The Liz Moody Podcast - Should You Move? Have Kids? Change Careers? Science-Backed Frameworks For Every Hard Decision

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Did you know our brains are wired to fear uncertainty MORE than suffering? The good news is that in the same way you can build muscles, you can build your tolerance for the unknown. When you’re comfortable with uncertainty, you’ll be less anxious, go after more opportunities, find more success, and make better decisions. And that is exactly what you're going to learn how to do today.  My guest is Simone Stolzoff, a famous journalist and best-selling author, who dives into the learnings and stories from his new book How To Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • How to stop catastrophizing and start planning  • The three "certainty traps" keeping you stuck • How to make hard decisions before you're "ready" • The one question to ask when you're stuck between two options  • Why your future self is more capable than you think • How to microdose uncertainty to build your tolerance Check out our NEW YouTube Channel with tons of YouTube exclusive Shorts and, coming soon, YouTube exclusive podcast content: https://www.youtube.com/@LizMoodyTV  Check out the previous episodes of The Liz Moody Podcast discussed today: • How To Have No Regrets When You Die with Mega Best-Selling Author Daniel Pink • Stanford Professors: One Tool That Makes Every Life Decision Easier If you liked this episode, check out: Stuck? How To Make The Right Decisions & Supercharge Your Path Forward For more from Simone Stolzoff: • Book, How To Not Know: https://amzn.to/3QUhqRY  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepizza_bagel/  • Website: https://simonestolzoff.com/  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Wildgrain: go to Wildgrain.com/LizMoody to get $30 off your first box + FREE croissants for LIFE. • OneSkin: visit OneSkin.co/Liz and use code LIZ to get 15% OFF for a limited time. • Branch Basics: head to BranchBasics.com and use code LIZMOODY for 15% off the premium starter kit. • NOCD: to learn more about OCD therapy with NOCD, go to NOCD.com and book a free call. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 430. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You would rather get a guaranteed, painful electric shock than face a 50-50 chance of getting one. That is an actual study. Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty more than actual suffering. The fear of a layoff does more psychological damage than the layoff itself. Not knowing if you're going to get sick is worse than dealing with the actual sickness. And right now, the world is a soup of uncertainty like, will AI destroy humanity? What's going on with the political situation and climate change? And that's outside of our personal lives.

Will we fall in love? Are we with the right person? Should we move to Europe? Should we have kids? The good news is that in the same way you can build muscles, you can build tolerance for uncertainty. And that tolerance is going to make everything better. You're going to be less anxious.

You're going to see more opportunities and find more success in your life. You're going to make better decisions. And that is exactly what you're going to learn how to do today. My guest is Simone Stolesoff, a journalist who's been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. He is the bestselling author of the Good Enough Job, and now he's back with his new book, which is called How to Not Know, the Value of Uncertainty in a world that demands answers. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we skip past the BS and get you actual solutions to your

real life problems so that you can feel as good as possible every single day. We're not going to tell you, oh yeah, you can do it. We believe in you. We're going to tell you exactly how. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay.

So I want to know, is the world actually more uncertain than it's been historically, or does it just feel like it is? A little bit of both. And so it's hard to have an objective measure of uncertainty. There's this one academic project that has done a really good job of tracking global uncertainty over time, but it began in the 80s. And what they found is that the five highest measurements since the study began have all occurred in the last five years. So you think about things like COVID and the war in Iran, Ukraine, tariff policy, but you also question how they're measuring uncertainty. And so there's not just like one number. One thing that they use is mentions of uncertainty in newspaper articles, for example. But I would argue if you were, say, a hand loom weaver before the industrial revolution or living in Florence before the bubonic plague, you might think that modern day uncertainty is sort of like small potatoes. But the feeling of uncertainty is definitely heightened right now, and it's something that is in the air that we breathe. Is that contextual?

Is that because like we can kind of remember the 90s or the 2000s. And so we're like, oh, there was a time that felt a little safer, a little better, whereas the person in the middle ages might not have something to compare it to that felt more certain or more safe. There's some really interesting research on the rise of the internet and mobile phones. And what they found is that the rise of the internet is correlated with our increase in intolerance of uncertainty. So basically, these phones in our pockets have given us access to more information. they have allowed us to reach and see what's happening on the other side of the world. But there's two things.

One is it takes all of the uncertainty in the world and brings it directly to us, a crisis that's happening, what your kid might be doing in any given moment. And the second thing it does is it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know. So like 10 years ago, I might have been fine not knowing the name of a given actor. And now if I don't know the name of an actor, I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket. I am not comfortable. I looked up an actor during a movie in the theaters the other day, and I felt terrible because, but it was just like driving me crazy. I was like, I know who this is during Project Hail Mary. And I was like, I know who this woman is and I could not place her. Yeah, it was awful.

That is so interesting. So how do you think about approaching that in your day-to-day life? Are you like, I just need to keep myself from pulling out my phone or how do you approach it? Well, the cliche is that you write the book that you need to read. And so the reason why I wrote this book is that I am not very tolerant of uncertainty myself. I'm a natural ruminator. So I'll get stuck on a question, let it loop in my mind. I like to play my own devil's advocate. So when I'm trying to make a decision, I'll make up my mind and then like think about all the reasons why I'm wrong.

And so I'm not very good at dealing with uncertainty. And yet I know that it is an increasingly adaptive and important skill. And so the benefit of being a journalist is I don't have to have all the answers myself. I can go out and talk the philosophers and the economists and the psychologists and then present it in 200 pages for you. Wait. So you say it's an adaptive and important. go. What are the benefits of raising our tolerance for uncertainty? It's a great question. I think the big

one is a mitigation of our anxiety. And so if you think about worry and anxiety as being primarily thinking about things that haven't happened yet and getting anxious about them, that is not necessarily beneficial. And so there's this researcher named Mikhail Dugat, who was the first to link a lot of today's mental health disorders with our intolerance of uncertainty as sort of the base underlying case. The benefit is that when you are comfortable with uncertainty, you can see uncertainty not as a threat, but as a potential opportunity. So think about any sort of genre busting piece of art or scientific breakthrough or innovative company. They've all come from someone who's willing to get to a point where they're not sure and keep going.

But when we're too addicted to certainty, when we have to grasp for certainty in all moments of our life, it keeps us from discovering the possibility that might lie on the other side of our discomfort. So a basic example, we all have a friend who is in a relationship that they know is not working for them,

but they would prefer the comfort of where they are as opposed to the discomfort of having to face the uncertainty of leaving. Or someone who's in a job that it might not be optimal, they know that it's not the best fit for them, but they would rather the devil that you know. And so when we are certain, it sort of closes our minds. And when we are able to tolerate uncertainty, when we're able to open ourselves to those possibilities, we stay open to the world as it emerges.

