Why Imagining the Worst Makes You Less Anxious | Dr. Raj Panjabi

Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10 Percent Happier podcast, I'm your host, Dan Harris. We live in an increasingly uncertain and unstable world, at least it feels that way. And quite understandably, you might be tempted to approach this constant upheaval by trying to control everything compulsively or alternatively curling up into a ball of denial. Neither of these is a winning strategy. We are going to talk to somebody today who has some much better ideas about how to navigate the dumpster fire of modern life. His name is Dr. Raj Punjabi. He's a Harvard Medical School physician who also served as a senior director for global health security and biodefense at the White House National Security Council under President Biden. Time magazine has listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, which is not bad. And his new book is called Safer, a playbook turning fear into action and crisis into community. Dr. Punjabi, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Dan. It's a pleasure to have you on. Nobody's put me on any lists of 100 most influential people, so I'm going to just try to sit here and control my resentment. But very, very nice to meet you. I'm really interested in talking about the book. One of the things that you talk about is that in the face of uncertainty and upheaval, a common kind of signature move of a human is denial. Why do we do that? Is there an evolutionary explanation? I found out that there is. I used to think it was a character flaw if you didn't take a threat seriously enough and then it came back to bite you. And I kind of experienced that the hard way. I start the book off talking about this experience of our infant daughter developing a life-threatening illness, and I missed it in my own living room. And for a while, you know, felt a deep amount of guilt as a parent, but also as a doctor. I trained health workers around the world to find heart failure. That's what you end up having. And when I started to do the research on Safer, I found that denial is the first feeling we tend to experience in a crisis or at times of deep uncertainty. And it turns out it's not a character flaw. What you learn is that it's actually hardwired into our brain evolutionarily. And here's the thing I learned. If you think back to our pre-human ancestors out on the savanna, they'd have to kind of be aware of a leopard was going to jump off a branch and try to attack you. But if you always thought a leopard was going to jump off a branch and attack you, your brain simply can't sustain that level of vigilance. And so it became a way to adapt. And we started to believe that whatever is happening today is how tomorrow will be as well. And that's a phenomenon that psychologists actually refer to as normalcy bias. And that is actually a good thing, but it also makes us less capable of assessing when tomorrow won't be like today. We need normalcy bias or else we're just constantly on high alert and running our nervous systems into the ground. However, we also need a system for recognizing threats as they arise. Yes, yes, we do. And part of the reason I wrote this book as a playbook, it's an eight play guide for navigating crisis and uncertainty is because I wanted to figure out how we overcome that denial when it's the right time to do it. Like if your child has a slow moving health condition like mine did that just tips over all of a sudden and you don't see the signs coming, how do you see the signs coming? Or when you're sitting there doom scrolling on your screen and thinking about all the bad things happening in the world, should we be alarmed or not alarmed? So the macro crises and the ones that happen every day, it turns out there is a way to deal with it. I experienced like many people crisis as chaos. But what I learned is actually it's not formless. There's really eight themes that come up and one of them is denial, but we also tend to, the next experience is usually feeling alone. You think about someone in your life or if you've had a severe diagnosis or you just got laid off, you'll feel isolated. We're often assessing our risk. Change happens often in a crisis. Critical information is always shifting. And then there's other themes that come up like conflict. You remember during the pandemic, the challenge during mandates, people felt controlled. And then there's vulnerability that pops up and hopefully some adaptation, but you have to change and evolve when there's a crisis. And the last one is uncertainty. I mean, sometimes like in the case of my daughter, we're not sure why the heart failure happened. She's still alive. Thankfully, she's nine now, but we don't know if it was an infectious cause, which she did have a virus grow out of her heart, or it was a genetic cause. And we may never know what the cause is. So it may come back. It may not come back. And that sometimes is what happens with the crisis is that it persists or the uncertainty around it persists. First of all, I'm glad your daughter, whose name I think is Karuna. Karuna. Yeah. Which means compassion. Yes. I come out of the Buddhist tradition. We use Karuna quite a bit in my world. Well, our kids are named Abbe, Soham, and Karuna. Abbe is courage. Soham is consciousness. And Karuna is compassion. Nice. I love that. Yeah. I'm also, I have a problem with alliteration. So it's the only way I can remember things in medical school. We're going to get to many of your plays for dealing with uncertainty, but let's start with denial. And because you do actually have some recommendations for how do we counteract the normalcy bias without, again, throwing ourselves into perennial hair on fire? What do you recommend? So a few things I've learned. Number one, when you're trying to distinguish crisis from normalcy, one of the first things you can do is to do a premortem. So imagine things going wrong and you work backwards from there and say, why would they have gone wrong? And you essentially simulate, simulate something going wrong. So this could be you're at work and you sense there's volatility in your sector. I'm in the biotech sector. Imagine the stock market crashes tomorrow and I'm worried about being laid off. Simulate what it would mean to get laid off for you. Who would you call first? Do you have enough cash in the bank to help you during that period? That helps prepare your mind for dealing with that even when it happens. That's one idea. Another tool. Wait, I'm going to jump in on that because I don't know if you know this, but in stoicism, they have this idea of premeditation of evil where you deliberately envision horrible shit that could happen so that you actually, it has the