How to handle uncertainty (w/ Simone Stolzoff)

I was looking for certainty when there was no certainty to be found. If Simone’s words resonate with you, then this episode is for YOU. Simone Stolzoff is a journalist who writes about the uncertainty of life. In his conversation with Chris, he observes why people are becoming less tolerant of uncertainty, the harm caused when we take AI output as definitive answers, and what you can do to expand your capacity to hold uncertainty in your life. Featured guest Follow Simone Stolzoff on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thepizza_bagel/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/simone-stolzoff-5a16b648/, TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@thegoodenoughjob, and at simonestolzoff.com/ https://simonestolzoff.com/Buy Simone's books How to Not Know https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Know-Uncertainty-Demands/dp/1324089458 and The Good Enough Job https://www.amazon.com/dp/059353896X 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.

• 0:02Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we're talking with Simone Stolzoff about how to handle uncertainty. How do you make the right choice when you're not sure what the right choice is? What if you're not sure there even is a right choice at all? Simone talks about these questions in his new book, which is called How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. Here's a clip from our conversation where Simone is talking about what he means by "the value of uncertainty."

• 0:31Speaker 01

  In the book, I tell a story about a couple who's wrestling with whether they want to get divorced or not. And their couples therapist was Esther Perel, the famed couples therapist. And Esther said something that's really stuck with me, which is that trust is an active engagement with the unknown. In order to be in a relationship, or in order to start a company, or a project, or to put your creative work out into the world, you need to cultivate some aspect of faith. Not in just a woo-woo spiritual sense, but faith as in placing your heart on something, making a bet on something that you don't necessarily know can be proven with evidence

• 1:12Speaker 01

  quite yet. I think that is not only an incredibly important skill for an entrepreneur, or someone that's deciding whether or not they want to stay married, or someone who is about to embark on an unknown journey, but for all of us in the face of this world that we currently live in, we need both faith and we need to take action.

• 1:36Chris Duffy?

  We're going to talk a lot more about uncertainty and not knowing, but first, I'm going to take a very specific action, and that is to read you some podcast ads. We will be right back.

• 1:52Chris Duffy?

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• 3:54Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. Today on the show, we're talking with Simone Stolzoff about the value of uncertainty.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Hello, my name is Simone Stolzoff. I am a journalist and an author, and I have two books. The first is called The Good Enough Job, and my most recent is called How to Not Know.

• 4:11Chris Duffy?

  Let's start by talking about what's your relationship with certainty? What has it been in the past and what is it like now after writing a book about uncertainty?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Well, the cliche among authors is that you write the book that you need to read. And so I would characterize myself as a naturally doubting person. I am prone to be in fits of rumination. I'm a very good devil's advocate for my own decisions. And the book itself actually began from a moment of indecision in my own life. I was working as a journalist and writing for The Atlantic and some other publications. And I got a job offer from a completely different industry, a design firm called IDEO. And so on one hand, it's like woe is me, the agony of having to decide between two attractive job offers. But on the other hand, it really threw me for this existential loop. Maybe some of our listeners have been in a similar place where they sort of see two paths diverging.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  And there was Simone, the journalist on one path, and Simone, the designer on another path. And as I was trying to make up my mind, I was completely insufferable. I talked about it with everyone I knew, my Uber driver, my yoga teacher, anyone who would listen. I tried to get their opinion. And I ultimately took the job at a design firm. But I think, thinking back to that moment, the problem, the source of my angst and anxiety, was I was looking for certainty where there was no certainty to be found. I was trying to find the right job before I had actually done either of the jobs. And that sort of began my multi-year exploration into this topic of how we can get better at what we don't know.