Tell the story of the couple who couldn't decide whether or not they wanted to stay in their relationship. I love that story. Yeah. So I opened the book with a story about a couple who's deciding whether or not they want to get divorced. They've been together for 17 years. They've been married for 10, and they're out having a drink at a bar in Manhattan, and they decide to do something that I would characterize as crazy. But they, right then and there, say, okay, we are going to do an experiment, and we're going to

call it the year of living dangerously. And for a year, we're going to go our separate ways. We're not going to talk to each other. And then exactly a year from today, we'll come back to this bar and decide whether or not we want to stay together. And it's a fascinating experiment. It's one of those things that you might like think about in your mind. Or see in like a movie. Yeah, but you're like, this is nonfiction. That's actually happened. And yeah, like I talk to these people. And I won't spoil the ending because you'll have to read the book. But I think there's something very cool about what they did because I think our natural tendency is to either just break up or grid our teeth and carry on. And they actually sort of created a container, a space to explore some of that.

uncertainty and it was a very illustrative year for both of them. Wait, so okay, I won't make you spoil the ending, but what would you view as their lessons from that year? What did that year give them versus just making the decision before the year started? I think it's an example of treating your life more experimentally than definitively. I think they in that moment honestly weren't sure what they should do about their relationship. And because that uncertainty is so uncomfortable, the natural tendency is to like find certainty in one way or another. So I'll give a quick analogy and then I'll come back.

So Mikhail Dugas, this psychologist that I talked to, said that when we are incredibly uncomfortable with uncertainty, it normally leads us to one of two different behaviors. We can either be incredible information gatherers, like try and learn everything that's possible or be incredibly impulsive. So if you're really uncomfortable with uncertainty and you need to buy a new pair of jeans, if you're uncomfortable, you might either try to try on every single pair of jeans in the store or like buy the pair of jeans in the window. And we probably can all think of like if we're further on one end of that spectrum or the other.

Instead of linking to the impulsivity or thinking that we need to sort of thought experiment our way and gather tons and tons of information, they decided to actually get proximate to the experience of what it would be like to break up. And, you know, I talked to many different experts about this particular case. When I talk to just like lay people, I do like an informal survey. And it's about 50-50. About half of the people that I talk to think that, of course, they broke up. Like they gave their energy away from the relationship for a year.

And the other half is like, it's the Pena Colada song. Like, of course they got back together. It's a Hallmark movie. And I think that sort of knee-jerk reaction is a good little proxy for our own sort of optimism or pessimism when it comes to these situations. But my favorite part of the whole story was their couple's therapist was Esther Perel, like one of the most famous famous therapist. Yeah, I was like, how did they get in with her? That felt crazy. That was the most implausible part of the story to me. You're like, this is definitely friction now. Well, it was kind of before Esther was

like Esther Perel. You know, this was like early 2000s in New York. And Esther said something that really stuck with me, which is that trust is an active engagement with the unknown, especially when it comes to something like starting a relationship or proposing or taking a new job, you're never going to know for certain exactly how it's going to turn out. When it comes to anything that happens in the future, certainty is a fallacy. What we need to do as individuals is to be able to trust things without knowing exactly how they're going to turn out. Faith, call it trust. But I think that skill of being able to get to a point where you don't know and to persist is, the benefit of developing uncertainty tolerance. It allows you to keep going in spite of not being

sure. It's so interesting to me, this idea that we can't really know the future. You cited research in the book where somebody studied like two decades, I think, of expert predictions. And I think he concluded that the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. I feel like every single day I turn on a podcast or I scroll social media or I read the news and there's like the godfather of AI, saying that AI is going to destroy humanity or like, this is going to happen with the climate, all of these kind of predictions of the future. And I found something deeply comforting about the idea that like nobody really knows. Yeah, it's liberating. You know, this researcher Phil Tetlock is famous for taking predictions from the smartest people in the world.

So economists, politicians, journalists. And the truth is they are so often wrong. And yet we turn on the TV and it says this is when the market's going to crash. This is who's going to win the election. This is who's going to win the game. And we discount the fact that everyone is sort of making their best guess. And there's very little accountability to those predictions moving forward. Like I would love to see, for example, at the end of a football season, every single commentator who's sort of a talking head on the TV have to go back and reckon with why they were wrong about the team not winning the game or every single political pundit doing. the same thing. But we often do it in our own lives, too. We are very bad at what researchers

call effective forecasting. So thinking about how we're going to feel about how a future event will affect us. This is research that comes from Dan Gilbert, who's sort of the godfather of happiness. And he particularly looks at moments that are very extreme. So for example, like someone getting left at the altar or someone getting laid off from a job, these moments that you think, you know, my life is over. This could be like the end. And, In actuality, what he often finds is some of these really bad moments tend to be the best thing that ever happened to me. We've all had a friend that's maybe gone through a really traumatic breakup and thought that their whole life was done only to realize the opportunities that

presented themselves on the other side. And there's so many examples of this. From the business world, from personal stories, from characters from history, we are really bad at thinking how we're going to feel about something that hasn't happened yet. Do you think that's because we actually don't feel as bad as we think or because when we're retroactively writing the narrative of our lives, we need it to like make sense and feel good? So we kind of change our relationship to that thing post facto. That's a great question. Yeah, there's definitely a need for that sort of consistency of our own identity.

And part of the reason why people stay so attached to past beliefs or are unwilling to change their mind is this desire for a positive self-image. So if I thought this thing before, changing my mind wouldn't just mean, you know, updating my thoughts. It would mean undermining my identity in some way. Like there's some really interesting research from people who have to pick stocks for a living. And when your prediction is out on a limb, so like not part of the consensus opinion, you are much more unlikely to update. your thinking based on new information. But if you're part of the consensus and the consensus is wrong, it's easier for you to update your thinking next quarter. And the reason that Katie

Milkman, the researcher cites is that when you're out on a limb, that prediction, that forecast you've made is likely tied to your identity because you're staking a larger part of yourself on it. It's why maybe flat earthers have a harder time admitting that the world isn't flat because they've staked a lot of their identity on this idea that the world is a certain way. And admitting that they are wrong doesn't just mean sort of changing their mind. It means potentially having to rethink who they are. Okay. So if we can't predict the future and we can't predict our reaction to whatever happens in the future, where does that leave us? When you're looking at your life and you're trying to say, what's it going to look like in five years, 10 years, whether it's about a global situation or a more

personal situation, how are you approaching that? Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish between what I'd call acute uncertainty. So that's an open question that will be resolved. For example, like, will I pass the bar exam, or where will I get into college, or will he text me back, versus ambient uncertainty. This is sort of the uncertainty that we are living in to be a human in 2026. So whether it's climate change or the threat of AI or geopolitics. In the first category, I think about a decision tree. And the first question is, do you have the power to influence the outcome? So there's some really interesting research that shows that for breast cancer patients, for example,

the period between getting a biopsy and getting the results of that test is often the hardest part of the entire journey. More difficult than chemo, more difficult than surgery. It's that uncertainty. There's another study that I love that split these research participants into two groups. And one group was given a 50% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock. And another group was given an 100% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock. And people in the first group, the 50% group, were far more stress than people that were certainly going to get the bad thing.