counterintuitive effect of relaxing your nervous system because you develop a plan and see that in the case of whatever evil might arise, you can survive it. So for example, in my company, I'm in the creator economy. I have a podcast. I give speeches. I write books. I have a social media operation. I have a meditation app. There are these five or six revenue streams. At any given moment, Apple changes the way its algorithms work or Instagram changes the way its algorithm works or the ad market for podcasting collapses. Any number of these things can happen and have happened. So every once in a while, sitting down with my CEO and doing what you're calling a pre-mortem or what the Stokes would call pre-metatio malorum, which is premeditation of evil, is just thinking, okay, we've had many crises in our past. Let's imagine some future crises. What would we do in those cases? And that interrupts the normalcy bias, but not in the way that makes you feel terrified all the time. It actually sues you because you know some bad shit could happen, but we're prepared for it. That's right. I think there's that old adage, better to be safe than sorry. It turns out better to be prepared than to be sorry is the way you probably practice how to be safer. You know, this practice you're describing, I mean, maybe the CIA trains people in Buddhism because I have seen the pre-mortem work being done by intelligence officials at the National Security Council. I mean, we would do these tabletop exercises, right, to predict a future flu pandemic, for instance, and we would, you know, you kind of feed a story, the head of the National Security Council, and you'd say, hey, there's a new flu outbreak in Cambodia, and it is spreading quickly between people, and it's killing a number of them. Okay, when do you start warning the public? Do you have enough information to do that, or are you just going to freak everybody out? When do you start putting billions of dollars to invest in a vaccine because every day is lives in an emergency? And then I saw, I've seen it, the other place I've seen it, Dan, is in my own practice as a doctor. I spent most of my career in internal medicine trying to help people deal with common conditions like diabetes and high cholesterol and trying to persuade them that if they take action now to eat better, more physical activity, they could prevent heart disease. And I kept stumbling, like I just failed at when I said heart disease. But the moment I asked them to visualize concretely what they would lose if they had a heart attack or a stroke, like what would you miss if you actually had a stroke and you couldn't use a part of your body? Then people would start saying, oh, I don't want to lose the chance to take my kids out into the playground and push them on a swing, or I don't want to mess up my golf stroke. Then people realize if you could make risk concrete and emotional, Daniel Kahneman's famous for having written about how people are more likely to take an action if it is framed as avoiding a loss than for the equivalent gain. And I think that's the same psychology of denial and fear that's probably playing out in the situation room and perhaps in Stoicism and Buddhism as it is in the exam room, I think. Tell me if you've ever had this happen. 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For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using the code happier at oneskin.co slash happier. That's 15% off oneskin.co with the code happier. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. You were going to move from pre-mortem to some other play. Yeah, there's another one that's for turning denial into action, and that's the first play in the book. It's called Turn Denial into Action. So you predefine a metric or a threshold at which point you would take an action. So as an epidemiologist, when you're trying to detect a new outbreak, you're essentially asking a very basic question. Are there more cases of measles, for instance, than you expect? And you just look at past years and you say, well, there were 10 cases of measles last year, and now there's 100 cases. So there's like something's going on. So what do you do? You then are going to send a team to go investigate that. But what you've done is you've predefined, and the pre is the key part. You've written down on the left side of the paper, here's the thing objectively, in that case, the number of cases. If that trigger is met, then I'm going to take an action, which is to send an investigation team. And so there are ways to apply that in our lives as well, whether you're leading a business or you're trying to help your child deal with how they're navigating a school test, for instance. That trigger action discipline is critical. And the psychology behind it, Dan, is for a slow moving crisis, what psychologists have found is that we have a very hard time of identifying that threat getting worse until it reaches an acute tipping point. The classic frog in a boiling pot of water. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And they have a term for this, it's called liminality. You've heard of the word subliminal, right? And so liminality, liminal, a threshold. Once a crisis in your home or in the world reaches an acute tipping point, liminality, at that point, how is that defined? It's defined by that point after which things will no longer be the same. You have to adapt. And everyone remembers March 2020, when you had this thing COVID going around for a while, and then all of a sudden, stock market crashed, the National Basketball Association shut down, and school shut down. All of a sudden, that was the tipping point. But the idea of a predefined metric or threshold, it being objective, measurable, is that you have a better chance of seeing those early warning signals before you hit that acute tipping point. See, it's funny, I am hearing all of this as kind of the middle path between denial and constant freaking out. So these strategies you're giving us feel like ways to not be in denial, not be suckered by normalcy bias, but then also not be so worried all the time that you're burning yourself out. So if I hear your thing about these triggers, I could just think about my son, for example. My son's almost 12. He's really smart, but we don't yet know what kind of student he is. Do I want to spend all my time wondering and worrying about like, is this kid going to be a good student? Or do I want to say, look, if he starts getting C's, you know, we're going to have a serious conversation about is he in the right school? Does he need more tutors? Does he need a contract that like my parents, when I was a bad student, gave me a contract and said, if you get above a certain grade, I'll