• 5:46Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so tell me more about that idea of us trying to find certainty where no certainty could be found.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so many of us have these decision point moments in our lives, these forking paths. And often we think that if we just bang our head against the wall at the right angle, then clarity will emerge, that there is one right decision to be made. But I think what makes a hard decision hard is that neither option is better than the other one overall. If that were the case, it would be an easy decision. But with hard decisions, often there are trade offs. So for example, the design job paid more money. The journalism job felt more in line with my passion. The design job was based in my hometown of San Francisco. The journalism job was based in New York City. And so there are these different competing values that I had.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And I was waiting to resolve all of them by just finding the one right choice, discounting my own ability to make that choice right. I think a lot of us, whether it's deciding in a relationship, whether you should stay or should go, or whether to move, you're trying to find certainty. You want to know exactly what is the, say, right college that you should attend. But it's impossible to have full certainty about anything that happens in the future. And by driving ourselves towards looking for that certainty, it can be a source of our suffering or our dismay.

• 7:11Chris Duffy?

  Sometimes uncertainty can also be the world outside of our choices, right? Like, I don't know. I think a lot of people right now are feeling huge uncertainty and like, I don't know the value of my skills. I don't know if AI or technology is going to make my entire field disappear or all of a sudden be worthless. I don't know if I'll keep my job. I don't know if the country that I live will continue to be peaceful or whether it will be unstable and chaotic. I don't know whether the money that I've been saving for retirement will be enough. Like, all these outside questions. So how can we think about that kind of uncertainty too? Or how do you think about that kind of uncertainty?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you made that distinction. I think about it in sort of two different ways. There's acute uncertainty. So that's, for example, not knowing whether you pass the bar exam or not knowing the results of a medical test that you went through. And then there's this more ambient uncertainty. Questions like, how will climate change affect my life? Or will I have a career in 10 years? And I think it's important to differentiate between the two. So we can start with acute uncertainty. If there is a question that will have an answer one day. There's some really interesting research that I quote in the book from this researcher named Kate Sweeney. And she specifically studies breast cancer patients and sort of the process and the journey of going through a cancer. And one thing that she found was that the hardest part for the majority of the patients

• 8:36Speaker 01

  that she worked with was the period between getting a biopsy and getting the results of that biopsy. That was harder than any sort of chemo or any sort of surgery. It was that not knowing exactly what was to come. This backed up by another one of my favorite studies, which was researchers in the lab gave participants either a hundred percent chance of receiving a painful electric shock or a 50% chance of receiving a painful electric shock. And those with the 50% chance were far more stressed than those with the hundred percent chance. We would somehow rather have a certain bad thing happen to us than have to deal with the

• 9:20Speaker 01

  ambiguity of not knowing. And so I think in those cases of sort of acute uncertainty, there's a few things that I would recommend. The first is to separate what you can and what you can't control. If there are actions that you can take that can actually influence the outcome, then you should take them, you know, if you are

• 9:38Chris Duffy?

  Don't sign up for the study, for example, if they say we're gonna shock you. You could say, hey, actually, I'm declining to participate in this study.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll opt out for now. But for example, say like you're applying for a job, you know, rather than just like throw your hands up and say, I don't know if I'll get it or not, there are things that you can do, at least at the outset, like write a great cover letter, like try and network with people on the hiring team. But once you've done all of the things that you can control, the next step down the flow chart is to plan for different scenarios. Often, a lot of our discomfort with uncertainty comes from putting all of our eggs in one basket, saying, okay, we need this job to work out, we need to get into the school, we need to have this specific outcome, when that outcome is actually out of our control. So rather than saying, I am just going to plan for one outcome, planning for a different, what I call contingency

• 10:29Speaker 01

  plans. So if this happens, I'll do this. If that happens, I'll do that. And then after that, it's just a matter of being able to regulate your nervous system, to be able to cope with Not knowing that might mean getting into a flow state and distracting yourself through another activity. That might mean something like meditation that will help you get to a grounded place or trusting in your future self to be able to handle any sort of uncertainty that comes your way. So those are all sort of for the acute category of you will get a piece of information.

• 11:02Chris Duffy?