We would somehow rather something bad happened for sure than have to deal with the ambiguity of not knowing. You also have this out in your book that fear of a layoff is actually more harmful to us psychologically than a layoff itself. Yeah, they're sort of even, like the threat of maybe getting laid off takes a similar psychological tool as actually losing our jobs. Which I want to point out last longer. Like some of us are just like sitting under the looming presence of a potential layoff for months or years. I mean, you're talking to two journalists. No better industry than our own. So the first question is sort of do you have the power to influence, influence the outcome. So say you're stressed about where you're going to get to college. If you're

like pre-application submitting, you should do everything that you can to like put your best foot forward and submit a great application. But once you've done what you can to try to control the outcome, the next question is, can you prepare for multiple potential results? So often our discomfort for uncertainty comes from clinging to one particular version or vision of what the future will look like. And then rather than ask yourself, okay, if this happens, what will I do? Ask yourself, if this happens, what will I do? If this doesn't happen, what I'll do? If there's a third option over here, what will I do? It's called contingency planning. So thinking about the different contingencies that might happen. But what if I only want

one thing to happen? Like, I have a lot of friends where they're like, I want to have a kid and I want to have a family and I don't have a partner yet. And there's no way for me to live a happy life unless I have a kid in the context of having a family, like not go off on my own and do it, but I want a family with a kid. They're not comfortable with the idea of preparing for contingency for that because that is so important to their vision of a life well lived. I don't think it's a problem to have a really strong vision or to really want something in your life. But I think you have to balance that desire with realism of thinking about that not potentially happening. I just think that's like it's a scary psychological thing because you are admitting that there is a future where that might not be what happens

for you. So let's go back to breast cancer patients, for example. So you do your biopsy. No one wants breast cancer. But one of the best things that you can do in that moment is prepare for different situations. So if I were to get a positive diagnosis, do I know what my insurance is? Do I know how my kids will get to school if I have to go and to take tests? Do I have all of sort of my ducks in the row? another sort of potential thing you can do in that moment is to look for the silver linings and potentially bad outcomes. So I didn't get the job, but that means that I might be able to do X, Y, or Z that job would have precluded me from being able to do.

So that's sort of the next question, like how can you plan for different contingencies? And then after that, it just comes down to acceptance, acceptance of the fact that you can't know for sure. And you can do things like, you know, breathwork and meditation that can help regulate your nervous system. You can do things like finding flow state activities that can help you get distracted while you're waiting to receive that acute piece of information that you're waiting on. There's a really cool study where they had participants play games of Tetris while they're waiting to get results of a test. And if the game was too easy, they were really stressed. And if the game

was too hard, they were really stressed. But if it was right at sort of the limit of their threshold, they were able to better cope with that waiting period. There's lots of examples during the pandemic and quarantine that we can learn from that. But the last sort of place that that leaves us is the sort of fundamental question of this book, which is how do we live in a world where uncertainty is unavoidable? It is part of what it means to be human. And in that case, you have to just accept the fact that you might not know until you know. What's helped you in your own life?

and what does the research say are the most effective ways to accept in this larger way? Yeah, there's some research about psychological distancing. And so, for example, if you are able to talk about yourself in the third person or give yourself advice that you might give to a friend that can help you sort of unattach yourself from a situation that you're clinging to so deeply, you can look for the potential upsides of uncertainty. So so often when we look at uncertainty, we see it as a threat because biologically, we were hunter-gatherers in the jungle and there was a wrestling in the bushes, not knowing the source of that sound could have potentially been lethal. And so our tendency as

humans is to try and find certainty wherever we can. It's the reason why we like music that's based on repeating patterns where we can anticipate what's to come. I noticed that when an artist samples the song I've heard before. It's instantly comforting. I'm just like, oh, yeah, and that's because it feels more certain. I'm totally like, I know where this is going. This feels safe and secure. But there's another side of uncertainty that we often discount, which is uncertainty is the source of mystery, of serendipity. There is so much that we can't anticipate in life. And that's part of what makes life so magical. I'll give one quick example from the business world that I think is a nice one to think about. So in the early 2010s,

There's a startup in the Bay Area. And it was called Tiny Speck. And it was this online multiplayer game. And it was super hyped. They were covered in the New York Times when they launched. They had raised $17 million. They had tens of thousands of active players in the first week. And the founder decided to do something that others thought was crazy,

which is he decided to shut the company down, sort of at the peak of its success. He had this feeling that the business was not on a sustainable path. And so he made his investors whole. He gave his employees the opportunity to leave. And then with the employees that were left, he decided to pivot and try to start a new company in a different industry. While they were building this online game, they had built this internal communications tool so that they can collaborate while they were building. And that company is Slack. That founder is Stuart Butterfield. And the reason why I like the story, of course, there's like a nice bow on the end, Slack sold for like 20.

billion dollars to Salesforce, like one of the most successful enterprise businesses of all time. But the reason why I like this story is because Butterfield in the moment said, we had no idea, like the possibility of this opportunity. We discovered it as we went. We had to like have the faith to take one step in front of the other. And what he discovered was larger than what the game could have ever become. And so that is the benefit of having tolerance of uncertainty. It's like the difference between like, oh my God, I don't know what's coming next to being like, oh my God, I don't know what's coming next. Yeah, imagine the alternative. Imagine if everything was scripted. Like we were all just like on a conveyor belt going to like a known destination. Like no movie, not have a spoiler. You know, no, there would never be like the butterflies of a first date. You know, everything would be written. We don't want that reality either. So it's a balancing act. We need to have some certainty in our life, some things to anchor us and help us feel grounded. And then also we can build that tolerance for uncertainty through our own experience, learning that we can be okay. uncertain situations. I find that really helpful because I'm a person who, if you ask me, I'd be like,

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branch basics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branch basics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. that is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. There's a few things I want to double click into. One thing you said was that we can kind of like recognize what's in our control and what's out of our control and work on the things that are in our control. Yeah. I find humans are pretty bad at knowing what's in our control.

I think we spend a lot of time, myself very much included, fixating on these things that are out of our control and acting like they're in our control while also missing these things that are very much in our control. So do you have any advice for figuring out which thing is. in which category? Yeah, I mean, it's a hard question, but I think the problem often starts one step before, which is even being able to distinguish and ask yourself what is in my control in this moment. So I think climate change is a great example. So many people are anxious about climate change right now. It's this big tapestry of potential intersecting crises. And the normity of that

has the potential to send you for an existential loop to keep. you up at night. And the thing that will help your anxiety is actually the exact same thing that will help make a difference with climate change. Getting rid of plastic straws. Is recycling. Yeah, exactly. Which is taking action, you know. And there's this quote from Dan Harris, the 10% happier guy where he says, you know, action absorbs anxiety. And I really like that as sort of a naturally neurotic and anxious person, I often find when I'm able to take the first step, that's when my anxiety starts to dissipate. That's when I can start to see clarity. And at the same time, with something like climate change, the only thing that's going to actually help us is

if we do find that sort of one string that we can pull on in the tapestry of different solutions. There's a metaphor that I learned while I was working at this design firm IDEO that I think about all the time, which is that being a leader is like sitting in a rowboat on a lake that shrouded in heavy fog. You might not be able to see very far in front of you. You might not be able to know exactly where you'll end up, but you have two jobs. The first is to have faith that you'll eventually reach land. Remember, you're in a lake. And the second is to keep rowing.

