Pod Insights TED Radio Hour The skin we're in About this episode Our skin protects us, connects us, and constantly gathers data about the world around us. This hour, we explore how skin shapes our sense of self and how tech might change the way we touch and feel. Guests include mechanical engineer Katherine Kuchenbecker, materials scientist Anna Maria Coclite, TV broadcaster Lee Thomas and author Kathryn Schulz.
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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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0:24 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 02 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 03 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 04 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you.
0:43 Speaker 05 I literally feel like I'm a different person.
0:45 Manoush Zomorodi? Yes.
0:47 Speaker 05 Do you feel that way?
0:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Many of us, most of us, are used to getting notifications on our phones and smartwatches all day long. Pings, vibrations, that we quickly learn to ignore. But what if your device communicated to you in a completely different way?
1:17 Speaker 06 This device kind of more feels like a person reaching out. And you can imagine it like a smartwatch.
1:24 Manoush Zomorodi? This is researcher Katherine Kuchenbecker. In her lab, she works at the forefront of haptics, inventing ways to add a sense of touch to our technology, making it feel more responsive, tactile, maybe even alive.
1:42 Speaker 06 A smartwatch, so just like a rectangle that's 3 cm by 3 cm, like 1 inch by 1 inch about. And when we send it a command, it will extend and go down and touch your skin. So imagine I reach over and just gently touch your arm. It's soft, so it feels very pleasant. It can touch you, make contact, and then it can press harder. And it can also vibrate. It can make all kinds of different signals on your skin.
2:12 Manoush Zomorodi? Can I, just to sort of understand it more, I'm picturing wearing like an Apple Watch, but maybe it pokes me some of the hours. Maybe it touches me and presses down gently some of the other hours. Maybe it does the regular vibration other hours. But this could be useful to me in that I ignore touch when it becomes habitual.
2:33 Speaker 06 Indeed. So just like you choose which alarm you want to use to wake up in the morning, you could choose how do you want your devices to notify you that it's time to stand up. So I have a few people in my team who live far away from their partner. And maybe this is creepy, but maybe you could send not just a little buzz, but like a pat or eventually a carafe.
2:58 Speaker 06 Or a congratulatory one, like a high five that comes in over your chat. Or, I don't know, maybe something, maybe something else. A hug. What would a hug feel like if my wristband could give me a digital hug?
3:15 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm picturing you call the grandparents on Zoom, but you also have a place where kids can put their hand and they can hold hands with their grandparents who are half a world away.
3:27 Speaker 06 Indeed, that's a personal connection through to supplement or augment video chat is definitely one thing. You could have like a zone on your phone or on a touchscreen where you could feel some haptic signals.
3:39 Manoush Zomorodi? You could kiss someone on the screen.
3:42 Speaker 06 One could. I haven't, we haven't prototyped that or tested it yet. I mean, I'm sure people will try all kinds of things.
3:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Is it fair to say that despite the fact that we have touchscreens, we actually use that sense, that sense of touch, far less than maybe we did before the digital age? I mean, I'm just thinking about all the hours I spend looking at a screen, touching nothing, taking it all in with my eyes and ears.
4:11 Speaker 06 That's a very insightful comment. And so touchscreens feel our touch. They vibrate, and that's good for getting your attention or telling you something happened. But touch has so many other facets, and those dimensions are really all missing from the interactions that we have.
4:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Is that problematic? Do you feel that in the last two decades or so, that's become more of an issue for people? That they are less, well, I suppose, disembodied in some way because they're using the sense of touch less in their daily lives?
4:46 Speaker 06 I do. Touch is, I would argue, our most important sense and also the most unappreciated because we have it so consistently. We can rely on it every day. In some ways, it is us. It's our body. Touch often grounds us to reality.
5:07 Speaker 06 It lets you know. Let me reach out and pinch myself or touch this thing. Am I here? Where am I? What is real? What is not? And so when virtual worlds don't have anything you can feel or screens feel my sensation and show me different materials, but I can't actually feel a digital representation of those materials, that's a disconnect and something that we are working to improve on.
5:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Through touch and temperature, your skin is constantly taking in signals from inside and outside your body in a uniquely personal way. And yet, our skin is the most public part of the body, too. It's always on display. How do we use our body's largest organ to interpret the world? And how does the world use it to interpret us? Well, today on the show, "The Skin We're In", from cutting-edge technology to personal journeys of self-acceptance, ideas about the role our skin plays in our lives now and how technology may change it.
6:12 Manoush Zomorodi? So, back to Katherine Kuchenbecker. Today, she's a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany. But her work on haptics started about 25 years ago as a PhD student.
6:26 Speaker 06 I really started getting interested in touch when I started working on my PhD with my advisor, Günther Niemeyer, at Stanford. And he had helped invent the Da Vinci surgical robot, which allows surgeons to remote control these long, thin instruments that reach inside of patients and do minimally invasive surgery. And he posed this problem of how can we let the surgeon who's controlling this robot feel what the surgeon is touching across the room? Because we both intuitively had this feeling that making surgeons do operations without being able to feel is going to make it more difficult. So when the surgeon is moving his or her hands and is touching things, if they don't
7:08 Speaker 06 feel anything, let's say they're pulling on a suture to try to tighten a knot. If they can't feel how tight they're tying that knot, just like if you were trying to tie your shoes, but your hands are numb, you may accidentally not tighten it tight enough. Or you might pull too hard and tear the suture in the patient's skin. Or you might bump into something and not realize that you hurt it or damaged the tissue.
7:32 Manoush Zomorodi? So Katherine and the team started thinking beyond push and pull and considering all the other messages that the skin takes in through touch.
7:41 Speaker 06 Your sense of touch is actually much broader than only forces. You can also feel where something is touching you on your skin. You can feel temperature, getting warmer, colder. You can feel vibrations. So, similar to how your ears can hear fast vibrations, your skin can actually feel vibrations up to 1,000 hertz or 1,000 cycles in a second. And that's much faster. You can only move your hand back and forth like maybe one or two or three times in a second. But if you take two objects and you hit them together, they cause vibrations that you can feel and that signal to your brain, "Oh, you hit something. Stop." Or, "That was a little violent." Or, "You hit the end of the rope."
8:23 Manoush Zomorodi? When a scalpel cuts through tissue or a needle pushes through the skin, there's a vibration between the two materials. The researchers realized that they could measure those vibrations and then simulate them with motors, making virtual surgery feel real.
8:41 Speaker 06 We could have a source of really rich, interesting information. And then we could very easily play these signals for the surgeons. Their right hand could feel the vibrations of the right instrument and the left tool could feel the vibrations of the left instrument. And it's almost like their fingers were on the instruments themselves.
8:58 Manoush Zomorodi? The tool is only used for teaching surgeons how to operate. It's not actually used on humans. But Catherine says it speeds up the training process immensely.
9:08 Speaker 06 The cool thing is it feels very natural. They don't have to learn some like artificial touch language. They didn't have to do any extra learning. They just immediately start operating, moving much more like an expert, like being more careful and more precise and not being so violent. Because once you can feel, you can automatically correct for accidents or collisions that are a little more violent. Or if you were supposed to hit something and you missed it, you didn't quite get it, then you feel that. So again, we're able to let the surgeon or the person learning how to be a surgeon close the loop and feel the consequences of their motion so that they can move more precisely.
9:47 Manoush Zomorodi? These days Catherine and her PhD students are developing all kinds of haptic technology, making touchscreens that feel textured, creating virtual reality gloves that make it possible to feel what you see, and building robots like Huggybot.
10:06 Speaker 06 It was motivated my PhD student at the time, Alexis Block. She and I were both living far from our families and wishing, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if we could just like, when you're having a bad day, just like your mom or your dad could send you a hug? Or maybe you want to send your sister or your brother or your kid a hug to give them some support? Like that physical, warm, soft embrace that like often just helps calm you down and know you're not alone. So we had the idea of creating a huggy, a hugging robot, and it was named Huggybot eventually.
10:40 Manoush Zomorodi? In a video done at the lab, you can see a robot wearing a purple sweatshirt with a screen for a head, smiling and asking, can I have a hug, please?
