Pending: Living With Uncertainty

0:00Of all the protests in the summer of 2020, For a moment there, it was utopia. One took a unique turn. Somebody over there, he's 18-0 to use a gun? This is the story of how violence came to occupy an anti-violence occupation in Seattle. Listen to We Keep Us Safe, a new true crime series on the Embedded podcast from NPR.

0:31Humans like to know what's coming next, how to plan for the future, and what the consequences of our actions might be. But the modern world is only becoming less certain. War abroad and political conflict at home, technological breakthroughs once only seen in science fiction, a volatile economy and labor market with the careers of billions at risk, and of course, the climate crisis, which rages on in the background and now in the foreground of our lives. And when we look inward, more questions, more uncertainty. What do we want our lives to look like? What happens when we achieve success or if we never do?

1:06And what about when we reach the end? This is the first part of a new 1A series we're bringing you over the next few months about uncertainty called Pending. Across these segments, we'll look at uncertainty in many forms. Health, relationships, faith, careers, uncertainty in life, and death. I'm Naila Boodoo in for Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. Today, what exactly is uncertainty? And is it always a bad thing? We talk about why we try to avoid it, how we can reevaluate our relationship to it, And maybe most important, how to move forward even when we don't know. That's the plan anyway.

1:43I feel very certain in saying, though, the show could end up somewhere else completely. Come back after this short break to see Stay With Us.

1:55For three weeks in 2020, part of my Seattle neighborhood was taken over by a protest occupation. We were here to protest police brutality. But it ended in tragedy. The whole space felt darker and angrier. Join me as I investigate the unsolved killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. Listen to We Keep Us Safe on the Embedded Podcast from NPR. As America marks 250 years, remember, we the people make a free press possible. Together, we hold the powerful to account with reporting for the public, funded by the public. At plus.npr.org. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're talking about life's uncertainties, the things we know, and the things we don't.

2:41Joining us is Simone Stoltsoff. He's a journalist and author of The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work. His latest book is How to Not Know, The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. And he joins us now from Barcelona, Spain. Simone, welcome to 1A. Thank you so much for having me. Let's just start, I think, Simone, with the most basic question. Why, as humans, do we want things to be so certain? It's biological. So our brains are wired to seek certainty because certainty makes us feel good. You can imagine an ancestor of yours or mine in the jungle, and they hear a rustling in the bushes, and if they don't know the source of that noise, that uncertainty could have been fatal.

3:25And so, because our brains are always predicting the future, trying to help us stay safe and survive, we have this natural aversion to uncertainty. The problem is sometimes we treat uncertain situations that aren't matters of life and death as if they were. And we go for the safest way out or the fastest way out, which isn't always the best way out of our uncertainty. You note that we're living in an era where information is abundant. And I wanted to ask you about something you write about the idea of our tolerance for uncertainty. does the modern era mean that we have a lower tolerance for uncertainty than at other times in human history?

4:04Well, it's hard to compare apples to apples here. If you were in Florence during the bubonic plague or a handloom weaver during the Industrial Revolution, you may think that modern feelings of uncertainty or the anxiety that uncertainty causes are sort of small potatoes. But there's two things going on. One, the world is getting more uncertain. So there's an economist from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom who's been tracking global uncertainty since the early 80s. And he's found that the five highest measurements since he began collecting data have all occurred in the last five years. So between the pandemic, as you mentioned, the wars overseas, geopolitical unrest, the threat of AI, the world is getting more uncertain.

4:49But the other thing that's happening that is less often talked about is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. There's this really interesting study from this researcher named Nicholas Carlton out of the University of Virginia. And he's found that the rise of our intolerance of uncertainty has correlated with the rise of the internet and more specifically mobile phones. I think phones do a few things. One is they create the expectations that answers should be readily available. Whereas 10 years ago, I might have been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. Now I feel an almost involuntary need to reach for my phone.

5:24And the second thing that phones do is they rob us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know. So the world is getting more uncertain. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. And that's why I argue so many of us feel anxious and unmoored. Simone, your book profiles several people who've dealt with major uncertainty in their lives at one point and another. Some people thrive in this. Others can't stand it. And I wanted to start with someone who thrived in the not knowing and who literally built his life around this. His name is Max Hawkins. Can you tell us particularly how a technologist from Silicon Valley ended up totally randomizing his life?

6:02Yeah, Max is a fascinating case study. So as you mentioned, he was a software engineer, specifically at Google. And before that, in college, he studied fine art as well as computer science. And so he always had this sort of interest in infusing a bit of serendipity or randomness into his art pieces using computer code. After a few years of living in the Bay Area where his life was very cushy, he had this strange feeling that maybe you've had before, Nyla, that my life feels like it's a bunch of rinse and repeat days. Like I'm acting out a script that I've read before. Who hasn't had that feeling, right?

