Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track, and this book is about getting back to yourself.

Breaking free, finding a new way forward, and it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good bookshops, so you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hello, and welcome back to Control or Delete. This is a replay of my episode with Sam Coniff and Catherine Templer Lewis, recorded in 2021. We discuss all things uncertainty, a big theme that feels especially relevant right now.

In this episode, we discuss their new project, The Uncertainty Experts, which is a powerful three-part interactive documentary, scientifically proven to reduce our fear of the unknown,

reduce our anxiety, increase our empathy, and improve decision making, and problem solving, which sounds just what we need, and that's why Sam and Catherine went on a mission to deliver this to as many people as possible.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. I learned so much from this one, lots of stuff about psychology, lots of stuff about the brain, and I kind of do feel a little less uncertain, or at least a little bit okay with being uncertain.

So I hope you enjoy listening to this one.

So I'm so excited to be joined by Catherine and Sam, and this is a new project, and I feel very honored to be talking to you about this because it's really exciting, and I spent a lot of time on the website last night, and we're going to talk all about the uncertainty experts.

Could we please start off with a very broad question, which you can both jump in on, is now more uncertain in actual terms? Are we living in an uncertain time, global travel, pandemics, social media, etc?

Or do we just feel more uncertain? Because I think the world has always been sort of uncertain.

I mean, you've got a really good point there, because of course, uncertainty, you know, somebody says the only certain thing, and we will always be faced with uncertainty.

However, there has scientifically been proven that we are living at the most uncertain time in all of history.

A guy called her here has done an uncertainty scale, and we've seen people being measured over the last couple of decades, and their tolerance on certainty, how uncertain they're feeling, because remember, it's a feeling as well, is on the increase.

There's also a world uncertainty index that was launched a couple of years ago, and it's backed by various people from the IMF, and the economist also do a tracker on semantic use of words around uncertainty.

And so it does seem, yes, and it's because there's this culmination of threats and challenges.

And one of the, I think, slightly more dramatic measures of this is the world Doomsday Clock.

So it came into being after the Second World War and International Confederacy of Objective Scientists put together the Doomsday Clock, and they manually changed the time on it to see how close we are to our own destruction.

And up until last year, the closest it ever got was three minutes to midnight, and that was around like the Suez crisis when we were going to a new-key trailer.

And then last year it moved to 30 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been.

So yes, we are on a precipice.

And could I ask you some a little bit about your personal journeys getting here because I have followed your work for a long time.

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