Navigating uncertainty

In unpredictable times, how can we stay calm, grounded, and on course? This hour, TED speakers lead us through uncertainty. Guests include former medical clown Matt Wilson, psychologist Jamil Zaki, writer and filmmaker Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir and human rights activist Yifat Susskind. (Original broadcast date: January 10, 2025) TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:11Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, navigating uncertainty. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the pediatric wing can be a tough place. Kids are going through truly awful treatments and often facing an unpredictable future. And you might be thinking right now, oh, no, this is gonna be a really sad story. But it's not.

• 1:16Speaker 07

  And on that farm, there was a

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Pig.

• 1:20Speaker 07

  A pig. E-I-E-I-O.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  With a woof-woof and a woof-woof.

• 1:25Speaker 07

  That's not how a pig goes. Pig. I'm going. With an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there.

• 1:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Dr. Rockwell S. Squeezeheimer and Dr. Philibuster.

• 1:35Speaker 07

  Do-do-do-do, minding our business. A regular day here. It's Monday. At the hospital.

• 1:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  And, OK, they might not be medical doctors, but they are medical clowns from the organization Healthy Humor. And on this day, we followed along as they made their rounds in the pediatric ward.

• 1:54Speaker 07

  So you go first, Philibuster. No, you go first. No, you go first. No, you go first. No, you go first. You go first.

• 1:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Healthy Humor clowns are here three times a week, four hours at a time, going room to room, getting to know the families there.

• 2:07Speaker 07

  Can we come in?

• 2:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  We're okay.

• 2:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, listen, we learned.

• 2:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  In some rooms, they sing songs. In others, they pull out their magic tricks.

• 2:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  What's going on? Something's happening.

• 2:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  But everywhere they go, they improv and play off each other to coax out a smile or even a laugh.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  He just farted at us.

• 2:32Speaker 07

  He farted at us.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  This is stinky in here.

• 2:37Speaker 07

  You know what? I'm gonna add something because I'm inspired.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 2:41Speaker 07

  Godzilla on the bus goes

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Come on, Godzilla.

• 2:47Speaker 07

  Godzilla on the bus goes

• 2:51Speaker 02

  All through the town.

• 3:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  Medical clowns like these work in hospitals throughout the world. They can be an important part of medical teams.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  The whole role of a medical clown is to reintroduce the sense of play and joy and trust and hope and light into a space that it doesn't normally inhabit.

• 3:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Matthew Wilson. But for a long time, he was known by another name.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  My name in the hospital was Dr. Berplunfert, so...

• 3:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  No, come on.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's Berplunfert. It's German. There's an umlaut on the A. The Berplunfert. Yeah.

• 3:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Matt was a medical clown in New York area hospitals for nearly a decade with a big red nose and everything.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I had a clip-on tie. I wore Heelys, size 11. I usually wore skate shorts. And I had spiky hair. It was me.

• 3:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  I love it.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, when you're a clown, it's like, it's who are you? You know, it's being vulnerable to access the sense of play. And that's literally what you're bringing into the room. Where's the play? Where's the game? Where's the fun? What tickles this person today? What do they find funny?

• 4:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  And studies do show the real tangible benefits to having medical clowns around. Can you share some of that research with us?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  So, some of the studies indicate that it reduces perceptions of pain during painful procedures like fanny punctures, blood draws. There's some really interesting research more recently that has to do with how interactions with medical clowns can potentially positively impact sleep. I'm really excited by the research when it comes to working with elderly, working in memory care, and also in dealing with folks with autism. You're using an embodied approach to communicating and to bridging gaps. You know, medical clowns are embodied performers. They're dancers, they're movers, they're using nonverbal communication. And that's what works in the space with folks who are navigating a wide range of abilities and disabilities.

• 4:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can you put me sort of through the eyes of the kids you were talking to? Like, what typically was going on for them? What sort of headspace were they in?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Honestly, hospitals, there's a lot of waiting. So boredom was always a factor. Other than that, there's the element of fear. You know, who's going to come in the room? What are they going to do to me? The majority of people that enter a room when a kid's in the hospital, they don't ask permission. So you're really being cognizant of that. Like, the goal is to not place any more demands on them. It's almost to alleviate or ease the experience. Now, that being said, sometimes they're ready to party. Just because someone is in this environment, it doesn't necessarily mean it's all stummen drang and angst and tragedy. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of that.

