Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Curious stories of coexistence About this episode Can otters be city dwellers? Are aliens real? Do we have to experience misery to understand happiness? On this episode, we investigate how strange bedfellows can lead to radical realizations. Guests include evolutionary biologist Philip Johns, astrophysicist Avi Loeb and author Laurel Braitman.
Original air date: March 21, 2025
TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted.
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Manoush Zomorodi? This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.
0:24 Speaker 01 Our job now is to dream big.
0:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Delivered at TED conferences.
0:27 Speaker 02 To bring about the future we want to see.
0:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Around the world.
0:30 Speaker 03 To understand who we are.
0:32 Manoush Zomorodi? From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:37 Speaker 04 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 05 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR.
0:55 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zomorodi. These are the sounds of a family of otters. They're in a river, some adults with their pups, chattering and playing. And then they start to form sort of a line, a chain of otters, corralling the small fish swimming amongst them.
1:20 Speaker 06 They herd fish with their pups. They technically corral them because they're often corralling them against a fixed surface like the side of a canal.
1:27 Manoush Zomorodi? This is Philip Johns. He's a biologist and geneticist who studies animal behavior like those in these otters.
1:36 Speaker 06 And I think what's going on is the pups are following really simple rules that might go, swim next to mom. If there's a fish in front of me, eat it. And the adults are coordinating things through their vocalizations.
1:51 Speaker 06 So you know, there's one vocalization that somebody's saying that's like, okay, dive, you know, here we go. And they all dive together. That's really cool.
2:02 Manoush Zomorodi? Otter behavior is of course fascinating, but what's more surprising perhaps is where exactly these otters are. Not off the Pacific coast or in North American rivers. These otters are living and thriving in the middle of one of the busiest, most modern cities in the world, Singapore.
2:26 Speaker 06 It's got this crazy enormous architecture and it is kind of a city in a jungle.
2:31 Manoush Zomorodi? A city-state, home to 6 million people and all kinds of high-tech companies, all surrounded by trees and waterways. And because of this geography, the city is a mix of steel and glass skyscrapers and wildlife.
2:49 Speaker 06 Some of that wildlife is extremely charismatic. We have pied hornbills, these birds with really, really large bills. We have things like flying lizards. They're in the genus Draco. We have klugos, which is one of my favorite, these strange nocturnal gliding mammals. And then there are tons of snakes in Singapore. Some of them are quite beautiful. I remember when one of my early outings, somebody said, oh yeah, when you walk over there, just keep your eyes open because there's a cobra that hangs out around there. Yesterday, I was walking home and you know, I walk home between these these brand-new giant condos. You know, they're over 30 floors high. They're glass and steel. And I look up and there's a white-bellied sea eagle, you know, this very large bird
3:34 Speaker 06 circling one of the condos. And it's just incredible because you know, it's kind of like this juxtaposition of you know, nature and modernity.
3:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Which brings us back to the otters that live here too. The Asian small-clawed otter and the more common and larger, smooth-coated otter.
3:53 Speaker 06 This is a really social species of otter. They have multiple broods that live with the dominant pair, the matriarch and the patriarch. And so you might have a family of 20 animals. And this might be, you know, three successive broods of offspring that are still living with the parents.
4:09 Manoush Zomorodi? Harmonious, large families of otters sound lovely. But here's the problem with all these otter families prospering side by side.
4:19 Speaker 06 They defend territories. They defend them violently. They fight. And the fights are injurious. You know, otters get hurt. Sometimes otters get killed. It's not pleasant to watch.
4:31 Manoush Zomorodi? Philip remembers one particular beef between two otter families that played out downtown.
4:37 Speaker 06 And by right downtown, I mean right downtown. At rush hour, the otters would swim toward each other and they're screaming at each other and they're swimming around, they're biting, and the water is beat to a froth. And you look on the banks and there are literally thousands, tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work, you know, walking along the banks of the rivers. And it's just incredibly dramatic.
4:58 Manoush Zomorodi? Every day, we hear about nations, different groups of people, struggling to get along. Humanity seems unable to overcome its differences. But what can we learn from more unusual examples of strange bedfellows? How are different species, or provocative scientific ideas, maybe even conflicting emotions, finding ways to live in harmony? Well, today on the show, coexistence. Ideas about what we can do to adapt, make peace with, maybe even find pleasure in conflict.
5:42 Manoush Zomorodi? When biologist Philip Johns first arrived in Singapore, he learned that this wasn't the first time that rowdy families of otters had made their home there.
