Are you feeling emotionally stuck? Here’s how to get past it (w/ Yowei Shaw)

the globe.

“With WISE, you can send, spend and receive in over 40 currencies with no markups or hidden”

fees. With the ascending pounds across the pond, spending rails and reo, bogging paid in dollars for your side gig, you'll get the mid-market exchange rate on every transaction.

Join 50 million customers internationally.

Be smart. Get WISE. Download the WISE app today. All Visit WISE.com, Teas and Seas Apply There are many podcasts you can turn to for work advice, but on our show, fixable, we help

real people just like you tackle real workplace challenges fast. I'm CEO and bestselling author Anne Morris, and I'm Harvard Business School Professor Francis Fry, and we are the hosts of the Ted Podcast, Fixable. Whether you're lacking confidence at your new job, feeling burned out, or struggling to lead your team through a big change, we won't shy away from any problem.

We bring our clear thinking, honest opinions, and expertise to solve your toughest workplace issues through practical solutions.

“Here new episodes of Fixable every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.”

This is how to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest Yeo Weisha is one of the most respected writers, producers, and hosts in audio. I for really confident saying that.

All of her talents and abilities and accomplishments and accolades, all of that, couldn't help her from losing her job at NPR's Invisibleia. And here's a clip of Yeo Wei talking about how it felt to lose that gig. I've been with Invisibleia for seven years, worked my way up from producer who did admin, to reporter producer, to senior reporter producer, to co-host.

I felt really lucky to get paid to do the thing I loved, making stories about ideas and emotions. Stories that I hope helped our listeners understand how to navigate the world. I love my team, I love my job. So I knew that getting laid off was going to hurt, but I was not prepared for how much

it hurt, and how long the hurt lasted. I was not prepared for how the lay-off turned me into someone I didn't recognize. I mean, objectively, I knew I had it about as good as it gets. I got severance, I had savings, I didn't have kids, I had partner, I had parents, I could rely on if things got really bad.

And I knew the lay-off wasn't about me, NPR had made a strategic shift, and shows like mine were part of the new strategy. They specifically told me it was a business decision and had nothing to do with my performance.

“So why did I keep cycling through old mistakes, wondering what I could have done differently?”

Why did it feel like NPR was rejecting everything about me? Why did I want to hide from everyone? Why was my self-worth on the floor? And here's the difficult part. No one in my life had been laid off before.

So while my friends and family tried to be supportive, they all had trouble understanding exactly what I was going through, which made it hard for them to give me the advice and comfort I needed. That just felt really alone. And that's where my new show comes in.

You'll always new show became proxy, a groundbreaking podcast where you'll weigh practices

what she calls "emotional investigative journalism." She tries to get to the bottom of how we feel about a situation and why. On proxy, guests talk through their emotional conundrums, and you'll weigh finds them the perfect stranger to talk to, the person who can help them get less stuck. Today on our show, you'll weigh is going to talk to us about the power of conversations.

But what it means to investigate our emotions and about how radical a change it can make to realize that we are never the only one going through something. We're going to get into all that and so much more after this quick break. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe.

With WISE, you can send, spend and receive an over 40 currencies with no markups or hidden fees. With the ascending pounds across the pond, spending rails and Rio, bogging paid in dollars for your side gig, you'll get the mid-market exchange rate on every transaction.

Join 50 million customers internationally.

Be smart. Get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Visit WISE.com, tease and see supply. There are many podcasts you can turn to for work advice.

But on our show, fixable, we help real people just like you tackle real workplace challenges fast. I'm CEO and bestselling author Anne Morris, and I'm Harvard Business School Professor Francis Fry, and we are the hosts of the TED Podcast, Fixable. Whether you're lacking confidence at your new job, feeling burned out, or struggling to

We bring our clear thinking, honest opinions, and expertise to sell your toughest workplace issues through practical solutions. Here are new episodes of Fixable Every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. We're talking with YoWay Shot today about how to understand our emotional commentrums,

and why we're never the only one going through something.

Hi, I'm YoWay Shot, and I am an emotional investigative journalist.

“Let's start with what is an emotional investigative journalist?”