10:51 Manoush Zomorodi? Their arms outstretched.
10:54 Speaker 06 Most robots in the world are not things you would ever want to hug. Many of them are pretty dangerous and you should stay far away from them because they could actually really severely hurt you. And even robots that are maybe safe to be around people, they usually have hard outer surfaces and they're cold and that makes them not very pleasant. So Huggybot is soft and warm and responds to how you touch it. We found out it's really important first that the robot let go of you when you're ready to end the hug. No one likes a robot or a person who hugs too long.
11:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Creepy.
11:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, definitely creepy. We even did that in the study. We had the robot hold on five seconds too long to prove that it's really important that the robot can feel when to let go. But then we realized there was this whole other level of the language of an embrace where if your partner squeezes you, it's nice to squeeze back or if they pat you, maybe you rub them on the back. Like there's a call and response, like a communication in this touch interaction. And so then we worked on giving Huggybot a sense of touch that would let it feel these intra hug gestures, what the person it was hugging was doing. And so we used, we custom made it, it's an inflated torso, kind of like a beach choy.
12:16 Speaker 06 And inside, we put a pressure sensor that can measure the air pressure inside of Huggybot because when you squeeze it, that pressure goes up. But then we also added a microphone. And, and these two sensors are just in there listening inside of Huggybot's body. And then it can feel and hear through the microphone when you pat it or you rub it, their characteristic sounds, the haptic contraction on the robot's back, that we can figure, measure those things and we can in real time, so we have little windows of data. We have a little machine learning algorithm that figures out with pretty high reliability, oh, that was a pat, that was a squeeze, that was a rub, or the user didn't do anything.
12:59 Speaker 06 So to give the robot some understanding of what's happening to its body during the embrace.
13:04 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, how humans reacted when Huggybot gave them a big embrace. On the show today, the skin we're in. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
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14:36 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. On the show today, the skin we're in. And we've been talking to Katherine Kuchenbecker. She is an expert in haptics, how we can interact with our technology through touch, from our smartphones to robots like Huggybot, a robot built by Katherine and her PhD student to, yes, hug people. Huggybot knows when to embrace. It knows when to let go. It can pat, rub, and squeeze.
15:10 Manoush Zomorodi? But do people actually like being hugged by a robot?
15:15 Speaker 06 We had people try the robot, and this is why experiments are really important. We guessed that if they patted the robot, they would want the robot to pat. Or if they did nothing, they would want the robot to do nothing. But that's actually not at all what we found. First of all, if people did something to the robot, like patted it and it did nothing, they did not like that. They thought that was a very rude robot that was kind of dissing them or ignoring them. So it was very important that the robot would respond. The second important thing was when people were just standing there hugging the robot and it spontaneously patted them or squeezed them or rubbed them, they really liked it.
15:51 Manoush Zomorodi? They liked it?
15:52 Speaker 06 They liked it. People really loved it, especially when the robot would squeeze them. It made people feel like this robot loves me, this robot cares about me. And of course, you know, it's just a robot, but it evokes this like, oh, wow, I feel supported. And so we actually then programmed Huggybot that when there's periods of silence in the embrace, like nothing's happening, the robot will proactively squeeze you so you know it's thinking about you. And people really, people really like this. But it's still important to let go when the person wants to let go. When the person lets go, the robot always lets go.
16:25 Manoush Zomorodi? It feels like we're at this point where we are developing, some people are developing relationships with artificial intelligence, which is still based on vision, text, or also more artificial voices talking. But the next chapter of that seems to be communication based on our skin, our sense of touch, and the emotion that can be imparted with that. But then I think also people will worry that we think that we can substitute real human touch with this new kind of technology.
17:02 Speaker 06 It definitely comes up. Actually, we were surprised. We did a later study that's not published where we compared hugging our robot with hugging a real human. And in some ways, people preferred hugging the robot, although it doesn't feel as comfortable. They didn't have to worry about whether the woman we'd hired to give hugs was enjoying hugging them. They could hug the robot. As long as they wanted to. So it's just like a one-sided interaction and you don't have to stress about is this woman who's been hired to hug me, is she really enjoying this hug as much as I am?