pay you a bigger allowance. Like then I will take action. But now the best use of my energy is neither denial nor unrestrained anxiety. And this helps me cope. A hundred percent. It helps you avoid overreaction and underreaction. Both. And I think that's right. That's the value I found in it. Like with my daughter, for instance, Dan, you know, when she fell sick, I got a call from her pediatrician. I'm holding my other two sons who were like four and six. My daughter was just turned two. And the pediatrician said, we just got the X-ray results back. My wife was with her. And your daughter's heart is twice the size of normal. And the only time like I've been on the giving end of that news, and it's usually a 75 year old who has heart failure. That night, we're in the intensive care unit. The next three weeks, we're in the hospital at Boston Children's Hospital. Amazing care for her. And she comes out of it and, you know, she's on medicines for the next two years. And I'm sitting there in her intensive care unit room, cuddling my wife the first night. She is a psychologist, my wife's. She's way more like stoic and calm than I was. I got on my phone and started looking up all the medical studies to try to predict whether my daughter would be the one third that needs a heart transplant or would die if there's no not available, whether she'd recover or she didn't need medicines her whole life. So I think now what I've thought is, well, she's recovered. We don't know the cause fully. It could come back. It may not come back. That's what we've been told by her. Her pediatric cardiologist. And the good news is they've given us a way to measure if it will come back. And what is that? Every two years she has to go get an ultrasound of her heart and the ultrasound of her heart measures how good her heart squeezes. And there's a fraction in medicine. We call it an ejection fraction. It's like supposed to be, you know, a certain percentage. And the nice thing is now I can just see if it starts to slide. Rather than what I probably would have been doing is ruminating about whether this will happen again. And I think that's just that objective calibration, as you describe the middle path between panic and denial is certainly a more sane path. Yes. Yes. And it's a safe it feel like I feel safer, but I don't feel like I'm neglecting my daughter. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. It's about the appropriate amount of vigilance, not hypervigilance and not hypovigilance. OK, so let's talk about another play in your book. One of your core arguments is that when we're in a crisis, one of the most powerful tools is community. I believe that your people like your wife, psychologists often refer to this as social support. Yeah. Let me start with a very basic question. Why is that so important when you're in a crisis? The second place called don't go it alone. It's critical for a lot of reasons. Number one, you might get more information about a threat that you may otherwise not know about. Number two, you may get more resources than you may otherwise get if you try to pursue something alone. So let me let me just give you an example from my own life when I was nine years old. So I grew up in West Africa in a country called Liberia in Monrovia, the capital. My parents migrated there from India in the 70s. We lived under an authoritarian dictator and eventually the country devolved into civil war. My parents had no idea about whether we should flee. When you have to make the decision to leave everything behind your home, the store that you've the home goods store, you've set up your kid's school, uproot yourself and try to find life somewhere else when the airport, the airport in the country shut down and rebels are marching on your hometown. But you're hearing the dictator on TV say everything's under control and there's no independent media. That was the situation my parents face. I was nine. My sister was four. You're trying to make a really tough decision. Do I stay or do I go? Well, my parents could not rely on the information that they were seeing on TV because you couldn't trust the guy who was leading the country. So where do they reach out to this group of ethnic Indians? Cindy's were called sort of migrated around the world. They had friends in the US who were getting information from the US embassy as Americans saying these rebels are literally marching on the road, coming to your town. Now you need to get out. My dad started helping evacuate people on planes. He sent my mother, sister and I out. And eventually he got out on one of the very last planes that he helped organize. I mean, quite literally, if we hadn't been able to depend on the community that we were connected to that in that case, by our ethnicity, we may have been caught in the inferno. And then when we ended up here in America, in North Carolina, that family took my family in. So, you know, we got physical support. I found out where to go to school. My parents learned new jobs. So there's some really practical things that social connection can help you with. In addition to emotional support, there's some very physical things that can help you with that are sometimes existential, like, you know, for your survival or how you're going to thrive. This is one of the riffs I go on a lot on the show. I suspect my staff has a little drinking game every time I give this speech, but I'm going to give it again. We are living in a counter evolutionary way in a society that is built around consumerism, individualism and tech driven isolation. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're also seeing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction and loneliness. Yes. So you want to be healthy and happy and as anxiety free as possible. Pay attention to the quality of your relationships. It's much more important than tracking your steps or achieving ketosis or all the other bullshit that we get obsessed with on Instagram. So I'm fully with you on all of that. And by the way, Dan, just my friend Vivek Murthy, who has been on the show and as you know, is our 19th and 21st Surgeon General. He, you know, issued a Surgeon General's advisory, sort of like the highest call you can make from that office and essentially found that having loneliness and isolation pervasive throughout your life is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes to your health. Yes. I sometimes worry about Dr. Murthy's framing because I think a lot of people don't see themselves in the word lonely. But I just reframe it more as pay attention to your relationships at all levels, from so-called micro interactions or making eye contact and saying hello to the barista, to your family relationships, to don't