• 5:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  But they might just be ready to play.

• 5:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  What do you think injecting that bit of ridiculousness and levity does for a kid in a scary situation like that, or an uncertain situation?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  I love that you ask that. This notion of the ridiculous is really important to me. The human condition, it is ridiculous. Living on a day-to-day, there is so much absurdity. And I think the role of the clown, from my perspective, it's about embracing the absurdity and sitting in it, and sitting with it, and mining it, and finding it. And so as far as when it comes to sitting in that with someone in the hospital with a seven-year-old who's getting his port flushed, you're not actually trying to change the outcome. And I think that's what sometimes folks misunderstand. Like, I'm not, I'm not so much here to make it feel better. I am here to experience this with you. What can we experience together?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And is there a way to, you know, shift the energy, shift the vibe that supports this experience? Pain is pain, and you're really not trying to distract from it. You're almost trying to accompany it.

• 6:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  At the start of a new year, especially this one, a lot of us are facing a lot of uncertainty. So how do we get through it all? How do we help the people in our lives going through unstable times and stay grounded in ourselves so that we don't feel like we're careening through chaos? On the show today, we're going to figure out how to navigate uncertainty. Ideas about how to get through the unknown in your life and the world around you. So back to Matt Wilson. Medical clowns, he says, have to go through the uncertainty and fear that kids and their families live with every day.

• 7:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  He shared one story from his early days in the hospital on the TED stage.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  My colleague and I were invited to accompany a young six-year-old with the most adorable southern accent to accompany him while he got his chemotherapy port flushed, a very uncomfortable and regular procedure. We joined him, his mom, and the nurse in this tiny closed-curtain cubicle. We start with a card trick. Fan the deck so he can pick. But as soon as the nurse approaches with the needle to flush the port, he starts screaming and cussing like no six-year-old I'd ever heard in my life. So we say, hey, should we come back later? He stops, mouth open, eyes wet with tears, face flushed pink with anger, and he smiles. Oh, no, you're fine. I want you to be here. Okay. So we start playing a song. My colleague on recorder, me on whoopee cushion.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  The nurse approaches with the needle, and it happens again, this torrent of four-letter words. He went from playing and laughing to screaming and crying, back and forth until the procedure was complete. For the first time, I experienced this odd duality of joy and suffering. But not for the last time. See, when we're there, medical clowns work moment by moment to create connections between the clowns, the nurse, the parent, and the child. This provides a source of power or control for the child while supporting the staff with their work.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  On the one hand, the work is very gratifying because it's very much moment to moment. You're very present, but you also don't always ever see the people you're working with ever again. Oh, right. You know, the patients or the families. And sometimes it's a great thing. You don't want to see them at the hospital again. But also, you know, I was a supervising medical clown at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and so you're working there long term. And so sometimes if you don't see a family, it's because they're no longer coming back. And that's really, really sad. Well, there was one family I saw regularly. And every time we went in, it's just, we tore it down, like gut busting, roaring, laughing. Sometimes you would, people would be looking and they're like, what is going on in there?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I carried tutus with me. I usually had four or five tutus collapsible, like compressible tutus tool. Of course. I would, I would put one on and I'd be dancing and then maybe the dad would put one on and then maybe a doctor would come in and then the doctor had time. So then all of a sudden. Oh, my God. I love that. You know, we've got a corps de ballet, you know, spontaneously dancing. And so this was just one of the families that we saw regularly and they played hard because they were there all the time. And then I didn't see them anymore. And so you just wonder, you know? Well, one day, out of the blue, I think at that point, I might have been in grad school at that point, I'm not sure, but I'd been out of the hospitals for a minute, so I wasn't working regularly.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And they found me and they reached out because they were having her bat mitzvah. No. Oh, that's lovely. That's great. Oh, man. I'm like crying just thinking about it. And so it's like, it actually was one of the best days of my life because I hop on the subway from Brooklyn, I do my makeup on the subway, and I get out in Westchester and I go to the synagogue and it's just this massive bat mitzvah. Dancing and some other medical clowns. And it was just, it was the first time I'd seen her in years. And, oh, man, I just, you can't ask for a better ending than that, you know?