So I think of myself as an investigative journalist, but the thing I'm investigating is not politics or corruption, it's feelings. So someone comes to me with an emotional mystery, like, how is it that I can't forgive my mom, even though I really want to, or why do I as an introvert, dread hanging out with my extroverted friends, then I as the reporter use my skills to try to find an answer.

I looked to research from sociology, psychology, I talked to practitioners, but probably the most important source is usually another human being that's just been through the same thing and lived to tell the tale.

I think of myself, like, on the emotions be.

I love that description. I also love your show, Proxy. I think it is so interesting and different.

“And I think one of the things that is cool about it is you're investigating emotions, but”

you're not trying to do therapy, and no, that is an important disclaimer. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, I'm not a mental health professional. It is not therapy. We're not trying to fix anyone.

Well, the other thing though that I think is so interesting about the conversations that happened on the show is a lot of times it is people working through something that has to do with someone else, often an important person in their life, but they're not putting it on that person. Instead, it's the person understanding by someone who is not in their life, what they actually

feel more deeply. Yeah, sometimes I think a stranger outside of your direct situation can help you see the situation more clearly, and also help you hear what they have to say with less defensiveness, because they don't have all the baggage that your actual person does. I have two things that I wanted to ask you about.

One is kind of like a head year philosophical personal thing, and then the other is just a really practical one, which is when I was thinking about my own version of proxy, right? I mean, do you have a niche conundrum? Well, I don't think it's best to get it by proxy. I don't think it's niche, but I want to share this thing with you to kind of hear how you

would think it through. I had a really close friend, and we are no longer friends, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I have unpacked them in therapy and gone to it, you know, discussed it many times, and it's been several years, and I still feel this lingering openness and sadness that this person

is not in my life anymore. And I think part of it is, you know, we have a lot of structure for a breakup that is romantic, and I just don't have that much structure for a friend where you are no longer together. And that's something that I struggle with, and I don't really have the answers to, but I wonder, like, talking to someone else who had been through that exact same thing, maybe

that would be helpful in some way. And so I'm just curious, you're initial reactions to my specific experience. I would ask you a lot more questions about what went down in the friendship, because I think

“that it would be important to know, like, was it a ghosting situation?”

Is it, like, a betrayal, like, I would want to know, like, exactly what happened, what kind of thing broke it up? And then I would try to look for a proxy, I think, on the other side. I would probably go looking for someone who could stand in for your friend, but it would need to be people who are, like, interested in the other perspective.

Like, it can't just be, like, a proxy who's like, Chris is a terrible person, and I'm, he's like, I don't ever want to talk to him again.

I will never heal from, like, he's a terrible person, he shows me that the world is, like,

a terrible place. You know, like, it needs to be someone who's like, interested in, like, what went down, and like, maybe they don't want to reconcile with the friend, but they need closure,

Then, like, I might go to a researcher who has studied friend breakups and has, like, a lot

of insights to share that could be helpful to you, and, like, any listener going through a friend breakup, who's also, I mean, this is, like, the ideal who's also gone through friend breakups themselves. Whenever we, we turned to a researcher, we really want them to have lived experience, too. It's cool.

You think it through. One of the episodes you recommend people start with if they're just new to proxy is, um, called bisexual life guy, and it's this, this very sweet man who has separated from his wife because she came out and understood her sexuality in a different way, and they separated and he's trying to process that, but he, he doesn't want to process it through her. He doesn't feel like it's appropriate. And so he gets to have this conversation

with someone who he's never met before, but who is in a similar situation.

Yeah, that was my old boss. That was, like, the rare instance where we get an email from a listener, and I know exactly who the proxy is going to be. Um, because usually it, like, takes a lot longer to find the proxy. Um, yeah, that was a really interesting episode, because it felt like, like, I hadn't realized before that proxy conversation, how meaningful the process could be for the proxy as well. It's like this reciprocal process. You know, so, like,

George has questions he wants to ask of his ex-wife that he can't, that he's going to ask Hanna the, the proxy, and then Hanna never got to have the conversation with her ex-husband. And so

she got to ask him all these questions, and also say these things that she never got to say to her

ex. So that was, like, a real, I don't know, like, magical moment where I was like, oh, this is, this is pretty smart. This proxy. I totally, I've even, I've been, I've even planned.

