How to Be a Better Human - 2025 Staff Picks - Best of How to Be a Better Human

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Remember those fun high school superlatives like the “Class Clown” or the “Biggest Flirt”? In this special How to Be a Better Human season finale, you will be hearing from our previous guest Dallas Youth Poet Laureate Naisha Randhar and our team of editors, marketers, producers, fact-checkers and more on their favorite episodes this year. How to Be a Better Human 2025 SuperlativesMost Likely to Make You Rethink Your Place in the WorldMost Inspiring StoryMost Likely to Make You Feel Your FeelsBest Motivator Most Likely to Improve Your Life TomorrowBiggest Perspective ShifterMost Shared TidbitFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. We are coming to the end of the year, and it has been a really big season for our podcast. So before we graduate, before we move on to our next season, we want to take a little look back. And we're going to do that in today's episode, High School Yearbook style. So people from across our podcast team are going to pick an episode and give it a superlative. You remember those, right? Things like Most Like It is Succeed, or Biggest Class Clown.

If I was going to get a superlative for this episode, it would probably be, most likely to have a seasonal head cold and sound like his nose is stuffed up because it is. Okay, so this episode, this is the superlative episode. And these superlatives are going to be bestowed by folks who work on this show, who produce it, who fact check it and keep it going. We've even got a previous podcast guest, poet Naisha Randhar, who's going to share her own superlative pick. I am going to get out of the way, so you're going to hear the voices of members of our team, and then after they tell you which episode they picked for a superlative, you'll hear an excerpt from that episode.

I want to also note that some superlatives were so popular that multiple people wanted to share their episode pick for that same superlative. So you will have to listen to the whole episode to find out which superlative wins most popular superlative, which is itself, of course, a superlative. Okay, that is more than enough for me. Let's get started with Lainey Lott, our audience marketing associate. And Lany has an episode on which she would like to bestow this superlative, most likely to make you rethink your place in the world. Here's Lainey. The episode with Lutheran pastor Nadia Bowles-Weber made me rethink my place in the world by rooting the concept of belief and spirituality back into just believing in other people and believing in the good and other people. It's not that often that I see spirituality represented in a lighthearted or like more logical way.

So this conversation was refreshing to help me feel more hopeful about what it can mean. to build a spiritual community and be a spiritual person and that it's really just about treating other people with sincere kindness. And it's humbling and just brings me a lot of peace to think about my purpose as being to just be kind to others and help others. And it's really just that simple. And also their conversation is also very interesting because Nadia has had a fascinating life and has a lot of cool mini lessons that can help you just have a little more faith. A lot of people think they don't have faith because they don't think, oh, I don't think Jesus was really alive after he was dead, right? Therefore, I don't have faith. And I'm like, oh, my God,

you definitely have faith in a million ways. And it doesn't have to do with, do you think that this story is medically true, medically factual? Is there resurrection in your life? Do you have stories of feeling like something was dead and now it's alive. That's a form of faith. And so to say to people, well, the only way to have faith is to say that medically, you know, Jesus was dead and then three days later he was alive. You know, it's like way to drain all of the meaning and mystery and power out of what faith really is, is to say that's what it is. My name is Michelle Quint, and I'm a story editor on How to Be a Better Human. And my pick for most inspiring story is Edith Zimmerman.

I found Edith's story really quietly, surprisingly inspiring. I think she'd probably be the first to tell you that her story is nothing super unique. Many people get sober. But the way she approached it, which was so open, and honest and vulnerable. It felt really brave and unique. And the root of what I found so inspiring was not the sobriety per se, but rather the idea that you can always make big personal changes if you are willing to look at yourself and your life clearly and honestly. I feel like maybe I come across as really honest, but I think there's been times in my life

where there's just like entire situations that I can't even look at and only later can I be like okay eventually I was able to like be honest about them but in the moment they're just like way too big and I don't even know like maybe I'm going through one of them now and I can't not to be like mysterious but it's like sometimes just I can't even look at it but anyway so I was like a very I don't know like medium problematic drinker for like kind of a long time like for probably like seven years I knew I was like this is not good but like I can't really handle this right now because I'm just, like, not equipped. And then, like, one day I was, and then I stopped drinking.