• 11:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, too.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. I mean, it's what you're walking into. I mean, you kind of sign up for the not knowing, you know? And if you can't think, I can't think of a worse place than like, you know, some of the drama and trauma and pain of suffering in a hospital.

• 11:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  So the clown sits in that trauma so you don't have to?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Well, here's the deal. I don't know about that. Like, we're sitting it with you.

• 11:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  I think it feels like our country, the world, the planet, is in this time of unsettledness. And I think people like structure. They like feeling like they can predict what's going to happen next. So they can plan. Knowing what you know from your work as a medical clown, how do you broaden out sort of what people can do in their own lives to cope with trepidation that they might feel?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I guess what I learned is it really does boil down to relationships, listening, play. Play is really important to me. And part of play is figuring out, how are we going to play together? How do we prioritize that? You know, I see it as a form of fitness.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  It's a component of building community. That's what I drew from my work and what I think would apply now more than ever. It's like, OK, this is where we're at. This is my day to day. When am I around people that I can be with? I can play with, whatever that means to me? Where do we find our own fun? This is real humanity? And you're really just trying to be unearthed at and find the joy amidst the suffering.

• 12:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Matt Wilson. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Special thanks to Healthy Humor and the team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital for letting us visit. On the show today, navigating uncertainty. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 13:29Manoush Zomorodi?

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  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. If you're looking for a dose of optimism, Planet Visionaries is the podcast you need. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate action. It's a lineup that proves hope isn't naive, it's fuel for change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, navigating uncertainty.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  I kind of think uncertainty is a perennial human experience. It's one that we're terrified of, but that we experience constantly. And right now is a moment of extreme uncertainty.

• 15:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is psychology professor Jamil Zaki.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  And cynicism is a sort of dark safety.

• 15:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Tell me what you mean by that.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Well, when the world is uncertain, we can feel totally out in the open. We can feel deeply unsafe. And so how do you recover a sense of control in a world that you fundamentally can't control? One way is to prejudge it and to prejudge everybody in it. And so a cynic, by deciding that they can't trust anybody, by deciding that people are generally rotten, they might not live in a very bright and happy world, but they live in one that they understand. They feel as though they can predict the future. They feel as though they understand all the people around them.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  And that at least gives them some semblance of control over a chaotic life.

• 16:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Jamil's interest in cynicism is part of his larger focus on the brain and human behavior.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  I study how people connect with one another, why it can be hard to connect, and how we can try to get a little bit better at it.

• 16:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  At Stanford University's Social Neuroscience Lab, Jamil measures the seemingly immeasurable qualities like goodness, kindness, and empathy. His goal is to experiment, document, and ultimately encourage these behaviors. And yet, Jamil openly admits that his recent research into cynicism Is very personal.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  I've been a secret cynic for almost my entire life. And a lot of people are surprised to hear that because I study, in essence, human goodness. But there's this phrase in psychology that research is me-search. The assumption that whatever you do, you must also be.

• 17:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  And during the pandemic, Jamil says he hit a bit of a breaking point.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2020 and 2021 was probably among the most cynical times of my life. I think a lot of us felt really stuck in our homes and we were experiencing humanity more than ever through our screens. And it turns out that it's very easy to feel cynical when your representations of other people are media representations, because a lot of media presents us with really terrifying, awful views of who other people are, especially people who are different from ourselves.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  And also, that year in late 2020, a good friend of mine unfortunately passed away from brain cancer. He was a neuroscientist who also studied empathy. And he was also one of my heroes. He was, his name was Emil Bruno, and he was one of the most optimistic and hopeful people I ever knew. And losing him, I felt was sort of like losing his worldview. He so fundamentally believed in human goodness. And when he died, I felt this sense that I had lost the ability to see things the way that he saw them. That was sort of, frankly, a little bit of a rock bottom for my own cynicism that

• 18:36Speaker 04

  made me think, gosh, I can't keep on living this way. And furthermore, if I, a scientist who studies human goodness, is having trouble seeing it, how is everybody else doing?