17:35 Manoush Zomorodi? A sense of touch that delivers an emotion to you without any expectation of returning an emotion.
17:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, we are absolutely not trying to replace humans. Like, a hug from someone you know and care about is going to always be, I think, better than a hug from any robot. Here, we were comparing to hugging a stranger or like a friendly person who you don't know.
17:59 Manoush Zomorodi? Huh.
17:59 Speaker 06 I mean, we actually had already stressed out the people and then they knew that her job was there to give you hugs. But my job as a researcher, our job is to ask questions, figure things out, be honest about what we find and report them so that other scientists can read about that, learn from what we learned about, and figure out what to do going forward to adapt technology to help people, to help society.
18:25 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Katherine Huchinbecker. She's a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligence Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, where she leads the haptic intelligence team. You can see her talk at ted.com. On the show today, the skin we're in. And now, a different angle on touch and technology. We want to turn to the idea of artificial skin, technology being developed to mimic this all-important organ. This research is in its very early days because replicating the sensations that our skin sends to our brain is extremely difficult.
19:05 Manoush Zomorodi? So the skin is a complex system where there are a lot of things that are actually all working together at the same time. This is Anna Maria Koklita. She is a materials scientist who spent the last decade trying to replicate skin. The actual idea of creating artificial skin isn't new. It's been around since the 1980s, often used for burn victims. But there is something missing from today's artificial skin. There is the possibility to reconstruct the skin, more or less, that it kind of looks Similar to before the burn, but still the sensation is lost.
19:48 Manoush Zomorodi? The warmth of your coffee cup in the morning, water running through your hands as you wash them, or all the different textures you touch, smooth, rough, soft, or sharp. All of those sensations are captured by your skin's receptors. We have receptors that are for a strong touch, light touch, that is for the temperature. We have millions of receptors. And all day long, those millions of receptors are bombarded with all kinds of information. And then they transmit this information through electrical stimuli to the brain thanks to the nerves, nerve connections.
20:31 Manoush Zomorodi? So it's a very complex system. And because the skin is so complex, replicating all those sensations has been really difficult, until now.
20:43 Speaker 07 This is a piece of skin, of artificial skin.
20:47 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Anna Maria Koklita on the TED stage, where she unveiled smart skin.
20:54 Speaker 07 We have, for the first time, produced an artificial skin that can respond to three stimuli: touch, so force, temperature, and humidity. And it can do this also at an unprecedented resolution. So it's a very tiny device. And so this means that it can sense objects that are actually smaller than the objects that can be sensed with our skin.
21:24 Speaker 05 So first of all, imagine burns victims. If the burn is very deep, this
21:34 Speaker 05 Burns up until the lower level of the epidermis. And this makes patients lose sensation. If one could make completely artificial skin, then you know, the skin, this artificial skin could be applied as a patch in the area where there is the burn and give back the sensation to the people who have lost it.
22:00 Manoush Zomorodi? So let's talk about what you're doing in your lab. You know, if I came into your lab and I, and you showed it to me, what would I see?
22:09 Speaker 05 Um, this artificial skin is actually thinner than the cross section of a hair.
22:14 Manoush Zomorodi? Huh.
22:15 Speaker 05 So it's basically impossible to see and impossible to really feel it when you touch it. So it takes the properties and the characteristics of the support material. So if we deposited on top of a glove, it will look like a glove. We have even deposited on top of this transferable tattoos, you know, the type that kids use. And then what you see is just really the tattoo paper. So it's so tiny that you don't see it and you don't feel it, but it takes the shape of the support material.
22:56 Manoush Zomorodi? The artificial skin is made of a bunch of nanoscopic cylinders.
23:01 Speaker 05 This is the architecture of the artificial skin. So we are really able to control the thickness and the chemical composition of a material at the atomic level.
23:14 Manoush Zomorodi? The inner core of each cylinder is filled with a polymer that gets bigger when exposed to a stimuli.
23:21 Speaker 05 Like touch, temperature and humidity.
23:23 Manoush Zomorodi? And the outer part of the cylinder is made of something called piezoelectric material.
23:28 Speaker 05 Piezoelectric material is a material that, when it is compressed, produces electricity.