Hi, my name is Nysha Randar. I am the Dallas Youth Poet Laureate. And my nomination for the category, most likely to help you rethink your place in the world, is Clint Smith. Clint, in this episode, discusses the intersectionality of identities. and the inheritance of often brutal paths interlaid with tragedy and the guilt and complicity that comes with that and the consequence of being American and having this contradictory identity because while there is this past that is so heavy and awful,

there's also so much progress and resilience to celebrate as a people. He argues that there are both, which I think lots of people are scared to accept because they want to see this golden standard of what it means to be American, which isn't always true. And he talks about the extraordinary importance of dealing with the past truthfully and recognizing both the shame and the pride of what it means to be American and in any history. I think part of my project is to ask us to hold all of the both-andedness of what it means to be human in the context of our personal lives, in the context of our identities, in the context of our history, because I think that is the most, perhaps,

central element of being human, is accepting that we are a bundle of contradictions. Like, there are values that I have. There are things that I believe I hold firmly. And I am cognizant of the way that I fall short of those values every single day. I don't think that makes me a bad person. I think that makes me a person who's reflecting on the fact that, okay, well, I say I care about this, or I say this matters to me, or I say I'm not the kind of person who does this. And today, I fell short of those things. My hope is that every day we wake up and try to get a little bit closer to the version of ourselves that we want to be relative to the version of ourselves that we are. That's like an ongoing practice. It's not necessarily trying to cross

a finish line, but a recognition that this is an ongoing part of like what it means to be alive. We're going to have a lot more superlatives, and we are going to have a lot more clips picked by members of our podcast team. But first, we've got to pay those team members' salaries, so we're going to take a quick ad break, and then we will be right back. On today's episode, we're hearing from members of the How to Be a Better Human Team about the episodes that they loved, and what yearbook superlative they would give them. So up next we have Mateus Salas, and Mateus is going to be presenting the category of

most inspiring story. Hello, I'm Mateo Salis, fact chapter for the Brad and Hellman podcast. And I think the story that really stayed with me this year was Sean Sherman's episode. There's just something so powerful about the way he's reclaiming food traditions, not just as recipes or ingredients, but as a very way of healing, rebuilding community, and I think restoring pride. And perhaps what struck me most is how his work turns food into something much deeper. While listening to him, I kept thinking, this is not just about cooking.

It's like about remembering who you are, where you come from, and finding hope in that, connection. So listening to this was fantastic for me. I just feel like food is something really powerful and food sovereignty is what we really push towards because if we can get tribes to really consider that there is a path to control their own food, to be able to grow their own food, to harvest their own food, to preserve their own food, to make more than enough food for their entire community with the spaces that they have. And even in all the different environments all over the United States, there's plenty of ways to work towards that. And I think that if we can control our food, we can really control the power that we have for our future, you know. And so I just

really hope people can see that we can learn so much from our ancestors, because we're not trying to create food that's a museum piece and trying to go backwards to 1491 of what were we eating long before European settlers showed up. We're looking at the future of like, how can we adopt a lot of the knowledge base from our ancestors, apply that to what we know today, and how do we think about the future because we have every, every single day we're alive, we can think about changing the future. Hi, I'm Daniela Balaresso. I'm an executive producer at TED, and I'm nominating Hanif of Durekib and Sarah Kaye for

most likely to make you feel your feels. And yes, as an executive producer, I did come up with that superlative category, and I do feel too millennial about it. I'm so sorry to everybody. But I'm nominating Hanif and Sarah because we had them on the show together for a very special video series on YouTube. And I knew that I would get a little teary-eyed, but I was really surprised as to how deeply I felt their words in my heart. The way that I've grown up, I've moved around a lot. And so I feel like I belong to a lot of places.

I was born in La Paz, in Mexico, but I was raised in El Paso, Texas. and I've been living in Brooklyn, New York for almost nine years. So I have always struggled to define what home is. And so even Sarah really helped me see and celebrate what belonging and community could look and feel like. Just learning how to forge community and thinking deeply about the people that you claim and that claim you feels so important right now. I think this is the time where we know. need solidarity, we need neighborliness, we need to feel belonging. So that's why I felt my feels with them as millennial as it sounds. And I will never say that phrase again, I think.

Nothing brings me more joy than sitting in the passenger seat while Hanif drives around the city of Columbus, picking up his dry cleaning, going to the bakery, dropping off some package to a friend that got delivered to his house because the friend was out of town. And while we're driving, Hanif is pointing out personal landmarks around the city. Like, there's the basketball court I used to play on when I was a kid. And then over there is the smaller basketball court where the younger siblings were relegated when the older kids wanted to play on the big court. And over there is where I had a really bad date one time.