• 18:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, not good.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  And it turned out, yeah, it turned out not that great. And that what I was going through was something that so many of us were going through. And that's what made me want to start thinking systematically about this problem and what we can do about it. Cynicism, the notion that humanity is greedy, selfish, and dishonest.

• 19:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Jamil Zaki on the TED stage.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  In 1972, 45% of Americans thought that most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had dropped to about 30%. We are living through a cynicism epidemic. But here's the thing. You might think that cynicism is a system upgrade that allows us to see who we really are. It's not. It traps us in a version of the world we don't want to live in and when we don't have to.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  One of my favorite studies of all time occurred in southeastern Brazil. Two fishing villages there are separated by just 30 miles. One sits by the ocean, where fishing requires large boats and heavy equipment. To make a living there, fishermen must work together. The other sits by a lake, where fishermen strike out alone on small boats and compete with one another. Years ago, researchers tested how people in each of these villages responded to a set of social experiments. Ocean fishermen trusted strangers and cooperated with their neighbors. Lake fishermen competed and mistrusted instead. But here's the crazy part. These folks didn't start out any different from each other. But the longer fishermen worked on the lake, the more they competed.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  The longer they worked on the ocean, the less they did.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Some families, schools, and companies are like ocean villages. People trust because they know others will earn it. Some are like lake towns. People look out for themselves because no one else will. Our social worlds shape us, like clay, into hopeful or cynical versions of ourselves. And right now, many of us are living in a lake town of historic proportion.

• 20:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Taking the fishing villages as sort of a metaphor, do you see that those two sort of approaches in different pockets of the United States?

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Absolutely. One big factor here is economic inequality. So more unequal states within the US, for instance, experience lower trust. Because when people feel as though resources are all grabbed up by a small percentage of people, they might feel like they really need to compete in order to be those people, in order to climb over everybody else. So that's one factor. Another is just the way that we've started to count everything about our lives. My colleague here at Stanford, Anna Lembke, says that whatever you can quantify can become an addiction. How many steps we take, how well we sleep, how much approval our opinions get on social media,

• 21:46Speaker 04

  and all of those become vectors for competition, comparison, and for cynicism, too.

• 21:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  One of the things you say, though, is that people love a cynic. And I'm curious as to why you'd say that.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Our culture has glamorized gloom in a couple of different ways. One thing is that cynics appear smart to many people. This is what psychologists call the cynical genius illusion. So if you tell people a story about one person who's very cynical and doesn't trust anybody, and another person who's really open and trusting, and you ask, which one of these two people would do better on a series of tasks? 70% of people think that cynics will outperform non-cynics on cognitive tasks, that they're smarter. And 85% of people think that cynics are socially smarter, for instance, better able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  In other words, most of us put faith in people who don't have faith in people, which is a bit of a tongue twister, but it's true, and we're wrong. It turns out that cynics do less well than non-cynics on cognitive tests. They're worse at knowing who's lying and who's telling the truth because they assume that everybody's on the take, and so stop paying attention to the evidence.

• 23:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  And this impact-

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Your health, too. Yes, cynics, they're physically less healthy. They suffer from more heart disease. They die younger than non-cynics. They're psychologically less healthy, suffering from more depression, loneliness, and anxiety. And they're socially less healthy, having shorter and less satisfying relationships. There's one study that I find so poignant and sad. Researchers brought people into the lab and had them give a speech on a topic that they didn't know they were going to talk about, which would make anybody nervous, and it increases people's blood pressure. Some of these folks were given a cheerleader. I mean, not literally, but a person who was with them, who said, "I know you can do

