Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Approaches to life: Improvise, pivot or plan About this episode Big life decisions are never easy. Should you follow a plan? Make a hard pivot? Improvise as you go? This hour, TED speakers who’ve made extreme life choices and their advice for getting unstuck. Guests include comedian and musician Reggie Watts, biomedical researcher Sonia Vallabh and conservationist Kristine McDivitt Tompkins.
Original broadcast date: October 18, 2024
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Delivered at TED conferences.
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0:43 Speaker 06 I literally feel like I'm a different person.
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0:56 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is Reggie Watts.
1:00 Speaker 01 Now, because this is looping, it gives me time to think about what I want to do next.
1:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Standing on the TED stage, armed with an assortment of audio equipment, Reggie, beatboxing,
1:13 Manoush Zomorodi? layering and looping his voice.
1:15 Speaker 01 Now, maybe I'd like to subdivide.
1:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Looping and layering. Until...
1:20 Speaker 01 And then I might just stop. So...
1:22 Manoush Zomorodi? He has the audience in the palm of his hand.
1:27 Manoush Zomorodi? If you don't know him, Reggie Watts is a singing, rapping, beatboxing, keyboard-playing, joke-making, chaos-creating force.
1:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Who just kind of makes up his performances as he goes along.
1:41 Speaker 01 All the people at TED doing all that they do when they're doing it well, when they're doing it...
1:45 Manoush Zomorodi? If you do know Reggie, it might be because he was bandleader of The Late Late Show. He's done all kinds of viral music videos, television. But mostly, he is a musical improv maestro.
2:01 Manoush Zomorodi? And I wanted to talk to him because, well, I'm kind of the exact opposite. I plan in advance. I am a person who loves lists and schedules. Good morning. And I was very prepared for my interview with Reggie. Do you mind just introducing yourself? But I was not prepared for his approach to being interviewed. My name is Reggie Watts. I'm...
2:25 Speaker 01 A forward running back for the Cleveland Oakland Raiders.
2:29 Manoush Zomorodi? He reluctantly answered my questions about his recent memoir, which tells the story of growing up in Montana as a biracial kid in the 70s.
2:38 Speaker 01 You know, my father was African American. My mother was a French colonialist. No, she was a white, a white French woman.
2:47 Manoush Zomorodi? At one point, he kind of wandered off.
2:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Are you still there?
2:52 Speaker 01 I'm right here.
2:53 Manoush Zomorodi? There you are.
2:54 Speaker 01 I didn't do anything.
2:55 Manoush Zomorodi? It wasn't until our conversation took a turn and Reggie landed on topics that sparked his interest that he got animated.
3:05 Speaker 01 I like things that pull me out of context and put me in different contexts. And I like that challenge of trying to make sense of chaos.
3:14 Manoush Zomorodi? And things just kind of evolved from there.
3:18 Speaker 01 Looping is like something that I really love because you can just layer down anything you want. It allows you to set something that repeats and you can build on top of those repeats. And so it's really nice. I did try doing that once at a party when I was, when I was on ketamine. And because ketamine gives you almost like a, like a supercomputer mindset. Ketamine, mindset, ketamine, mindset, ketamine. So you're able to like have several realities overlaid on top of each other, but you're experiencing all of them in real time. Ketamine, ketamine, ketamine, ketamine, ketamine.
3:57 Manoush Zomorodi? That sounds terrifying.
3:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's great. I mean, for me, it's, it's just about the method that you use. It's what I guess I would call it a method of awareness. And so it's mainly about how you're viewing what you're doing at any given time. And then once you realize that and that everything that you're doing is improvisation, then that allows you to start playing with possibilities and outcomes.
4:22 Speaker 01 And that's how I lead my life. I, anything can be anything at any given time. You don't have to accept things for face value. And so because of that, I do things that I really enjoy that may not necessarily exist, but I try to bring them out if I can.
4:40 Manoush Zomorodi? What is the best approach to life? Set goals and make a plan? Take a hard look at where you are right now and head the opposite direction? Or go with the flow like Reggie and make it up as you go along? On this episode, Pivot, Plan, Improvise. Three speakers who've made extreme life choices. And the advice they have for any one of us who is feeling stuck and not sure which way to go. Which brings us back to musician Reggie Watts.