5:50 Speaker 06 All of this was just incredible to me.
5:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Here he is on the TED stage.
5:55 Speaker 06 And part of the reason it was incredible to everybody is that the otters were returning after a long absence. So we know that there were otters in Singapore in sometime before the mid 20th century. But then Singapore started to change. It modernized, it started to industrialize, and all of a sudden, the waterways got filthy.
6:16 Speaker 06 What happened was they started to fill with sludge, industrial pollution and dead animals to the point where they stank. And otters live in water. They eat fish in water and they couldn't eat and live in waterways that were that dirty. So they left. But things changed again. Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways and they were really, really successful. So all of a sudden, instead of having waterways that were filled with filth, we had waterways that were filled with fish. And from the otters' points of view, they were feeding troughs. So they came back. And now we have lots of otters all over Singapore.
6:54 Manoush Zomorodi? How many otters are we talking here? Are we talking like you turn a corner and you look at water and there's an otter there?
7:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, the otters live in the waterways and the waterways typically have some kind of park around them. I think there are probably 20 families. And if you're an otter, being an otter is pretty cool in Singapore because you know, you wake up, you fish, you roll around in the dirt, you play, and then you go back to sleep. And it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of awesome. And so I can be on one side of the river, looking across the river, watching a family of otters do its thing through binoculars or a camera, and they're absolutely unfazed.
7:33 Manoush Zomorodi? So they, they don't take any mind of you. But I have to ask you, like, if you put in the words otter and Singapore, there's some crazy headlines that come up.
7:44 Speaker 06 Uh, yeah. So now all the, the interactions have been benign. There have been a very few incidences where the otters have bitten people. And I think all of those were cases where either somebody was behaving unwisely, or where the otters had pups. And when, when otters have young pups, they become defensive. They're less likely to be sort of sanguine about people getting close to them.
8:09 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm. Yeah, because I have to say, like, especially the British press seems to love picking up stories like this one.
8:16 Speaker 01 Fearing for his life.
8:18 Manoush Zomorodi? Man attacked by pack of otters in a Singapore park, said he thought he was going to die.
8:23 Speaker 01 Suffered 26 wounds on his buttocks, legs, and
8:26 Speaker 06 Fingers while on his usual six AM walk in Singapore. That case, as I understand it, was a case where the man was very close to a group of otters. Uh, it was a big family and another man jogged directly through the group of otters. And in this case, the guy who got bit, it was kind of an innocent bystander, but the otters got confused. Um, you know, it's hard to think of of a situation where running through a group of wild animals is acceptable. Um, and and the otters aren't small, they they can hurt somebody.
9:00 Speaker 06 So that's been one issue and it has been an issue. Um, and otters also have eaten a lot of fish.
9:09 Speaker 06 You know, people keep fish in Singapore, uh, people keep koi and these koi are large, they're expensive, they're long-lived, they're pets.
9:21 Speaker 06 You know, and when I say expensive, I mean, uh, the koi pond might have tens of thousands of dollars of koi in it. You know, those kinds of human wildlife conflicts are things that we we can't kind of sweep away. We have to be realistic about them. But within that context, I think there's room for people and animals to coexist, even in someplace that's as urban as Singapore.
9:45 Speaker 06 And so people who might start otter watching because they want to get photographs of cute pups might continue to do other things because they've formed a connection with nature. And we see this all the time, that people care about nature when they form some connection to nature. Whether that connection is to otters or to a pair of hornbills on campus or to a bird that visits them on their balcony. We need these personal connections and we see them all over the place. Singapore has enacted a lot of policies that make these kinds of connections a lot easier. There are over three hundred parks and nature reserves. Singapore has a plan that no one should be more than ten minutes away from some kind of park.
10:26 Speaker 06 One of the effects of this is that people will have more chances to interact with nature and they'll have more chances to care. I think we're trying to get away from something where nature is over there on the other side of a fence or a wall or something like that. Nature is something that's around us and above us and beside us. And that's true in lots of places, including in cities.
10:50 Speaker 06 So I think this also raises other questions such as can cities be wildlife refuges? Is this something that we can protect and maybe foster and grow?
11:01 Manoush Zomorodi? As cities grow and there are more humans on the planet and we spread and take more space, what are some of the lessons that other city dwellers or urban planners can take from how humans and otters are figuring out ways to coexist?
