Approaches to Life: Improvise, Pivot or Plan  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Radio Hour]] - Full Title: Approaches to Life: Improvise, Pivot or Plan - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/cc66a46f-199d-4d98-b7d2-c27f58451b29 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Improv As A Method Of Awareness** - Reggie Watts treats life as improvisation, layering repeated motifs and recontextualizing sound and meaning. - Improvisation, for him, is a method of awareness that reframes situations and expands possibilities. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi And I wanted to talk to him because, well, I'm kind of the exact opposite. I plan in advance. I am a person who loves lists and schedules. And I was very prepared for my interview with Reggie. Do you mind just introducing yourself? But I was not prepared for his approach to being interviewed. Reggie Watts My name is Reggie Watts. I'm a forward running back for the Cleveland Oakland Raiders. Manoush Zomorodi He reluctantly answered my questions about his recent memoir, which tells the story of growing up in Montana as a biracial kid in the 70s. Reggie Watts You know, my father was African American. My mother was a French colonialist. No, she was a white French woman. Manoush Zomorodi At one point, he kind of wandered off. Yeah, I mean, that's a way of describing it. Are you still there? I'm right here. There you are. Reggie Watts I didn't do anything. Manoush Zomorodi It wasn't until our conversation took a turn and Reggie landed on topics that sparked his interest that he got animated. Reggie Watts I like things that pull me out of context and put me in different contexts. And I like that challenge of trying to make sense of chaos. Manoush Zomorodi And things just kind of evolved from there. Reggie Watts Looping is like something that I really love because you can just layer down anything you want. It allows you to set something that repeats, and you can build on top of those repeats. And so it's really nice. I did try doing that once at a party when I was on ketamine. Because ketamine gives you almost like a supercomputer mindset. Mindset. Mindset. So you're able to have several realities overlaid on top of each other, but you're experiencing all of them in real time. Manoush Zomorodi That sounds terrifying. Reggie Watts Yeah, it's great. I mean, for me, it's just about the method that you use. It's what I guess I would call it a method of awareness. And so it's mainly about how you're viewing what you're doing at any given time. And then once you realize that and that everything that you're doing is improvisation, then that allows you to start playing with possibilities and outcomes. And that's how I lead my life. Anything can be anything at any given time. ([Time 0:02:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b76e3cff-b64b-464a-9fad-3182b47255ef)) - **Treat Small Choices As Practice** - Notice everyday choices as improvisation and treat them as mini experiments in presence. - Use mindful tweaks to make mundane actions feel playful and expand your sense of agency. Transcript: Reggie Watts Well, you're improvising all the time. And as an example, whenever you're having a conversation with somebody, you're improvising. That's kind of the easiest way to understand. Some things are a little bit more abstract, but are true. It's like you're reaching out for a door handle. You're improvising the way that you're reaching for that handle every time even though it seems road and you know or you're like what should it should i add salt or should i not add salt To the soup you know those are all improvisational moments they're choice points so we're constantly in a gigantic choose your own adventure i brush my teeth with my other hand. Or I will, if I put on my pants, I'll put on the left leg first because usually I put it on right leg first. I see someone approaching me on the sidewalk. My natural tendency is to drift to the right, but I'm going to drift to the left this time. And so there are plenty of tiny little things that you're doing every single day that if you put mindfulness into it, suddenly you have this life game that you're playing. And it makes the tiniest, most mundane things absolutely exciting. ([Time 0:11:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/367388e5-ae05-4d34-a48c-6fcf5a969174)) - **A Sudden, Unexplained Decline** - Sonia Vallabh recounts her mom's sudden decline from unexplained weight loss to confusion and loss of function. - The rapid progression shattered normal medical explanations and began a devastating diagnostic mystery. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Was a newlywed. Sonia Vallabh Eric, my husband, and I had moved here to go to grad school. He got a joint degree in transportation engineering and city planning. And Sonia was going to law school at Harvard. And we thought that, you know, that was sort of the path that we were on. Those were the careers we were going to have. And it was in my second year of law school, which was 2010, that unbeknownst to me was sort of the beginning of a huge sort of chapter break in our lives. Manoush Zomorodi This very strange story starts with Sonia's mom, who at the time was 51 years old and up until then had been perfectly healthy. Sonia Vallabh And then all of a sudden was almost in complete freefall, losing her abilities one by one by one, and nobody knew why. The very first things that showed up were that she lost a lot of weight, no explanation, and eyesight started to play tricks on her. ([Time 0:15:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e808a38d-5671-492d-b337-0dda454559fe)) - **Risk