• 23:52Speaker 04

  this, you've got this," just kind of encouraged and supported them, and others didn't. And what these researchers found is that for most people, having someone supportive around lowered their blood pressure. But if you were a cynic, it didn't lower your blood pressure. Oh. You know, I think that social contact, togetherness, is like a form of psychological nourishment. And if that's true, then cynicism makes it harder to metabolize the calories of social life, to receive nourishment from the people around us, which is tragic, because that's a huge part of what makes life beautiful and meaningful.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  So cynicism might not be as smart as you think it is, but it's still powerful, because our stories about each other become self-fulfilling. Cynics are more likely to refuse intimacy and cooperation. They hurt others to avoid being hurt. They tend to spy on their colleagues and suspect their friends, and other people, unsurprisingly, react badly, sometimes acting selfishly in response. In other words, by mistreating others, cynics create the exact conditions they fear. They tell a story full of villains and end up living in it. I call this the cynicism trap, and my lab explores ways that people fall into it. In one study, we asked people how happiness works.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Some thought that it's a zero-sum game, meaning that as one person's happiness goes up, another person's must go down. Now, they're wrong. It turns out that when we act generously towards others, that tends to increase our happiness. But cynics acted on their illusion. When given chances to help strangers, they were less likely to do so. They ended up less happy as well. By hoarding well-being, they lost out on one of its key ingredients: other people. It's not just that people are trustworthy or not trustworthy. It's that when we trust them, they reciprocate. This is what's called earned trust. The idea is, if you have low expectations of somebody, they know, they can tell.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  It comes through in the way that you behave, and people don't like that, and they retaliate. So if you treat somebody like they're not trustworthy, they actually become less trustworthy. You create this toxic, self-fulfilling prophecy. The good news is that the exact same is true of trust. People are more likely to be trustworthy if you trust them. And that's something that I don't think people realize. We act as though trusting others is a sort of weakness, like we've shown our belly, we've made ourselves vulnerable. In fact, it's a gift that we give to other people that can change them for the better, and a gift that they often repay.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Cynicism doesn't help us see reality more clearly, but it does change reality, poisoning our relationships, our lives, and our culture. It is not a system upgrade. It's mental malware. But we don't have to accept it. In one study, we changed how people thought about empathy in politics. Some people were randomly chosen to read a cynical essay. It began, and I'm paraphrasing, "You might think that empathy is a weakness that will make you lose every argument, and you'd be right." Afterwards, we asked these folks to write a note about gun control to someone they disagreed with, and they sniped at each other. Here's a voice actor reading what one Democrat wrote to a Republican.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  It's hard not to state this bluntly. You should be in favor of stricter gun laws because you should care about the lives of...

• 27:34Speaker 04

  ...other people more than your outdated feelings of machismo. And here's a Republican writing to a Democrat.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  People need to know they are able to have the freedom to bear arms in order to protect themselves. You Democrats don't get to take that away from us.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Basically, we recreated Twitter by accident.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Other people read a different essay. It began, "You might think empathy is a weakness that will make you lose every argument, and you'd be wrong," and went on to describe empathy as a strength in politics. Again, we asked these folks to write to an opponent about gun control, but this time, things changed. Here's a Democrat. There are some common sense regulations that we should implement to keep people safe. We all want what is best for the country, and there are things we can meet in the middle on to tackle the issue of gun violence. And a Republican.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Horrible crimes can be committed using guns. Everything from school shootings to murders because of racism and white supremacy. It's very understandable that you think it makes sense to make gun laws more strict. We're all reasonable people, and we just want what's best for our loved ones.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  To us, this was wild. Remember, just like ocean and lake fishermen, these people did not start out any different. But just reading one essay turned some of them into new optimists and others into new cynics. We taught these people that empathy was useful. They used it, and it became useful. This is what I want you to remember and what I want you to know. That if cynical stories can become self fulfilling, our work shows that hopeful ones can as well.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  The evidence is really clear that people on each side, Democrats and Republicans, are dead wrong about their adversaries, about their opponents. When asked to imagine the average person they disagree with, people on both sides imagine somebody who is way more extreme, twice as hateful, twice as anti-democratic, and four times as violent as the truth. We're really fighting phantoms in a way, and as we draw further apart from one another, we don't get the evidence, the data, from real conversations to know that actually, people we disagree with, first of all, are still people, and second, that they're probably more reasonable and peaceful and open-minded than we think they are.

• 29:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  This gets us really to your prescription for overcoming cynicism. It is what you call hopeful skepticism. Please explain that idea.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's take the two pieces of hopeful skepticism one at a time. Skepticism is often confused with cynicism, but it's really quite different. If cynicism is a lack of faith in people, skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Skeptics think like scientists and they don't imagine or assume that people are great or that people are terrible. They wait for evidence to figure out who they can trust and who they can believe in. And because of that, they learn more quickly and are able to adapt to new situations. Hope is often confused with optimism, and it's not. Hope is the idea that things could get better, that we don't know what the future holds.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  And because of that, our actions matter. I am a big fan of putting these two perspectives together. I think that both hope and skepticism are a form of mastering uncertainty. So a hopeful skeptic to me is not somebody who is naive, not somebody who thinks that things are great or will be great, but rather someone who's open to learning about what people are really like and using that common ground to try to craft a future that more of us want.