11:22 Speaker 06 We have to be realistic that we can accommodate all wildlife, I think. Having said that, we can be remarkably accepting of a lot of wildlife. You know, one of the most amazing things to me was the mountain lion that lived in Griffith Park in Los Angeles for years. And, you know, not everybody is thrilled about it, and there's good reason to be concerned about having a large wild cat living inside the city of Los Angeles. But I think for the most part, people were kind of proud of it. If you go to social media sites of people who have things like camera traps in their backyard, a lot of people are thrilled that they have bobcats periodically in their backyard or that there are coyotes that come and visit in their backyard.
12:06 Speaker 06 And again, there is the potential for human-wildlife conflict. Coyotes eat a lot of cats and dogs. You know, we have to be clear-eyed about that. But I think in many cases, we can make some very modest concessions. And when we do, coexistence is certainly possible, and it's maybe something that can be encouraged. So, you know, that's my hope. It really is kind of wonderful to do things like walk to work and see gliding lizards, seeing lizards that are literally gliding from tree to tree.
12:37 Manoush Zomorodi? So cool.
12:38 Speaker 06 Right. You know, just amazing things like this, or to see, you know, eagles flying among the skyscrapers. You know, just crazy things like that. You know, if familiarity breeds empathy, then I think it helps us to have more familiarity.
12:56 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Philip Johns. He is a biologist and associate professor at the Yale National University of Singapore College. You can watch his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about coexistence. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
13:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Cornerpiece, a podcast from TED. If you've ever stayed up at 2:00 AM wondering why some friendships last while others fall apart, or whether unconditional love actually exists, this show is for you. Check out Cornerpiece wherever you listen. This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts, they use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joyrides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For
14:12 Manoush Zomorodi? the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.
14:49 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
14:52 Speaker 06 One, two, three, four, five, can you hear me?
14:55 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Hi, Avi.
14:57 Speaker 06 Hi, good to speak with you.
14:59 Manoush Zomorodi? And you. Today on the show, coexistence. It sounds like it's clicking in and out a little bit.
15:04 Speaker 06 OK, let me see, maybe the connection here.
15:06 Manoush Zomorodi? With other humans, animals, and whatever is out there in space. Would you mind just introducing yourself? Tell us your name and what you do.
15:20 Speaker 06 My name is Avi Loeb, and I have the privilege of being a scientist, meaning that I can follow my childhood curiosity without pretending to be the adult in the room.
15:32 Manoush Zomorodi? If you know a lot about astrophysics, then you know who Avi Loeb is. For the past four decades, he has been a leader in the field.
15:41 Speaker 06 I'm a 10-year-old professor at Harvard University, and I was also chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years.
15:49 Manoush Zomorodi? Avi has published over 1,000 scientific papers on black holes and how the first stars and galaxies formed.
15:57 Speaker 06 I've been the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard. I was the founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative.
16:05 Manoush Zomorodi? He's written nine books.
16:06 Speaker 06 I chaired the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. I chaired the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, which is the first.
16:15 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, he's a big deal. But over the last decade or so, he has put that reputation in jeopardy by searching for something else in the cosmos.
16:26 Speaker 06 I think it will be the biggest discovery in science ever made in terms of its impact on the future of humanity.
16:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Signs of life.
16:36 Speaker 06 We are searching for artifacts that may have been manufactured by extraterrestrial civilizations.
16:44 Manoush Zomorodi? That's right. Avi is looking for aliens.
16:48 Speaker 06 Yes, that's my latest hobby.
16:51 Manoush Zomorodi? But why? Why go on a quest that, to some of his fellow scientists, sounds ridiculous?
16:58 Speaker 06 You know, one reason I search for higher intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it here on Earth.
17:07 Manoush Zomorodi? As far as Avi is concerned, the scientific method requires us to ask questions and seek answers. So why is he doing this? He says, why not? But exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life has created a huge rift between him and many of his colleagues. They are questioning whether his ideas should even exist within their scientific community, just as Avi wonders whether we humans coexist with other life forms.
17:41 Speaker 06 Space is vast. It's measured in tens of thousands of light years just within the Milky Way galaxy alone. So to imagine, you know, there are other beings like us on similar rocks far away is very natural.
17:57 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, you're right. Everyone, we love to watch movies about other beings that might be out there in the universe. We love to think about this idea that we might not be alone. It is fascinating to people. And you are saying, well, you know, let's use the science to see if there is a way that it might be sure.
18:22 Speaker 06 Exactly. Let's use the scientific method, which is basically let's not imagine anything the way Hollywood does. Let's not assume anything. To make progress, we need to collect data. And, you know, new knowledge does not fall into our lap. And so you have to put effort, money, time in order to design instruments that will detect those very challenging signals.
18:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Avi Loeb on the TED stage. I'm just a curious farm boy.
18:59 Manoush Zomorodi? And I want...
18:59 Speaker 01 wander about the world around me.
19:03 Speaker 01 And I hate to behave like the adults in the room. Because they often pretend to know more than we actually know. And that bothered me since I was a young kid. And so I decided to become a scientist and answer the questions based on evidence, not based on prejudice. And for 70 years, we've been searching for radio signals. This is equivalent to staying at home and waiting for a phone call that may never come. Because nobody cares that we are lonely. A much better approach is to check
19:48 Speaker 01 if there is any object in our backyard that may have arrived from a neighbor's yard. Like a tennis ball that may tell us that the neighbor plays tennis.
20:03 Speaker 01 People often say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they are not seeking the evidence. So let's just look around.
20:13 Manoush Zomorodi? To understand why Avi began his search for alien life, we need to go back to 2017, when scientists spotted a strange object in the sky.
20:24 Speaker 01 This was an object called 'umua muua', which means scout in the Hawaiian language. It was discovered by a telescope named the Panstars in Hawaii on Mount Haleakala.
20:36 Manoush Zomorodi? 'Umua muua' was unlike anything Avi and other astrophysicists had ever seen before. And it raised a lot of questions. Namely, what was it and where did it come from?
20:47 Speaker 01 At first, you know, we just knew that this is an object from outside the solar system because it moved too fast to be bound by gravity to the sun. And so it was clear beyond any doubt that it came from outside the solar system. So everyone assumed that it must be an asteroid or a comet, the type of objects we find within the solar system, rocks or icy rocks. But there was no cometary tail.
21:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Even more perplexing was the way that the object moved through space.
21:21 Speaker 01 The object showed a push away from the sun by some mysterious force. And so it's as if there was something pushing it away from the sun. It's a non-gravitational acceleration. But there was no cometary evaporation, no gas or dust around it. So the question was, what is exerting this force on the object?
21:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Scientists looked for an explanation, any explanation.
21:47 Speaker 01 You know, some of my colleagues argued, maybe you can explain these anomalies by imagining a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen. So then someone else said, well, maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg. And then someone else said, well, maybe it's a dust bunny.
22:01 Manoush Zomorodi? But Avi wasn't convinced. He suggested another hypothesis, that perhaps Umumua was not naturally occurring. Perhaps it was produced by something or someone from another planet. Perhaps it was alien technology.
22:19 Speaker 01 And just the suggestion that it might be artificial got me into trouble because I was not supposed to consider that possibility. How dare you even think about that? It's a rock of a type that we've never seen before, period.
22:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Avi published a paper about his hypothesis, which launched a slew of criticism from his colleagues, who said that he was leaping to the conclusion that Umumua was proof of aliens without exhausting every other possibility.
22:50 Speaker 01 All of the alternative explanations had issues. And I just said, let's keep the artificial origin on the table because we are producing space trash and other civilizations might have done the same.
23:03 Manoush Zomorodi? Then in 2023, two scientists published a paper in Nature with a new explanation for Umumua, that it was simply a comet with no tail. Scientists now call this a dark comet, an object that moves like a comet but looks like an asteroid. The explanation does not satisfy Avi.
23:27 Speaker 01 Because the only way you define a comet is by detecting its cometary tail. That's what a comet is. So if you say that an elephant is an unstriped zebra, you know, that sounds strange because it's not the same animal. Okay. And so my point is, when you don't see a cometary tail, don't call it a comet.
23:50 Manoush Zomorodi? In 2024, researchers found more objects that move like comets, but look more like asteroids, calling them dark comets. By now, most scientists have moved on from the Umumua debate. But the public has not. Ever since his suggestion that Umumua could be a sign of alien life, Avi has gotten more attention and funding from people outside the world of astrophysics. He may have lost favor with his colleagues, but he's gained a whole new audience.
24:21 Speaker 01 Yes, on the one hand, the public really was extremely fascinated by this possibility. And I got a huge amount of attention from the media, something that I was not familiar with before. And I was also contacted by a literary agent to write a book, which ended up being extraterrestrial, became bestseller. And I participated in about 3,500 podcast interviews. Netflix is producing a documentary.
24:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Thanks to all this attention, in 2021, Avi co-founded the Galileo Project at Harvard, a research program dedicated to searching for alien technology on and near Earth. Avi and his team have received millions of dollars in private funding from a long list of uber wealthy donors.