  Is it your opinion that we are uncomfortable with uncertainty because we are like unrealistically poisoning our idea of the future and also like stressing over the present because we just haven't made these plans so that we feel like if things don't go out, there are other options? Why do we have that like depth of discomfort with uncertainty?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's biological. It comes back to our roots as human beings. You can imagine one of your ancestors in the jungle and there's a rustling in the bushes and they're not sure the source of that rustling, or they reach for a fruit that they don't know whether it's poison or not. That uncertainty can be lethal. And so our brains are wired in a way for certainty to make us feel safe and secure and uncertainty to naturally see as a threat to put us into this sort of fight or flight response. But a few things that I learned through the research has really helped me deal with those sorts of scenarios where you might think about the worst

• 12:02Speaker 01

  case scenario. One is that humans are really bad at what's called effective forecasting. Effective forecasting is thinking about how we might feel about a future event. So there's this researcher from Harvard named Dan Gilbert, and he's one of the sort of foremost researchers on happiness. And one thing that he's found is that people, for example, that get left at the altar, or people that didn't get that job that they really wanted to get, often with some benefit of hindsight, can look back at that experience and see it as a blessing in disguise, or maybe even the best thing that ever happened to them. So the first thing that I'd tell you

• 12:45Speaker 01

  is if you're really in this catastrophizing mindset, to think back about past periods of Uncertainty. We all know a friend who maybe went through a breakup and then saw that breakup as the thing that allowed them to meet their partner that they actually ended up with, or maybe didn't get that job that they thought they wanted and then ultimately got something that was even better.

• 13:07Chris Duffy?

  Let's also talk about that other kind of uncertainty. That's not the acute uncertainty.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the sort of ambient uncertainty of the world. So if you're feeling that the world is incredibly uncertain right now, you are not alone between COVID and wars and Ukraine and Iran and tariff policy, what have you. We live in this incredibly uncertain world. And the other side of the coin is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. So the rise of the internet and mobile phones has created the expectation that answers should be readily available. I know that maybe 10 years ago, if I didn't know the name of a given actor, I might have been okay. But now I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket. And the second thing that does is it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  We are not as good at tolerating that uncertainty as we used to be. And so in terms of dealing with that ambient uncertainty, the first thing that I'll say is that when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So I give the advice of finding your anchors. What are the things in your life that will remain constant amidst all that is changing? Maybe it's a commitment to live in a particular city or to a particular person. If you're running a business, maybe it's your company values or your commitment to serve a particular customer. But when you are clear about the things in your life that will be those sort of boulders amidst all the changing winds, it makes it easier to hold the uncertainty in other aspects of your life.

• 14:37Chris Duffy?

  I love that you brought that up because this was one of my favorite passages in the whole book about finding your anchors. You say this on page 191. Being certain about some aspects of our lives allows us to hold uncertainty in others. Certainty anchors can be a routine, ritual, or unwavering relationship. But perhaps the most important anchor is our values. In spite of the swirling winds around us, values are the steadfast boulders that remain. I love that writing and I think that is such an incredible framing. I never thought of it like that and I found that to be really helpful and profound.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for saying that. I'll give you one example from my own personal life. So my grandma recently passed away. She was ninety-nine and a half years old. And I'm Jewish, and in the Jewish tradition, there is this ritual of what you should do in the seven days after someone passes away. It's called shiva. And I think one thing that's really nice about it is amidst all of the uncertainty of not knowing what to do after you lose a loved one, here is a list of instructions. On day one, you invite people over to the house to bring food. On day seven, you go on a walk in your neighborhood to show your face that you're still around to your neighbors.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And I think having that process certainty can help us cope with or manage some of the emotional uncertainty that we may be feeling.

• 15:55Chris Duffy?