5:13 Speaker 01 Certainly a pleasure to be back here, all of you guys here. Certainly a special show here, Ted. Now, people ask me, why start like that? I don't really have an answer. Many of you are familiar with improvisation because you've heard the word. And sometimes, sometimes that's enough. But what is it really? Improvisation. Why am I speaking like this? I don't know. But I try as much as I can to be as truthful about who I am in the moment, even if I'm using different voices. So I've been dealing with improvisation all of my life.
5:58 Speaker 01 It's hard for me to write things down. Ted was so gracious to allow me to come up here on the stage when they keep asking, can we see that script? And I was like, I'm sorry, I don't have that. But after I perform it, then you'll have that. Improvisation is something that I love very much because it is the center of existence to me. And that allows me to reformat any situation at any given time.
6:34 Manoush Zomorodi? What is your, I don't know how to put this, true singing voice? Or for lack of a better word, real singing voice? I guess because you have such range and you can imitate or emulate all different kinds of styles and voices that I'm like, but, okay, so if he was just being Reggie and singing, what would that sound like? Is there one pure version?
6:59 Speaker 01 Um, not really. It's like I'm channeling, like when I'm doing whatever I'm doing on stage, generally it's like tuning a radio dial to ideas that exist in what I call the idea sphere.
7:12 Speaker 01 You know, I'm just kind of like, oh, that would be funny. Oh, wouldn't it be cool if I do this?
7:20 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's what I can't figure out, and I've been trying to since I watched your special, is why do I find it so hilarious when you add reverb to something or put an echo on your voice? Like, why? Why is that funny?
7:32 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it's what I was just talking about. It's just, it's, you know, it's recontextualizing. And music is like, hyper-efficient in what it's transmitting. And it's probably the most accurate, most honest, fastest form of communication that humans have, even before language, even before talking.
7:53 Speaker 01 You could put so much more information in music than, I think, you know, having a conversation with someone. It's pretty honest. It doesn't take much.
8:05 Speaker 01 Sometimes I'm doing things, people are laughing their asses off, and I'm like, that, I wasn't intending that to be funny at all.
8:12 Speaker 01 It's like a slight mispronunciation of a vowel, waiting a little longer to say something, you know, dropping in this weird drum sound, or, you know, taking something out, or like, building up the effects and then cutting them all out so it's super dry again, you know? Whatever, whatever is possible that you can do in music is very effective on an audience, especially if they know that you're using them creatively.
8:46 Manoush Zomorodi? So are you responding to the audience? Are you like, oh, they laughed at that drumbeat? Let's go there. Is that what you're doing? Or are you, do you already kind of have a like, you know, sort of structure that you think you're gonna hit?
8:57 Speaker 01 No, there's never any structure at all.
8:59 Manoush Zomorodi? Nothing?
9:00 Speaker 01 No, not really. I'm not going out on stage going like, I'm gonna do this. Like, I don't really have any of that prepared. I just go out, I start, and then I try to monitor myself for not repeating things too much.
9:12 Manoush Zomorodi? So what's hard for you? Like, what, do you avoid things that are hard for you? Like, what would you be like, no, I am not doing that?
9:19 Speaker 01 Oh, no, scripts are hard for me. It's like, if I have to memorize lines, if I'm in a scene with somebody where I'm exchanging dialogue for like, a few pages or something like that, that makes me so incredibly uncomfortable and very terrified. Because I don't wanna get it wrong. And I'm too, it's like, I think, I think the problem is that I'm so analytical of the situation that I'm in, that improvisation tamps that down because I have to be actively participating in the moment.
9:50 Speaker 01 Like, even if people ask me, I have a bunch of MC gigs coming up and, you know, they want me to rehearse for them and all this stuff, and I'm just like, ah, that makes me, that aggravates me. Can I just show up and you just put stuff in the prompter and I'll just go for it? Is more my take.
10:07 Manoush Zomorodi? Just circling back to the idea of like, improvising a life, you know, you and I are Gen X, we're not the spring chickens anymore.
10:16 Speaker 01 That's true.
10:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Does it feel like you have to focus a little bit more? Because, I mean...
10:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know what you're saying. I mean, I do think about that. I mean, you know, you're 100% right. I think about like, oh, aging and, you know, getting like, my, I'm not recovering as fast, you know? It's like, well, put on a couple pounds, I wanna get rid of the, you know? And it's just like, I tend to try to stay in a kind of childlike mind frame, which doesn't make me feel like I am a particular age. And I put in enough work and enough time that I think my reach is a little bit, it's, I think if I were just an aesthetic performer, I would be worrying a lot more.