• 31:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what do you say to those people when they say, "Oh, Jamil, so positive"?

• 31:30Speaker 04

  I say, "If you could only see inside my mind, you would not accuse me of being too positive." I think about, one of my favorite terms for, I guess, what I would think of as a fierce sort of hope comes from Martin Luther King Jr. In 1967, he spoke to the American Psychological Association. And he was much more diplomatic about it, so I'm paraphrasing here. But he in essence said, "You all are so obsessed with people being positive and happy and well-adjusted. And why should we be adjusted to a world of bigotry and violence and inequality? We should not be adjusted."

• 32:11Speaker 04

  He said, I think that what we should focus on is creative maladjustment. We should absolutely reject a status quo that is unjust, but we should be creative in knowing that something better is possible and that a lot of people want that better outcome. That, to me, is a perfect encapsulation of hopeful skepticism. It is not the same as saying things are great. It is writing down that list of all the things that are terrible, but also acknowledging that many, many people around us want things to improve. And in that, there is power. In that collective will, there is great power to produce change.

• 32:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Jamil Zaki. He's a professor of psychology at Stanford University and lead investigator at its social neuroscience lab. You can watch his full talk at ted.npr.org. On the show today, navigating uncertainty. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 33:31Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 34:14Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 34:29Speaker 00

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• 34:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, uncertainty. So we've talked about our outlook during uncertain times, how to support people in very unstable situations, and now the importance of finding our inner compass.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  So Iceland is a volcanic island. We have lots of lava fields and like high lava rocks. And there's, there's mountains and fjords.

• 35:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Rund Guntstendt. She is an Icelandic writer and filmmaker who studies intuition, or what's called insay in Icelandic.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  So insay is put together with two words, inn and saye. So inn, it means insight or into. And saye means to see or the see. And so when you look at the word like that, it opens up the whole world inside us and this world of intuition.

• 36:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Rund remembers feeling this connection, this symbiosis between her and her surroundings all the time.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  I would roam the lava fields around my home. I would, I tended to get really lost in my imagination, which I think is something nature does for you. You know, I just remember all these days and late into the evening and night, just walking outside. Maybe I was six or seven and I could really imagine there were trolls, you know, in the lava field. And I had to hide or I had to run away. And I felt really lucky to have been able to come back home and I was still alive. And, and imagine that my parents were so happy that I survived the trials in the lava field, you know, with all the drama.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just remember lying in the snow and I was looking up at the stars and I just felt like the stars belonged to the same world that I belonged to.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  And I felt this very deep connection to my surroundings and the earth I was lying on and just I was given the permission to be alone and just to experience this moment and be in absolute awe of the universe that I belonged to.

• 37:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  But as Rund got older, she wanted to go beyond her small island nation and experience the rest of the world. So in her twenties, she got what seemed like a dream job working at the United Nations.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  I got a job with one of the UN agencies in post-war reconstruction in Kosovo. I became the head of that agency, a program manager, and coming to Kosovo just after the war felt like walking into an open wound.

• 38:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  This was 2001. Kosovo was still in shock after the war in the late 90s. The situation was also a shock to Rund.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  You are working with people that have just survived probably the most horrible years of their lives and war and their lost loved ones.

• 38:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, you must have been seeing in these places that had really been ripped apart by war, where neighbors were killing neighbors. You must have been surrounded by so much grief and pain.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yes. I think that I definitely internalized the pain of others. You know, I remember saying to a friend, something along the lines of, "I couldn't take a day off because this was not about me. It was about the people I'm working for." Just like I was just pushing myself. So hard.

• 38:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  And I, that just takes a lot of toll. And I think it's especially when you think that you can just continually pour out of your well without filling it again, which I, I just thought I could.