23:35 Manoush Zomorodi? So when the cylinder is touched or exposed to heat, for example, the polymer on the inside kind of puffs up and compresses the material on the outside. And boom.
23:47 Speaker 05 This produces an electric current.
23:49 Manoush Zomorodi? From there.
23:50 Speaker 05 Each of these cylinders could be connected to a series of electrodes. And then we measure the electric.
23:58 Manoush Zomorodi? Electricity at each of these location. And similar to how our own skin sends information about what it's feeling to our brains. The artificial skin sends information to a computer. And that's where we read this electric signal. But then, you know, this signal can also be transmitted wirelessly to, for example, a neuroprosthetic. And this is how we actually intend to transmit it to the brain. But that will be a future development.
24:33 Manoush Zomorodi? You mentioned prosthetics.
24:37 Manoush Zomorodi? How would smart skin be an added value, I guess? Or be important to someone who needs to wear a prosthetic? Yeah, so with this type of artificial skin, when this would be added to a prostheses, we could produce electrical signals that could send directly the information, could either stimulate the rest of the arm or of the leg, or they could transmit the information to a neural processes in the brain and then help the patient recognize also the characteristics of the objects. So if they had a prosthetic foot,
25:22 Manoush Zomorodi? they would know if they were walking on hot gravel or... Yes, exactly. So a prosthetic hand, for example, would feel if the patient is holding a hot cup or a cold bottle of beer and would feel the difference.
25:44 Manoush Zomorodi? Another interesting field of application would be robotics. Nowadays, humanoid robots are used in many fields, for example, in medicine, but also in household.
25:56 Speaker 02 And these robots are exposed to several stimuli, several interactions with the environment and with the humans. And sometimes they have too many inputs at the same time. And this is the reason number one for robot failure. So imagine a future where actually a robot could be a bit more sensitive, a bit smarter. This would lead also to a higher safety of this technology.
26:23 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, would that be, this sounds kind of like science fiction, but in the future that you have a burn and you just put on like a temporary tattoo over that part? And it connects to your body?
26:38 Speaker 02 Something like that, yes. It could be a temporary tattoo or a patch that can be applied on the body. And then there could be different way of detecting the electrical signals. Could be even that it is just connected to an app on the smartphone. And then maybe the app is, I don't know, sending a message, a warning, a sound if the temperature goes above a certain level. There could be different options.
27:06 Manoush Zomorodi? In terms of the drawbacks to this, I can only imagine, this is expensive?
27:11 Speaker 02 Well, yes and no, actually. In the sense that the instruments to deposit these materials are expensive at the beginning. But then the amount of material that is produced is so tiny that when you do a calculation per centimeter square, the price is not that high.
27:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, interesting. Okay, so this could be something that is accessible to people?
27:35 Speaker 02 Yes, that's where we would like really to keep it accessible to people. It's a challenge.
27:44 Speaker 02 And therefore, it's an interesting project, you know, from also the scientific point of view, from the technological point of view. And yeah, this is what keeps me going.
27:59 Manoush Zomorodi? That's Anna Maria Koklita. She's a materials scientist and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Bari in Italy. You can see her full talk at ted.com. So that's the tech side of skin and touch. But let's talk about the human side. We all want to feel good in our own skin. But for those of us who appear on camera, the pressure to look a certain way can also feel intense.
28:29 Speaker 01 Yes. It's a very cosmetic business. It's not just voice. It's a picture as well. And you do have to be presentable, what my mom used to say. You have to be presentable.
28:40 Manoush Zomorodi? This is Lee Thomas.
28:42 Speaker 01 I am an anchor and entertainment reporter. And I've been broadcasting on television since 1991.
28:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Woo!
28:54 Speaker 01 Yep.
28:55 Manoush Zomorodi? Long time.
28:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:57 Manoush Zomorodi? From a very young age, Lee had always dreamt about being on TV.
29:01 Speaker 01 Where I came from, my example of television was this little boy named Rodney Allen Rippey.
29:08 Manoush Zomorodi? Hi, I'm Rodney Allen Rippey.
29:10 Speaker 01 He had a commercial back in the 70s.