11:06 Manoush Zomorodi? This idea of being able to be fully yourself and fully present without being self-conscious, and this idea of just showing up to something without a plan and being able to enjoy it. That might sound really foreign to some people. Like, I guess I'm wondering, give us some advice. Obviously, you're the maestro with this, but for regular folks, how can they sprinkle a little bit of that into their lives?
11:37 Speaker 01 Well, you're improvising all the time. And as an example, you know, whenever you're having a conversation with somebody, you're improvising. That's like, kind of like the easiest way to understand. Some things are a little bit more abstract, but are true. It's like you're reaching out for a door handle. You're improvising the way that you're reaching for that handle every time, even though it seems rude. And, you know, or you're like, what should I add salt or should I not add salt to the soup? You know, those are all improvisational moments. They're choice points. So we're constantly in a gigantic choose your own adventure. I'll brush my teeth with my, with my other hand. Or I will, if I put on my pants, I'll
12:19 Speaker 01 put on the left leg first, because usually I put it on right leg first. You know, I see someone approaching me on the sidewalk. My natural tendency is to drift to the right, but I'm going to drift to the left this time. And, and so there are like plenty of like tiny little things that you're doing every single day that if you put mindfulness into it, suddenly you have this life game that you're playing. And it makes it, it makes the tiniest, most mundane things absolutely exciting. And I, and I think that that's where you feel like you're really alive and you're living life, because you're aware of the abundance of choice in your life.
12:54 Manoush Zomorodi? That was musician, comedian Reggie Watts. You can see both his TED Talks at ted.com. His memoir is called Great Falls, Montana. Today on the show, improvise, pivot, plan. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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14:49 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, ideas about how to approach life and deal with its zigs and zags. Should you plan, improvise, or pivot? Back in 2008, Sonya Vallabh was in her 20s. I was living right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a newlywed. Eric, my husband, and I had moved here to go to grad school. He got a joint degree in transportation engineering and city planning. And Sonya was going to law school at Harvard. And we thought that, you know, that was sort of the path that we were on. Those were the careers we were going to have.
15:33 Manoush Zomorodi? And it was in my second year of
15:37 Speaker 02 Law school, which was 2010, that unbeknownst to me was sort of the the beginning of a huge sort of chapter break in our lives.
15:48 Manoush Zomorodi? This very strange story starts with Sonia's mom, who at the time was 51 years old and up until then had been perfectly healthy.
15:57 Speaker 02 And then, all of a sudden, was almost in complete freefall, losing her abilities one by one by one, and nobody knew why. The very first things that showed up were that she'd lost a lot of weight, no explanation, and she, her eyesight started to play tricks on her. Neither of these things seemed like either an emergency or like they were connected to each other or to something larger.
16:28 Manoush Zomorodi? Uh huh.
16:28 Speaker 02 But then, like, very rapidly, we were in a situation where she was getting confused. She was having a hard time putting sentences together. She was having a hard time remembering to do things or where she had put things or who she was talking to. And nobody went to neurodegenerative disease right at first. The possibilities that were thrown out were very, very far flung. She was tested for tons of things. And it just felt like the fabric of reality was like tearing apart. It just felt wrong and bizarre.
17:01 Manoush Zomorodi? So what happened? You you kept going to law school and and spending time with her as much as you could? Or how did things progress?
17:09 Speaker 02 Basically, yes. I went home when I could. And, you know, it was only, she had those very first symptoms in February. She was like completely confused in March. She was too weak to walk in May. She went into the hospital basically full time in June. And after that, the degree to which it was possible to communicate with her fell off super dramatically. We still didn't have a diagnosis. And the longer this went on, the more I realized that I no longer believed she could recover. And I remember specifically in the fall of that year, I went for a walk in a park near my home where I grew up.
17:53 Speaker 02 And the fall colors were, you know, in full splendor. And I was walking by myself and
18:01 Speaker 06 I realized that I had already said goodbye to my mom. That she was in so much pain. She was in a place that was so far away from us. It just seemed insurmountable. It just seemed like too much.
18:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Sonia Vallabh picks up her story from the TED stage.