Becomes A Call To Action** - An autopsy revealed genetic prion disease and placed Sonia at a 50-50 risk from a single-letter DNA typo. - That knowledge transformed uncertainty into a call to act, despite no existing cure. Transcript: Sonia Vallabh The report tells us that my mom died of genetic prion disease, and that I am at 50-50 risk of having inherited the single-letter DNA typo that caused it. Prion disease spreads through your brain and kills your neurons. And it kills about one in 6,000 people. But most cases aren't genetic, they're random. So it's maybe one in 50,000 people that has a high-risk mutation like this one. I stand at this fork in the road with Eric, and sometimes in life you know yourself. We realize there is no fork. We want to know. I'm trained as a lawyer. He's trained as a transportation engineer. We are not biomedical people, but we know that for us, this limbo isn't life. I can't control what happens next, but I can control whether something happens next. And my choice is yes. So I get tested, and we learn that I have the mutation. ([Time 0:19:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/900aa8c3-1a3a-4f83-9e82-b890f1fe2fe8)) - **Learn The Field If You Want To Change It** - When faced with a life-shattering diagnosis, Sonia and Eric pivoted by learning biology and joining labs to gain competence. - Do immerse yourself in the domain you must influence rather than waiting for experts to solve it. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi First, she enrolled in some night classes just to learn more about biology. Sonia Vallabh That itself then sort of without me having totally planned or foreseen it led to a next thing. Manoush Zomorodi She ended up getting a job as an entry-level research assistant in a lab. And that was the beginning. I mean, I worked in that lab for two years. Eric, her husband, did something similar. He got a job in a bioinformatics lab. Sonia Vallabh Science jobs, being able to make a living from it. And we sort of looked at each other and said, huh, if we can actually work in this field, don't we have to be thinking about how we move towards doing exactly the work that we think needs To be done and developing a drug for prion disease? Manoush Zomorodi So two years after leaving their professions, both Sonia and Eric went for PhDs in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard. Sonia Vallabh We spent five years as PhD students and we defended in 2019 and sort of rolled forward our own lab here at the Broad Institute, which is now 14 people. Manoush Zomorodi I mean, it's kind of wild. ([Time 0:23:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/96fdbbed-3648-451e-949b-3296df92964e)) - **Target Prevention Not Just Treatment** - Prion disease is caused by a normal protein (PRP) going rogue and corrupting others, making it unique among pathogens. - Targeting prevention by lowering PRP levels may be more effective than trying to fix late-stage damage. Transcript: Sonia Vallabh Prion disease is unique in all of biology. The causal pathogen isn't a virus and it's not a bacterium. It's this one normal protein called PRP that you normally have in your body, and it's normally not a problem. But it is capable of going rogue. And then it goes around grabbing other copies of PRP, and it corrupts those. And if we think about how to treat this disease, we might think, go get those bad guys. But Eric and I have come to see our mission differently. What if we can do the most good not by going after the big scary pathogens and lobbing fireballs at them? What if what we really need to do is this? Long before disease begins, we use a drug to ask this not-yet protein to please go away. We're lucky to have the series of clues from nature that indicate you can live a healthy life without PRP. So we're scouring the globe for tools to dial it down. ([Time 0:26:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/561b0018-9387-4128-bf39-f0ccf3c6f5e9)) - **Choosing Children Without The Mutation** - Sonia and Eric used IVF with pre-implantation genetic testing to have children without passing on the mutation. - Their kids grew up knowing the family's mission and work from early ages. Transcript: Sonia Vallabh These are our kids. Daruka is the big one. Kavari is the also big one. We had them through IVF with pre-implantation genetic testing to avoid passing on my mutation. My mom never got to meet these kids, and she would have been a luminous grandma. But if she had, we wouldn't have known about my risk in time to avoid passing it on. ([Time 0:29:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80785631-cd2e-4af7-bf73-8fa92de169b6)) - **Buying Land To Create Parks** - Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and Doug bought vast lands in Chile and Argentina to conserve wild habitats and create national parks. - They rigorously evaluated impact, neighbors, and federal linkages before committing to purchases. Transcript: Kristine McDivitt Tompkins 30 years ago, when my late husband Doug Tompkins and I began working on land conservation projects, we knew we would invest everything we had in terms of our time and resources to slow Down the freight train of development that we saw destroying the natural world. As climbers, ski racers, wildlife people, we had long begun to witness with our own eyes, and it was time for us to react to those things that were oh so clear to us. We committed ourselves to saving as much wild habitat as we could, at first by simply buying land, ultimately acquiring over 2 million acres of key habitat in Chile and Argentina. Manoush Zomorodi