29:13 Manoush Zomorodi? Pass of the kids, crank of the car, do you jack it a bow?
29:17 Speaker 01 He was a little black dude. And I said, hey, I could do that. I could talk on TV.
29:21 Speaker 02 Lee Thomas joins us now with some helpful hints.
29:25 Manoush Zomorodi? By his mid-20s, that dream was coming true.
29:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. I was at WABC in New York, the number one station. I was on the number one newscast, the 5 p.m. I was the entertainment reporter on that newscast. And it's the highest rated local newscast in the country.
29:45 Speaker 01 Talk about stress.
29:47 Manoush Zomorodi? Despite his fast-paced schedule, Lee felt like things were going well. But then, one day, he noticed a mark on his hand.
29:56 Speaker 01 It looked like a freckling of light color on my hand. So I didn't really pay attention to it. I figured I hit my hand. It would, you know, it would fix itself.
30:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Later, the barber pointed out a spot on the back of Lee's head.
30:08 Speaker 01 And that was about the size of a quarter. So I immediately did what any grown man would do at the age of about 25 or 26. I immediately called my mom. And my mom said it was a stress mark and that it would go away.
30:26 Manoush Zomorodi? But it didn't. More spots started appearing on Lee's skin.
30:31 Speaker 01 I had like three on my hand. I had two on my scalp. And then I had some in the corners of my mouth, about the size of a dime on each corner of my mouth. And that's when I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with vitiligo.
30:48 Manoush Zomorodi? What did the doctor tell you? Had you heard of vitiligo before?
30:52 Speaker 01 Never, never heard of it. And when he said it, I didn't know what he was talking about. He said, "You have vitiligo. It's a pigment disorder. It takes the pigment out of your skin." And then it turned into, you know, Charlie Brown's teacher.
31:11 Speaker 01 He said, "Vitiligo is an autoimmune disorder, like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, where your body attacks itself." And in the case of vitiligo, your body attacks the melanocytes, which are the pigment-producing cells in your skin. And they destroy them. So you basically are without pigment.
31:33 Manoush Zomorodi? How did you react? Do you remember?
31:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. So my head's spinning, you know what I mean? I was a young guy in New York on a great newscast, you know, having a great time. And I didn't know how to process it. And I'm walking to work, talking to myself. I mean, what's gonna happen now? Am I gonna turn all the way white? Am I gonna still have a job? And the most popular person at the time was Michael Jackson. And Michael Jackson said he had vitiligo.
32:03 Speaker 02 Okay, number one, this is the situation. I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin. It's something that I cannot help.
32:11 Speaker 01 And Michael Jackson also lost all of his pigment. When Michael Jackson was a boy, he was a black kid. And now, as an adult, he looks like a white man.
32:22 Speaker 02 That's ignorant.
32:23 Speaker 01 What do you mean?
32:24 Speaker 02 Out of control.
32:25 Speaker 01 The fact that I have vitiligo. So I was afraid that I was going to be that dude that was black one day and white the other on television. And I really did not, I didn't know how to handle it.
32:40 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, how Lee Thomas navigated his vitiligo diagnosis and got comfortable in his own skin. On the show today, the skin we're in. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
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34:30 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. We were just talking to TV news anchor Lee Thomas about living with vitiligo, a condition that causes the skin to lose its pigment. When he got his diagnosis back in the 1990s, Lee felt shame and embarrassment. He was in the public eye and wasn't sure how he would deal with it. Here he is picking up his story from the TED stage.
34:58 Speaker 01 I just couldn't give up. I couldn't quit. So I decided to just put on makeup and keep it moving. I had to wear makeup anyway. It's TV, baby. Right? I just put on a little more makeup and everything's cool. And that actually went very well for years. I went from being a reporter in New York City to being a morning show anchor in Detroit. And as the disease got worse, I just put on more makeup. It was easy, except for my hands. See, this disease is progressive and ever-changing.
35:41 Speaker 01 That means it comes and goes. At one point, for about a year and a half, my face was completely white. And then, with a little help, some of the pigment came back. But living through this process was like two sides of a coin. When I'm at work and I'm wearing the makeup or wearing the makeup outside and I'm the TV guy, "Hey, how you doing, everybody?" "Great." At home, without the makeup, I take it off and it was like being a leper. The stares, constantly staring at me, the comments under their breath.