let your friendships wither, which is very easy to do when we're mid-career, really obsessed with what we're working on. Let me just frame it in the really positive, as I did before. If you're interested in longevity, which is what everybody's obsessed with these days, longevity and happiness, this is the most powerful lever and that's supported by data. Your institution, Harvard, has been running this study for 90 years, I believe, called the Harvard Study for Adult Development. Yeah, by Bob Moldinger and the team. Who's also a frequent guest on the show. And they have found that the number one variable for long, healthy, happy life is the quality of your relationships. So yeah, so I think the loneliness thing is a problem. I just worry that it doesn't speak to many people who might qualify as lonely but not see themselves that way. Right, right. And where your point is that even if you don't feel that way, investing in those and nurturing those relationships still gives you positive benefit. And I agree with that. Actually, in the book, I was trying to figure out how do you practically, because my wife and I are always talking about like, how do you build community? And community, the definition I like is, you know, shared responsibility, people who share responsibility to one another. And in the book, what I wrote, and we're practicing now is think of three circles, your inner circle. These are your, you know, your partner, people you live with, your immediate relatives. Have you checked in with them daily? Your middle circle. And that's the this is the harder one, I think you described it, given the kind of lives we live now, tech savvy lives. These are like friends, neighbors, colleagues at work, maybe your extended family. You know, more of us migrate our lives, social lives online. We kind of have lost touch with those folks. And so one of the things I we try to do, my wife and I is like, can you pick one person once a week that you could do an act of kindness for? Yeah, we're not always good at keeping up with that practice. But every time we have it, it just has felt, you know, might just be getting a meal for someone who's having a hard time. It might be like picking up somebody's kid from school after school if they're, you know, overwhelmed. We found that that really sharpens that sense of responsibility between people who otherwise might not be related. And you said there are three concentric. Yeah. And the third one is the outer circle. And this one described as sort of. Community leaders. Experts, people in your community that you trust that are and we actually argue like you should at least know who those are. And in medicine, you know, given how much how many crises we're facing now, this country's had twice as many measles cases in the last two years in the prior two decades combined. A lot of people in Washington are saying we need to rebuild trust in public health. I've never seen trust be rebuilt from Washington. It's rebuilt by and I'm not saying that's a partisan statement. I think, you know, it's it comes from your local doctor, your local nurse, your local trusted community leader. But if you identify that trusted community voice in advance of a crisis, that's critical. And we also I also argue that you should try to diversify that outer circle, because I think that's another challenge we have is a lot of the people in our circles are people who think and look like us sort of pushing people to ask, like, is your circle the outer circle? Think and look like you or can you push yourself a little bit to add somebody who may not have the same lived experience? I think one of the biggest problems with this outside ring that we're describing is and there was a big piece about this in The Times the other day. Distrust is on the rise in this country in a massive and corrosive way. Distrust, especially of so-called experts. We are in the do your own research era, which is fucking insane, in my opinion. And honestly, like, you know, with respect to you, because I think you you and many others did heroic work during covid public health officials made some mistakes. Don't wear a mask, do wear masks, keep the schools closed longer than they probably should have been, et cetera, et cetera. That added to the mistrust. And then you have what are sometimes called conflict entrepreneurs, you know, people like Trump and Tucker Carlson coming in and stoking this mistrust for their personal gain and. Democracy cannot work if we can't stipulate to the same set of facts. So I worry about, I mean, I feel much safer telling people, hey, work on your first two circles, your inner circle and then the slightly wider circle. But knowing who to trust in an age of rampant mistrust is super tricky. Very hard. It's very hard. In fact, the fifth play in the book is called Find Common Ground, because this this theme of conflict, either conflict within yourself, within your family or within your workplace or just broadly in our society, comes up often when there's a crisis, right, when things are in upheaval. What I learned is there's this part of the reason the distrust is persistent during those times and escalating, as you describe, is because we've and public health officials to their fault, which is appeal to control instead of curiosity. And what I mean by that is an example. Again, I'm using measles because we have a lot of it right now. It's it's on a lot of our minds. Certainly a lot of parents like me who are sending their kids into under vaccinated communities are worried. But you could you could talk about this in other situations as well. So we spent. The measles vaccine came out in 1963. We spent about 37 years getting a place where we eliminated measles. And to get there, yes, we had school mandates, but we also had like outreach, meeting people face to face. All of a sudden you eliminate it. We stopped doing the outreach and the education. We rely on this brittle foundation of mandates alone. And of course, it takes just another 14 years for the first outbreaks to come back. And now we're in a place where we're likely to lose our elimination status, which like very few countries that are like level of wealth have ever lost. And I think it's a lot of it has to do is if you only apply appeal to forcing someone to do something, but not curious about what might make them do something. People ask me all the time if they're vaccinated, they're worried about a loved one who isn't. You know, the first instinct is to ask a blame oriented question. Why aren't you following the guidelines? Actually, what I've learned a more useful question to be is what's in the way? Yeah, because then you're and you often need to do that in person, which is harder and harder