“I totally agree, and I think, you know, it makes me think about this idea, which is that,”

you know, investigative journalism is about finding the truth, like, an objective truth. And a lot of these conversations that you are now doing are about emotional truth, right? Like, can you give us a little bit about how you think about truth and emotional truth and objective truth, whatever that might be? I think that emotional truth tends to get a bad rap these days, because people are like, well, that's not factual. That's just how you feel about the situation.

You know, the story your nervous system is telling about what happened. But I think we know by now emotional truth drives a huge amount of human behavior. There's a bunch of research that actually shows that, you know, once your brain comes up with an emotional story of what happened, your brain's really good at, like, discounting any evidence that doesn't conform to that story. So when people are arguing about the facts, quote unquote,

“often what they're fighting about is like the emotional truth of the event. And so that's why”

I'm proxy, I really wanted to take emotional truth very seriously. And instead of, you know, arguing with somebody's emotional truth, we find a proxy who can help you understand the emotional reality of this situation. For example, we did this episode about a mom whose kids had cut her off, and she didn't understand why. And instead of trying to investigate the facts of the astrangement, we paired her with a daughter who had cut off her own parents. And I think hearing

that perspective from someone who wasn't her own kid accusing her of being a bad mom helped her be less defensive and, you know, be open to hearing that emotional perspective, the emotional reality of what it's like to need to astrange from your own parents. And this is where the ethics policy comes in. So that's why whenever we're dealing with a conundrum or conflict that involves more than one person, we anonymize because, you know, that would be a problem if we weren't

“anonymizing people's, you know, details. I think it's important too to note that you have a lot of”

respect for like the idea that there are facts and reality. There's an emotional story, but there's also a factual story that's really important. I really love, Praxia. I think it's so great. And when I listen to it, it is so nuanced and special. And I think if I just think about the idea without having listened to it, I have this kind of reflexive thing of like, but that's naval gasey. That's like we're focusing on the emotion. We like, we get so stuck in our own feelings. We need to

get outside of our head a lot. But what I realize listening to the show is so much of this is people feeling like they are the only ones who have experienced with something, feeling really alone,

whatever they are experiencing, someone else has experienced something quite similar. My hot take is that I think we need more emotional investigative journalists because I think that if we paid more attention to the emotional dynamics beneath our problems, not just personal, but like political, social, like literally every problem, there's emotional dynamics going on. And there's like all these disciplines of scholars who study those emotional dynamics. There's like a whole

sociology of emotions. There's like a science of emotions. There's history of feelings and

those scholars never get any play. So I just would like to make the point like, I really respect

traditional journalism, and obviously it's not a, it's not a good time for journalists in general. But I would also like us to pay a little bit more attention to emotional dynamics when we're reporting on like hard-facts news or whatever. If you are feeling alone with a problem, and you're not talking to anyone about your problem, then you are literally just tunneling tunneling tunneling

“into the same interpretation of your problem. And it's hard to break out. And that's why”

on Proxy, I'm trying to report on feelings, bring a different perspective where, you know, you can talk, you can talk to a researcher who studied your issue and has like context to share

like for why you're feeling so bad. So you're like, oh, I'm not, I'm not such an alien. It's

I don't have to blame myself, or you can talk to people who've lived through the same thing for an outside perspective. It's really just like, you know, taking the regular things we do as a journalist talking to sources and just like applying that to emotional conundrums. But I do think like if you're just kind of stuck looking at your own emotions and not sharing and not getting supported and not talking to anyone else, I think it can be naval gaysie and not super helpful.

So in this podcast, you're diving deep into a niche emotional problem someone's having, and then you offer them this proxy just to step back for a second so that people if you're not familiar with it. You offer a proxy. So it's someone who has had a really similar experience and they're going to help guide a stranger through their conundrum that is related.

“So how do you think about the best way to find a proxy for someone? What's the”

process of discovering a proxy? Well, sometimes it just falls in my lap and I'm like, I know someone who went through that. That only happened once though.

We'll never be once. So some time, not some time.

