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Farnoosh Tarabi
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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Simone Stolzoff
You're listening to so Money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Tarabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh yourself, looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to SO Money. When we are certain, when we think we know exactly who someone is based on who they voted for in the last election, or we think we know exactly when the market is going to crash or exactly how the relationship is going to end, it closes our mind. But when we're able to develop enough tolerance for uncertainty to stay in this not knowing place, it allows us to open our mind to the possibilities that may emerge.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Welcome to SO Money. Everybody raise your hand if you're feeling a little uncertain right now about work, your investments, the economy, all of your life's decisions. Yeah. Same. My guest today says we are living through what the World Health Organization calls a poly crisis. Overlapping economic, political, technological and personal disruptions that are leaving many of us feeling anxious, untethered and desperate for answers. But what if the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty? What if the real skill is learning how to live with it? Were joined by Simone Stolzoff. He's a journalist and author of the new book how to Not Know. Simone argues that our obsession with certainty, whether it's in our careers, our relationships, our money, it may actually be making us more anxious, less adaptable and less fulfilled. So we get into things like why uncertainty tolerance is actually declining despite the fact that uncertainty has been the only certainty for as long as we've been humans living on this earth. How to stop tying your self worth to to your job title, the dangers of chasing a dream job, and how becoming a parent has actually forced Simone to practice what he preaches. Let's get into it. Simone Stolzoff, welcome to SO Money.
Simone Stolzoff
Thank you so much for having me.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Do you like that literation? My gosh. Say that six times fast. Like Simone stoles off so Money.
Simone Stolzoff
Simone stoles off so money.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Good job.
Simone Stolzoff
It's a tongue twister for me and my mom and every substitute teacher I've ever had in my life.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Well, today we're here to talk about my favorite subject and now yours, apparently, uncertainty. Uncertainty. There's a whole chapter of it with it in My book, my book, How a healthy state of panic, the fear of it. And right now we're feeling it in many ways. Whether you're looking at it through the lens of work money, in your book, you explore it in from so many angles and you write that in how to not know the value of uncertainty in a world that demands answers, that we live in a poly crisis. Let's start with that. Can you share a little bit about what you mean by that? The polycrisis. Is that a word that you invented?
Simone Stolzoff
No, it's a term that comes from the who, the World Health Organization and they're referring to these sort of layered, different crises that we're all facing day to day. So if you think about the economic crises of say the housing market or the fluctuations in the stock market, you can think of geopolitical crises like the wars going on overseas or tariff policy, you can think about crises that you might be dealing with in your personal life, like what is the future of your career or whether you're going to be able to afford living in the place that you want to live. And so I think the idea is that these crises don't live in isolation. They all are related. And it sometimes feels like there's this heavy cloud of uncertainty hanging over all of us right now. There was a study that studied global uncertainty over time and it found that the five highest measurements since the study began in the 80s have all occurred in the last five years. So you think of know, Covid, tariffs, wars, all of these things are just the day to day water that we're swimming in.
Farnoosh Tarabi
And is it true that we are less equipped than ever to sort of navigate uncertainty? That I was surprised by. I don't know why I thought that was unbelievable. Like I just thought by now haven't we figured out like hasn't, you know, just, you know, evolutionary wise, like we haven't, like our bodies haven't sort of adjusted to be able to figure this out.
Simone Stolzoff
We've had enough exposure.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Right.
Simone Stolzoff
Well, I mean the sort of finding comes from psychology and, and what they found is that uncertainty tolerance, so our ability to cope with all of these things that we don't know is in decline. And they really interesting study, they looked at the rise of the Internet and social media and mobile phones in particular. And they found with the rise of these new tools, this new access to limitless information, it has come and correlated with a rise in our intolerance for dealing with what we don't know. And to a certain extent it is counterintuitive Right. You'd think we live in this information age, but access to this limitless information almost always just fuels our anxiety. And the second thing that it does is I think it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know. So we have these computers in our pockets. Maybe 15 years ago, I might have been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. And now I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my phone if I don't know something. And so the world is more uncertain. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. I think that's why so many of us feel so anxious and unmoored.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Right. So I'm going to give you the floor to tell us why uncertainty is actually valuable. We'll get into the how to of it, like how to actually navigate this, the skills we need, whether it's in our financial lives, in our career lives, but at a high level. Why is uncertainty makes us uncomfortable by design? Why is this actually an important human experience?