6:38I know. And so he decided to do something that arguably is a little bit extreme, which is he started designing different computer programs to infuse randomness into his daily existence. And it began with a program where he tapped into Uber. And it was an app that allowed you to call an Uber to your house to bring you to a location in your city that you didn't know, that was only known to the driver. and he would play with this app and it would take him to a cemetery on the other side of the town or a restaurant that he had never been to before or a neighborhood that he had never explored. And then he sort of got addicted to this randomization of his life.

7:16He created another app to allow you to go to random Facebook events that were public in your city. And at its most extreme, he ended up quitting his job and for two years spinning the dice, allowing the computer to tell him where around the world he would live. And he lived in Slovenia for a month and in Dubai for a month and Vietnam for a month, literally randomizing his entire existence. So in history, you include this idea of explore, exploit. Can you explain what that is? Because I think there's people listening thinking, well, I feel more comfortable doing research and eliminating whatever uncertainty I can.

7:54Yeah, of course. At first, when I started talking to Max, I thought he was this brilliant idea of someone who is super tolerant of uncertainty. This idea of explore-exploit comes from theoretical computer science. And I'll give you an example. Imagine you worked for Spotify, and it was your job to choose the next song that plays on a person's playlist. You can choose to exploit their taste, which means playing something similar to other things that they've liked. or you can choose to explore their taste by playing something that you're not sure whether or not they'll like. Both have trade-offs.

8:31If you exploit, you might risk overplaying a song or not entrusting them enough. It's the low-risk option, but anyone who has played a song enough times until it drives them crazy knows the risks of too much exploitation. The other side of the coin is exploring, where you play something that's outside of your known preference area. And the benefit here is you might delight them. You might play something that they didn't know that they liked, or maybe you didn't know that they liked. The risk, of course, is that you might play something that they hate and turn them off. And so it's a nice metaphor for life.

9:06At different phases of our lives, we do more exploring. At different phases, we do more exploiting. But there are risks on either end of the spectrum. If you're too extreme and too calcified in your ways, maybe you could use a little bit more exploring. Whereas if you aren't directing your energy in any particular direction, maybe you could do a little bit more exploiting. That's journalist Simone Stoltzoff. He's an author of How to Not Know, The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. And we're hearing from those of you listening as well. One of you texted, I hope the author will address the uncertainty of people who live in war zones, individuals who lose their families to violence such as to genocide.

9:44How do families living in Gaza and other devastated regions of the world deal with uncertainty like the inability to find food and shelter? We also got this text from Miriam in Kansas City, Missouri, who said, For so long, uncertainty has moved me. Housing uncertainty, financial uncertainty. Very recently, I found that stability starts inside, letting life flow through me, a strategy of radical self-acceptance and nervous system regulation. But how do you come by that if you're worried about your basic needs? It's nearly impossible, but awareness practices are the place to start. Thanks for those text messages.

10:19You can also email us to 1a at wamu.org. So Moni, how does weighing our options in the face of uncertainty change when our uncertainty comes from basic needs not being secure? I love this question, and it's definitely germane to this current moment where we're living in. In many ways, How to Not Know is a book about the virtue of uncertainty. But if you were to hand this book to someone, say, fighting on the front lines of Ukraine or in Gaza right now, they might have a very different read on what uncertainty means for them. One of the tactics that I advocate for is that when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others.

11:04So I tell people to try and find their anchors. What are those things that you hope will remain steady amidst all that might be changing around you? As our listener mentioned, maybe it's something like a mindfulness or meditation practice. Maybe it's a keen sense of your values or your commitment to living in a particular place. But when you have those anchors, when you know what you are certain about, it can make it easier to hold uncertainty in other facets of your life. We have to take a quick break, but before we go, we got this message from one of you. A member of our text club said, I'm a mental health therapist and professor.

11:39When the path isn't clear and you're at a fork in the road, brain dumping with a pen and paper is incredibly helpful in getting all of your thoughts and your uncertainty out of your head. It can help clear the path for a more insightful perspective. Coming up, uncertainty in forecasting, in faith, and in death. Stay with us.

12:03This week on Newsmakers The far-right pastor with growing influence In the Republican Party and the administration What I would do right now is outlaw abortion Overturn Obergefell Those are the fish that I would want to fry now Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist On his vision for a Christian America This week on NPR's Newsmakers Wherever you get your podcasts Are We Doomed? helps you understand humanity's biggest threats. Climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons. Stuff still hits planets. We stand, divided we fall. How worried should you actually be? And what can we do? I'm Ben Bradford.