18:20 Speaker 06 By the time she dies,
18:24 Speaker 06 it has been months since she was really there. And we still have no idea what happened.
18:33 Speaker 06 And then, we get the results of my mom's autopsy. The report tells us that my mom died of genetic prion disease.
18:46 Speaker 06 And that I am at 50/50 risk of having inherited the single-letter DNA typo that caused it. Prion disease spreads through your brain and kills your neurons. And it kills about 1 in 6,000 people. But most cases aren't genetic, they're random. So it's maybe 1 in 50,000 people that has a high-risk mutation like this one.
19:17 Speaker 06 I stand at this fork in the road with Eric. And sometimes in life, you know yourself. We realize there is no fork. We want to know. I'm trained as a lawyer. He's trained as a transportation engineer. We are not biomedical people. But we know that for us, this limbo isn't life. I can't control what happens next, but I can control whether something happens next. And my choice is yes.
19:51 Speaker 06 So I get tested. And we learn that I have the mutation.
19:58 Speaker 06 What does this mean?
20:00 Speaker 02 For me, for us, genetic prion disease is always fatal. We can't say when it will strike, only that it'll be some point in adulthood. And once it does, you die in months. We have just watched it happen.
20:19 Manoush Zomorodi? One of the things that happens after a genetic test is you get genetic counseling and you get recommendations for how to go on with living your life. What did they tell you?
20:28 Speaker 02 Ah, well, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus here, but because you asked, I'll tell you that before my test report was given to me, the genetic counselor said, no matter what the result, we're going to sit down together and we're going to make a plan for your health and wellness, what you eat or like whatever. And then the result was given to me. And then the medical professionals in the room said, you probably want some time and left me and my husband sitting there and didn't come back.
21:03 Speaker 02 And in retrospect, that kind of captures it. There was nothing to say. There's no plan. Like eating blueberries isn't going to help. There's no drug. I knew all this before I got tested. So it was just kind of, in some ways, a very fitting close to the appointment.
21:20 Manoush Zomorodi? So you and your husband are sitting in this empty room, looking at each other. What did you say to one another?
21:27 Speaker 02 He cried and I held him.
21:30 Speaker 02 We had two friends who were sitting in the waiting room and my dad flew in the next day. And the five of us kind of spent the weekend together, just grieving, but also just doing normal things. And what I managed to get sort of front of mind during that weekend was the idea that I was basically no more likely to die. That day or that week than I had been. In fact, nothing had changed at all, right? Like, this mutation had always been in my body.
22:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Uh huh.
22:06 Speaker 02 That established a little bit of a protective bubble where I could do the things, do the things that were involved in like, living. And it was just a few weeks in that a friend of ours came over and he brought a bunch of scientific articles on a thumb drive. And he said, you guys should read these. There are people working on this whose day to day is thinking about this disease. What causes it? What goes wrong? Potentially even, how can we stop it? And that was like a mesmerizing thought.
22:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah. What did it make you and Eric think?
22:41 Speaker 02 I mean, at first, it just made me think, I need to take a sabbatical. I need to get up to speed on this new thing that has come crashing into our lives. And then I'll go back to my regularly scheduled life.
22:54 Manoush Zomorodi? But that is not what happened because from there, things got a little weird. First, she enrolled in some night classes just to learn more about biology.
23:05 Speaker 02 That itself then sort of, without me having totally planned or foreseen it, led to a next thing.
23:12 Manoush Zomorodi? She ended up getting a job as an entry level research assistant in a lab.
23:17 Speaker 02 And that was the beginning. I mean, I worked in that lab for two years.
23:22 Manoush Zomorodi? Eric, her husband, did something similar. He got a job in a bioinformatics lab.
23:27 Speaker 02 I could feel that there was like a momentum pulling us in this direction. And now here we were doing low on the totem pole, science jobs, being able to make a living from it. And we sort of looked at each other and said, huh. If we can actually work in this field, don't we have to be thinking about how we move towards doing exactly the work that we think needs to be done? And developing a drug for prion disease?
23:56 Manoush Zomorodi? So two years after leaving their professions, both Sonia and Eric went for PhDs in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard.
24:07 Speaker 02 We spent five years as PhDs. PhD students and we defended in 2019 and sort of rolled forward our own lab here at the Broad Institute, which is now 14 people.
24:19 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, it's kind of wild. You and Eric are now leading a lab that is looking for a therapy for prion disease. But like, at the time, did people think you had lost it? How did people around you respond to this big change that you all made?