Other than that, I really just rely on my usual tricks as a long-form journalist and I scour memoirs. I scour personal essays, news articles. I do a lot of creative Googling. I talk to researchers, practitioners. I just make a ton of calls and try to find people who are like in the ballpark. And then once I find those options then I do a careful vetting process where we do a pre-interview and I just like ask

a bunch of questions to see, like, does their set of experiences line up enough emotionally? And, like, fact patterning with our guests. And then I'm also, like, checking to see, like, are they asking me follow-up questions? Like, are they, like, giving, like, how are they holding space and even this call with me? And that's usually a good indicator of, like, how they'll do in an actual proxy conversation. And then the other part is, like, just enthusiasm. Like,

sometimes I found someone who I think would be really, really great. But they just don't get the idea or they're just too busy or, like, you know, for any number of good reasons,

“they're not, like, jazzed about doing it. And I think it's really important for the proxy”

to actually want to get something out of this experience, too, so that actually feels reciprocal, because at the end of the day, even when our proxy is, like, a therapist or, like, a researcher or, like, somebody with, like, professional expertise, not just lived experience, I wanted to feel, like, a conversation between two peers. Like, you just happen to sit out of bar next to someone who has, like, the exact right experience for the thing you're going through. And then you just

start talking, you know, it's not a workshop, it's not a training, it's not a coaching session. We're going to be right back with more from your way after this quick outbreak. This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around

fees. Whether you're sending pounds across the pond, spending rails, and Rio, bargaining paid in dollars for your side gig, you'll get the mid-market exchange rates on

every transaction, join 50 million customers internationally. Be smart, get Wise, download the Wise

app today, or visit Wise.com. Teas and seas apply. Raise boys in an age of impossible masculinity, or what is it like to make your living as a sugar

“baby? I think Anita is one of the greatest interviewers working today. I had such a great time”

talking to her on our show a few years ago, and it was an honor to get to be on her show recently. In every episode, you will meet people rethinking sex, health, identity, and relationships. It's an honest show, it's an eye-opening show, and it's a show that leaves you with a lot to think about, so check out embodied wherever you're listening to this right now. And we are back! Today, we're talking with Yo-Way Shaw about how to sort through and understand

our emotions, even the tough ones. And one of the things that I admire the most about Yo-Way is how open and vulnerable she is with even her hardest moments. One day last March, I was sitting in my home office with my cap by my feet. It braised myself as I clicked

“open my working mouth. Ah, there it is. Honestly, I feel nothing.”

Okay, now the tears are coming. In one of your very first episodes, you talk about the pain and the stigma and the emotional rollercoaster ride of being laid off from your job. A job you're really cared about, and disability. I mean, you have this incredible audio of you hearing me here. You're being laid off, and you're crying, and you're really destroying. I mean, this is being an audio journalist. You knew that this was an emotionally important moment,

so you were recording yourself. But you talk about how there's one moment where your husband hears you find out that this project that you've been working on that was like the big thing, postlay off that matter, that it got canceled. And you're wailing so loud that he runs in naked

“from the shower, because he thinks something like he thinks it's a disaster, because he's never heard”

you like that. I have never been in that exact situation, but I had such a vivid memory of

in one of the hardest times in my life. I was applying for this job. I had written a packet to apply for last week tonight with John Oliver as a writer, and I had worked so hard on these jokes, and everything was going bad, and I had like a person on the inside who was recommending me, and I just felt like it's lined up for me to get this job. And I was so in my head, I had built this other future, right? And then I found out I didn't even get to the next round. I didn't even get

so like the interview round, and I wept so unbelievably hard. And the thing that made me really understand that moment differently is you and your husband are talking about it, and you say some version of that was the scaffolding that was holding everything else up. It wasn't really about this project. It was about the grief of losing your job and all the stress and everything else, and he gives the parallel of when he cried so deeply about an older cat being put down. What

is actually about his grandfather who he hadn't grieved. I just had never so clearly seen that

experience of my own articulated. And I wasn't even a guest on the show. This is just as a listener. So I wonder if there's some way that people can really access deep understandings of themselves just through listening to other people. Talk about their issues. Thank you for sharing that, and I'm sorry you went through that team playoff, not getting what you want solidarity, I'm holding everything like so funny. In retrospect, I'm like, oh no, you didn't get a job

ready for an HBO show. So sad Chris. And it's like in the moment, it felt it felt like the life or death. And now I'm like, oh yeah, that was not really about that. Really, wasn't. Yeah, I kind of feel similarly about my layoff now. Now that I've healed, well, so when I got laid off, I felt really bad. And then I felt really bad about feeling so bad because I was like, shouldn't I know better? Like boohoo, I lost this job. Like I,