Simone Stolzoff
Well, for one, it's inevitable, especially when it comes to anything that hasn't happened yet. Uncertainty is sort of the base case of what it means to be human. So you have to learn how to be able to tolerate this uncertainty if you want to more gracefully adapt to whatever comes our way. But I think the crux of my thesis is that when we are certain, when we think we know exactly who someone is based on who they voted for in the last election, or we think we know exactly when the market is going to crash or exactly how the relationship is going to end, it closes our mind. But when we're able to develop enough tolerance for uncertainty to stay in this not knowing place, it allows us to open our mind to the possibilities that may emerge. So y we often feel the discomfort of uncertainty. We see uncertainty as a threat, but also uncertainty is the birthplace of possibility. No breakthrough business or piece of art or personal growth discovery has come without someone getting to the precipice of what they know. And being able to persist is an attempt to be a guide of how you can get better at dealing with all of these anxieties that stem from the uncertainty that we all live with.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah, of course, the possibility, the fruits of the uncertainty we see in hindsight sometimes, like at the, at the precipice or at the beginning of the uncertainty, like it's really hard to break from it or see through it. So for somebody who is feeling the uncertainty, sees the uncertainty in, let's say the job market. We had a huge, like Disney just announced a Huge layoff, you know, last week. And my husband always says, when it's. When one major company does it, then all the big CEOs have to start doing it. It's like a ripple effect. Um, of course, that's not a. We haven't. It's not the first layoff of the season. So for that person who's worried about job security, which then means financial insecurity, what do you think they should be doing right now to navigate this uncertain time?
Simone Stolzoff
Well, first I just say that it sucks to get laid off or to live with the cloud of uncertainty about your own job. I. I cite one study in the book that professional uncertainty takes a similar toll on our health to actually losing our job. So we hate to have to. This uncertainty, this ambiguity that so many people are facing in the job market. And often you get this sort of cliche piece of advice of like, embrace uncertainty. Embrace the unknown. And I feel like sometimes that comes across as sort of gaslighty, like, no, uncertainty sucks. I don't want to embrace. Sort of falls on deaf ears if you're laying, staring down at an impending layoff or industry that might not be as stable as it once was. But a few things I'll say to someone that might be feeling some of that anxiety. One is that we are really bad at what psychologists call effective forecasting, which is predicting how future events will make us feel. So the canonical examples here are people that, say, get left at the altar, or people that become a paraplegic, or people that win the lottery. These sort of like big life events that you'd think would really ultimately change our mood up or down. And what the researchers have found is often we are really bad at sort of anticipating how they'll actually affect us. We all have a friend who probably has gone through a breakup and in the short aftermath thinks, oh, my God, my life is over. I'm not sure how I'm going to cope. And then you talk to them six months later or a year later, and they might say, oh, actually, that was a blessing in disguise, or that was the best thing that's ever happened to me. So one is sort of framing the possibility that might sit on the other side of what you don't know. The thing I would do now is to really what I call focus on finding your anchors. So when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So maybe that's things outside of your career. Maybe you get really clear on your commitment to a particular place or to a person or to a set of values. And those can be the sort of boulders that will remain steady amidst all of the changing wins. The second is you can do some. What's called contingency planning. So planning for multiple potential scenarios. Often when we are facing ambiguity or uncertainty, a lot of our distress comes from having a very fixed image of how the future will go. So putting all of your sort of identity eggs in your job title basket or thinking that you might need for this stock to go up in order for you to be happy. But similar to how an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. So how can you think about multiple potential path that you might take and how each of them provides some way to either grow or to learn or how you can benefit? And then once you've sort of separated what you can and can't control plan versus different potential scenarios, it comes back to acceptance, which is as much as we might want to know exactly what the future holds or whether you'll have the job in two weeks or two years or 20 years, there's a level of just regulating your nervous system and being able to accept the fact that uncertainty is not necessarily a problem that you can solve. That's something that we have to learn how to deal with. And so you can prepare yourself, but at the end of the day, you have to be able to accept the world as it is.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah. You know, Simone, I often feel in a weird way, like, some relief when I resign to this thought of, like, there's nothing I can do about that. And there's some science behind that, you know, as, like, maybe, I don't know, unhappy I may be about it. Like, there's almost like, there's a saying, like, the best decisions are the ones that are made for you. Because, like, you just, like it's. That option is gone. So now you have only now this many choices. And sometimes we need, like, just a limited set of choices or an elimination process to move forward. What do you think about that? What is. What is that? What is that all about?
