Navigating uncertainty in 2025

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zamarodi. 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 going to be a really sad story. But it's not. And on that farm there was a pig. A pig. E-I-E-I-O. With a woof woof and a woof woof. That's not how a pig goes. Pig. I'm going.

1:34With an oink oink here and a oink oink there. This is Dr. Rockwell S. Squeezeheimer and Dr. Philibuster. Minding our business. A regular day here at the hospital. And okay, 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. So you go first, Philibuster. No, you go first. No, you go first. No, you go first. No, you go first. You go first. Healthy humor clowns are here three times a week, four hours at a time, going room to room, getting to know the families there.

2:13Can we come in? Okay. Oh, yeah. Listen, we learned. In some rooms, they sing songs. In others, they pull out their magic tricks. Abra-cadabra! Something's happening. Something's happening. but everywhere they go, they improv and play off each other to coax out a smile or even a laugh. He just farted at us. He farted at us. This is stinky in here. You know what? I'm going to add something because I'm inspired. Oh, really? Godzilla on the bus goes... Yeah, fight. Come on, Godzilla. Godzilla on the bus goes... All through the town

3:06Medical clowns like these work in hospitals throughout the world. They can be an important part of medical teams. 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. This is Matthew Wilson. But for a long time, he was known by another name. My name in the hospital was Dr. Berbunfert. No, come on. Yeah, no, it's Berbunfert. It's German. There's an umlaut on the A. The Berbunfert. Yeah. Matt was a medical clown in New York area hospitals for nearly a decade with a big red nose and everything. I had a clip-on tie.

3:46I wore Heelys, size 11. I usually wore skate shorts. And I had spiky hair. It was me. I love it. 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? And studies do show the real tangible benefits to having medical clowns around. Can you share some of that research with us? So some of the studies indicate that it reduces perceptions of pain during painful procedures like venti punctures, blood draws.

4:25There'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 the 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.

4:55Can 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? Yeah, sure. Honestly, hospitals, there's a lot of waiting. So boredom was always a factor. Other than that, there's an 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 is almost to alleviate or ease the experience.

5:30Now, that being said, sometimes they're ready to party just because someone is in this environment. It doesn't necessarily mean it's all stum and drang and angst and tragedy. I mean, don't get me wrong. There's plenty of that. Yeah. But they might just be ready to play. 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? I love that you asked 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.

6:15And 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 so much here to make it feel better. I am here to experience this with you. What can we experience together? 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. At the start of a new year, especially this one, a lot of us are facing a lot of uncertainty.

6:57So 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. He shared one story from his early days in the hospital on the TED stage. 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.

7:48We 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. The nurse approaches with the needle, and it happens again, this torrent of four-letter words.

8:29He 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. 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.

9:08Oh, 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 be looking and they're like, what is going on in there? I mean, I carried tutus with me.

9:43I usually had four or five tutus collapsible, like compressible tutus tool. Of course. 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, 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're 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 and they found me and they reached out because they were having her bat mitzvah no oh that's a lovely that's great oh man i'm i'm like i 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.

10:41I 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 with dancing and some other medical clowns. And it was just 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? So you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty too. Oh, 100%. I mean, that's what you're walking into. I mean, you kind of sign up for the not knowing, you know, and 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. So the clown sits in that trauma so you don't have to.

11:27Well, here's the deal. I don't know about that. Like, we're sitting it with you. 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? 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?

12:21How do we prioritize that? You know, I see it as a form of fitness. 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 is like, okay, 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 unearth that and find the joy amidst the suffering. 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.

13:11On the show today, navigating uncertainty. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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15:28Ready to bring your visions to life? Learn how at AmazonBusiness.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, Navigating Uncertainty. 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. This is psychology professor Jamil Zaki. And cynicism is a sort of dark safety. Tell me what you mean by that. 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?

16:24One 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, and that at least gives them some semblance of control over a chaotic life. Jameel's interest in cynicism is part of his larger focus on the brain and human behavior. 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.

17:10At Stanford University's social neuroscience lab, Jameel 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. 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. And during the pandemic, Jamil says he hit a bit of a breaking point.

18:24with really terrifying, awful views of who other people are, especially people who are different from ourselves. 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. 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.

19:13That was sort of, frankly, a little bit of a rock bottom for my own cynicism that 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? Yeah, not good. 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. Here's Jamil Zaki on the TED stage.

19:53In 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 one we don't have to. 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.

20:37The 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. The longer they worked on the ocean, the less they did. Some families, schools, and companies are like ocean villages.

21:14People 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. Taking the fishing villages as sort of a metaphor, do you see those two sort of approaches in different pockets of the United States? Absolutely. One big factor here is economic inequality. So more unequal states within the U.S., 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.

22:07So 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 Lemke, 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, and all of those become vectors for competition, comparison, and for cynicism too. One of the things you say, though, is that people love a cynic, and I'm curious as to why you'd say that. 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.

23:1070 % 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. 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.

23:48And this impacts 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.

24:29I mean, not literally, but a person who was with them who said, I know you can do 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. 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.

25:15So, 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.

25:57In one study, we asked people how happiness works. 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.

26:36This is what's called earned trust. The idea is if you have low expectations of somebody, they know, they can tell. 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.

27:19In 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. 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.

27:58Afterwards, 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. 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 other people more than your outdated feelings of machismo. And here's a Republican writing to a Democrat. 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. Basically, we recreated Twitter by accident.

28:34Other 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. Horrible crimes can be committed using guns.