Episode Details

Famously or infamously, in 2002 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that “[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

That comment stoked a lot of mockery among his critics, but he was addressing something that all people feel. It is difficult to deal with uncertainty at times when our lives have never felt less certain in a world of increasing change.

Now journalist and former IDEO design lead Simone Stolzoff comes to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to discuss his guide to navigating uncertainty, spelled out in his new book How to Not Know. From politics to our careers to our personal lives, we don’t know what the future holds. Yet, Stolzoff says, our capacity to tolerate this uncertainty is declining.

Stoloff shares stories of people who have grappled with big problems with no easy answers—such as an economist trying to predict the next market crash, or an island nation facing the existential impact of climate change. How can one be comfortable with ambiguity and the unknown? Join us to hear Stolzoff’s answers.

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