to do when you can communicate so easily by text and phone. People don't even use as much anymore, but by text and email and social media. And what you're doing when you do that, certainly as an official, but I think you're doing it as a parent with a kid or you're doing it as a brother with a sister or a friend with a friend is you're humanizing yourself. You're in your understanding their humanity because you're meeting face to face and you can listen to their concern. I think we should talk about this not only in the in the. Context of public health, because most people watching and listening are not public health officials, it's about how can you get the people in your life to do what's in their best interest and will keep them safe without having it backfire? And if you call them an idiot all the time and or impose rigid rules, they're unlikely to listen to you. Yeah. In case and points are our 14 year old at home, our teenager who really wanted a smartphone when he went to middle school. And my wife's a psychologist, remember, so she's consuming all the pieces of information that say really shouldn't have a smartphone until you're 16 and above. And your brains aren't fully developed to 26. Mine might have taken even longer to get to this. And our 14 year old comes home from school like a lot of kids. Their friends have the phones and the smartphones and they want the device, too. And, you know, we sat down with him and initially we were like, no, you can't have one. What I learned doing this research is when you do that, there's a part of our brains called the prefrontal cortex. And many will have heard that. It's like kind of like the part of the brain that reasons when you tell someone, no, you can't. That part of the brain, the signal dampens at the very time you want them to be open to reasoning. So, of course, we said no. And he came back with a with a vengeance and kind of pushed us and started, you know, acting out. And then we got to a point where we said, well, why is this important to you? And he said, you know, what's really important to me is I don't want to be on social media, which is what we were worried that he would want to be on. He's like, yeah, my friends have it, but I can't be in touch with my friends in the evening like they are over text. And I feel like I'm being left out. Yeah. My wife, give her all the credit for this because she does a lot of the tech management and set the phone up so that allows him to text. And he's got like the New York Times app, but no social media. Yeah. And I think if we hadn't listened to his concern, we wouldn't have found that insight. Yeah. Curiosity, not control. Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while. And in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading. 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For every item you purchase, they donate an essential clothing item to somebody facing housing insecurity. One purchased equals one donated with over 200 million donations and counting. Head on over to Bombuzz.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash happier. Use the code happier at checkout. Hey, it's Dan. I just want to tell you about something I'm really proud of. The new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. And geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind. That makes you happier and less reactive because you're steadier. That improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier than your relationships get even better. And up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world class teachers like Sabine Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. Just to reset, we're talking about strategies or plays as you call them for keeping yourself safe in an increasingly uncertain and chaotic world. Another of the plays that I found particularly interesting is you put a high, high premium on flexibility. I think there's a tendency, this may be the opposite of our tendency toward denial. Some of us, I'm not going to name any names, but his initials are Dan Harris, would try to deal with uncertainty by compulsively planning rigid plans for everything. That can get brittle, as I said, plays a high premium on flexibility and the willingness to pivot. So can you talk about how that keeps us safe? When you're in a crisis or a period of deep uncertainty, so let's just take AI, for instance. In my line of work in medical research, we are constantly trying to keep up with AI and how it's shaping how we find cures for treatments for cancer, heart disease, dementia. And it's really tough to keep up as a business. We have scientists, we have entrepreneurs. They are constantly hearing every day in the news of some latest advance of how AI or some other companies already gotten the answer to it. So that's just an example. Our economy is very volatile when there's such rapid technological change. So how do you deal with that? Well, one of the key things, whether you're a business leader or you're the head of a household is to anchor tightly to purpose so that you can hold loosely to your plans. And the way I translate that in my own life is to ask the question or at my workplace with the entrepreneurs and medical researchers I work with is to say, don't give me a perfect plan. Tell me what the next experiment is. And that is a way to hold tightly to the mission of the company, but also what the purpose is. Is it a cancer treatment you're trying to develop? But also be able almost by proactively being wanting to experiment. And I think that that's something that's going to be a skill set that's going to be more and more critical as we enter an age where we're, as they say, the fourth industrial revolution with AI sort of pervasively both upending, but also accelerating many parts of our lives and economy. So to put that in language that might resonate with just a regular person running a household, whether it's a single person household or you've got a full family, your purpose is to stay safe in an ever-changing world, in particular, like to figure out how you're going to have enough money to support your life in the midst of the emerging fourth industrial revolution about which none of us know anything. And we're hearing differing predictions every day. It's going to turn us into paperclips in a decade. It's going to create unprecedented abundance in 20 years. Who knows? Your idea is, OK, be clear about what your purpose is, which is I want to have I want to create a happy and healthy life for myself and the people around me. And instead of coming up with one rigid plan, run a series of experiments tied back to your values and purpose. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I describe it in the book as sort of iterative navigation. And Apollo 8, before they had GPS goes up to the moon, they had to program the rocket and the computer to keep reprogramming. But they always knew they wanted to go to the moon as long as they kept that as their purpose. They could iterate how they got there. And so I think in many ways, in our families, the you know, many of us are worried about our jobs getting disrupted. You know, I've worked with executive assistants, for instance, who are deeply worried that agentic AI that can schedule, you know, an executive is going to displace you from the job career you've always had. And what I've told some of the colleagues I've worked with who are working as executive assistants is if you enjoy that work, you can still anchor to that path. But you probably want to experiment with AI yourself. Maybe you could become the executive assistant that learns how to use agentic AI so well that you become the executive assistant all the executives in the company have to work with and want to work with. And that's one way of implementing, you know, this idea of holding tightly to purpose and loosely to our plans. Another thing you talk about in a crisis in terms of maintaining a simultaneity of focus on your purpose and goals and also a willingness to stay flexible is to label the unknowns. Yeah. Yes. The idea being when there's critical information and lots of shifting data. It's really easy for the mind to trick itself into believing that there is certainty in that fact. And you brought up, you know, masks and and schools closures during Covid as an example. In New Zealand, they did something very different. This prime their prime minister at the time, Jacinda Ardern, sort of famous for leading with kindness and humility during that time. She would and her health secretary equivalent would get on Facebook and social media and they would brief the public and they would not withhold any information known or unknown. They would tell the public. what they didn't know. And it's simply saying in real life or practically in life is I have a crystal ball and the crystal ball can only tell me how far I can see for these three or four things and it can only tell me for these two or three weeks and then I'll need to recalibrate. And I think that naming of the unknown also breeds trust because, you know, people don't follow, especially at times of distrust, they don't follow invincibility. Whether you're a parent leading your family, you're an executive leading your company, you're a leader like Jacinda Ardern leading a country, people don't follow invincibility. They follow authenticity. Actually conveying you don't know, but with the message that we're gonna figure this out together actually brings more people along. Do you think there's also something, I mean, I always look at everything through the lens of just an anxious individual. There's something about listing the known unknowns, to put it in Donald Rumsfeld's speak, for young people out there, Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense during the war in Iraq and in my opinion not a great actor, but he had this idea of known unknowns and known knowns and unknown unknowns anyway, but listing the known unknowns is a way to kind of wrap your arms around uncertainty that makes it just feel a little better, if that makes sense? I think it does. I think it does. We sometimes conflate uncertainty, the unknown unknowns, with the known unknowns in that phrase, which is actually risk. The difference between risk and uncertainty is, in my mind at least, is risk is you can quantify it. It's either high, medium, or low. Uncertainty you cannot calculate. So you think back to like the maps, the medieval times, and when they didn't know, like, people hadn't like gone on a ship to various lands on earth, and they would put here be dragons, if you you know, on it, and it was a void. And so risk would be, hey, we're gonna get on that ship and charter that sea that no one, and get to that land no one's been to. Risk would be, hey, there's a storm, there's clouds coming, our ship may sink, or we may go through, you know, a very difficult journey. It's high or low. There's a high chance of it or a low chance that you can see a cloud, there's a signal. Uncertainty is, when we get to that land, we don't know what we're gonna meet when we get there. We don't know whether people are gonna try to attack us, or it's gonna be a wonderful paradise to live in. That's the way I think about risk and uncertainty. And so naming the known unknowns at least lets you calibrate risk. And then with uncertainty, which is harder to measure, you just have to take a different approach. I mean, this is, I think, why we struggle sometimes, is AI is a great example. Like, you know, you had these reports in recent weeks about AI, a bunch of CEOs of various AI companies saying, like, AI could end humanity. You know, and somebody said there's a 10% chance all of humanity will end. Well, I think that's uncertainty. It's not... You're attributing 10% as if there's a risk. It could be 10% today and 5% tomorrow, like there's a chance of rain tomorrow or sunshine tomorrow. But I think it's a mistake because uncertainty is incalculable. And that's actually incalculable. It doesn't mean you can relax and say, because I can't do anything about it, I shouldn't do anything about it. You still have to, even when we feel out of control, we still have this desire when we feel out of control, that is, to feel steadier. And so the way we do that is by taking a very small practical step, right? The next meaningful step can still be in our control. And in the book, for instance, in the eighth play, the chapter is actually called Embrace Uncertainty, I learned about this idea called Shift the Locus of Control. It's a pretty common idea in psychology, it turns out, where basically what you do is if you feel totally overwhelmed by not knowing if the risk is high or low and it's just uncertain, AI, for instance, is it going to be great? Is it going to be bad for us? Take that situation and put a circle on a piece of paper. Everything outside that circle, as in like, is AI going to take my job or not? Keep it outside the circle. Within the circle, what's the one practical step you can take in the next 24 hours? And then you commit to do it. And in the case of, like I mentioned, executive assistants, it would be, let me go sign up for an AI webinar, because whether it's good or bad, that's a step I can control is at least understanding what it is. I do want to highlight, you called it play number eight, and it is, I think, a core argument in your book, and it's counterintuitive. Your argument is that we should embrace uncertainty, the thing most