  I know we were talking about the the second way that we can deal with ambient uncertainty, and I had taken us off on this tangent on the first.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  No, I think it's a great segue. You know, we talked about finding your anchors. And the second thing I'll say is to focus on the next right action. So this is a concept from Buddhism. Often when we are thinking about an uncertain situation, we can get overwhelmed with sort of that spiraling thinking that you were talking about earlier, where you might end up sleeping with four people on a love seat. But instead of thinking about this leads to this leads to this leads to this, we can ground ourselves in the present moment and just think about one step at a time. So one example, in the book, I profile this crisis communications expert. So she sort of gets brought into companies at the worst part of their company journey. Maybe there's been some sort of tragedy or scandal.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  And she told me about this one time where she was in this boardroom full of lots of executives, and everyone was freaking out about the next thing to do after this big sort of company calamity. And she took a piece of butcher paper and she rolled the butcher paper out on the boardroom table. And she wrote down every single thing that needed to be done. You need to write a press release, you need to communicate with your employees, you need to communicate with your investors. And she had all of these things written out on a piece of butcher paper. And she said, what is the next right action? What is the one most important step that we can take right now? And by getting all of those things out of their heads and on to the page, they were able to start prioritizing and chipping away. And so I think we don't need a boardroom to necessarily do this in your own life.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  If you're overwhelmed by the process of, you know, writing a novel or applying to jobs or whatever, if you're able to just focus on that next right action with the great writer Anne Lamott called Going Bird by Bird, that will allow you to actually build some momentum and take the sort of amorphous uncertainty that you might be feeling and make it a little bit more applied. Give yourself some control back over the universe.

• 17:54Chris Duffy?

  You can't see this because it's behind my camera, but I literally, I only have two things tacked up on the bulletin board that's behind my computer. And one is a note card that says, proceed as the way opens, which I learned, a phrase I learned about from a friend who's Quaker. And he told me this is a Quaker saying. And then the other one is just, actually related to the other thing. It's just some, some things that I really value to do every day. So it's like, you're stressed? Okay, here's the five things you need to be trying to think about. One is laugh hard, eat well, learn something, go outside, meet someone. I'm like, if I can do any of those, we're going to have a good day.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I love that. So you have your anchors on one side and you have your reminder to focus on the next right action on the other side. I think the idea with like focusing on the next right action is particularly true with these big sort of uncertainties in our life, these existential uncertainties. And just quickly to round out the sort of ambient uncertainty category, the last thing that I'll say is to choose curiosity over fear. So often when we think about uncertainty, we see it as a threat. We see it as that wrestling in the bushes and we think that it's necessarily going to be something bad. But one thing that I like to think about is that uncertainty is also the birthplace of possibility.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  So no groundbreaking piece of art or inspiring company or scientific breakthrough has come without someone's willingness to get to a place of uncertainty and to persist. I like to think of the metaphor of like someone on a, on a lake that's shrouded in heavy fog. Like you might not be able to see very far in front of you or know exactly where you'll end up. But if you keep rowing, then you'll eventually reach land. And so those are the three I'd say. Find your anchors, focus on the next right action, and then choose curiosity over fear.

• 19:49Chris Duffy?

  Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we will be right back. So please choose to keep listening.

• 20:02Chris Duffy?

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• 20:44Chris Duffy?

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• 21:53Chris Duffy?

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• 22:54Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. I wonder if a part of this relationship with uncertainty that we have, that we struggle with, is because we have an idea in our heads sometimes. Or let me just make it personal. I have an idea in my head sometimes that things are supposed to be easy and that if they're not easy, it means that I'm doing something wrong. So I wonder if you could talk about that part of that, that relationship with like it feeling wrong, but us needing to live in that to actually get past the scary uncertainty and into the good uncertainty.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're talking broadly about how do you build tolerance for uncertainty? How does uncertainty go from this thing that is incredibly uncomfortable to something that you can collaborate, that you can manage in your day to day basis? And I'd say that in general, it's not too different from other phobias. So I talked to a lot of different psychologists for the book and one of them is this guy named Mikael Dugard and he was the first one to link uncertainty intolerance to a lot of the anxiety and mental health problems that his patients feel and that many of us feel. And he equated uncertainty tolerance to something like exposure therapy.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  If you were scared of spiders, for example, you might not go toward reaching for a spider right away, but maybe you'd start by researching some fun facts about spiders. And then maybe you get comfortable enough to sort of be in the same room as a spider. I think the same can be true with uncertainty. We can build our uncertainty tolerance by sort of micro dosing uncertain moments. By consciously putting yourself in uncertain situations and safer, controlled environments, you are training your brain to be more comfortable with uncertainty when you are, say, facing that job uncertainty or that medical diagnosis. And so we can learn to build more uncertainty tolerance through exposure.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The problem is, modern life makes it very easy for us to stay in our comfort zones, whether it's our climate controlled rooms that we're in, or our filter bubbles that we consume online, or even just like our neighborhood in our cities or our towns that we live in. It's really easy to just stay in that comfortable place, but discomfort is necessary in order to learn and to grow. And so, in the same way that unlearning is a precursor to being able to learn new information, developing the ability to not know, or maybe we can call it unknowing, is a precursor to being able to learn and to grow.