I don't have kids. We got severance. We had a really good union contract. Like I had about as good of a layoff as you could have. And I just fell embarrassed. I felt ashamed, like the double

like some of the narratives we have about layoffs, it really made a lot of sense. Like why I was

feeling so bad. And it just like took the pressure off. It made me feel less, it helped me stop blaming myself. The main thing I learned was talking to the sociologist Hover Sharon, who studies long-term unemployment. And he talks about how our culture really personalizes work. You know, not just like through our identity, through the myth of meritocracy, but also our hiring system is very personalized. You know, it's all about like the interview and whether you're good fit

for the team. And so when you get laid off here, as opposed to like some other country where,

you know, the culture and the hiring system is really like it's much more bureaucratic.

The interview doesn't really matter. It's really about checking boxes and it's more formulaic. Like in those places, people don't blame themselves as much when they get laid off. They're mad at the system. Whereas like in the US, like it makes sense why we would blame ourselves and feel terrible for all of these reasons. That was really freeing, you know, to realize the context of what was

“happening and that I wasn't alone. So that's like the context piece, you know, which I think really”

helps. But then there's also the like listening to somebody else who has been through a similar thing tell their story. And I was noticing in these proxy conversations, there's like this moment of magic that happens in every proxy conversation that works where like the two people really see each other and they hear each other. And then like after that moment, everything starts flowing. They trust each other. The guest is able to take an insight from the proxy. And when that moment doesn't happen,

that moment of recognition, emotional recognition, then like it's not going to work. Like the conversation is still tid, people don't trust each other and then we have to find another proxy. And so that has really taught me like the importance of emotional recognition in like the stories that we tell and the conversations that we're having with people. One of the reporting quests that I've been going on is like, so what is going on in these proxy conversations? Like why did you Chris feel so viscerally

“seen in a situation that actually is not your exact situation? You know, like what is that about?”

And so I've been like reading a bunch, talking to like researchers and like there, it turns out there's like a few core emotional processes that happen in healing, emotional healing. So one process is telling the story of what happened. So telling a coherent story and organizing all the like fragmented bits and feelings you're having, just telling a coherent story about what happened, helps you feel better. Having another person recognize your experience. That also helps.

Hearing a new perspective that helps you reinterpret your experience. That's another thing that helps. So proxy conversations, I think they bring all three of those processes together. I think what's unique about the proxy conversations is that it's happening between two people who share the lived connection to the issue, which makes the recognition and perspective taking just like, you know, to the emph degree like on steroids, you know, because it's like embodied perspective

“taking. And so I'm still trying to figure it out honestly, but that's where I'm at so far.”

It's interesting to me because I've sent a lot of time both as a comedian and so professionally, but also personally thinking about humor, right? I like I wrote this book about humor and one of

the things that I always say about it is that like when you laugh with someone else, you are so locked

in in that you both are in that same moment. It's really present, but also you know like they see that thing the way that I see it. I'm not the only one that sees it. And so you know, so often when we're laughing hard we say something like that's so true or like, oh yeah, I've never thought of it that way, but then the laughter means that there's this connection. And this is kind of in in some ways that same thing of, oh my gosh, they actually understand.

I'm not the only one that sees it that way. So it's not necessarily resulting in laughter, but it is that same kind of a connection. It reminds me of this research finding I found in neuroscience

When you're telling a joke and I laugh because I see the world of state, like I feel seen

in the way you are observing the world or whatever, like I wonder if like that's also a moment of like our brains being linked, you know, and like seen. And like I think that recognition

“is so, so important. And that's why like being alone with your feeling,”

that is, I think, it's just really, it's dangerous, you know? And like, I think that's like the one thing that I have learned from doing this show is like no matter how specific somebody's conundrum is, no matter how weird or, you know, niche they think it is, like there is probably someone else out there who gets it. And you don't have to feel so alone. You know, there's probably support groups. You don't have to just like write into my show. I mean, please write into my show.