• 39:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  As the months went on, that grounded feeling inside that had defined Rund from a young age started slipping away.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  I had become more and more disconnected from, from my body and, and my emotions. So I would even wake up in the night and because of a nightmare of, of bugs crawling all over me, you know, it was a very vivid dreams. And while I was thinking that I was dealing really well with the difficulties around me, I was basically just stuffing hard stuff somewhere in my body and my body just couldn't take it anymore.

• 39:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  Rund believes that that disconnection can be summed up by an incident that happened to her on a work trip.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  I was traveling from Kosovo to Kazakhstan for work. And early in the morning, I felt this terrible pain and I started to bleed. And my reaction was to, was something like, this really hurts. And I took some painkillers and just continued with my travel and work.

• 40:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  She was pregnant and didn't even know it.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  I'd had a miscarriage. This really should have been a wake up call. And it's a very strong example of how disconnected you can become from your body.

• 40:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Rund ignored the signs of what many would now consider burnout. She kept going. Fast forward several years, she was promoted. She went to work at UN headquarters in Geneva. She and her fiance had a baby. She was ticking off all of life's boxes, but also.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  I hadn't slept for weeks and I was exhausted.

• 40:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  Her body started breaking down, her relationship fell apart, her job meant nothing to her. She was losing sight of who she was.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  But I did manage somehow. To find a moment with myself and I literally walked down to the sea close to where I live.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Just I've always been drawn to the sea. I think it's the sound that's very calming. It's this broad horizon which does something to your mind. There was something inside me that was like, okay, Rund, you've been very. There's an Icelandic word, duleg, døgtig in Danish. It's like. It's like somebody who perseveres and has grit and never gives up, you know? But then I thought, um, so why am I doing this? And I had this moment where I really had to, I, I knew I had to make up my mind from, from the, the deepest roots of who I am and what my sense of meaning is in this life.

• 41:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  She decided to start a new chapter as a single mother without her partner and without her UN job.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Just this deep calmness came over me and I realized what I wanted to do and it was very unsensible, Manus. It's the, nobody said to me, that's a great idea. What a great career plan.

• 42:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's funny, running towards instability made you feel more calm.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yes, the complete unknown. Yeah. There is insecurity on all levels, you know, personal life, income, everything. It was extremely hard and I, I was really forced to connect with my intuition. And I got to know it all over again. My search for answers brought me back to my roots and helped me see with fresh eyes the Icelandic word for intuition, insay.

• 42:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Rund Gunstén's daughter continues from the TED stage.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Insay helps us reframe intuition because it brings together the scientific and the spiritual, the solid and the poetic. Insay means the sea within and refers to the overflowing unconscious mind. Stress, work and financial pressures can block our access to insay. And while we can't get rid of these. Pressures, we can learn how to clear the way to insight when we need it, and we gain clarity in mind. Intuition picks up information with all our bodies. So next time you feel something's off, you get tips down your spine or a gut reaction, ask yourself, what is my unconscious trying to tell me? Insight also means to see within, to be self-aware.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  And one of the most powerful ways to see within is to pay attention to how you pay attention and document it. And lastly, insight means to see from the inside out and has to do with how we navigate the ocean of life from within with a strong inner compass. Unconsciously, we process a massive amount of information, sensory data that our body picks up, including the brain. While this is unconscious, it still shapes our actions. Intuition helps us tap into this information. I've been able to practice, research, and interview scientists, spiritual leaders, and artists from around the world, and I've discovered that we all have intuition, and it's up to us to tune into it,

• 44:25Speaker 03

  which can be quite a challenge in today's world.

• 44:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you ended up building a whole new career for yourself around this idea of insight. You wrote a book about it, traveled the world to make a documentary. You must get a lot of questions about how to connect to insight when there is so much noise and chaos in the world. What do you tell people?

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And so the world we live in is characterized by uncertainty and turbulence. And so this is going to sound very simple, but believe me, it's a very, very powerful tool. And that is pay attention to what it is that you pay attention to

• 45:07Speaker 03

  and document it. Because we pay attention to so many things throughout today, like our attention, our mind has become the main market space. But attention is the gateway to intuition. We pay attention with all our body, all our senses, and just put down whatever your tension brings your way. Don't judge it, just put it down and allow it to be what it is. And you start to see patterns emerging. But also to know yourself well enough to be able to understand, when am I following a good intuition? When am I being biased, following fears or prejudices or even wishful thinking?