24:37 Speaker 02 I'm sure there were people who thought that we were way out of our depth. They would not have been wrong. Certainly, it wasn't easy. And this is something I've really come to appreciate about science is that there's no bottom to how complex it can be. It's under no obligation to be knowable in your lifetime. Like, it's just, it's constantly moving under your feet. But even if it stood still, it would be like unmappably vast. But I think that there was a spirit of optimism. We're going to throw ourselves at this problem because it is a worthy problem. And we will move the ball down the field by being totally focused and dedicated to this problem.
25:22 Speaker 02 Let's talk about how prion disease works and what we need to do about it. Prion disease is unique in all of biology. The causal pathogen isn't a virus, and it's not a bacterium. It's this one normal protein called PRP that you normally have in your body, and it's normally not a problem. But it is capable of going rogue. And then it goes around grabbing other copies of PRP, and it corrupts those. And if we think about how to treat this disease, we might think, go get those bad guys. But Eric and I have come to see our mission differently.
26:05 Speaker 02 What if we can do the most good, not by going after the big scary pathogens and lobbing fireballs at them? What if what we really need to do is this? Long before disease begins, we use a drug.
26:24 Speaker 06 To ask this not yet pathogenic protein to please go away.
26:32 Speaker 06 We're lucky to have the series of clues from nature that indicate you can live a healthy life without PRP. So we're scouring the globe for tools to dial it down. Our greatest good isn't a drug that will stabilize me or anyone else mid train wreck, one foot in the void. We have to aim higher. We have to prevent.
27:00 Speaker 06 And maybe you're wondering how it's all going. Here's what I can say. There will be the race to the first drug and the race to the best drug. We're far from the end of this quest, but we're far from the beginning.
27:15 Speaker 06 We don't have any guarantees, darn, but what we do have, and gosh, are we lucky to have it? Is jeopardy.
27:28 Manoush Zomorodi? I hate this question, but I have to ask it. Do you feel like you're racing against the clock? I mean, how old are you now? You're
27:34 Speaker 06 I'm 40.
27:35 Manoush Zomorodi? You're 40. So are you thinking like, I gotta figure this out in the next decade? Before I get to be my mom's age?
27:44 Speaker 06 I mean, the interesting thing about genetic pre-on disease is that age of onset is not predictable.
27:49 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh.
27:50 Speaker 06 It could happen anytime. So I don't presume that we have a specific number of years to get this done. Regardless of what we thought, for me, even if we did believe that my mom's age of onset predicted my age of onset, there's people for whom we already haven't been on time. Lots of them. Every week, every week we hear from more of them. So it is a matter of getting there as quickly as we can.
28:22 Speaker 06 I got dealt a bad card and don't get me wrong. I really don't want to die young.
28:30 Speaker 06 At the same time, this bad card has launched me on a quest with a team. And the wonder of this exact life is that I am constantly getting the
28:44 Speaker 06 Meet people's best selves, including versions of Eric and me, that I wouldn't have encountered any other way.
28:53 Speaker 06 Does everything happen for a reason? Probably not. And yet,
28:59 Speaker 06 here we all are, making our own grace out of the darndest raw materials.
29:06 Speaker 06 It is not such a bad thing to be called to notice. Speaking of grace, I want you to meet these guys. These are our kids. Deruka is the big one. Cavari is the also big one.
29:22 Speaker 06 We had them through IVF with pre-implantation genetic testing to avoid passing on my mutation. My mom never got to meet these kids, and she would have been a luminous grandma.
29:37 Speaker 06 But if she had, we wouldn't have known about my risk in time to avoid passing it on. So somewhere wrapped up in the grief of having lost her so young is this other thing, this transgenerational gift.
29:53 Speaker 06 I'm walking alongside these kids on their own journeys as best I can. And you know how it is with kids. Sometimes the shape of the future begs to be assumed. X number of years until Y, this parade of milestones, this storyboard. But here again is a luxury not all of us have.
30:19 Speaker 06 And perhaps, in ways large and small, it's a luxury none of us have.
30:27 Manoush Zomorodi? They're seven and four. They know what we do for a living and why. They do. You know, they've always known. They've always known that we're scientists, that we work on the disease that killed my mom, that I'm at risk, that we do this because we want to develop a medicine so that nobody has to die that way anymore. I just want this to be part of their normal.