12:41Join me for Are We Doomed? Part of the NPR network. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. From mail-in ballots to racial gerrymandering, A lot is at stake for America's free and fair elections. I spoke with journalist Ari Berman about what he calls a final blow to the Voting Rights Act. My fear is that we are returning to a politics of Jim Crow in the South. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back into our conversation. We're discussing uncertainty for our new 1A series. It's called Pending, How to Better Face It and Even How Uncertainty Unbenefits Us.

13:23Here's a tip we got from one of you coming from New Hampshire. You text, wait. Wait for the path to become clear before acting or deciding. It's difficult sometimes, but it works. In nature, there's always chaos, but chaos doesn't last. It happens, then it sorts itself out, then there's normalcy again. Simone, one of my favorite parts of the book is the idea at one point, the Federal Reserve had a department of doubt. What did they do? So after the 08 financial crisis, this one enterprising economist at the Federal Reserve in New York named Meg McConnell set up what was affectionately dubbed the Department of Doubt.

14:00And the idea is that internally at the Fed, they created a department of devil's advocates whose job was to poke holes in central bankers' main arguments, try to find blind spots that they may not be paying attention to, and ultimately try to prevent some of the hubristic thinking that led to not taking action sooner on the crisis of 08. And so they do things like run simulations about what if catastrophic events occurred at the Fed. They would get economists to write down their predictions of how, for example, they thought interest rates might impact unemployment and provide a level of accountability to these choices that these very powerful policymakers were setting.

14:43So one of the things that I thought was so interesting about this is the idea that experts actually have more biases because they feel more certain. What are some of the biases that rear their heads when we have uncertain moments? How can we avoid them? There are a few, and experts are definitely susceptible to some. For example, there's the overconfidence effect, which is the idea of being overconfident in your own ability to, say, solve a problem or see the future. My favorite stat around this is that 80 % of drivers think they're better than average, which obviously is an impossibility. And so sometimes expertise can lead to the metaphor of only looking for answers under a lit streetlight because that's the lit place where your, say, keys or answers may occur.

15:32We're limited by our expertise and then the whole world is just through the lens of our narrow area of attention. But that isn't to say that experts are always susceptible to these biases. There are things like our general ambiguity aversion, which is our tendency to take known risks over unknown risks. You and I probably know someone who's in a job or in a relationship that they know isn't quite working for them, but they'd rather stick with the devil they know than have to experience the uncertainty of stepping outside of that job or relationship. There's confirmation bias, our tendency to look for answers or evidence that confirm our pre-existing beliefs.

16:16I see this all the time with AI, where people who think AI are going to take all the jobs, look out and just read articles about that, or people who think AI is going to lead to this age of creative expression, just look out for articles that say that. And so in moments of uncertainty, it can be very easy to cling or grasp for certainty even when there is no certainty to be found. And part of the role of the Department of Doubt was to try and point that out or gently nudge these central bankers into trying to trade some of their hubris for humility. Simone, the striking thing to me about that example is that department no longer exists at the Fed.

16:55How much do economic downturns or lack of resources cause us to tend, perhaps ironically, to turn away from the type of innovative thinking that might help prevent future crises? Yeah, so in moments of economic hardship, often the departments of doubt or the red teams or the people who are set out to look for risk are some of the first on the chopping block. And that is because often this sort of risk mitigation work is seen as a cost center as opposed to something that is benefiting the business's bottom line. But it's very hard to prove the value of a bad thing not happening. The author Nassim Taleb uses this great example in his book Black Swan, where he says, imagine if on September 10th, 2001, there was someone at the federal FAA who decided to make these cockpits of airlines bulletproof and very secure and spend billions and billions of dollars doing so.

17:59If that investment had been made, 9-11 might never have happened. But at the time, it would just be seen as this huge cost as opposed to the benefit of preventing this catastrophic terrorist attack. And so that is the problem with teams like the Department of Doubt or red teams that are looking out for these worst possible scenarios, is that often, unless there's a leader who can really champion this risk mitigation work, they're seen as a cost and not a benefit. So let's talk about leaders and the macro level of uncertainty because, as we've said, it's everywhere in the world. Pat in North Carolina writes, I need counsel on how to deal with waking up every day in America and not knowing what our president has done to break down societal norms, political and global norms overnight.

18:43I truly fear what this man and his administration think is normal and the suffering they have and will continue to cause. You can keep the questions and comments coming to 1a at wamu.org. Simone, there are practical tips for dealing with uncertainty, and then there's the emotional management. What did you learn about the best way to think? What thoughts to focus on? What to avoid? You started talking before the break about the idea of anchors. Yeah, I like this idea of anchors, and they can definitely be relevant in a business context. Your anchors for your business might be your values or your mission or your commitment to serve a particular customer.