And then over there is where, like, the best milkshake is. And I have this great awe and this great respect for the way Hanif loves his hometown and how it's not abstract to him. He loves people there. He loves the elders that live on his block. He loves the high school students that he. mentors and who mentor him back. He loves the guys who work at the record store and remember what he bought last time so that when he comes in next time, they have something to recommend him. And the way that he moves through that place looks like what I imagine you are looking for when you are

looking for an example of how to be in community. Hi, my name is Tan Ska Sangamani Wong, and I am the podcast publishing and programming specialist at TED. My pick for the best motivator to get you to do X, Y, and Z, is Bonnie Tsoy, how to use you muscles or risk losing them. I remember when she said, in your 30s, you start losing bone and muscle mass, so you need to ask yourself, who do you want to be and what you want to be capable of doing in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. It was scary to hear him, but it resonated. As an Asian American,

I am at a higher risk to get osteoporosis. So Bonnie's episode motivated me to join a gym, lift weights, build strength, and regain some functional mobility. I couldn't help, but over the course of writing this book, start to think of muscle as a philosophy, where there are are all these characteristics of muscle, the tangible stuff, right? So strength and form and, you know, action that it is the stuff that actually moves us and flexibility and endurance. And these are not just qualities of muscle, but they are qualities that we strive for in personhood. And I think that's very moving. That's very profound. And so to kind of like think about the body as not just this vehicle we occupy for a certain period of time on earth, but it is something that if we think

about it in a certain way, it elevates like who we want to be in the world. So muscle is something that you can only get stronger. You can only strengthen a muscle by stressing it, by pushing it, by challenging it. And that's something that I think we all understand. We can look at life as something that always is stressing us, is always throwing these challenges at us. I know it's just a really good life lesson. We're going to take another quick ad break, and then we will be right back with many more life lessons.

Today, we are awarding some of our guests of this past year with the very prestigious awards we all know and love, yearbook superlatives. Lainey Lott and Matthias Salas are two members of the Better Human Team, who you heard from earlier, but they're also both overachievers, so they nominated multiple episodes. They are going head to head in this next superlative because they both made a pick for the category of, most likely to improve your life tomorrow. So let's hear from them both, and then you can decide which episode you think should take the crown.

Who deserves the superlative? Here's Lainey. So when I listened to the episode with Dave Nattelberg and Neil Cather, How to Reclaim Your Cringe, I really felt a lot better about the many cringy things I've done in my life. I'm a theater kid, so there's many. But hearing everyone make a huge joke out of their cringy stories help me kind of spin the narrative on my own cringy moments and look at them with kinder eyes and see them to be a little funnier and more endearing. Plus, this episode really made me want to journal more just to try and make myself laugh. So it was a quick perspective shift to keep me from laying awake thinking about something I did 10 years ago. That was embarrassing.

I think one of the things that is really fun and mortified is that the things that a kid wants isn't necessarily any different than what an adult wants. The big difference is that the kid has less information. and so we are often, I often call teenagehood the sort of the first day on the job of being an adult and the training's been really bad. There's been really poor training at the office. And so a lot of the things that we, that we laugh at and enjoy, but also relate to so much is just someone operating without a manual. And in a weird way, that's why they're keeping their journal. And it's also why we root for them. Hello, I'm Athel Salis, fact checker for the Better Human Podcast. And my pick for this one,

the easiest change to improve your life tomorrow, is Anil Seth's episode, mostly because of something he said that I just can forget, like catching yourself in the act of subjective existence. That idea really hit me. And since listening to it, I've actually tried it, like just stopping for a second in the middle of the day, perhaps while making coffee or walking outside and noticing the feeling of the air or a tiny emotion passing by. And in that moment, you realize that all of this, everything you see and feel, it's like your brain making sense of the world.

It's such a small shift, but it makes they feel completely different. Things become a little more vivid. You become a little more present. You're in your own life. And it's beautiful. And honestly, it's changed how I moved through my days. The brain makes this best guess about what's happening in the world by continually making predictions about the sensory signals that it's getting.

And then instead of just reading out the sensory signals to sort of form this inner picture of the world, the brain is continually updating the predictions, so they explain away the sensory signals that are coming in. And the key idea here is that what we experience in this story is the content of these inside out predictions. We don't read out the world from the outside in. we always actively construct it, actively generate it from the inside out. Now, it turns out, if you do all the maths and all this stuff, that if you have a brain which is continually updating its top-down inside-out predictions to minimize the sensory signals that are coming in, to try and explain them, predict them before they happen,

that mathematically is a very, very good way for the brain to approximate exactly what caused the sensory signals out there in the world. It's a very good way to make a best guess. And that's the claim. That's what we experience. And that's why I call it a controlled hallucination, which is a term I, like all good analogies. I like the idea because it emphasizes that our experiences come largely from within. So that's the hallucination part. Hi, this is Tansika Sangmani Wong, podcast publishing and programming specialist at TED. My pick for the biggest perspective shifter is Debbie Millman and her take on personal branding. It seems like every time I open up a social media app, there are tons of influencers and content creators and people monetizing their hobbies everywhere.