And I think the keep rowing part is the key. That is the way that we are able to navigate uncertainty, just focusing on the next right action and taking one step at a time. I often also say, if you want to quote me, Simo, action is the antidote to anxiety, which is similar. And I do think there's really interesting research around how the action doesn't even need to be related to the thing that you're anxious about. Like you can take action about something in your personal life and it will make you feel better

about your career life or the environment or whatever. So any small action is going to give you back your sense of agency, which is really helpful. The thing I struggle with, though, so to use the rowboat analogy, figuring out which direction to row in, I feel like if I row the wrong way, if I don't have enough certainty to pick a path, then I'll pick the wrong path and waste my time, take me further away from the shoreline that I'm going for. So how do we know when we have enough certainty to pick a direction? Yeah, that's the crux of the fear, right? it's that you're going to go in the wrong direction and you're going to waste your time.

There's going to be a huge opportunity cost. One, I think any decision has some sort of risk baked into it. In the moment before you make a decision, all possibilities are still open to you. And then the minute you decide to go in a direction, you have to sort of foreclose all of those possibilities and that can feel like a loss. You don't know necessarily the benefits of the direction you've chosen. you just know all the things that you haven't chosen. And that's concrete compared to something that is like a little bit more abstract.

But I think we often discount our own ability to course correct. You know, there's lots of cliches about this. You can say like there is no right decision only the ability to make a decision right. Or you can say you can go in one direction and you either get a lesson or you get confidence that you've chosen the right path. I teach career design. And one of the things that I often try to help my students do is to make a decision in a direction, even if they know it's the wrong direction or they think that it might not be right for them right now,

because that will give them information. And then, especially if it's a two-way door decision, a decision that isn't too hard to undo, knowing that that is the wrong path for you can help, you get closer to the right path eventually. Now, there are certain decisions in our life, like picking who to marry or whether to buy a house or not, that are more like one-way door decisions. You know, once you walk through that door, it's harder to go back. But the majority of the decisions in our life are two-way door decisions, and we take a sort of one-way door mentality to them. We discount our own ability to course correct, to adapt, to figure things out as we go.

And so we try and gather endless information or talk to our yoga teacher about our dilemma or to try and do every single chat GPT query you possibly can before you make your choice. But often there are diminishing returns that information you can capture. And it's more effective to make a decision before you're completely ready. Because when you're 100% ready, often it's a little bit too late. What about one-way door decisions? Like, you and me have talked a lot about me trying to decide whether or not I should have a kid or these ones that feel much more. Like, you can't go back from that. How do we approach those?

The biggest thing that I learned from talking to John Gottman, who was sort of the love doctor, one of the biggest researchers when it comes to relationships in love, is when you're really in a dilemma with a one-way door decision, the thing you have to try to get in touch with is yourself. The big piece of advice that he gave is to know thyself. And a little spoiler to the sort of conversation that we started with about the couple that was just starting to get divorced. The biggest thing that Connie and Andrew learned in that year was who they were independent of their relationship.

And so with a question like whether or not you want to have a kid, I definitely can't answer that question for you. You can't play out both counterfactual and the choice that you make at the same time. We only get one life to live. And so at a certain point, you have to make a bet. You have to put the chips on the table. And often, what makes a hard decision hard isn't that there's like a clear, better decision and a worse decision.

and we're just too stupid to see. It's that these decisions have tradeoffs. Having a kid might give you some benefits, not having a kid might give you other benefits. And at the end of the day, you just need to choose which tradeoffs you're willing to accept. I don't want any tradeoffs in my life. Well, it's hard to be a human species then. It is interesting. The advice to know thyself, you know yourself better than most people I've come across in my life. You give this sense of like a real self-trust that I think is increasingly hard to come across. I don't know if it's because we're being told who we should be or what we should think at every single moment of our lives or where this disconnect is coming from.

But I'm curious just because you are this very self-knowing person if you have any advice for how we could get to know ourselves better. I think one place to start is looking backward. And uncertainty tolerance as I arguing in the book is a muscle that we can. can build over time. And one of the first things that I'll ask people to do is to think about past moments in their life that were incredibly uncertain. Maybe it was a period of time after you graduated school before you knew what to do, or maybe after losing a loved one, or maybe a personal decision that you were flip-flopping on. And then think about both what helped you in that

moment and what came of that tumultuous period in your life. I think one of the best things that we can do when we really don't know is to find what I call certainty anchors, those things in your life that will be the boulders amidst all the changing winds. And so maybe they are your values, or maybe they are your commitment to live in a given place or your commitment to your partner. And you might not know whether or not you want to have a kid, but you can know some things that will remain constant regardless of whether you have a kid or not.

And I think that's a great place to start to find some grounding when we are certain about some aspects of our life. It makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. And then part of it is just chance. And I think one of the things that I've learned through living some uncertain periods, whether it's been as a freelance journalist abroad or switching careers or deciding to propose to my wife, for example, is that you don't necessarily need to have a lack of doubt in order to commit. There's a psychologist named Rollo May who says commitment is healthiest, not in the absence of doubt.

but in spite of doubt. And I think that is really wise. How can you make decisions in spite of not knowing for sure that reinforce the type of person that you want to be, that refine your character? I'm thinking specifically about this one moment in my life where I was working as a journalist

and I got a job offer to leave journalism to join this design firm. And I could not make up my mind for the life of me. I couldn't possibly know whether I would like the design job better than the journalism job until I did it. That was a source of my agony. It was looking for certainty about a decision where there was no certainty to be found. And what helped me make the decision ultimately was a question of what kind of person do I want to be

and how does either choice reaffirm some of the values of that potential person? I had told the recruiter at the design firm that I wanted to take the job. I was having lots of doubt. And then I decided, okay, I want to be the type of person that is like good on my word and follows through with what I say. And maybe this will be the biggest mistake in my life. And maybe I'll try and come back to journalism with my tail between my legs. but this is a decision that reinforces the type of person that I want to be.

I think that's a nice question that can be a heuristic when you're at one of those crossroads in your life. Have you ever encountered somebody who made the wrong decision and it ruined their life in a way they couldn't come back from? I have friends that have like broken up with partners that they regretted and then tried to get them back and we're not successful. I have friends that have. have taken on incredible amounts of debt to go back to graduate school to pursue a degree

that didn't actually lead to job prospects on the other end. But in general, I think the norm is that even in those sort of catastrophic mistakes, you might call them, they are character refining moments in their own way. Like, it could be a really hard way to learn a lesson. You know, This author, Dan Pink, has this book, The Power of Regret. And the idea that has stuck with me from that book is that regret can be incredibly instructive. When we know that we regretted something, it shows us that we really cared about something. Yeah, we have a whole interview with Dan Pink about regrets. So if that sounds interesting to you, I can link that in the show notes. I thought it was fascinating. What I took away from that interview was that we always regret not taking a risk more

than we regret taking the risk, even if the risk does not work out. I have lived with that and applied it to my life in hundreds of ways since that interview. So I think that's fascinating. I'd love for you to share with everybody listening to the only option test. Say that you're deciding between going on vacation to Paris or to Rome. This feels much higher stakes than pasta or pizza at the restaurant, right? It's potentially very costly. It's potentially one of the few vacations that you can take.

that year or maybe in that few years. And so we think it's a really big deal decision. And so you might create a spreadsheet and compare things and worry about what might happen if you get swindled by an Italian cab driver or get food poisoning from bad escargo or whatever and think about all the reasons why one choice or the other could go wrong. But the only option test is basically, say I said you only have one option and your option is to take a trip to Rome, would you be happy? Okay, you only have one option, and your option is to take a trip to Paris. Would you be happy? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, then the

decision probably matters a little bit less than you think. Often, the things that we're comparing have maybe more in common than they do differently. And the risk of that worst case scenario, that cab driver swindle or that bad as cargo are likely about equal in either place that you go to. And so another situation where if this passes the only option test, if both options would be a source of happiness, if they were the only option that you had, maybe the decision matters a little bit less than you think. So at that point, can you just kind of like close your eyes and pick one? Yeah.