That'd be great. But also there are support groups. There are all these support groups out there that I think proxy is sort of trading on the mechanics of why that works. We're just doing it in podcast form. And I think that that is something people could try is going to support group and sticking around even if it is awkward, you know, for a while until you find someone, you know,

“you click with. It's interesting to think about what you do and what I do as podcasters because I think”

people often feel a very intimate connection. You know, people often call this like the Paris social relationship. Paris social is often kind of thought of in a negative way. I wonder if there's the version of the proxy that is like the positive sort of Paris social where you cannot necessarily have to have the one-to-one direct in-person relationship and still get something out of emotionally connecting with this other person. I guess you could argue that it is a kind of

parasocial relationship. But I guess since there's strangers meeting for the first time,

maybe it's like a really fast, a very social relationship developed like this. Yeah, yeah, really fast. Like 40 minutes. So when I started working on the show, a friend was like, oh, proxy conversations. You know, that's a thing in restorative justice, right? There is a tradition in restorative justice where if the survivor victim and the offender don't want to like meet for that healing conversation, maybe because they're just like not ready to take accountability,

maybe because like the survivor feels like too trauma. Like that would be too traumatizing to them. Maybe somebody's dead. Sometimes a proxy will be used. Somebody who has like experienced the same harm, either as like the victim or the offender. And so there's like this whole world of like proxy conversations that are really, really intense. So I talked to this woman the other day who'd experienced sexual harm. And she couldn't talk to the person who did it because he

wasn't willing to take accountability. So like she told me about this proxy conversation. She have with this guy who committed a similar sexual harm. And like she says that like she got what she like she got the apology, she needed. And like there was something really healing about just like hearing this person who didn't do the thing to her but take remorse and take accountability

and say like this should never have happened. I'm so sorry. It is a kind of personal relationship.

But like she's getting to have a positive experience with the person with like a stand-in. That can like help rewrite her meaning of what happened. You know? Yeah. I don't know if it counts as per a social. But it just maybe think of that. I'm curious what you've learned about honesty and self-awareness through this process. Because so much of what is required to have a conversation or to get a useful advice or take away from someone else's experiences to actually understand

“your own experience and what you're feeling. I think what can be missing is like”

having outside perspectives that help you not just be self-aware but sort of like I don't know what the word would be. But like more collectively aware of your situation. You know? Like it's so easy to get stuck in your like one interpretation of what's going on and to feel like that's

the show are like incredibly self-aware already. So that's sort of like the baseline. But it's like

are you willing to consider other perspectives and integrate them into how you think about what's

“going on? I think that's not everyone's ready to make that jump because that I think that does take”

a level of humility and also like openness. Like are you ready to like hear some things that might be challenging or might you know question the way that you're thinking about things and also might be helpful you know not everyone is ready to like consider new possibilities and that's also something that we think about on the show when we vet people is like have you already gotten like a bunch of resources are you seeing a therapist? I like to think of ourselves as like we're like the

third or fourth responders. You know like we're like a year out after the thing happened.

I think there's also you know a big piece in our culture that is does not want nuance. It does not want things to be messy or unresolved right it wants clear easy answers it wants black and white it wants here's these three simple tips that your doctor doesn't want you to know to kill belly fat right like it's like that that style of processing the world is really

“dominant and I think when people are left with these like lingering questions or the lingering”

uncertainties or unresolved pieces that there's no space for that. I like to think of what we're doing on the show is hopefully is hopefully modeling a different way of like connecting with other people and like relating to your own stuff. Can you tell me a little bit more about that like the modeling a different way of connecting with people how would you articulate that that connection?

Well not blaming anyone I think is number one I think that's like one of the first things that we

look for when we're vetting guests is like are you in a place where you're not blaming the other person for what happened you understand that things are complicated and like they had probably a lot of there's a lot of reasons that they did what they did and you want to understand more and I think that like uncertainty and humility and like openness and wanting to help other people