• 25:32Chris Duffy?

  I've never heard that before. What does that mean, unlearning is a precursor to learning new information?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I think it's a very popular idea in sort of education pedagogy about the necessary tool to trade some of our hubris, some of our assumption that we know best, for humility. And whether that's updating your thinking about something that you once believed that's no longer true, or opening your mind to receiving new information, one sign of a good learner, we close our minds and narrows our scope. But when we are able to maintain that level of uncertainty, of unknowing, we actually open our minds to what actually emerges. We can maybe surprise ourselves by learning that their neighbor that voted for someone

• 26:18Speaker 01

  different than you actually has things to teach you. That is sort of the, my goal of the book is to help readers get more tolerant, more comfortable with uncertainty so that they can open their mind and choose to treat the future with a little bit more curiosity.

• 26:35Chris Duffy?

  I, I'm really interested in that specifically. I think that idea of intellectual humility and that idea that we maybe don't know everything. And it is one of the biggest things that I admire in people is when they say, here's what I think, but I also am open to the idea that I could change my mind if you present more information. But if you believe one thing and then you find out new information and change your mind, great. I want more of those people. I want people who flip flop from wrong to right. That's, that's what we all should be aspiring to do.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, we should be open to updating our worldview based on new information that we receive. For example, there's this professor named Phil Tetlock, and he was a professor of mine in college. He collated data from a decades worth of predictions from the smartest people in the world. So these are like economists, politicians, journalists, experts in different fields. And then he took those predictions and measured them against what actually happened in the future. And his big canonical finding was that the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart throwing chimpanzee. And so as much as we want to know who's going to win the election

• 27:47Speaker 01

  or when the market is going to crash, or how seductive some of those hot takes are on social media, the truth is, we're not very good at predicting. And the people who are the best predictors are the ones who update their worldview and update their forecasts as often as possible. So we can take that into our own mind. One sort of little mantra that I like saying to myself is, this is what I believe today, based on what I know now. And I like that sort of framing of ideas because inherent in the sort of construction is the idea that I might learn more later that might change what I believe in the future. And if we could trade some of that hubris or that certainty for humility, I think we would live in a much more connected, open and generous world.

• 28:32Chris Duffy?

  You're from San Francisco, you have worked in a lot of tech-adjacent industries, your personal and professional interests have intersected with a lot of technology. I am curious about how artificial intelligence plays into these ideas because I'll just, you know, lay my own prejudices on the table. One of the things that I find the most unappealing about AI is that it presents, in my experience at least, it has always presented me with a definitive answer. And I think that is something that makes me really deeply uncomfortable with it as the source of information for many people right now. But I would love for you to push, in the spirit of intellectual humility, I would love for you to tell me that either I'm wrong and there's something I'm missing, or that I'm right and that uncertainty plays in this way in some different way.

• 29:17Chris Duffy?

  So how do AI and uncertainty interact in your mind?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see it on sort of two levels. There's sort of the question about how do we personally interact with AI? And how does that change the way that we see the world? And then there's sort of like the macro question about like how AI will impact jobs or careers moving forward. So let's take each of them one at a time. The first one is, you know, I think they're, the models are getting better at not hallucinating, which is to say that the information that they are presenting is more and more accurate. The problem is when, like I was debating between these two jobs, we are looking for certainty where there is no certainty to be found. One thing that I think these LLMs and these chatbots do is create the expectation that