Take me through, if you would, I'm sure each acquisition of land was different in its own way, but was there sort of a pattern that you established about how you identified where to go Next, how you went about securing it? Like, what was the process? Kristine McDivitt Tompkins First of all, you're looking for the greatest impact possible. So if you're buying 200,000 acres, what is the absolute maximum impact that that purchase can have? Is there federal land around it that could be part of a package with the government someday? Maybe that's another half a million acres. Who are the neighbors? What's the temperature of the local towns? Ecologically, are they key? So every one of them, I would almost say, is sculpted before a commitment. And we say, okay, we're going to take the bet here. We're going to invest in it. And we're going to work like dogs to get it returned back to the citizens of Chile or Argentina in the form of a new national park. ([Time 0:38:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b3584c20-e65a-4e03-9dba-24edadd07a20)) - **Facing Backlash And Danger** - Their large-scale purchases triggered suspicion, political backlash, death threats, and phone taps that strained the team. - Despite danger and controversy, they persisted with on-the-ground presence and engagement. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Because people were like, who are these two rich white people? Kristine McDivitt Tompkins Well, that's right. Absolutely right. I mean, you can't buy land that's not for sale. You can't buy land from people who don't want to sell it to you. So these were all normal transactions. But when people began to realize that we were buying up, say, 50,000 acres, 100,000 acres at a time, and this was forested areas, primeval forest, not planning to cut the trees, that's When an era of suspicion, mistrust, downright anger toward us began. And it really started with the presidency. The particular president who happened to be in power in the early 90s felt that what we were hoping to do was very disagreeable. So yeah, it started four or five years of controversy in the papers, often if not daily. People thought we were going to establish a military base for Argentina to finish Chile off once and for all. All of these alarming descriptions of what we could be up to. And, you know, today I understand why it happened. It was overwhelming that the two people could be doing what we said we were doing. And it took a long time and death threats and having our phones tapped for years and the team members working in both countries. ([Time 0:42:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8c86df4-f8c5-4d6c-8c4a-0aac3bd2a145)) - **Make Conservation Public And Useful** - Converting private reserves into national parks required building infrastructure, public access, and government partnerships. - Lasting conservation depends on returning protected lands to public ownership and local economic benefit. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Because in 2013, Doug and Christine made their first donation of land. 37,000 acres that expanded Argentina's Puerto Moreno National Park. In 2014, they donated 94,000 acres in Chile's Tierra del Fuego, adding to a national park there and establishing a protected area of roughly 370,000 acres. And another nature sanctuary in Chile that they'd worked with the government to create became accessible, which meant... Kristine McDivitt Tompkins A lot of the infrastructure that we'd been working on, trails, restaurant, little hotel, campgrounds, all of that became open for the public. So their plan was finally coming to fruition. Manoush Zomorodi But then, in 2015, tragedy struck. Doug, always an outdoor adventurer and risk-taker, was on a kayaking trip with friends. When the weather turned, he flipped out of the boat and couldn't get to shore, eventually dying of hypothermia. In 2015, your husband was on an adventure, kayaking, and did not come home alive. And you say that the big, audacious vision of Doug's kept you in one piece after he died. Yeah. Kristine McDivitt Tompkins It was a tomahawk to my forehead. It wasn't just a moment of grief. But I was always a fighter, really. And in this moment in my life, I knew we have to finish this. And this is the team led by Sofia Genona in Argentina, Carolina Morgado in Chile. We decided we have to go do this. The big risk was holding all of these big parks and all of the costs of all the infrastructure, building it, completing it, maintaining it. So I just went through everything we had. And in each one, okay, this is what done looks like. ([Time 0:44:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc502570-236e-4205-8dd0-7f3f088e01e0)) - **Start With Your Unique Skill** - To contribute to big problems, identify what you're good at and give that skill away in service of the cause. - Do not assume money is required; meaningful action starts with aligning strength to need. Transcript: Kristine McDivitt Tompkins There are a lot of things people can do. I get asked every time I speak in public, what can I do? What should I do? And I always say the same thing. I'm just meeting you for the first time. I don't know where you live, but mostly I don't know what you're good at. And let me tell you, that's where you have to start. You don't have to have money. You can be anywhere in the world and take a hard look at yourself. What am I really good at? And go give it away. Go do that. Because if we don't participate in our future, it is an abdication of our future. ([Time 0:51:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93897583-01f9-4487-b85f-1120718b9dde))