“is how I would I feel like that's what I would like that's what we're trying to model and being”

respectful but also like real with each other like that's something that I tell people like you can push back in these proxy conversations you can interrupt you can challenge you can be like I don't actually understand what you're saying like can you make it clear to me like or like I disagree but like we're gonna keep things respectful. It's interesting you know thinking about the the arc of proxy and and what you've done and what you're continuing to do you started with

examining your own emotions and complicated ways of dealing with the the grief and the uncertainty and the pain and the self reevaluation after after a layoff did you feel like oh I am I am perfectly suited to unpack this or did you feel the kind of like flailing what am I doing or or both or something totally different. Well honestly I've been relying on this trick of reporting on your feelings for years like I sorry MPR that I was like healing on your time but like

you know I a lot of the stories that I did at Invisibleia were like born out of personal conundrums like niche emotional conundrums that I could not get answers to from the people in my life because I felt alone with it no one could relate and also not from my therapist you know like the therapist was helpful but also like I was still there's still an emotional puzzle that I needed to crack and so I found the process of doing a story and talking to experts looking

for research to help explain the context of what was what I was going through and talking to other people who'd been through the same thing like I was like oh every time I do this by the end of the story I magically feel better and so I wanted to like give that to other people because I was like I think that there is like um there is a whole here to be filled that people can avail themselves of using you know a microphone using like research skills and and honestly like having the guys of

like like I'm a reporter we're doing a podcast episode like it helps sometimes to have

to get this researcher to talk to when like you're like when you're not a reporter like I think

“of what we do on the show at the end of the day is like service journalism like I think”

one of my kinks journalism kinks is probably like I like to be useful just like I want to help and so I feel like yeah maybe we're like providing a service that is not being provided at the moment it seems clear to me that you feel this real um duty to the listener and to make sure that you are not um misrepresenting or causing harm and I think that is a level of care that not many people bring or are even aware of so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that

as the intersection with the service journalism I mean that might just be my anxiety talking I mean like as a reporter who like grew up at mpr like that was the number one fear was like well the number one thing that we were afraid of was fucking up you know like that's the number one

“fear is like getting something wrong like you're reporting not being tight and so I think that like”

my just like my general anxiety like has kind of made me a better reporter because I'm like I really don't want to fuck things up and like I have fucked things up before and that really sucked and you know that's something that we talk about on the show is like every proxy conversation is an

experiment and we are always iterating and getting better because we're trying something new and I

also want to be really cautious about dealing with emotions this is tricky territory this is why we we take on niche emotional conundrums not like um serious actively traumatic emotional conundrums because that's like a different show and that's for like a professional um I don't think we're well suited uh well equipped to take those on I don't know how you can be a journalist and not like have nightmares about fucking up just like I don't know doesn't everyone doesn't every journalist

have those nightmares and so I guess I'm like bringing that hardcore MPR ethos into like this new beat and I understand that like we are charting the territory ourselves um and I'm like pretty much a one-woman shop and I don't have you know like we don't have a lot of resources

“and so that's why I'm trying to be as careful as we can be but I'm sure we will get things wrong”

and we will learn from them and that's like the process of being human and like that's okay and I I think our listeners will be okay with that if they if they're fans of the show

well you always shop thank you so much for being on the show um thank you so much for the work

that you do on proxy and and thanks for just this great conversation I really appreciate it make it for the time thank you for having me that is it for today's episode of how to be a better human thank you so much to our guest yo wa shah check out her podcast proxy it is a fantastic show and I cannot recommend it more highly a good place to start if you're looking for an episode to start is Mike chooses the wrong life it's about a comedian who can't stop wondering if he should have

become a doctor instead and it's about how we make peace with the lives we didn't choose you can find proxy wherever you listen to podcasts and new episodes from their latest season are out right now I'm your host Chris Duffy and my book humor me is out right now too you can find more about my book my live show dates and all my other projects at christduffycomedy.com how to be a better human is put together by exactly the kind of team that you want investigating all of your

emotional conundrums on the ted side we've got Danielle Aballa Reso band band Chiang Michelle Quint Chloe Shasha Brooks Valentina Bohanini Laney Lott Tonsicason Manivong Antonio Leigh and Joseph DeBrine Ryan Lash put together the video no proxy needed and this episode was backed checked by Mateus Salas who investigates all claims both emotional and factual on the PRX side all audio both proximate and bi gone is handled by Morgan Flanary Norgil Patrick Grant and jostlin Gonzalez thanks to you

for listening please send this episode to a person you know or a stranger who seems like they would be relevant we will be back next week with even more how to be a better human until then take care add a little curiosity into your routine with ted talk stale the podcast that brings you a new ted talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes a day you'll go beyond the headlines and learn about the big ideas shaping your future coming up how AI will change the way we communicate