• 45:50Speaker 03

  It's knowing when you're too angry, too excited, you haven't slept, it's not the good time to listen to your intuition. So especially when we need to take brave decisions about our life, it's very important to be well-grounded in ourselves and well-anchored in our intuition. And I firmly believe, and I take this from ancient spiritualism as well, I firmly believe that the deepest sense of security we will ever find in our lives is within ourselves. We all have intuition, but it's absolutely up to ourselves to acknowledge it, to honor it, to harness it,

• 46:34Speaker 03

  to hone it and respect it.

• 46:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Rund Gunnstann's daughter. She's the author of the book Insei, Heal, Revive and Reset with the Icelandic Art of Intuition. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 46:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  To close our show about navigating uncertainty, we want to share the advice of a human rights advocate. Yifat Susskind is the founder of the nonprofit Madre, which yes, translates to mother. Madre supports local women's rights organizations around the world. And Yifat believes that thinking like a mother can be a great guiding principle for anyone living through uncertain times. Here she is on the TED stage in 2019.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  One morning 18 years ago, I stepped out of a New York City subway on a beautiful day in September. The sun was warm and bright, the sky was a clear, perfect blue. I had my six-month-old son in one of those front-facing baby carriers, you know, so he could see everything. And when I turned right on Sixth Avenue, what he saw was the World Trade Center on fire.

• 47:56Speaker 06

  As soon as I realized that this was an attack, the first thing I did, without even really thinking about it, was to take my baby and turn him around in that carrier. I didn't want him to see what was going on. And I just remember feeling so grateful that he was still young enough, that I didn't have to tell him that someone had done this on purpose. 9/11 was like crossing a hostile border into uncharted territory. The world was suddenly in this terrifying new place, and I was in this place as a new mother. Well, my son turned 18 this year, and in that time, we have all crossed into this hostile, uncharted territory

• 48:40Speaker 06

  of climate breakdown, of endless wars, of economic meltdowns, of deep political divisions. But there is a way to face these big crises in the world without feeling overwhelmed and despairing. It's simple and it's powerful. It's to think like a mother. Now, to be clear, you don't have to be a woman or a parent to do this. Thinking like a mother is a lens that's available to everybody. The poet Alexis de Vau writes, "Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth. It's an understanding of the needs of the world."

• 49:26Speaker 06

  A few years ago, East Africa was gripped by a famine, and women I know from Somalia walked for days carrying their hungry children in search of food and water. A quarter of a million people died. And half of them were babies and toddlers. A group of women farmers in Sudan heard about what was happening. And they pooled together the extra money that they had from their harvest and asked me to send it to those Somali mothers. Now, these farmers could have decided that they didn't have the power to act. They were barely getting by themselves, some of them. They lived without electricity, without furniture. But they overrode that.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  They did what mothers do. They saw themselves as the solution and they took action. You do it all the time if you have kids. You make major decisions about their health care, their education, their emotional well-being, even if you're not a doctor, or a teacher, or a therapist. You recognize what your child needs and you step up to provide it the best you can. Thinking like a mother means seeing the whole world through the eyes of those who are responsible for its most vulnerable people. And we're not used to thinking of subsistence farmers as philanthropists, but those women were practicing the root meaning of philanthropy: love for humanity.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  We recognize hate in the public sphere, right? Hate speech, hate crimes, but not love. What is love in the public sphere? Well, Cornel West, who is not a mother but thinks like one, says it best: "Justice is what love looks like in public." And when we position love as a kind of leading edge in policymaking, we get new answers to fundamental social questions. Like, what's the economy for? What is our commitment to those in the path of the hurricane?

• 51:33Speaker 07

  How do we greet those arriving to our borders? Because you know that migration, just like mothering, is an act of hope. Think like a mother. Thinking like a mother is a tool we can all use to build the world we want. Thank you.

• 51:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Yifat Susskind. She's the executive director of the human rights organization Madre. Thank you so much for listening to our episode on living with uncertainty. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, James Delahoussaye, Hershna Hada, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Katie Monteleone, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Girin. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Neil Teavolt, Becky Brown, and Jimmy Keeley. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hailash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo.

• 52:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.