• 30:05Speaker 01

  answers should be readily available, even for big questions in our lives that don't necessarily have definitive certain answers. The second thing they do is they take away the need for us to wrestle with problems. So there's this idea that I, was coined initially by the writer Cal Newport, which I really like, and it's about cognitive fitness. And so similar to the metaphor you used earlier, in order to get stronger, we have to lift weights, we have to put our muscles under tension. That's what allows us to get stronger. Similarly cognitively with our thinking, we need time. Under tension in order to grow our brains, in order to learn, in order to think harder.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And I think one thing AI does is it allows us to circumvent some of that time under tension because we can just ask the chatbot for the answer. And there's some really interesting studies from MIT recently, people who were given the opportunity to use AI to help assist them write papers. And what they found is basically the papers were good, but the writers of the paper did not retain any of the information or the points that they were making. And so I think that's the real risk where we outsource the hard thinking to AI in a way that detracts from our own ability to actually learn and to grow. When it comes to sort of predictions about AI,

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I think we have this natural tendency to either lionize or villainize the technology. To say, okay, AI is gonna automate all rote tasks and push us towards high level work. And we're going to be in this utopia of UBI and being able to just focus on writing poetry. Or the other side of the spectrum, which is, you know, this class warfare is imminent and the robots are gonna show up at our doors with pink slips. And there's gonna be this massive disruption that's gonna lead to this very dark age. And the truth is, you know, as seductive as both of these worldviews are, no one really knows. There was this great prediction about how people that looked at scans in doctors' offices.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  So whether they're cardiologists or people that are trying to analyze X-ray imagery, there was this very smart professor who said, by the end of 2025, there's gonna be no more cardiologists. And then there were more cardiologists at the end of 2025 than there were before the year began. And so this comes back to this parable, which I'll just share a brief version of, which is, there's this farmer and his horse runs away from the small village. And his neighbors come to his door and they say, oh, we're so sorry to hear about your horse. What a tragedy. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And then the next day, the horse comes back and with it, there are seven wild horses in tow.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  In tow. So in the farmer's livelihood depends on these horses. Now he has eight horses where he only had one before. And his neighbors come to his door and they say, oh, you're so lucky. What great fortune. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. The following day, the farmer's son is riding one of the horses and falls off the horse and breaks his leg. And again, the neighbors return and they say, we're so sorry to hear about your son. What a bummer. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. The day after that, generals from the military come by to draft people into the war. And because the son has broken his leg, he gets out of the draft. The neighbors say, what great luck. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And so that's sort of my take on AI.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Like, yes, it's really seductive to make predictions about exactly what the world is going to look like in 10 years. Or the future of writers, or the future of all of these different creative professions. But the truth is, we don't quite know yet. And the more time we can remain in this space of not knowing, the more receptive we can be to the actual information that presents itself as opposed to our expectations of what is to come.

• 34:03Chris Duffy?

  So let's, let's start with someone who is maybe a recent graduate or early in their career. And they're, they're just swimming in this pool of uncertainty and they feel really helpless without answers. They have no idea what job or career path they want to take, or even where to begin figuring it out. How can they begin to guide themselves through that immense uncertainty? Or even to just view it in a way that allows them to, to start taking actions and not just feel completely paralyzed by it?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, first and foremost, I, I empathize with the situation of new grads today. I don't want to sugarcoat the state of the job market or what it's like to be applying to jobs coming out of school. A few things I'll say. One is, The fastest way to learn what you want to do with your life is to build, which is to say, to get proximate to actually doing the work. I think this applies to people at any stage of their career. Often, when we're trying to figure out what we want to do next, we get caught in these sort of thought experiments. And you say, oh, do I want to be a project manager? Or do I want to be an artist? And you sort of get caught in your head thinking like, what would be most fulfilling? Or what might allow you to pay the bills, et cetera?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  But the fastest way to learn whether either of those paths is actually something that is sustainable or viable or feasible for you is to do it, which is to say, not wait for anyone to give you permission or to, you know, say, please, I want to commission you to paint this painting, but just to do it on your own terms. I, you know, as a writer, get a lot of DMs and people asking for advice on how to become a writer. And often, the first question I'll ask them is, what do you enjoy writing? What have you written recently? And people often say, well, I haven't actually written anything, but I have all these ideas of what I want to write. And to that, I say, go out and try to do it. You know, at Idea, this place that I used to work,