36:24 Speaker 01 It was tough and those were some tough years. Like this one time, this little girl wasn't paying attention. She's about two or three years old. She's running. She runs directly into my leg and falls down pretty hard. I thought she hurt herself. So I reach out to try and, you know, help the little girl. And she looks at my vid ligo and she screams. Now, kids are pure honesty. This little girl, she wasn't trying to be mean. She didn't have any malice in her heart. She was just afraid. I stayed in the house for two weeks and three days on that one.
37:09 Speaker 01 It took me a second to get my mind around the fact that I scared small children.
37:16 Speaker 01 And that was something that I could not smile away.
37:23 Manoush Zomorodi? It seems like that was a particularly low point for you when it came to people's reactions and how you think of yourself in your own body. How did you get out of it?
37:37 Speaker 01 It was tough because the truth of the matter is, and it's a tough sentence to say, "I scared small children." That is a tough thing to get your mind around. But how did I get out of it? I was watching Oprah in my basketball bag, like my gym bag with my basketball shoes and my basketball are right by the TV. And I decide that I am, um, I just want to be okay for like, you know, an hour. I just don't want somebody to say squat about my skin for an hour, just one hour. And when I go play basketball, the dudes that I play basketball with have seen my skin change over the years.
38:19 Speaker 01 They know exactly what's happening and they don't care as long as I make my jump shot. And so I went to the gym. Dudes were like, where you been? They didn't care. I played, had a great time. And I went and took the shower and, you know, like normal, like it was normal. And I say, you know, bye to the guys at the desk on the way out. See you, fellas, next time, blah, blah, blah. Oh, my God. It was like breathing, you know what I mean? It's like breathing. It was normal again.
38:50 Manoush Zomorodi? It sounds like you also reconnected with your body. You appreciated what it could do. It could sweat, it could play, it could have a jump shot. It could take a hot shower. It could feel good and not just thinking about your appearance, which, you know, can be so tedious.
39:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I realized that what was happening to my body didn't stop everything that my body can do. My body had this disease, vitiligo, that wasn't painful, wasn't life threatening. I was the one that's stopping movement and the other things that my body could do.
39:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Eventually, you wrote a memoir in 2007 about your experience living with vitiligo. I mean, and you would think, Lee, that since then, things have changed. We have a supermodel, Winnie Harlow, who has vitiligo. We talk about body positivity in society and people feeling good in their own bodies. But at the same time, I guess we still live in a place that is incredibly... Well, I was gonna say judgmental, but maybe it's just uneducated?
39:55 Speaker 01 Both, yeah. I was the first person that I know of that started talking about vitiligo openly. Even Michael Jackson didn't like talking about it. So people would interview me and ask me about him. But I wrote a book in The Smithsonian, got a copy of my book to put it in the Smithsonian Institute because there was not a book on this before. And so I realized one thing very quickly is that I am a man with vitiligo who can articulate his journey very well. And talking about vitiligo is, besides my daughter, one of the most things I am most proud of.
40:32 Speaker 01 It's an interesting place to be in society right now because people are less tolerant of each other. But at the same time, I feel like we're leading to a place where we all can come together in understanding. And I think identity is big, big, big. Because for me, when I first would walk down the hallway without my makeup on here at work, people were not able to look me in the eye. But I kept doing it until they were used to it. And then we're having conversations, and it's not the conversation. It's just, oh, Lee doesn't have his makeup on yet. It was normalized.
41:09 Manoush Zomorodi? So, Lee, I do have to ask, you still choose to wear makeup on air. What is your thinking behind that choice? And I guess, do you think you'd ever get to the point where you'd say, you know what? I am going on camera, I'm going to do the news, and I am going to look exactly as I do when I'm not on TV? No makeup?