I mean, everyone has their own way of doing it. You know, I'm not saying that you necessarily have to flip a coin. I'm just saying that you can make a choice quickly. And the quicker you make that choice, the quicker you can start to convince yourself while you made the right choice and build the anticipation. That is a great part of choosing to take a trip anywhere. And so for people like me who are naturally ruminative and doubting, some of these heuristics can be helpful.

Yeah, you also talk about the Cheryl Strait idea of the ghost ships that didn't carry you, right? I've read that essay many, many times. I think it's a beautiful essay. And my question is always like, how? Like, how do I make peace with the ghost ships that didn't carry me? How do I let go of them? It feels like a beautiful idea and so hard to put into practice that there are these thousands of lives that I'm not going to get to live.

Well, there's actually an idea from a previous guest of the Les Moody podcast that I think is really helpful here. If you think about Evans and Burnett, the authors of Designing Your Life and their new book about meaning making, they teach this class called Designing Your Life at Stanford that's incredibly popular. And one of the exercises they do is basically ask people, how many lives do you want to live? If you could live as many lives as you want. And they say that the average answer is something like nine, you know? And on one hand, you can think, what a tragedy.

Like we only get to live one life where the majority of people want to live eight lives. or you can think about the other side, which is like how liberating. Like, we are never going to be able to live all of those lives. And so I am going to try and live this one life at the best of my ability. You know, for a while I was an international correspondent. I was writing overseas. And I remember having this lesson about travel, which is sometimes I would show up in this country, like Nepal. And I'd be there just for a few days.

And there's such a pull to like want to go to all of the UNESCO heritage sites. and go to all of like the restaurants that were written up in New York Times 36 hours in Nepal. And I remember having this realization that there's no way that I'm going to be able to see everything that is recommended to see. And the quicker I have that realization, the quicker I feel okay doing exactly what I want to do. And it's okay to go to Paris and not go to the Louvre. You know, it's okay to be on vacation and maybe watch Breaking Bad in your hotel room for a few hours because even if you tried to do everything, you would only be able to live this one

life out of nine. And so that's sort of what helps me have some peace in thinking about all the roads not taken or all the ghost ships that aren't carrying me is that part of what it means to be human is just to make decisions, half chance, and be present as they go. And I can link that episode if you want to listen to that in the show notes. It will make you cry. It's about finding more meaning and purpose in life. I cried recording. I cried editing and I cried listening back later. So like worked on me every time. High endorsements. So fair warning. Easy cry. Easy cry. I have a really easy cry at commercials. Do you cry easily? More so since I've become a father. That's interesting. I feel like you're Italian. I feel like Italians are very in touch with

their emotions. I'm a Scorpio Italian, which is something I can't even put a word on. Don't let him in the wild. You say in the book that there's three uncertainty traps. So these are things that essentially keep us from right-sizing our relationship with uncertainty, correct? Yeah, I refer to them as comfort, hubris, and control. Comfort is that voice that says, you know, stay where it's safe. Hubris is that voice that says, you know best, and control is that voice that says, plan everything. You can control the future.

And they're all damaging in their own ways. I think the other side of each of these traps has a virtue as well. So on the other side of comfort is growth when we're able to. to get outside of our comfort zone, that's when we're able to learn and to grow. When we're able to trade some of that hubris for open-mindedness, for humility, that's when we're able to learn because when we think we know all the answers, we aren't opening our mind to new information that might emerge. I think it's a particularly important scope for leaders. We think that the best leaders are the people that have the most conviction and talk about

the future with the most certainty. But actually, the best leaders research shows are people who can admit what they don't know and persist nonetheless. And yet, though, I, like, politicians don't do that. And we get so mad when they do. Like, if a politician's like, this is the belief I had 10 years ago. And now, because I got new information, I've updated that belief. We're like, you are not consistent as a person. We're voting you out. What is up with that? Flip-flopping has a brand problem. Changing your mind about something is a sign of growth. It's a sign of being attentive to new information as it presents itself. And yet we judge people so much when they change their mind. I think the perception of this is changing a little bit in fields outside of politics. You know, Adam Grant wrote this

great book called Think Again. That's all about this topic. But the truth is, like there's some great research in the book about how scientists, for example, that admit they were wrong in the past are seen as much more favorably than scientists that just think that they're right all the time. Anyway, the last certainty trap is control, which I think is one of the hardest, especially for ambitious type A people who want to see their life go in a certain direction. I think it holds us back a lot, particularly in like the dating realm. I have a lot of friends who are dating and they want all of their relationship to adhere to this sort of standard rubric that they have in their head, this timeline that they know that they

want to be on. And there's this idea that I've been playing around with. You might have heard of the arrival fallacy, which is like when you get the thing that you thought you wanted and feel less fulfilled than you actually do. You know, you get the promotion and sort of this like fleeting sense and you're like, is this it? I think there's also a departure fallacy, which is when we create these expectations that we should hit these milestones in life, that we should be married by 30 and have a kid by 35 and have a house by 40. There's actually something that's incredibly freeing of understanding that that timeline is a fabrication and there is no professor grading behind the scenes and that you aren't able to plan exactly how your life is going to go.

the sort of canonical example of letting go of control comes from the parable of the Chinese farmer. And what happens is that the farmer has a horse that runs away. And all of his neighbors come to his door and they say, we're so sorry to hear about your horse. What a tragedy. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. The next day, the horse comes back and with it, there are seven other wild horses that it brings with it in tow. And again, the neighbors return to the door, and they say, oh, you are so lucky.

What great fortune. You have all of these horses now. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And then the day after the farmer's son is riding one of the wild horses and falls off the horse and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, you know, what a bummer. We're so sorry to hear about your son. What a tragedy. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no.