25:13 Speaker 01 We built an observatory at Harvard University. It's a unique observatory. Usually astronomical observatories are focusing on a small portion of the sky and looking at very distant sources. But here, we are looking at the entire sky all the time and in particular, searching for objects near Earth. That are just overhead. And we are using infrared cameras, optical cameras, radio sensors, audio sensors, and analyzing the data with machine learning software, using state-of-the-art algorithms to figure out if there are any objects that are not familiar. I'm not trying to imagine what might be out there.
25:58 Speaker 01 I'm just saying we know about birds. We know about airplanes, leaves, clouds, satellites, balloons, drones. These are things we know about. And is there anything else? And if we find an object that is maneuvering in ways that does not mimic the flight characteristics of known objects, we will write a paper about it and share it with the scientific community. And for me, having more data is really a bliss because once you have a lot of data, it will become clear whether we're dealing with a rock of a type that we've never seen before or maybe some artificial object.
26:40 Speaker 01 And at some point, it would be impossible to ignore it.
26:45 Manoush Zomorodi? There are probably going to be people listening who are saying, why? And these are scientists on Earth right now who would say, why are you giving Avi Loeb the mic? You have become a bit of a pariah in your field. I want to quote one astrophysicist, Steve Dash, who said, "People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb's wild claims. It's polluting good science, conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room." There's a lot of ire towards you, a field that embraced you for the longest time. And now, what's it like having them call you names?
27:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I really don't like that. But one thing I learned is that... You know, if you don't want to get dirty, don't mud wrestle. So I don't respond to those. I am still the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation. I work with students, I work with postdocs. I just gave a lecture at the Black Hole Initiative about primordial black holes. So I continue to work on other subjects as well. And the people who know me, you know, are very supportive because they know that I'm doing it not out of any other reason than advocating for something I believe in that should be studied.
28:09 Speaker 01 And, you know, I borrowed the approach from the research on dark matter that I worked on early on in my career. You know, we don't know what 85% of the matter in the universe is. So billions of dollars are spent on the searches for dark matter. Specific types of particles that were proposed by theorists like myself were very much rewarded by attention and so forth. So I have that experience. And for me, it's no different. But for some reason, this particular subject is making some people very upset. And those are people who are upset about the public attention that I'm getting.
28:50 Speaker 01 You know, when I gave my class at Harvard, in the opening lecture, I asked the students, "What is the strongest force in academia? Is it gravity? Is it electromagnetism?"
29:05 Speaker 01 They were quiet, and then I answered the question myself. I said, "No, it's jealousy."
29:13 Manoush Zomorodi? Can I ask you, how would you know? You've given us several examples of all the data and specimens that you're collecting and sort of sifting through all of this. How will you know for sure? What would be the moment where you could tell the rest of the world, "Yes, we are not alone. We are coexisting with something else that is alive"?
29:39 Speaker 01 Well, that's relatively straightforward if you have good enough data. For example, if we had an image of an interstellar object, and you see bolts and screws, and you see that it looks like a technological object, there is no doubt that it's not a rock. That would be clear evidence.
29:59 Manoush Zomorodi? Let's say this did happen. How would it change things for us? What you must have imagined this scenario in your mind.
30:09 Speaker 01 Yes, I think it will change our perspective. Because, you know, when you find a partner, it changes the meaning of your existence. We know that from our personal lives. And here, I'm just talking about finding a partner in the global scheme of the cosmos. These are all the Earth-Sun systems. You know, there are 100 billions of them in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We see so many houses like our own. And to me, it's very natural to imagine that there are residents that we can learn from. So just paying attention to our cosmic neighborhood, you know, will allow us to mature and realize that what we usually care about
30:52 Speaker 01 is not as important as the bigger scheme of things. And we could do better by paying attention to our neighbors. When I look up at the sky at night, I see 100 billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy. They look like lights in cabins of a giant spaceship, the Milky Way, sailing through space. And I wonder if there are other passengers in those cabins. There are 100 billion of them, comparable to the number of people who ever lived on Earth.
31:37 Speaker 01 It would be arrogant to think otherwise, that we are alone, that we are unique and special. Especially if you read the news every day. We are not the pinnacle of creation. There is room for improvement.
31:55 Speaker 01 And so the next Copernican revolution would be that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe. Not only that we are not at the physical center of the universe, but actually, you know, we arrived to the play relatively late. We are not at the center of stage. The play is not about us. We should be modest. We keep thinking that it's about us, but it's not. And we better find other actors that will tell us what the play is about.