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite studies in the book is there is this research study where they gave research participants either a 50% chance of receiving a painful electric shock or an 100% chance of receiving a painful electric shock. And Those with a 50% chance were far more stressed than those who were definitely going to receive an electric shock. And this is counterintuitive, right? You'd think, like, the People that had a chance of getting off shock free would feel a little bit more relief or hope. And I think it points to this fundamental truth in human nature, which is we would rather a certain bad thing happen to us than have to grapple with the ambiguity of not knowing. And I think that's one thing that constraints offer us is in this age of abundance, where we have this paradox of choice of all these different paths we could potentially take, it's sometimes easier to just say, okay, shock me already. Give me the certainty, even if it's the devil I know. And I think part of my goal of the book is to help people understand that in life you have to make choices in spite of not knowing. You don't have to wait till you get to get perfect clarity or perfect certainty before you take an act. And actually that action can help you find clarity along the way. A metaphor I like is to live to be a leader is like being on a rowboat on a lake that's shrouded in really 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. One is to maintain faith that you'll eventually reach land. Remember, you're on a lake. And then the second is to keep. Keep rowing. And I think that is really the key to keep putting one foot in front of another, keep taking action, because the action is what is going to absorb your anxiety. I think the biggest problem with uncertainty is that it can paralyze us. It can keep us stuck. If we're able to keep moving through the fog, through the uncertainty, through the not knowing what the future of your career or your portfolio or your relationship will look like, that's how you begin to find some clarity along the way.
Farnoosh Tarabi
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Paige from Giggly Squad
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, definitely. I mean, think having some savings or a financial cushion is a great example of an anchor. It's something that will remain hopefully constant even if there is some bad news on the horizon. And the more of that cushion, the more savings you can have. It allows you to better equip yourself for that moment of maybe losing your job or having a financial hardship. And I think the other thing that it does is it keeps you from having to rush out of that liminal space or that moment of transition as quickly as possible. We're so uncomfortable with uncertainty that often we take the sort of safe bet as opposed to the right bet or the optimal bet for your given situation. This makes sense biologically. You can think back to our ancestors in the jungle you hear a rustling in the bushes. The quicker you learn the source of that noise, the quicker you get away from uncertainty, the more likely you are to survive. But it's that same biological wiring that often gets us to avoid uncertainty at the expense of the growth or better outcome that might live. So we all maybe know someone who's in a job that they know isn't a great fit for them, or maybe in a relationship that they know isn't a great fit for them, but they'd rather stay in the relationship because it gives them some sense of comfort or control as opposed to the sort of not knowing of what it would mean to leave. But when you're able to turn toward that uncertainty, you might also discover a better job, a better relationship. And I think one thing savings does is it allows you to have that space to explore, to discover the possibilities that might be waiting for you around the corner of what you think you know.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah, yeah. Because sometimes I think about the ability to navigate uncertainty. Well, it is a privilege because some people can do it better than others simply because they have the resources. It's not. It's not just a mindset. It's also the physical resources to be able to do so. Right. They have the network, the money, the fallback plan. But that's not to say that all those things cannot be earned and cannot be planned for. And that's what we're talking about today, you know, And. And the other thing, too, is just the education. You talk about curiosity and learning also as a way to kind of arm yourself against uncertainty. And so my next question, Simone, is like, what would you tell the person who's like, okay, what do I need to learn right now? As I'm, you know, and perhaps we have to drill down even more because I don't know if everyone needs to learn the same thing. But. But we are living in a world where AI is going to affect all of us, is affecting all of us. Maybe not all of us, but majority of us, you could say, are work. What is the stuff that you think people, if they're not learning yet, if they're not open to yet, they should, because it would mean being a little bit more protected against uncertainty with regards to work.