The next day, generals from the military come by the village to conscript people, to draft people. into the war. And because the sun is broken his leg, he gets out of the draft. And the neighbors say you're so lucky. And this time you can join me. The farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And I think that equanimity, that resistance of wanting to know exactly how a particular event will shape our lives is an incredibly empowered and, dare I say, agentic way to live. It allows you to be in the present moment. When we are trying to control, we are thinking about the future in a way that we don't have the power to control or to plan. When we are trying to think about exactly how our career or our relationship or our personal life will go, we become more brittle. We become less

adaptive. We become less open to seeing the world as it is, as opposed to how we wish it to be. I don't think there's anything wrong with planning or having goals or having a bucket list or desiring things from your life. So as long as you're not white-knuckle-gripping those accomplishments to the point where you're not allowing yourself to actually be present in the life that you're currently living. I was diagnosed with OCD a little over to. 10 years ago, and it took me years to get that diagnosis because my OCD looks nothing like what you see on TV. OCD is so misunderstood and it is nothing like the stereotypes about being organized or really any of the portrayals that you see in mass media. It's a condition where unwanted,

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for these dating milestones? What would be an alternative way that they could be approaching that? One of the things that I like to think about is the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to recognize what I can control and what I can't control and the wisdom to know the difference. So when it comes to dating, what can you control? You can control the amount that you're putting yourself out there. You're increasing your surface area of luck. You can control how you express your values, what is important to you.

looking for someone that shares those values. You can control your intentions to want to, for example, have a kid by a certain age and try to find a partner that wants to have that as well. And you can't always control your biology, what happens in life circumstances, what happens in your career, whether your partner changes your mind. And so keeping yourself grounded in that category of things that you can control, having those intentions, but keeping them as intentions, as opposed to mandates, is a much more adaptive way to live your life. I'll give you one example. When my wife and I got pregnant and trying to have our first kid, we walked into the doctor's office on the first day, and we created this list of how we wanted the birth to go. And we handed

the doctor the list. And we said, okay, these are, these are birth plan. This is exactly how we wanted to go. And the doctor looked at us and she said, it's your first time, isn't it? And the idea is that, you know, okay, it's great to have like intentions of how you want the birth to go, but rarely does everything go to plan. And so it's better to have preferences, not a rigid plan. And when we are too fixed on a rigid plan, whether it's a strategy for an organization or a plan of how we're going to live our life, it becomes like a narrow bridge that we're balancing upon. We're susceptible to be blown over by a strong gust of wind. I want to walk back to comfort because you tell this really interesting story about a woman

named Kate in the book and she joins a campus organization that sort of becomes like a religious cult a little bit. And at the heart of its appeal is this certainty that it offers. And it made me think about how religion in general offers so much certainty. It gives you rules for how you can live your life. It gives you rules for what life is going to look like after it's over. And as more and more people have moved away from organized religion, do you think that's why we're feeling so much more uncertain than we felt historically? Yeah, I think religion is an incredible anchor, you know, that term that I used before. Like, for example, last week, my grandmother passed away. She was 99 years old.

And in the Jewish tradition, there's this tradition of Shiva, which is these instructions for what you do in the first seven days after a loved one passes away. And it's incredibly comforting to know that there is a protocol. There's a series of steps that you can follow in a moment where life feels so uncertain because you've lost someone that you live. I think religion is really good at finding those anchors for people's lives and also giving them a container to wrestle with some of those big questions and a community that can be an anchor to help absorb some of those big questions at all. I think one distinction is between what I might call blind faith and what I might call conscious faith.

And so I think of blind faith as the mandate to believe in one particular worldview with a lack of flexibility for anything but that worldview. Whereas conscious faith is something more like putting your heart on something, choosing to believe, but also opening your mind to coming to your own understanding. of what it means to you. Part of the appeal of organizations like cults is that they prescribe a very certain worldview. They say, this is how the world works. If you do these set of things, you will become successful professionally.

You will reach enlightenment. You will go to heaven. You will never feel lonely ever again. And that's incredibly alluring because that's a really deep psychological desire we have, you know, to feel certain. It's like the song that's based on repeating pattern. But the problem is it's easy until it isn't.

And the inflexibility of those paths leave the individual without the agency to be able to come to their own understanding and have a sense of openness to the world as it emerges for them. And so I'm a big fan of choosing to put your faith in something, whether it is a religion or cause or your neighborhood group or this uncertain thing that you want that might not turn out. But there's a big difference between blind faith and conscious faith. Is there an easy way to knock ourselves or others out of blind faith? I don't think you can sort of bang someone on the head with the idea that they have to leave

because our natural tendency is to get defensive, especially if you pull to one extreme, hard, our natural polarity will make us pull in the other direction to sort of balance it out. If you come across too strong, the truth is I don't know. And I'll try to practice some intellectual humility myself and not try and make up an answer. Oh, that's such a nice segue, because I wanted to talk about hubris. You basically make the argument, we talked about this with politicians, that in many circumstances in our lives, particularly in leadership, we would benefit from having a little bit more uncertainty and projecting a little bit more uncertainty. How can we recognize when we are in a

situation that could benefit from an injection of uncertainty? When the honest answer is that we don't know, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. And at the beginning of the pandemic, Airbnb lost 80% of its business. It was like about to IPO and be this heralded success story for the tech industry. And then all global travel shut down. And he had to like raise emergency financing and figure out how to weather the storm. And one thing that I learned from Chesky is that even if you. can't be certain about the outcome or the state of global travel, there are things that you can

help your employees find more comfort and certainty in. So, for example, he increased the cadence of his communication, whereas they used to have either weekly or biweekly sort of all-hands meetings and check-ins with the whole company. He changed that to every day. So even though you can't have certainty about the news, maybe you don't even have an update. to share, but giving your employees a time that they can rely on where leadership is sharing the updates that they do have can be one of those anchors amidst the uncertainty that you're holding. How do we know the right amount of certainty and uncertainty to project as both a boss and an employee? It starts with trust. I used to think that the people in authority or leadership

positions that I trusted the most are the people that had the most convincing story of exactly what the future would hold. And I think increasingly the leaders and the people I look up to the most are the people that understand what they know, understand what bets they're making, and understand what they don't know, and are able to communicate all. three of those things clearly to their employees. Do you think that's true for employees as well? I think one of the best things that employees can do, particularly early career employees, is test things through hypotheses and prototypes, which is to say that as opposed to going to her boss and saying, hey, like, what do you think I should do about this side or another thing? Be like,

hey, here is my example of what cold email I might send to that prudential business lead that we're looking for. Or, hey, I've really been thinking about how we might be able to change this policy in the company, and I wrote up a V1 of what this looks like. It's much easier to give your boss something to react to and not feel so attached to it as an employee, saying this is my best guess or this is my hypothesis, and really treat it like you are a scientist, having a hypothesis, running a test, seeing how that test goes, and then being able to adapt over time. There are two other tactics that I want to talk about in the book. We talked about finding your anchors, and we talked about making peace with the ghost ships that didn't carry you. You also talk about choosing curiosity over comfort. Why is this important? And how can we do that? It comes back to this idea that we have a natural tendency to look at uncertainty as a threat. But we can see that potential that comes from uncertainty. And curiosity is really the thing that I think unlocks that. If we have something happen to us, we can be more like the farmer and say, maybe yes, maybe no.