Everyone wants to be a brand. Yet Debbie argues that maybe we shouldn't because brands are manufactured and once we see ourselves as brand, we become a commodity and lose the essence that makes us human. I loved hearing Debbie's thoughts and how it's a reminder that not everything has to be a brand. When people ask me about personal branding, because I do so much work in branding, that's inevitably a question. And I've thought about it long and hard. And brands are manufactured.

It's meaning manufactured. Humans are living, breathing entities. We're a species. and we're messy and we change and evolve, or at least one would hope that we do, we grow. And brands are not self-directed. They're only directed by humans. Some humans are better than others in that direction

and in their intention. But what I suggest that humans work on is building their character and building their reputation and building their body of work. And doing those three things will help create, or communicate, really, your persona and your intentions and who you are. But the minute we begin to see ourselves as brands, we become a commodity. And I find that really unfortunate and a little bit sad.

Hi, my name is Naisha. I am the Dallas Youth Poet Laureate. And my nomination for the category biggest perspective shifter is Catherine May and her episode on wintering. I love this episode so much because what she's saying seems to be so obvious, yet I don't think most of the people that I know, and especially not me, fully comprehended this concept, which is to say that no one actually rests enough and takes the time that they need to recover and gives themselves grace? Like, for example, she says, there is a really profound belief that we fail if we winter, whereas actually, if you think about it for just a

few moments, it's entirely obvious that it's normal. And she's right, it's so obvious that this need for rest is integral to being human, and the wintering or the hibernation, the peace, that's key to recovering and healing and becoming better. My favorite part is when she talks about how resistance to pain causes us the most suffering. And if we were to just take the time to winter, we would actually be able to be alive to the pain, but also heal from that and be more alive to other things like beauty. and happiness and good things in our lives. That was a really profound episode for me

and completely blew my mind. There's a really profound belief that we fail if we winter. Whereas actually, if you think about it for just a few moments, it's entirely obvious that it's normal. You know, we can't live a whole life without, having someone dear to us die. We can't live a whole life without getting sick. We rarely get to live a whole life without losing a job, for example. I mean, there are so many different things that can happen. And yet, quite often when we see them happen to other people, we do this little

trick of the mind that says, okay, so why is that their fault? Like, what would I have done differently? And I still catch myself doing it. And that, you know, it's protective, isn't it? Like, we just don't want to think that that kind of horror is possible. But then, of course, when it visits us, we are left with no toolkit to process what's happening. And of course, guilt is inevitably the thing that comes up, first of all, because we do seem to be like a very guilt-laden species in the first place. And we don't allow ourselves any other exit route, really. And finally, to close out this episode, Michelle Quint is back, and she's sharing her winner for the superlative Most Shared Tidbit. And I have to agree, this is a tidbit that I have shared a lot as well.

Here is Michelle. My pick for the most shared tidbit I learned from the show this year goes to Ingrid Lee, because I've been telling absolutely anyone who will listen how the minimalism movement has made us. all feel sad and how our brains respond really positively to bright colors, repeating patterns, and just how generally we should be trying to bring more color into our lives. And after listening to this episode, I went out and bought a very bright multicolored chair and have been trying to wear more colors and patterns in my day-to-day life and have been trying to spread the gospel far and wide. So thanks, Ingrid. What I was trying to understand was what makes these things specifically joyful.

And it's understanding that there are sensorial qualities to those joyful things that are repeatable that we can find throughout cultures all over the planet. So things like bright color, round shapes, a sense of abundance and multiplicity, a feeling of lightness or elevation, repeating patterns. And it's, that level of abstraction of being able to understand what is the essence that's actually making this joyful from a neuroscientific perspective that allows us to then say, okay, well, what's really doing the work of creating the joy is the repetition, not necessarily the polka dots. It's the repetition of the circular shape. And those two things together are what's

creating that feeling of joy. And so we can apply that idea somewhere else, and it doesn't necessarily have to feel so literal. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to all of the guests we had on this season. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find out more for me, including information about my book, Humor Me, which comes out on January 6th, and is all about How to Laugh more. You could pre-order that now and find info at chrisduffycom.

How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who are all superlatively superlative to work with. On the TED side, we've got the extremely likely to succeed Daniela Bolarezzo, Ban Ban, Chang, Michelle, Quinn, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laini Latt, Tansega-Sung-Manivong, Antonio Leigh, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by the most likely to correct an error duo of Julia Dickerson and Matthias Salas.

On the PRX side, we've got Audio Prom Kings and Audio Prom Queens, Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. The best listener superlative goes to you. Please share this episode with a person who you would want to have signed your yearbook. And that is it for this season of How to Be a Better Human. I would say have a great summer, but it is the middle of winter. So instead, I will say, stay warm and we'll catch you next year.

Thanks for listening. I'm going to go blow my nose.