19:19But I am sympathetic to the concern shared by the listener when tariff policies are shifting or when there's geopolitical unrest overseas or you're not sure the future of inflation over the course of the next six months or a year. It's hard to make those investments in the future. It's one way that I think about why it's so hard for young people to land jobs right now. If you are the leader of an organization, hiring a young person is like investing in a factory or investing in a future of your human capital of your organization. But when the future feels so systematically uncertain, it's harder to make those types of commitments.

20:00So when it comes to leadership, I'd think about, yes, finding your anchors. The other side of it is that uncertainty isn't necessarily always a threat. And so, yes, it can be uncomfortable. Yes, it can cause anxiety and fear, but uncertainty is also the birthplace of possibility, as I write in the book. If we're willing to withstand the discomfort and the anxiety and the fear that comes with uncertainty, we might be able to discover possibilities sitting on the other side of our discomfort. Certainly no generational company or genre-busting piece of art or scientific breakthrough has come about without someone's willingness to get to the precipice of what they know and to persist nonetheless.

20:44us. We got messages from so many of you about how you respond to uncertainty, and a common theme was faith and prayer. Michelle in South Carolina texted two words, trust God, and another of you said, pray, talk to people with experience, pray again. Simone, you have multiple chapters of faith in the broadest sense. You say that it doesn't have to be religious faith. It can be deep belief, and you write about how faith can help us respond to uncertainty as well as how it can be harmful. What's the difference between faith that helps versus hurts us when we're in uncertain moments? Faith is a great example of an anchor that I mentioned earlier.

21:25If you have faith in God or faith in a particular bet you're making, it can give you the conviction and the confidence to keep going even when you're not exactly sure where you'll end up. The distinction in my mind is between what I might call blind faith and conscious faith. So blind faith is making a bet and then closing your mind to new information or new evidence as it emerges. One of the examples I use in the book is a young woman who joins a cult-like organization. And I think seeding your agency to a cult leader is a great example of faith gone poorly, where you are seeding your own autonomy, your own agency, and you're not keeping your eyes open to the nefarious effects that may be happening to you and your loved ones.

22:15Conscious faith, on the other hand, is using faith as a tool, is to choose to put your heart on something, even if you're not sure exactly how it'll turn out, but also being open to changing conditions around you and also being open to changing what it is that you do believe in. And so it can be a fine line, but as you mentioned, I don't think faith necessarily has to be framed in a religious context. I really like the definition of faith from Pali, which is the original language for a lot of Buddhist texts. And the word for faith is sada, which means to put your heart on something. And so that's what I think about when I think about a good definition of faith is even in these uncertain moments, what can you choose to put your heart on?

23:01In fact, you write that oftentimes times that faith and rationality are not like oil and water and that cultivating faith can be pragmatic. How do you think that's so? Let's go back to the business world, for example. So I'll share an example that's not in the book. In the early 2000s, there was this company in the Bay Area called Tiny Spec, and they were building this massive online multiplayer game called Glitch. and it was sort of the bell of the ball. They had raised$17 million. Their launch was covered in the New York Times. They had all of this buzz and tens of thousands of active users.

23:42And yet at sort of the height of the company's success, less than two years after founding it, the founder decided to do something that others thought was crazy, which is he shut the game down. He had this sneaking suspicion that the company wasn't on a sustainable path. And so he offered to make his investors whole. He gave up employees that wanted to leave the opportunity to walk away. And then with the employees that remained, he pivoted the company around this internal communications tool that the company had built to collaborate across offices. That tool is what you and I today know as Slack.

24:18And that founder's name is Stuart Butterfield. I think it's a great example of where faith can go right. At the time, he didn't necessarily know the opportunity that he was chasing or that Slack would sell to Salesforce for$27 billion. He wasn't sure whether or not it would work out. But his willingness to take that bet, to take his own conviction and put faith and also resources behind it is what ultimately led to this outsized positive outcome. We got this email from Eric who says, Father Richard Rohr from the Center for Action and Contemplation talks a lot about the uncertainty in religion being the third act of life.

24:57We move from knowing to unknowing to reknowing. In today's climate where fundamentalist religion seems to be at the root of so many geopolitical problems, uncertainty could potentially be a way for people to experience religion and also uphold values of plurality and justice for all. Eric, thanks for that email. S in Baltimore texted, I suffer from analysis paralysis when I try to optimize an outcome or find the perfect solution. When that happens, I think, what decision would I regret on my deathbed that helps clarify what really matters and nudges me towards more adventurous and creative decisions?

25:32I've heard from many older people that they only regretted the things they didn't do. Simone, can I get you to react to what listener S said? You've talked to so many people about their analysis paralysis. What should we know about it? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the cliches among authors is that you write the book that you need to read. And I'm right there with you. I am an overthinker. I'm a ruminator. And sometimes when I'm in the state of analysis paralysis, I've come to realize that it's its own type of comfort. Without having to make a decision, by staying on this treadmill of indecision, you don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions.