real duty to the listener and to make sure that you are not misrepresenting or causing harm. And I think that is a level of care that not many people bring or are even aware of. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that as the intersection with the service journalism.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  I mean, that might just be my anxiety talking. I mean, like, as a reporter who like grew up at NPR, like, that was the number one fear was like, well, the number one thing that we were afraid of was fucking up, you know? Like, that's the number one fear, is like getting something wrong. Like, you're reporting not being tight. And so I think that like my, just like my general anxiety, like, has kind of made me a better reporter. Just like, because I'm like, I really don't want to fuck things up. And like, I have fucked things up before, and that really sucked. And, you know, that's something that we talk about on the show, is like, every proxy conversation is an experiment.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  And we are always iterating and getting better because we're trying something new. And I also want to be really cautious about dealing with emotions. This is tricky territory. This is why we, we take on niche emotional conundrums, not like, serious, actively traumatic emotional conundrums. Because that's like a different show, and that's for like a professional. I don't think we're well-suited, well-equipped to take those on. I don't know how you can be a journalist and not, like, have nightmares about fucking up.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Just like, I don't know.

• 46:20Chris Duffy?

  Totally.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Doesn't everyone, doesn't every journalist have those nightmares? And so I guess I'm like, bringing that hardcore NPR ethos into like, this new beat. And I understand that like, we are charting the territory ourselves. And I'm like, pretty much a one woman shop. And I don't have, you know, like, we don't have a lot of resources. And so that's why I'm trying to be as careful as we can be. But I'm sure we will get things wrong and we will learn from them. And that's like, the process of being human. And like, that's okay. And I, I think our listeners will be okay with that if they, if they're fans of the show.

• 47:04Chris Duffy?

  Well, Yoay Shah, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for the work that you do on Proxy. And, and thanks for just this great conversation. I really appreciate you making the time.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 47:17Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Yoay Shah. Check out her podcast Proxy. It is a fantastic show and I cannot recommend it more highly. A good place to start, if you're looking for an episode to start, is Mike Chooses the Wrong Life. It's about a comedian who can't stop wondering if he should have become a doctor instead. And it's about how we make peace with the lives we didn't choose. You can find Proxy wherever you listen to podcasts and new episodes from their latest season are out right now. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and my book, Humor Me, is out right now, too. You can find more about my book, my live show dates, and all my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by exactly the kind of team that you want investigating all of your emotional conundrums.

• 48:00Chris Duffy?

  On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lott, Tansuka Sungmanivong, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBrian. Ryan Lash put together the video, No Proxy Needed. And this episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who investigates all claims, both emotional and factual. On the PRX side, all audio, both Proximate and Bygone, is handled by Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please, send this episode to a person you know or a stranger who seems like they would be relevant. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

• 48:42Chris Duffy?

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• 49:28Chris Duffy?

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