Research shows that we have this natural tendency to get into a fight, flight, or freeze response when we are in an uncertain situation. And that's why so often we reach for the safe bet, which might not necessarily be the right bet or the optimal bet. But when we're able to look at that uncertainty with curiosity, when we're able to ground ourselves and take a step back, we're literally able to see possibilities that we can't see when we're in that narrow, fight, flight, or freeze response mode. The researchers call it approach mode. When we're able to approach uncertainty with a sense of wonder or curiosity, it allows us to see

it as the birthplace of possibility and not just the source of our potential doom. What are your favorite tactics to cultivate curiosity in your life? One of them is inspiration, particularly through art. I love listening to new music, watching movies, and particularly with an eye towards originality. I love people that do things unlike anyone has ever done them before. What's an example of that? Like, with a movie that you're like, whoa, this is unlike any other movie I ever saw. So an example from a movie that I saw relatively recently, it's called In and of Itself.

And it was a magician who did this live show. but instead of it just being sort of a series of tricks, it was also a narrative about his own identity as a magician. Wait, I think I saw this in New York in the West Village. Does he like answer a phone and like there's, is there like filing cabinets? I know at the beginning, everyone chooses like a label that they used to identify themselves. Yes, I saw this in New York. Interrogates it person by person.

That's so cool that they filmed. I mean, it's really, really cool. You know that I'm like a magic, magic shows are like my thing. Yeah. Like I had a magician at my last book launch. Cool. And like I, he made up a whole magic show based on my book. And anytime I go to New York, I see all the magic shows, anytime I go to L.A.

And here, San Francisco is actually quite good for magic shows. Yeah. I'll give one more sort of deep cut recommendation, which is this DJ named Kid Kowala. And he does a show unlike anything I've ever seen before. it is a play with puppets on a stage that is filmed live and then streamed for the audience. And so as an audience member, you can watch the sort of narrative play out live on the stage with the puppets. Or you can watch the video that is sort of very cinematic on the screen ahead of you. And he's live mixing music behind it.

And it's one of those things that it's like you have to be there to explain. experience it. And it was just the conviction of one person to be like, I'm going to create a wholly different genre of art, you know, live theater puppetry. And I have so much respect for that type of work. And that's really one source of curiosity for me is like, how can I always be thinking about the edge of what it means to be a writer or to bring that new things into the world? Yeah. I think that's the important part of engaging with something like that is it moves the edges. Like it moves the edges of what's possible because you're like, oh, I didn't know that. I mean, not to be that girl, but I felt like that at the Ares Tour.

I was like, I didn't know that a concert could feel like this. It felt like it incorporated elements of musical theater. And it was just this very different experience that I'd ever had at a show. And I was like, oh, now I know that that's possible. That moved the edges of possibility for me, which I thought was really interesting. Okay. The next thing that you say is to trust your future self to handle future problems. Why is that important?

And how can we do that? This comes from a friend of mine named Emily Onhalt, and she is a mental health professional that particularly works with entrepreneurs and people navigating uncertainty and change in her life. But before she became a therapist, her mom was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness in her early 20s. And she was really struggling. She was by her mom's bedside week after week. And one day, one of their family friends, this guy named Bill, came to visit them. And Bill said, Emily, how are you doing? And Emily said, honestly, I'm not doing very well. I'm writing this roller coaster of anticipatory grief and fear. I just don't

know what I'll do if my mom passes away. And Bill is an oncology doctor. So he has lots of experience with people dealing with the end of their life. And he told Emily something that I've never forgotten since I heard it, which is, he said, Emily, the version of yourself that will deal with that tragedy if or when it happens will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more information, more context, and be better equipped to deal with that event than the version of you today. You have to trust in your future self to solve your future problems. And I love that statement so much, because so often when faced uncertainty, we have this natural tendency to think about all the things that will go wrong.

We have a natural tendency to rush out to meet our worry, to catastrophize. And yet, by having trust in your future self, you are able to not have to suffer before something like that comes to be. And Emily is so glad she got that advice because her mom ended up recovering. and is all right. And Emily didn't have to go through that whole process of grief and suffering unnecessarily because she was able to trust in a future version of herself. And I think so often when we are at a crossroads or at the precipice of something

or at a place that we've never been before, we have the ability to trust in our future self to be able to weather that storm, handle that setback, adapt or swerve if life gives you a challenge. And by being able to cultivate that trust, we are able to be more present where we are, as opposed to thinking about everything that might go wrong in the future. We're going to do a speed round. I have a bunch of uncertain situations that keep people awake at night, that fill people with anxiety,

and I would love your research-back tactics to deal with each one. Great. I'm worried AI is going to destroy humanity. Start playing with the tool is yourself. One of the best things that you can do for uncertainty tolerance is exposure therapy. Get yourself more proximate to the source of your fear, and hopefully you'll be better equipped to both have a realistic perspective and more adopt. if the robots do come for our jobs.

And all of life itself, like a Terminator situation. I can't decide whether to break up with my partner or not. Ask yourself, what is the more expansive choice that you could make in this moment? I often think that these answers are better held in our bodies than in our minds. And we tend to run in circles, go on loops, running these thought experiments. But if you can literally think about it as an atomic experience, what feels more expansive versus what feels more contractive and move towards the more

expansive thing. I can't figure out whether moving will make me happy or not and if so, where I should move. Prototype the move. Go rent an Airbnb for a week in the place that you're thinking about moving, learn what you can learn, and then come back and make your decision.

I had a revelation about this recently. So you know that I've been studying novelty and our draw towards novelty. And I was driving around L.A. and I was like, oh, should I move? here like I love LA so much. I love the creative energy. And then because I'd been doing all of this research on novelty, I realized that this huge part of my draw to LA or like why I Zillow whenever I'm in Montana or Paris or anywhere that I'm on vacation, I'm like on Zillow. And I'm like,

what would my life look like if I lived here? Is because novelty wakes us up to the present moment. Like it turns all of our senses on. It makes us pay attention. We literally smell more, see more, feel more when we're in novel places. And if you move somewhere, you lose. You lose. that novelty. And so you lose this big part of the thing that draws you to it. You lose some of that magic. And it doesn't mean you should never move, but it means this big part of what you're experiencing when you're wondering if you should move is the novelty, not the place itself. Totally. Let me build on that for a second. I think we've all maybe gone through a moment in our lives where we were dating around or maybe not all of us, but getting a rush from the novelty of

meeting all of these different people. And there was this moment in my early 20s when I was doing a lot of dating, I realized the more expansive thing for me was actually commitment to someone as opposed to just trying to like try every flavor at Baskin-Robbins, so to speak. And commitment was actually more novel to me than going on another first date. And so I don't think that novelty or commitment always has to be the thing that others might see as, you know, more different, it can be the more felt experience of what would be more novel for yourself. That's so interesting. And I just think being aware of like, where are your feelings coming from? Like, where is that? Is the rush coming from the person or the novelty of the person? Is the

rush coming from the place or the novelty of the place? And teasing those apart, I think, can be really helpful. Okay. I keep hearing about mass layoffs and I'm freaking out that I'm next. I'm sorry. But this comes back to separating what you can and what you can't control. What can you control? You can try to make yourself indispensable at the company. You can have a frank conversation with your manager about what success looks like

and whether you're meeting expectations. You can network and diversify the opportunities that are available to you if you were to get laid off. And sometimes Block just lays off 40% of their employees and it has nothing to do with your individual performance. Contingency plan, plan for different potential scenarios in your life and don't try to control something that you can't. I'm trying to decide whether or not to have kids.