41:31 Speaker 01 For me, I don't know, you know? I know that even if you don't have VidLigo, everybody puts on makeup to even out their skin, white, black, everybody. It's something that people do for television. And even if I didn't put on this brown makeup, I would have to put on something because I have oily skin. I don't know if I'm ever going to stop putting on. I think I'll stop doing TV, and then I'll just stop wearing the makeup. For me, especially now, I'm proud to be an African American. I'm proud of my heritage, and it's most identified with darker skin, brown skin.
42:16 Speaker 01 And I like that, you know, for an hour a day, five days a week, I get to be brown. Like, I get to be the way I was born. I get to be that. Now, is it me? Yes. And when I take off the makeup, you know what? That's also me, too.
42:34 Manoush Zomorodi? That's broadcast journalist Lee Thomas. His book is called Turning White: A Memoir of Change. And you can see his full talk at ted.com. So, a lot of changes to our body happen slowly and naturally, but that is not the case if you choose to get a tattoo. In the US, about a third of adults now have a tattoo. That's some 86 million Americans who made a change to their body that is typically permanent. One of those people is the writer Katherine Schultz. For her, the tattoo she got had significance, but not the one she'd intended. Here she is on the TED stage back in 2011.
43:18 Speaker 07 I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. Because we all know people who've gotten tattoos when they were 17, or 19, or 23, and regretted it by the time they were 30.
43:35 Speaker 05 That didn't happen to me. I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly.
43:43 Speaker 05 And by regretted it, I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place. This is just a couple miles from here, down on the Lower East Side. And I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street.
43:58 Speaker 05 Which is a great place to do it, because nobody cares.
44:02 Speaker 05 And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute. And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. Now, I had made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. I do that hourly. But I had always felt like, look, you know, I mean, I made the best choice I could make, given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. I learned a lesson from it. It somehow got me to where I am in life right now, and, okay. I wouldn't change it. In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past
44:47 Speaker 05 is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "Things without all remedy should be without regard. What's done is done."
45:07 Speaker 05 Now, this seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first, something we might all agree to sign on to, until I tell you who said it. Right, so this is Lady Macbeth, basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people.
45:23 Speaker 05 And as it happens, Shakespeare was on to something here, as he generally was. Because I think you need to learn to live not without regret, but with it. So let's start out by defining some terms. What is regret? Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. So in other words, regret requires two things. It requires, first of all, agency. We had to make a decision in the first place. And second of all, it requires imagination. We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present.
46:01 Speaker 05 And in fact, the more we have of either of these things, the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be. So let's say, for instance, that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding, and you're trying to get to the airport, and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. Why? Well, because if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. I should have gone through that yellow light. These are the classic conditions that create regret.
46:46 Speaker 05 We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well. What does that experience feel like? Well, we all know the short answer, right? It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Ctrl+Z culture. Ctrl+Z like the computer command, undo. We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities in a certain sense. We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem. We can undo and unfriend and unfollow. And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life
47:31 Speaker 05 that we desperately want to change, and we cannot. Sometimes, instead of Ctrl+Z, we actually have zero control. And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists, and I know whereof I speak, this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right. So how are we supposed to live with this? I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google "regret and tattoo", you will get 11.5 million hits.
48:11 Speaker 05 The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17% of us regret getting them. That is Johnny Depp and me and our 7 million friends. And that's just regret about tattoos. The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. Now, in my case, this really wasn't a problem because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. I don't think that's the case, though. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief
48:55 Speaker 05 understand that humor, and even black humor, plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us. The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds, except for tattoos, which are permanent. So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. And, um, do you guys just want to see it? Actually, you know what? I should warn you. You're going to be disappointed because it's actually not that hideous. Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are.
49:40 Speaker 05 I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside of the country and traveling. And when I came and settled in New York afterwards, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. Specifically, the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and simultaneously how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device. Well, it did. But it turns out it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would. It reminds me constantly of something else instead.
50:25 Speaker 05 It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body. If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with
51:07 Speaker 05 today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better. Thank you.
51:29 Manoush Zomorodi? That was author Catherine Schultz. She writes for The New Yorker, and her most recent book is called Lost and Found. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week. The episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaa Zemshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Guirin and Harsha Nahada. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Jimmy Keely and Robert Rodriguez. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hy-Lash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Bellarezzo.
52:10 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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