• 35:59Speaker 01

  we used to say, never come to a meeting without a prototype. And so being able to prototype your career will be the quickest way to tell you whether or not it is actually something that is desirable to you. The other thing it'll do is give you a sense of agency. Part of the reason why it's so hard to be in the job market right now is because all of these applicants are sending out their resumes and cover letters into the void and waiting for a hiring manager to take mercy on their souls. It feels like they don't have very much control. And the way that you can take back control is by trying to build something on your own terms. It might not sound very optimistic at this point, but if you were curious about, say, building your own business

• 36:45Speaker 01

  or becoming a advertising art director or trying out your hand at coding, the best way to show your work Is to actually do that work. And that skill of being able to learn through building is going to be one of the most important skills. As we go from a more sort of laddered version of what a career looks like. Into this more sort of meandering path age, this pathless path that we're all entering today. So build to learn and don't wait for anyone else to give you permission to start creating the work that you want to be creating.

• 37:21Chris Duffy?

  How did writing this new book change how you thought about everything you'd learned about jobs in the first book?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the first book is about how work has come to be so central to our identities. And I talked to many different workers from Michelin star chefs to Wall Street bankers to software engineers at Google about how to think about their jobs. And the main argument of the book is about the value of diversifying your identity. Rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. If you're able to diversify the sources of identity, meaning, purpose in your life. Then it is a much more sustainable way to think about work's role.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  I think it's also great advice for how to deal with uncertainty. If all of your identity eggs are in your basket of being, say, someone who works at Google. And that job is taken away from you, maybe by no fault of your own. Then it can drive you towards an existential crisis. But if you have been able to diversify to say, okay, I'm gonna, you know. Invest in my relationships over here. I have these hobbies that really bring a lot of meaning to me. I have work that is a source of meaning, but is not the sole source of meaning. You're better equipped to deal with whatever slings or arrows the future holds. And so I think that is the link to me, you know, how to not know.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  You're never going to know with absolute certainty what your career or your job might look like. But the more you diversify your source of identity, of meaning, of purpose. The wider foundation you will have, and even if one pillar of your identity were to crumble, you will remain standing tall.

• 39:05Chris Duffy?

  What if someone is in a job that they do not like? They feel like this is really unpleasant. I am not liking my day to day. I'm dreading going to work on Mondays. But I don't have a clear next step. Should I quit? Should I stay? How do you deal with that kind of uncertainty?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I hear this a lot, especially these days, and particularly in relation to burnout. And one of the things that I've learned from research that has been really helpful for me is that there are actually three, at least three, different types of burnout. There is overextension burnout, which is I have too much on my plate and I feel very strapped. There is depletion burnout, which is I don't feel like I am having enough time to recharge. And then there is misalignment burnout, which is I feel this discrepancy between what I value and what I'm doing with my time. And often when people are not happy with their job, it's one of these three things.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  So when it comes to overextension burnout, maybe it's just a matter of doing less, of trying to say no, set better boundaries, make sure that you have enough time to do deep work, the things that are maybe more fulfilling with your work. If you're in a state of depletion burnout, you feel like you aren't adequately resting or recharging, I would recommend trying to find active forms of rest. So often we will go to work, we'll come home, we'll try to turn off our brain, turn on Netflix, but actually by investing in things like your local community, your hobbies, something like learning a new language, or going on a weekly walk with your best friend. Those are the types of things that will help you adequately recharge so that you can be

• 40:54Speaker 01

  more present and productive when you're back on the clock. And lastly, if you're in a place of misalignment burnout, where there's this discrepancy between what you care about and what you're doing, maybe that means that you need to make a change. Maybe that means either changing your role within your company, or leaving your company to try something else. But distinguishing between these three categories is often a good place to start when you have that sort of ambient sense of I'm unhappy, but I'm not exactly sure why.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up.

• 41:42Speaker 02

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• 42:27Speaker 02

  Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com.