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah. I mean, the first thing I'd say is the sort of meta skill of being able to learn how to learn. I think especially in our current economy, we sort of spend the. The first, what, 22, 25 years of our life in sort of this learner mindset, this growth mentality, and then it's really easy for us to calcify in our ways and think we know everything that we need to learn without understanding that lifelong learning is an inevitable skill and a most important skill, perhaps in the age of AI or in the age of this rapid technological disruption. So even if you expose yourself to learning in small ways, it is a great way to rewire your brain into thinking of yourself as someone who is constantly able to grow and to learn. So I think about maybe taking a small class or reading a book outside of sort of like your narrow area of interest or expertise, or just exposing yourself to novelty in small, interesting ways. Like, one of the great findings in the book is that if we're able to practice, say, uncertainty exposure therapy, so taking a new route to work or going to a restaurant and ordering something that you don't normally order, or striking up a conversation with a stranger, these things might not seem like very big deals. But similar to how if you have a phobia of spiders, exposing yourself to spiders in sort of small contained environments will help you build more tolerance over time. The same is true with uncertainty. And so I think one of the big things I tell people, especially if you're anxious about AI, is try to learn about the tools themselves. And if you can get more proximate to actually interacting with some of these sort of big, scary tools that might seem like a threat, you, one, will develop an aptitude to be able to use them, and two, you will take the sort of amorphous fear of this technology and make it a little bit more familiar or comfortable for you. The other sort of like meta skills around storytelling or salesmanship or collaboration, I think often are lines that, yes, these are evergreen skills. And even just last week I heard the founder of Khan Academy talk about how he's trying to teach his kids to be good team players, et cetera. But I think the most important skill is that sort of meta skill of being able to see yourself as a learner and see yourself capable of learning new things along the way.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah, AI is such an existential fear for so many people. But I love, I love your tips. I mean, I mean, just what I'm learning is just do something even small that takes you out of your comfort zone. You know, pick up a spider.
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah. I used to work at this organization called ideo that was this innovation and design consultancy. And one of our big sort of mantras internally was never come to a meeting without a prototype. So rather than sort of standing around and talking about what we wanted to build, get to sort of like the build stage as quickly as possible. And I think that sort of build to learn mentality is so important in this age of AI, technological disruption, et cetera. I think if you tried to create a playbook for sort of the old world of business, it would mean make a 10 year plan and execute on that plan and then get exactly the results that you want. But now I think the cycles are much quicker. You need to be able to build and adapt and build and adapt. And I think the people who are able to get into those quicker feedback loops are the people that are gonna be able to thrive in this new age.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Well, while I have you, would you be up for talking a little bit about your last book, the Good Enough Job, which I think in some ways dovetails some of our conversation about uncertainty. Your last book, the Good Enough, Reclaiming Life from Work specifically? I think it would be great to talk a little bit about, about the dark side of looking for a dream job and the importance of separating our self worth from our output, which is so, so hard. Especially these days. People are working round the clock, working from home, which is very difficult. And on the one hand great for some, but it can also create this blurred line situation where you're not really ever, you don't ever stop working. Tell us first though, what sparked your interest in the Good Enough Job and then we can talk about kind of like why the dream job job, you know, that goal is kind of a fallacy.