of us dislike the most. You say we should embrace it. Why? Well, first of all, I think it's pervasive. And the second reason is because ignoring it is sometimes not possible and often can cause us harm. So I'll give you an example. In the case of, you know, the origins of COVID, just to put that out there for a second, I helped oversee the White House's review of the declassification of whether did it come from a lab? Did it come from a bioweapon? Was it naturally occurring? I'm not going to share anything on this podcast that I couldn't share. The declassified report showed that it either is from a lab or it's naturally occurring, and it's certainly not or almost certainly not a biological weapon. That's what it showed in 2023. Now, I believe that when that report was being released from the White House or from the Office of Director of National Intelligence in 2023, there was a lot of concern that the public was going to struggle with not having a clear answer to this horrific pandemic that took the lives of a million Americans and millions more around the world. We would want some closure, right? We're not getting it. We're not getting it. We don't know if it came from a lab or it came from nature. What did we decide to do? We decided to deal with all three potential causes, whether it came from labs, nature, or a potential biological weapon. And my point being is that if we had avoided the uncertainty or just ignored it, then we would not be taking as potentially effective action as we could be to reduce risk from all three potential causes and make ourselves safer. So that's at a macro level how we can think about why addressing uncertainty matters and managing through it. But then the last thing I'd say, Dan, and turn it back to you, is there's two or three practical things we can do to make ourselves feel a lot less uncomfortable with uncertainty. One example is the idea of that shifting the locus of control. That's one. A second is updating your story. And my parents, when they came here, could not know after losing their home and their jobs and their careers in West Africa whether they would be able to build a life to keep a roof over our head and have successful careers. They updated their story. My dad would say this thing all the time. No condition is permanent. It has come to mean for me that we can't control the conditions we face, but we can control how we respond to them. And so they dedicated that moment of their lives to invest fully in their kids' education. I got to become a doctor because they got me so focused on school. But they were thinking long-term. And then the other thing, Dan, you can do to manage uncertainty is something they use in the VA system. There's this idea called acceptance and commitment therapy. I don't know if you've heard of it before. And for listeners who may not have heard of it, there's a real nifty tool that's called choice point check-ins. And here's what it is simply. When you feel uncertain about a decision, should I take that job that I've been offered or not, for instance, you often hit a fork in the road. One part of the fork is the away move. The other part of the fork is the toward move. You could take the away move, which is away from what you value and believe in. The toward move is aligned with your values. And what they found through research with vets who've experienced PTSD and a lot of anxiety is that if you take the toward move towards your values, even if you feel more anxious, over time, you actually learn not to be your fear, but to live with your fear and still actually align yourself with your values and be connected to your values and you have less regret over time. That's the third way to think about it, is to do these choice point check-ins with yourself. At a high, high level, are you also in some way saying, look, uncertainty is just the ground truth of this being alive thing. So you either embrace it because it's non-negotiable or you're just going to suffer indefinitely. I think that's right. I mean, you're not going to be able to avoid it. And I think that if you find some practical ways to manage through it, that's possible. You will at least find you can mitigate its impact on your life emotionally. What else may be true is you might find yourself getting stronger every time you face it. And you know, I talk about this idea of using tension to adapt in the book, meaning it's sort of inspired by our biology. So our immune systems are designed such that if they face a threat, an infection, for instance, they remember that threat so that the next time they face it, they get stronger. And the only way they can get stronger in the first place is by facing the first threat. What if we could approach uncertainty that way, that every time we feel a threat, some uncertainty, that we could build an emotional memory cell, like our our B cells in our body build that memory for that infection. And by documenting who showed up for me, what skills helped me through this, what did it reveal about who I want to be, what my strengths are, what my limits are? Might we build an emotional memory cell so that the next time we face uncertainty, we could, as Nassim Taleb talks about, not just be resilient, but be anti-fragile. The idea of not just bouncing back, which is what resilience is about. Anti-fragility, as he describes it, is about getting stronger only because you went through that threat. And you start to then ask a question when difficult things happen in our lives, not what can't I be because this happened to me, but what can I only be because this happened to me? I've never met this guy, Jocko Willink, who's a former Navy SEAL and podcaster, and I've mentioned this a few times on the show. So, Jocko, if you or anybody you know is listening, you're welcome to come on and talk about it. But there's this viral clip of Jocko talking about how he developed the muscle when something shitty happened to say, good. Oh, I just, uh, lost my job? Good. Or I just, I just tried this project and it failed? Good. Because there's always some opportunity in whatever quote-unquote disaster you're facing. How does that land for you? I think it's very resonant. Just give you a very simple example. I now commute for work from the Washington DC area to Boston almost every week. And that's the least favorite part of my job is having to leave my teenage and pre-teenage kids at home and my wife with them. And yet I'm stuck because this is the way I kind of keep the roof over the head of our family. And I like what I do. And so the first year of the job, I was struggling with it. And then the second year I told my wife, again, I have the advantage of being married to a psychologist, but she has the disadvantage of me