30:44 Speaker 06 And I wouldn't have it any other way because this, even at these ages, shows them, I think, that you can love what you do, even if it's hard, that you can like choose a worthy problem and give yourself to it and still have a good life. I think it's an important part of knowing who we are.
31:02 Manoush Zomorodi? Well, that's what I I keep thinking about is I I can imagine, or actually I have told people this story. I'm like, and then she found out she had the disease and they made this crazy life change. And some people are like, wow, that's real optimism to think that you can figure this out. Other people are like, that's real hubris to think that you can figure it out. But regardless, it's strong headedness either way. What reaction do you get?
31:29 Speaker 06 People tell me how inspiring they think what we're doing is. And that's very, very kind. But I I worry that sometimes people say it in the spirit of like, oh, my God, like you, Sonia Vallabh, had this like really specific and incredible reaction. And I think that's like the wrong story. I actually think that we collectively might not know what we're made of until the moment when we have to know. And I would not have known, I I never could have predicted that this is what I would do.
32:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 06 You don't know until you have to know. And there's sort of this, this like bending upward of the human spirit through hardship that my word for it is grace. Maybe there are other and better words, but now when I, when I look for it, I see it everywhere. And that's not to be Pollyannaish and say, this is all going to work out. Because I don't know, man. So to the people who say
32:35 Manoush Zomorodi? It's hubris. I have no assumptions about us succeeding. But I'm really, really happy to be doing our best.
32:48 Manoush Zomorodi? That's Sonya Vallab. She's a senior biomedical researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about how to live your life. Should you improvise, plan, or pivot? I'm Manoush Zamirodi. Stay with us.
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34:35 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, radically different approaches to life. We've talked about improvising, pivoting, and now, plan.
34:50 Speaker 06 What we had in common, and sometimes it was unspoken between us, is that we wanted these wild lives.
34:58 Manoush Zomorodi? Christine Tompkins has lived an incredible life. She was one of the Patagonia Company's first employees. Then she became CEO and ran the company for 18 years. But then, she was ready for a change. That's when she met Doug Tompkins, the founder of The North Face Company and co-founder of Esprit. He had sold his shares in both companies, moved to Chile, and was getting ready to embark on a new mission.
35:30 Speaker 06 Doug was really committed to spending the last third of his life, looking at ways to slow down what he saw as the trends of a globalized economy and the degradation of wildlands, nature in general. And I was a year and a half behind him. I wanted to retire from Patagonia, end my role as CEO after so many years. And so, when we got together, that's what we had chosen to do with the next and probably final stage of our lives.
36:06 Speaker 06 Some of it was moderately planned, some of it was just commit, as Doug always said, and figure it out later.
36:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Doug and Christine's goal was, well, unheard of. People talk about dedicating their lives to saving the planet, but they wanted to preserve huge territories of land in South America and eventually create national parks, similar to some of the most famous places in the US.
36:36 Speaker 06 Yellowstone, West Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, all these places that, if you protect them, people want to come and see these jewels of a nation.
36:48 Manoush Zomorodi? But how to pull it off? They made a plan: use their wealth to buy land, lots of land.
36:58 Manoush Zomorodi? It was the 1990s. They moved to the hinterlands of Chile, a place Doug had always loved and which still had a chance at being preserved.
37:07 Speaker 06 Roads were starting to come into the extreme south of Chile. So mining became an issue. Logging became an issue. All the things that here in the United States we'd been seeing decades before. And so in many ways, we got there at that inflection moment for the extreme south of Chile. There were still extraordinary territories, pristine temperate rainforest and massive grasslands that could be acquired and saved and restored.
37:44 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Christine Tompkins on the TED stage.
37:47 Speaker 06 30 years ago, when my late husband Doug Tompkins and I began working on land conservation projects, we knew we would invest everything we had in terms of our time and resources to slow down the freight train of development that we saw destroying the natural world. As climbers, ski racers, wildlife people, we had long begun to witness with our own eyes. And it was time for us to react to those things that were oh so clear to us. We committed ourselves to saving as much wild habitat as we could. At first, by simply buying land, ultimately acquiring over 2 million acres
38:32 Speaker 06 of key habitat in Chile and Argentina.
38:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Take me through, if you would. I'm sure each acquisition of land was different in its own way. But was there sort of a pattern that you established about how you identified where to go next, how you went about securing it? Like, what was the process?
38:52 Speaker 06 First of all, you're looking for the greatest impact possible. So if you're buying 200,000 acres, what is the absolute maximum impact that that purchase can have? Is there federal land around it that could be part of a package with the government someday? Maybe that's another half a million acres. Who are the neighbors? What's the temperature of the local towns? Ecologically, are they key? So every one of them, I would almost say, is sculpted before a commitment. And we say, okay, we're going to take the bet here. We're going to invest in it. And we're going to work like dogs
39:36 Speaker 06 to get it returned back to the citizens of Chile or Argentina in the form of a new national park.
39:47 Speaker 06 And also, I think you have to remember that we were flying every day in these bush planes that we had. Every day? Five days a week, six days a week.
39:59 Speaker 06 We're in this roadless farm in the middle of this million acre temperate rainforest. It rains 250 inches a year. It's on the toe of a wildly ferocious fjord and all those things. No electricity, no phone, just HF radios. But there's an airstrip within 100 feet of the front door. So for us, getting around meant running out, jumping in the bush plane, taking off. And we're in the kind of high foothills of the Andes. So this is very tricky flying.
40:43 Speaker 06 We would go all over, looking at land, flying, landing in another grass, maybe 300 meter strip, meeting with team members, take off again, go to another one. So almost everything was by plane.
41:01 Manoush Zomorodi? Lest we give people the impression that you and Doug would just fly over land and say, "Okay, we'll take that."
41:07 Speaker 06 Oh, no, no, no, no.
41:08 Manoush Zomorodi? And add it to our pile. Can you explain what the reaction was as you started to buy up acres and acres? Because people were like, "Who are these two rich, white people?"
41:23 Speaker 06 Well, that's right, absolutely right. I mean, you can't buy land that's not for sale. You can't buy land from people who don't want to sell it to you. So, these were all normal transactions. But when people began to realize that we were buying up, say, 50,000 acres, 100,000 acres at a time, and this was forested areas, primeval forest, and not planning to cut the trees, that's when an era of suspicion, mistrust, downright anger toward us began. And it really started with the presidency.
42:06 Speaker 06 The particular president, who happened to be in power in the early 90s, felt that what we were hoping to do was very disagreeable. So, yeah, it started four or five years of controversy in the papers, often, if not daily. People thought we were going to establish a military base for Argentina to finish Chile off once and for all. All of these alarming descriptions of what we could be up to. And, you know, today, I understand why it happened. It was overwhelming that the two people could be doing what we said we were doing.
42:51 Speaker 06 And it took a long time, and death threats, and having our phones tapped for years, and the team members working in both countries. This was really hard on them.
43:04 Speaker 06 I mean, I look back on it now,
43:07 Speaker 06 and I'm surprised by how naive we were that that might not take place.
43:12 Manoush Zomorodi? I was about to ask.
43:13 Speaker 06 Honestly, you know, you learn a lot in 30 years.
43:18 Manoush Zomorodi? But was there a point where you thought, why do we even have to be here to do this? Let's just go back to the US and have our team take it from here? Because, you know, literally, your lives were at risk. Your phones were tapped, you were getting death threats.
43:30 Speaker 06 No, we never did. We never thought, oh, God, let's get out of here.
43:36 Manoush Zomorodi? After years of distrust, public sentiment slowly started to shift. Because in 2013, Doug and Christine made their first donation of land, 37,000 acres that expanded Argentina's Prito Moreno National Park. In 2014, they donated 94,000 acres in Chile's Tierra del Fuego, adding to a national park there and establishing a protected area of roughly 370,000 acres. And another nature sanctuary in Chile that they'd worked with the government to create became accessible, which meant...
44:15 Speaker 06 A lot of the infrastructure that we'd been working on, trails, restaurants, little hotels, campgrounds, all of that became open for the public.
44:27 Manoush Zomorodi? So their plan was finally coming to fruition. But then, in 2015, tragedy struck. Doug, always an outdoor adventurer and risk taker, was on a kayaking trip with friends. When the weather turned, he flipped out of the boat and couldn't get to shore, eventually dying of hypothermia.
44:53 Manoush Zomorodi? In 2015, your husband was on an adventure, kayaking, and did not come home alive. And you say that the big, audacious vision of Doug's kept you in one piece after he died.