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah. So both books actually were born out of the same inciting incident for me personally, which is I was about 29 years old, in my late 20s, I was working for the Atlantic magazine in New York and I had a recruiter reach out to me from this design firm idea that I mentioned. And I sort of passively went through this interview process and then I found myself at this career crossroads. You know, maybe some of our listeners had been in a similar position before where it felt like there were these two very distinct paths ahead of me. There were sort of Simone the journalist and Simone the designer and Tarnoosh. I could not make up my mind for the life of me, I was insufferable. I talked to sort of everyone I knew and my Uber driver and my yoga teacher trying to figure out which job to take. And on one level it's like, oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers, you know, the world's smallest violin. But on the other hand, it felt like I was choosing between two versions of myself. And whatever job offer I chose would mean foreclosing part of who I was. And I think there were two main insights that came from that moment in time for me. The first was that my job and my identity had become so entwined, I'd become enmeshed with my work. And I think particularly here in the United States, where what do you do? Is often the first question we ask when we meet someone new. It is a societal wide problem where we think sort of I produce, therefore I am. And that was the central insight of the first book, which is, how did our jobs become so central to our identities and what can we do about it? And then the central insight for the second book is that I was looking for certainty where there was no certainty to be found. I thought that if I just sort of banged my head against the wall at the right angle that I know which job to take. And I kept looking for the certainty. But it was a moment where I couldn't have found certainty even if I tried. And so the second book was sort of my attempt to sort of write the book that I wish I had read that moment in time. And so the short argument of the first book is that our work has come to be so central to our lives in the absence of some other sources of identity and meaning. Things like organized religion, neighborhood and community groups, these other pillars that used to help define who we were. And now so many of us are looking to work for self actualization. And that unfortunately, is not a great mental health recipe for having a good relationship with work in the long term. Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything wrong with looking to work as a source of meaning or a source of identity, But I think it becomes problematic when it becomes the sole source of identity or meaning in our life.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah.
Simone Stolzoff
And so the dream job chapter is really about these expectations that we've created for ourselves where we think that unless we found the dream job, something must be wrong with me. And I often think about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality. And we have these inflated sky high expectations about what a job can deliver when in actuality, that mentality is creating a lot of disappointment among many seekers that are looking for self actualization through their work. And so the book is an attempt to sort of right size work's place in our life rather than thinking of our life revolving around our work. How can we think of our work as something that supports the life that we want to live?
Farnoosh Tarabi
Right. Like, does it have benefits?
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Will I be able to clock out at a reasonable hour? You know, Absolutely. You know, and you write like it's not your family. Don't go looking for, you know, a place that's going to be a soulful place where you're going to. Although I do still hear people finding their partners at work.
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, that made me so
Farnoosh Tarabi
happy because such a throwback to the 90s and the early thousands. I met a young couple like we met at work. We, you know, we saw each other in the, in the car, coffee room. I was like, what?
Simone Stolzoff
That's beautiful.
Farnoosh Tarabi
That's incredible.
Simone Stolzoff
That might require you to actually show up at the office. You know, one thing I like to think about is even like the sitcoms reflect the sort of places of the era. So in the 90s, you have shows like, I don't know, like Friends, where it's all about, like friends hanging out and living next to each other. In the early 2000s and 2010s, you get shows like the Office where it's like, oh, the Office is sort of the locus of your social life and the locus of your identity.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Maybe, you know, if you're tired of the apps, just like go to the office. And that is the solution. Before we go, Simone, you're a new parent relatively, and I'm just curious, what is something very uncertain that you're grappling with now? All of the things, I suppose. But how are you sort of framing parenthood, taking pages out of your, your own book?