32:32 Manoush Zomorodi? That was astrophysicist Avi Loeb. He is a professor of science at Harvard University's Department of Astronomy. Since we spoke, Avi has put out similar theories about another interstellar object called 3I Atlas, which was discovered in 2025. It is still being studied, but for now, NASA and the majority of the scientific community maintain that its origins are natural, not alien. You can see Avi Loeb's full talk at ted.com. On the show today, coexistence. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
33:21 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Cornerpiece, a podcast from TED. If you've ever stayed up at 2:00 AM wondering why some friendships last while others fall apart, or whether unconditional love actually exists, this show is for you. Check out Cornerpiece wherever you listen. This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season. From joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views, REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop.
34:04 Manoush Zomorodi? In-store or at REI.com. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message. What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.
34:39 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we are exploring coexistence. And our next speaker tells us the story of her family, a warning we do talk about suicide.
34:55 Speaker 03 We really can't have happiness without sadness. We can't have joy without pain. We also cannot have bravery without fear. Instead of being opposites, those things are teammates.
35:09 Manoush Zomorodi? It took writer Laurel Braitman decades to understand this lesson. But the seeds were planted in her childhood. Quite literally, she grew up on an avocado ranch outside of Los Angeles.
35:23 Speaker 03 We are about 20 miles inland in a really gorgeous canyon that is lined with fruit orchards. So you can often smell avocados blooming or lemon trees blooming.
35:38 Manoush Zomorodi? Her earliest memories are of her parents teaching her and her brother how to work on the ranch.
35:44 Speaker 03 You know, pulling out orchards that were failing and planting new orchards, rebuilding the main ranch house, restoring the corrals, and really just rehabbing the landscape in a lot of ways. We helped spread fertilizer and prune, and we would just kind of take breaks and play and then come back and help them.
36:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Alongside those farming chores, Laurel's father also taught them some other life lessons.
36:10 Speaker 03 But they were really specific skills to like what my dad cared about. So like all the member nations of the UN, how the Dewey Decimal System worked. He really wanted me to like beat men at things that were stereotypically male. That was like a thing, a point of pride. So he wanted me to be able to like outfish any guy who might dare underestimate me or repair a carbureator or be really good at pool.
36:37 Manoush Zomorodi? These were skills he wanted to pass on because when Laurel was three years old, her father was diagnosed with bone cancer. It started in his knee, then metastasized and spread to other parts of his body.
36:52 Speaker 03 And so from that day forward, we lived between scans. So sometimes we would get, you know, six months. Sometimes we would have six weeks. The longest we ever had before he had a recurrence was about four and a half, five years.
37:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, wow.
37:07 Speaker 03 So that was a great period of time. But that's how we lived. You know, we tried to fit as much life and memory making and togetherness into those periods of time between therapy or surgery or treatment or scan.
37:23 Manoush Zomorodi? So for most of her childhood, Laurel grew up with a constant feeling of dread, knowing that every one of those lessons and memory making moments was her father's attempt to make the most of the time he had left.
37:41 Speaker 03 So another thing my dad did was that he taught himself how to be a beekeeper. And he knew that ancient Egyptians had used honey to treat wounds and for other medical applications, it's a really good natural antibiotic. And because of that, honey that the Egyptians put away is still good. Like in some cases, thousands of years later. So he started putting away a lot of honey, like buckets and buckets of honey. And he knew that the honey would outlive him. And I think he hoped that, you know, we would stir it into our coffee or our tea long after he was gone and we would think of him and we would know how much he loved us.
38:24 Speaker 03 He was so scared and heartbroken that he was gonna have to leave us before we were ready, before he was ready. Amazingly, he lived 14 years with this disease. So he lived his prognosis many, many times over. And, you know, he always used to tell us, like, when I can't enjoy life with you and your mom and your brother, I'm gonna die. And then I was a junior in high school, and I found a pill bottle, and there was a little note tied around it. There was dosage instructions on the note. And I kind of immediately knew what it was.
39:05 Speaker 03 Suddenly, everything clicked into place, and I realized my dad had a lethal prescription. You know, right-to-die medication was not legal in California, though, at the time. And so I knew I wasn't supposed to know about this. And so I just wrapped it up, and I put it back in the cabinet, and then I never spoke of it again. And so that added another sort of dread layer, I'd say, to the everyday, where I knew he had this, but I didn't know when he was gonna take it. And he didn't know when he was gonna take it.