This is a decision that only you can make. And the reason why it's probably hard for you is because you see the tradeoffs of having kids and you see the tradeoffs of not having kids. And rather than thinking that if you just banged your head against the wall at the right angle, full clarity will emerge, ask yourself, what tradeoffs am I most willing to accept? I'm terrified that we're descending into fascism and I feel. I have no control of it. Find one cause that you care about that makes the world into a version of the world

that you actually want to live in. And is it okay if like, like, I just picture the person like singing while Rome is burning. You're like over here being like, I save this tree. And everybody's like, our national parks don't exist anymore. Well, the problem isn't necessarily that this one individual can't single-handedly all fascism. The problem is their anxiety is paralyzing them from doing anything about it. Yeah, I completely agree.

My mom died young of cancer and now I live in fear of getting it. Go to therapy. Try and find other people who might be struggling with something similar and find solidarity through the shared experience. You're less alone than you think. I would also say trust your future self to handle your future problems. Like I do think that it's not a problem yet and future you will have more information and more insight, wisdom, tools there.

Amen. I'm dating and I can't find a partner that I like, but I want kids and a family. family. Continency plan. Continue to date. Put yourself out there. Make your desires really explicit. Tell your friends what you're looking for and potentially explore ways that you might be able to have a kid if that is very important to you as well. You said make your desires explicit. Would you be freaked out of somebody like on a first day? It was like, I want kids. I want a family. Or would you respect that? I think you have to read the room. You know, and I think maybe there is certain where being explicit like that can be an incredible turn on if that's what your potential

suitor is looking for as well. How soon did you and Katie talk about it? Basically, one of the first states. I have always known I wanted to have kids. So did Katie. So we're grateful that that wasn't a source of contention for us. I don't know if I'm on the right path in my life or my career. Try to figure out what your values are and check to see if your calendar or how you're spending

time is reflective of those values. Also think that this is one season of your life and you might be choosing to prioritize certain values over others and know that there will be other seasons where you might be able to make different choices. That's a great segue into our last one, which is I don't know if I should prioritize enjoying my life now or optimizing for the future. That's a balance that I struggle with. I think it's a false binary. I think you can do some of both. And there are people. who try to push off all current enjoyment for some future payoff. That's a path that I wouldn't recommend. And there are some people that are only enjoying the moment at the expense of being thoughtful

about how they want to grow and live in the future. And that's also a path I wouldn't recommend. I think either extreme is dangerous and you can figure out on a day-to-day basis where you sit on that seesaw. If you had one message for people about what we are getting wrong in our relationship to uncertainty, what would that be? Uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. It is impossible to live a life without uncertainty rather than trying to rid it from your life, learn how to build a tolerance for it so that you can be more equipped when you face the inevitable

uncertainties of life. What is one thing that anybody could do the second that they turn off this podcast to begin to build their tolerance for uncertainty? Well, in Liz Moody's fashion, I'd say micro-dose uncertainty. Consciously expose yourself to an uncertain situation, whether it is striking up a conversation with a stranger, taking a new route to work, trying a dish from a restaurant that she wouldn't normally order, and see how it goes. When we're able to try uncertainty in some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to tolerate

uncertainty in others. Because we have proof that we live through it, whether it's good or bad. We did it and it's over. Exactly. Simo, tell us about your wonderful book. How to Not Know. It's called How to Not Know. I think it's a book that is really meeting its moment.

Uncertainty is all around us. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. And I wrote the book to be a guide to help you, the listener, get better at managing and maybe even appreciating some of the uncertainty that we're faced with in our work, in our lives, and in the world. It is crazy that you started working on this, like, years ago and it's coming out at what feels like the most uncertain time in human history. Yeah, I am the beneficiary of good timing. You can learn more at how to not know.com.

That is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate if you would share it with somebody that you think would love it too. It is my goal to get as much life-changing information out to as many people as possible. And you sharing episodes with people is 100% the thing that makes that happen. I would also love to be a lot of the thing that makes that happen. I would also love to hear from you in the comments, any thoughts or questions or opinions that you have on this episode. Make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, wherever you like to listen. You can find every single discount code that you heard in this episode and tons more at lizmoody.com slash codes. It is the best way

to save money on amazing vetted products. Truly, our brand partners make the best products in the world. That is why there are beloved brand partners. And it's the best way to support the show and keep completely free for you and we so appreciate it. Okay, I love you and I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. You've probably seen red light everywhere lately and honestly, I was very skeptical of it. Like, how can one thing help hair growth and skin and period cramps and thyroid health and energy. So I brought Dr. Vivian Chen, who is the founder

of Loombox, onto the podcast, and she finally explained the science in a way that made it all make sense. The short version, Red Light targets your mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of your cells, so it literally gives your cells more energy to repair, regenerate, and function better. That's why you get these localized benefits like less knee pain or better scanner, calmer stomach, and more systemic energy. In fact, there are over a thousand studies showing benefits from quicker COVID recovery times to healthier thyroid function to less depression and anxiety to better joint pain to skin health and hair health and scalp health and all of these things because the red lights work on the mitochondria in the different places that you put it and then it's also going to work on your body

as a whole. Dr. Vivian gifted me her red light and I dove into the research around it and then Zach and I both tried it for over six months, and I loved it so much that I literally begged her to become a podcast partner so that I could get a discount code for you. I have been gifted so many redlights over the years. It is a perk of this job, and this is the only one that I feel like actually helps with those deeper issues. That's because it has something that is called higher irradiance, which is essentially the dose, and a metric that a lot of red light companies do not even disclose.

And also it uses red light, which helps with the surface stuff. like your skin and stuff like that, and near infrared light, which is going to penetrate deeper into your cells. You just put it over whatever area you want to target. So I'll put it over my lower belly to help with period cramps and it makes a huge difference. I use it for headaches. So I'll like put it over my head and it makes them basically go away. It's amazing. Or I'll just sit with my loombox during a short meditation or breathwork for mitochondrial support and having it like on my skin on my face. I've gotten a lot of compliments on my skin health recently and I fully give Loombox a lot of credit. for that. Loombox is third party tested for radiance. Remember, that is the dose. That is the thing that

most red light companies are not even testing for, much less disclosing, which is crazy. It's also third party tested for wavelength and it's FDA registered, which is so, so rare. I think of a lot of red lights is more like beauty gadgets, and then this is more like a medical device that can also be used for all the beauty purposes, too. Plus, it's portable, so you can use it anywhere on your body and you can also like take it on vacation with you. Now is the perfect time to try loombox. You can use my link for 40% off. Just head to the loombox.com slash Liz. That is the loombox.com slash Liz for 40% off. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor. One of the easiest micro habits to change your diet is to stop giving yourself the unhealthy option,

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