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, well, there's no better practice in not knowing than being a new parent, you know, especially with a little one running around. I think, like, there's so many examples of where I've had to try and live. Some of the wisdom of the book one is sleep training, like trying to figure out how we're going to get our son to sleep through the night. And I feel sometimes when me and my wife are having this discussion, a natural tendency to pull towards the extremes. You know, if she comes on really strong about like not wanting to sleep train, I almost feel like there's a natural pull where I have to be like, but look at all the benefits of what we could learn along the way and, you know, nothing like a screaming 10 month old at 3 o' clock in the morning to undermine your best laid plans about how you thought exactly the future would go. But I think there's something really humbling about becoming a parent and I think that's a great lesson that we can all take away. How I organize, how to not know is I have these three sort of certainty traps, these things that are Very tempting for us to cling to, to try and feel certain in situations where we might not. And one of the big one is, is hubris, our desire to think that we know best. And I think on the other side of each of these traps is a virtue that can help us deal with uncertainty. So on the other side of hubris is humility. And I don't think there's any better practice in being a parent than getting that sort of slice of humble pie that realizes that, okay, there isn't always a direct relationship between your effort and the output. You can't dictate exactly how another sentient being acts in the world. What you can do is try your best and keep your mind open to adapting along the way.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Well, thank you for giving us permission to know, not have all the answers. I think, particularly for women, this is an important book because there's also the data that, for example, we won't apply for a job until we feel or know with certainty that we can do all of the job requirements. That's a little bit of a dated statistic, but I think it's still. It has endures. We feel like we have to over deliver. We have to, you know, just overcompensate.
Simone Stolzoff
And I think both from a gender perspective and from a financial perspective, this topic is super important right now, where there's so much of the false certainty that gets peddled around, especially on the Internet. People claiming to know exactly whether the market's gonna crash, whether the stock is
Farnoosh Tarabi
gonna go up anywhere. Yes. We can't even get into that. The false uncertainty.
Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, exactly. You know, you just have to turn on the television and anyone will try and tell you exactly what the future looks like. But, you know, the principles of having a diverse portfolio, of being able to have enough savings to weather form, of not trying to pick individual stocks and investing in things like index funds, those are all metaphors that can help us both in our financial life and our
Farnoosh Tarabi
life outside of money as well, diversify your revenue streams. Right, right, right. All of that. Simone Stolzoff, thank you so much. How to Not Know is your book, and it's coming out in May, I believe, so we got you May 12th.
Simone Stolzoff
So, yeah, it's. We're right in the throes of the time where you were able to actually hold it in your hand, which was very exciting.
Farnoosh Tarabi
That is very exciting. Well, thanks for making us one of your book launch stops. And congrats again.
Simone Stolzoff
Thanks for having me.
Farnoosh Tarabi
Thanks to Simone Stolzoff for joining us. His book is out tomorrow May 11, and it's called how to not the Art of Embracing Uncertainty. I'll see you back here on Wednesday, when our guest will be Carrie Joy Grimes, author of the Joy of How to Do More and feel better about your money. No matter how much you have, stay tuned.
Simone Stolzoff
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Episode 1981: Why Uncertainty Might Be Your Superpower
Air date: May 11, 2026
Guest: Simone Stolzoff, journalist and author of How to Not Know
In this episode, Farnoosh Torabi sits down with journalist and author Simone Stolzoff to discuss the often-misunderstood power of uncertainty and how developing a tolerance for the unknown can actually become a personal and professional superpower. Together, they explore the current climate of “polycrisis,” why our collective discomfort with uncertainty seems to be growing despite constant exposure, and strategies for navigating ambiguity in careers, finances, and life. Simone shares actionable insights from his new book, How to Not Know, and connects his research to both societal patterns and his recent experience as a new parent.
What is a “Polycrisis” (05:02 - 06:38)
Why Are We Getting Worse at Dealing with Uncertainty? (06:38 - 08:02)
Advice for Those Facing Job Instability (09:33 - 13:40)
Certainty vs. Action (14:23 - 16:23)
The Role of Money in Navigating Uncertainty (21:30 - 23:09)
The “Meta-Skill” of Lifelong Learning (24:29 - 26:57)
Iterative Action Over Perfect Planning (27:13 - 28:04)
Next episode guest: Kerri Joy Grimes, author of The Joy of How to Do More and Feel Better About Your Money. No Matter How Much You Have.