39:40 Manoush Zomorodi? Tell us how it finally happened.
39:44 Speaker 03 About six months later, he and I got into a terrible fight on the phone. I wasn't at home, and I had called home, and he was hassling me about my college applications, of all things. They were due in a few weeks, and he was telling me I had to get them in, and, you know, I was a surly teenager, you know? And I yelled at him, and I was like, I don't know why you're giving me such a hard time. Like, I was so mad, and I hung up on him. And as I was hanging the phone back in the cradle, could hear him say strongly through the phone, "I love you." And I was just like, I am not saying that back. He needs to know he's being unreasonable. And I slammed the phone down.
40:26 Speaker 03 And unbeknownst to me, that was the last time we would talk. And the reason he was hassling with me was because he knew he was gonna take his medical aid and dying medication. And he knew I was gonna be upset and not be able to apply to college. And he wanted to make sure I did it.
40:43 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh.
40:43 Speaker 03 And by the time I got home, a few hours later, he had taken his medication and he was unconscious and I would never hear his voice again.
40:53 Manoush Zomorodi? That was your senior year of high school?
40:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I was 17.
41:01 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, it's kind of amazing what happened next. You, at least on the face of it, absolutely thrived. You went to Cornell University. You played Division I sports after being an All-American lacrosse player. You were class president. You were a summa cum laude. You, you, you wrote bestselling books. Like, you went to MIT for a PhD. Like, you, again, on the face of it, did your father proud.
41:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, I did.
41:35 Speaker 03 You know, in the wake of his death, I felt so guilty. I, I lived with a crushing sense of guilt that, you know, someone who was good would not have hung up on her dying father, would have said she loved him. Here, here was somebody who had sacrificed everything for time to teach me things, you know, like how, how to beat a man at pool, you know? I felt because of that, that when it really mattered, I, I had let him down. And so I took his dreams for me. And rather than seeing them as like a parent's dreams for their child, like, I took them as a literal to-do list. And I went on the list and I was like, okay, he wanted this for me. I'm gonna do this. He wanted that. He didn't get to see this place.
42:19 Speaker 03 I'm gonna make sure I get to see this place. And I, I really approached his dreams for me as like marching orders.
42:28 Speaker 03 I dealt with his death by doubling down on the things he wanted for me. And then, in my mid-30s, I realized I was just completely exhausted.
42:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Laurel Braitman continues from the TED stage.
42:42 Speaker 03 I had been living my entire adult life in a way to prove to myself that I was good. I was using achievement and all of the shiny things that come along with it as a way of anesthetizing my own bad feelings of shame, regret, and fear. Those feelings were so big, I worried that if I let myself feel them for even a minute, I would never, ever feel anything else again.
43:12 Speaker 03 But you cannot kill negative feelings, sadly, with work and avoidance.
43:23 Speaker 03 And mine came back with a jolt. On the outside, I was successful and thriving. And on the inside, I was anxious, terrified, and questioning my worth. By avoiding all of the negative feelings, I was muting the fantastic ones, too. I was so scared about missing out and losing more of the best things in life, joy, awe, love, wonder, that I couldn't even let myself experience them. I needed to find a new way to be. I wanted to find a new way to be.
44:01 Speaker 03 I had learned that when a young person has a trauma, they can get stuck developmentally at that age, of whatever age you were when the hard thing happened.
44:12 Speaker 03 So I was kind of like, you know, a Pleistocene ant in amber, but as a 17-year-old.
44:19 Speaker 03 So I got sort of developmentally stuck in some ways at 17. And I felt like I needed some help moving past that and opening myself up to feeling everything.
44:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, I mean, how did you come to that realization? Because you say it took you years to understand that your father expected himself to be superhuman. And by extension, you too. How did you figure out that like, I mean, that could be the end of the story. And my father died and I took everything he taught me and I had this amazing life. But, you know.
44:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, if only, I mean, what happened was was a little bit harder to understand. And I reached the end of the list and I wasn't happy. Immediately, you know, what I noticed kind of first was that it was getting really, really hard for me to be in relationships. And I really wanted to be in love and I wanted partnership. And when I got close to people, I got really uncomfortable. I think I was just, you know, scared. To this day, I hate falling in love. It's terrible to love anyone or anything because it can be taken from you. So I did a bunch of stuff.
45:35 Speaker 03 I interviewed a ton of grief specialists and therapists. But what hit me the hardest was becoming a volunteer at a grief support organization for kids.