• 42:38Chris Duffy?

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• 43:22Chris Duffy?

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• 43:52Chris Duffy?

  What about in friendships? There is, especially in the beginning of a new friendship, so much of the barrier, I feel, is the uncertainty. Do they actually like me? Do they want to hang out with me? Is it weird if I meet this person in the park and then say, hey, can I get your number so we can just hang out as friends? Like, or should I not do that? Like, so much of what stops us from actually making deeper social connections with friends is uncertainty around like, what is or is not allowed, normal, wanted, desired? How can we think about or change our perspective on that kind of uncertainty?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I think it's similar to romantic relationships in some way, which is the first thing that I always tell people if they're looking to meet a partner or looking to make a new friend is to assume that person likes you. Often, we sort of negotiate against ourselves and come up with all the reasons why they probably are judging you and they don't want a new friend anyways, or this, that, or the other thing. So I'd start from that place. Assume they want to connect. And the second thing I'll say is to be an initiator, which is to say that if you want more friends in your life, be willing to make the first move. And then the third thing I'll say is give your friendship a reason for being.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  As my friend Anna Goldfarb likes to say, every friendship needs an about. It's not quite a complete sentence, especially as you're an older adult to say, I want a new friend. Give yourself a reason to make that friend. I want a new friend to watch the game with. I want a new friend to read books with. I want a new friend to talk about politics or to think about my career with. And if that relationship has a reason for being, it's much more likely to be sustainable and to give the relationship itself a sense of purpose, rather than what happens so often, which is this sort of like, we should totally hang out sometime. Maybe you like hang out once, but you don't necessarily have that reason to come back again and again.

• 45:51Chris Duffy?

  Okay, and then my last hypothetical one is a personal one for you, which I imagine you have experienced many times. On the other end, which is what if you are a person? And you are meeting someone and you're not 100% sure how to pronounce their name. You're not sure, is it Si Money? Is it Simone? Is it Simone? You don't want to say it wrong. You don't want to be rude. How can you handle that uncertainty as a person who I know has had to think about this many times in his life?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  It's a great note to end on. It's the first question every single podcast host or substitute teacher of my life has ever asked me. Yesterday I gave a talk at a company and a friend of mine was the person that brought me in. We were sort of like loose coworkers working at the same company at the same time. She said, why don't you come speak to my organization? I give the talk. This morning I get an email from her and say, I'm so sorry. This is so embarrassing, but do you pronounce your name Simone or Simo? Simo is sort of my nickname. And as the recipient, I felt so grateful that she asked because she was willing to traverse some of the, you know, awkwardness or social faux pas of asking the question, even though

• 47:07Speaker 01

  we've known each other for a number of years, because she cared enough to get it right. And as anyone who has sort of an Italian or harder to pronounce name out there will probably agree with, it means a lot when people try to get it right. And I'm never judging someone for getting it wrong if they show a genuine interest in who I am as a person. Maybe that's a good note to end on.

• 47:29Chris Duffy?

  Simone, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. I knew I was, I will say, I was certain that this would be a good conversation, but thank you for making it be a good conversation and for helping us all to embrace some uncertainty in our lives.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me. Cheers.

• 47:47Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest Simone Stolzoff. His new book is called How to Not Know. My new book is called Humor Me, and you can find out more about me and my book at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team that seems like they really do know. On the TED side, we've got the masters of nuanced complexity: Daniela Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lot, Tansikusun Manivong, Antonia Lei, and Joseph DeBride. Ryan Lash knew how to edit this video, and the episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas, who is uncertain that we can say with certainty which times in history have been most uncertain. On the PRX side, they know how to make podcasts sound good and how to not make them sound bad. It's Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for

• 48:32Chris Duffy?

  listening. In a world that demands answers, all that I demand is that you share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. At least, I think we will be back. There is no way for me to know with certainty.

• 48:51Chris Duffy?

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• 49:36Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up. But here's the thing, the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24/7 across voice, chat, and email in any language with zero wait time.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, 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.

• 50:50Chris 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.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at G O O dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini. That's G O O dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.