45:10 Speaker 06 Yeah. It was a tomahawk to my forehead. It wasn't just a moment of grief. But I was always a fighter, really. And in this moment in my life, I knew, we have to finish this.
45:32 Speaker 06 And this is the team led by Sofia Henan in Argentina, Carolina Morgado in Chile. We decided we have to go do this. The big risk was holding all of these big parks and all of the costs of all the infrastructure, building it, completing it, maintaining it. So I just went through everything we had and in each one, okay, this is what done looks like. And within two and a half years, all the parks were national parks. And we did them all at once.
46:13 Manoush Zomorodi? In 2018, Christine and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed a decree to create a network of five new national parks in Chile and expand three others, adding a total of more than 10 million acres of new national parklands to Chile's system of protected areas. And they've added more since. To date, Christine's organizations have created...
46:39 Speaker 06 15 new national parks, enlarged three or four others, for a total of around 15 million acres.
46:50 Manoush Zomorodi? This roughly doubled the national park systems in Chile and Argentina, with territory that put together is the size of Costa Rica.
46:59 Speaker 06 This was what we were looking for, pushing ourselves to some new level of commitment in all aspects of our life.
47:09 Manoush Zomorodi? They wouldn't have worked otherwise.
47:11 Speaker 06 No, you know what? I think, I think you're right.
47:17 Manoush Zomorodi? There are some who don't agree with your approach to conservation because buying acres of land and keeping it pristine doesn't necessarily add to the GDP of a country. I mean, we hear this a lot when we talk about climate change, that the richest countries, those that caused all these problems, won't now allow the poorest ones to get a shot at being industrialized and growing the wealth of their population. What do you think?
47:46 Speaker 06 Well, it isn't true that you're taking production out of a territory when you create national parks. I think we have to be careful about imagining protected areas are just closed up as if the air's been sucked out of them. I say, we're changing what it produces. Employment inside the national parks, tourism business, economic activities in the local communities. If you make a national park or just preserve an area and the local communities and regional communities don't absolutely visually, tactically
48:30 Speaker 06 benefit from it, where is that 50 years from now? Or 100 years from now? It's not going to work. And we're not interested in just seeing that nature is protected. We also have responsibility to our own species. The importance is absolutely equal. You can't do one without the other.
48:56 Speaker 06 Dignified, healthy human communities have a much greater chance if natural systems are respected and cared for. Because we won't make it in the absence of a healthy ecosystem. I mean, there's a, there's a chance for that. Well, we know, certainly I won't in my lifetime.
49:19 Manoush Zomorodi? How do we get more people to think in that long term, though? Because I think some people would say, well, you had the financial luxury of being able to think that way.
49:30 Speaker 06 Well, I mean, in our case, it helped us work faster. And I'll be really honest with you. Your question is a good one. And having really read a lot about the collapse of various civilizations, we humans only really change our behavior in a crisis. Otherwise, it's just too difficult. We don't have the spine. We don't have the willfulness to look at what we're doing and collectively decide we're going to change the way we live so that our grandkids and great grandkids can live even remotely well.
50:12 Speaker 06 It's hard to imagine what we can do, but that's also a fallacy. There are a lot of things people can do. I get asked every time I speak in public, what can I do? What should I do? And I always say the same thing. I'm just meeting you for the first time. I don't know where you live, but mostly, I don't know what you're good at. And let me tell you, that's where you have to start. You don't have to have money. You can be anywhere in the world and take a hard look at yourself. What am I really good at? And go give it away. Go do that.
50:55 Speaker 06 Because if we don't participate in our future, it is an abdication of our future. And I don't think most people want to live like that.
51:09 Manoush Zomorodi? That's Christine Tompkins. She's the president of Tompkins Conservation and former CEO of Patagonia. Her next big plan is in full swing, by the way. She and her team are bringing back keystone species like the jaguar to these national parks and the surrounding regions. Learn more in both of Christine's talks at ted.com. And you can also see her in the National Geographic documentary, Wildlife. Thank you so much for listening to our episode, Improvise, Pivot, Plan. It was produced by James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner White, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkempur, Katie Monteleone, and me.
51:54 Manoush Zomorodi? Our production staff at NPR also includes Harsha Nahada and Fiona Guren. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Patrick Murray. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balorozzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
52:24 Speaker 06 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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