45:50 Speaker 03 So many of them thought they were bad too. They'd been out of the room playing when their mom died. Or they'd said something in anger to an ill parent that they regretted. And I could so clearly see that the painful things that happened to these kids were not their fault.
46:09 Speaker 03 For the first time, I was able to see that that was probably true for me too.
46:14 Speaker 03 By blaming themselves, the kids were making their losses make sense. Even though it hurt to blame themselves, it gave them a reason for the terrible thing that happened. Like, losing someone they love for no reason at all.
46:32 Speaker 03 Maybe some of you can relate.
46:35 Speaker 03 Often, when we feel difficult things, we blame ourselves because it's easier than admitting we have no control.
46:46 Speaker 03 That's what I had been doing for the 25 years since my dad died. But just because you feel guilt and shame does not mean you did something wrong.
47:00 Speaker 03 Just because you feel regret does not necessarily mean you should have acted differently.
47:06 Speaker 03 It sounds very simple, and it is very hard to accept.
47:13 Speaker 03 Life is nothing except one long sushi conveyor belt of things that are going to test you and teach you at the same time.
47:24 Manoush Zomorodi? What struck you about the way these kids were processing or dealing with losing someone in their life that was different from what you had gone through?
47:35 Speaker 03 At a center like this, the kids are around other kids who have had similar experiences. And it was a really powerful thing for me to watch. One activity we would do is, you know, draw your grief. And I remember sitting next to one child who was drawing a sneaker wave of grief, kind of like a tsunami. And I remember them getting pretty sad, explaining it. And then, two seconds later, like, they're on the jungle gym, you know, shrieking with joy. And watching that really affected me profoundly because I realized I could do the same for myself, that I...
48:19 Speaker 03 The hard things could live alongside my joy, that I could be working and I could take a bead and I could let myself have a, have a moment and then I could get right back into it.
48:29 Manoush Zomorodi? What did happy, sad, or this coexistence of two vastly different emotions, or we think of them as being vastly different, what did that look like for you?
48:40 Speaker 03 I had to learn how to do it. I think I saw the depth of my despair and it scared me so much that I needed to bury it.
48:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Mm-hmm.
48:53 Speaker 03 And it really wasn't until I realized that that grief that I had tried to, to lock away and that was masquerading as self-doubt and as shame and guilt was going to keep me from what I wanted most in life, which is to love other people well and to be of service and to connect with people and places and things.
49:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
49:18 Speaker 03 But I will say it's like a daily practice and it comes up in the damnedest ways. So like I have this thing that I can't add someone to my favorites list on my phone or something terrible will happen to them. And so I finally like, I think we'd been married for like a year, I like finally added my husband to my favorites list on my iPhone and was like, you can, you can do this, it's gonna be fine. And guess what? He is still with us. You know, I live in an area too, for example, where wildfires are now a constant threat and I have to make peace with that, you know? So I was so scared that if I hung the things I loved on the wall, that they would burn down, that I, you know, it would slow me down from grabbing them as I, as I left the house, you know?
50:03 Speaker 03 So I, this is a daily, daily practice where I have to live with the anxiety and the fear and somehow let my enjoyment and pleasure find a way in around it and through it.
50:18 Manoush Zomorodi? That was bestselling author Laurel Braitman. Her latest book is called What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love. You can see her talks at ted.com. By the way, in 2017, a wildfire did reach Laurel's childhood home. The ranch burned down, and she lost many of the structures her father had built to pass on. But miraculously, the chicken coop survived, which was incredible.
50:51 Speaker 03 And a few other things, including one small shed. And I was going through it, and we found a bucket of honey, like a five-gallon bucket of honey. And it was fine. It wasn't even smoky. You know, even in the wake of like, the devastation of the wildfire, the million other kinds of losses that come for us and had come for me, the honey itself was just perfect, as if it had just been poured in the bucket yesterday. And so now, you know, I don't have any family photos left, or very few, but I have honey.
51:34 Manoush Zomorodi? If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Katie Monteleone, and Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Guerin and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Jimmy Keeley, Becky Brown, and Zoe Vangenhoven. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.
52:15 Manoush Zomorodi? Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
52:28 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
52:32 Speaker 05 This message comes from TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new idea every day. Learn what's transforming humanity, from balancing AI in your critical thinking to surpassing discoveries about the adolescent brain. Find TED Talks Daily wherever you listen.
52:49 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from Schwab. Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage, or experience, Schwab has everything you need all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.
Previous Getting what you want: A guide to negotiating Next The TED talk that put writer Pico Iyer in “Marty Supreme” Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