being her 11th patient every day. And I talked to her and I was writing that chapter and learning about embracing uncertainty and asking that question. Not what can't I be because of this? Because I'm telecommuting, because I'm commuting. But what if I asked what could I only be because of this? And two very simple things came to my mind. This is through some journaling as well. One is I realized actually in the evenings I'm by myself. And when I'm with my kids in DC, I rarely have gotten to go to an evening lecture or a play that I would have enjoyed doing. And so now when I'm in Boston, I'll just go down and actually go watch a lecture from somebody I hadn't seen before. Now, lecture's not necessarily everybody's cup of tea in the evening. But the other thing I realized is, well, what if the kids could come and summer camp with me in Boston? And all of a sudden they're doing camps they wouldn't otherwise do. But importantly, they're getting one-on-one time with me for a week at a time that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten when I was at home. And so, yes, I agree with what he said. I think that there is opportunity in every situation. But we have to pause and reflect to imagine it. And you probably can't be told what that is. You kind of have to ask yourself. Two expressions from the meditation world are coming to mind. One is everything is workable. Like no matter what's happening, there's a way to work with it. The other comes from a guy I quote on almost every episode, Joseph Goldstein, my long-time friend and meditation teacher, and he always says, don't waste your suffering. We are going to suffer because life, either we're going to screw up in some way or life is going to foist some unwanted circumstances. as it's on us, but don't waste it, because there's always an opportunity embedded in the shit show. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. My dad, that mantra, no condition is permanent. We can't control the conditions we face, but we can control how we respond. I think he would probably agree with what you just said as well. I think that's very powerful. We have a segment we do at the end of the show now where it's called What's Good, and so it's an opportunity for the guest to recommend something. It could be a book, a movie, a play, could be some little practice they've integrated into their lives, and then I'll reciprocate with something from my side. One of the things I find good in my life is morning pages, and if listeners don't know the practice, Julia Cameron, in her book, The Artist's Way, writes about this practice where you, the moment you wake up in the morning, you get out three pages of paper, and it's really important you write, get a pen or pencil, and write whatever comes to your mind. I didn't hear it from her first. I heard it from my friend, physician-author Atul Gawande. Who was recently on the show. Oh, okay, yeah, I'm not surprised he's so terrific. He described it as a way he writes his writing practice. When I read it in Julia's book, I learned it as a spiritual practice, and I will just spend time taking questions like that one. In fact, that's how I discovered the answer to what could I only be because I commute, was through morning pages, and just writing out three pages in a row, whatever comes off your mind. You might start with, as I did, I feel tired. I feel groggy, and that's fine. Just like, it's a way of releasing the cobwebs from your mind so that then clarity comes, and I recommend that practice for writers, but just for any individual, morning pages. There's also a bunch of research around a related practice, therapeutic journaling, where for one or two days in a row, you spend, I think, 15 minutes, and you just write with no particular agenda, and no finickiness about the quality of the writing, and in the wake of a traumatic event, or just if you're doing it for no particular reason at all, it's been shown to have all sorts of positive benefits. So there's something about writing out what's going on in a kind of discursive, unplanned, no going back and editing it, and then, in fact, usually burning it afterwards, that really does help people. So you're onto something, and so is Julia Cameron. Mine is much more lowbrow. I've found in the few weeks that we've been doing this that guests always recommend something really high-minded and beautiful, and mine is always some TV show I'm watching, and in this case, it is literally a TV show I'm watching. On HBO, there's a show, a new documentary series, although by the time this posts, it may not be that new. It's called A Killer Story, and I will admit that one of my guilty pleasures is true crime. HBO documentaries are always so, the filmmaking and the storytelling is always of such high quality. I mean, I'll watch shitty true crime, because I love, first of all, I love mysteries. I love seeing, I love watching the act of people figuring something out, but also, from a Buddhist lens, crime really is about the unwholesome aspects of our mind, unregulated, unrestrained. But in this, this actually is quite an interesting story, because it's about this couple that identified what they thought was an injustice, a woman who was convicted for killing her ex-husband and her ex-husband's current wife, and nobody believed this woman was not guilty. She was convicted and in prison, and these two people have dedicated their lives to getting her out, and the story's kind of told through the POV of a grizzled, cynical, hard-bitten New York Times investigative reporter who this couple had reached out to for years, and he had ignored them until, actually, her case was overturned, and then he started to get interested. And you see him go there for her retrial. I'm not yet done with it, but it's, the characters are really vibrant, and it's, yeah, it's an elevated version of true crime on HBO, killer story, I recommend it. Well, my wife is a big fan of those, like, CSI, and so I've got something to take back to her. Yes, yes. As a recommendation. I feel much better that your wife, as a psychologist, is interested in CSI, because it makes me feel like less of a reprobate. The book, everybody, I have it for, if you're watching, you can see me holding it in my hands. If you're not watching, the book is called Safer, a Playbook, Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community, written by my new friend, Dr. Raj Punjabi. And you can get it wherever you find your books. All right, go check it out. In the meantime, thank you very much for doing this. Great job. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for making the time. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. 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