Approaches to life: Improvise, pivot or plan

Summary

TED Radio Hour (NPR)

Episode: Approaches to Life: Improvise, Pivot or Plan
Host: Manoush Zomorodi
Date: September 19, 2025

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Overview

This episode of TED Radio Hour explores the fundamental question: “What’s the best approach to life?” Should you meticulously plan, boldly pivot, or improvise as you go? Host Manoush Zomorodi speaks with three guests—musician and comedian Reggie Watts, scientist and patient-advocate Sonja Valeb, and conservationist Christine Tompkins—each embodying a different philosophy. Their stories bring insight, honesty, and humor to the challenge of navigating uncertainty, change, and ambition.

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Segment 1: Improvise — Reggie Watts (00:56–12:50)

Key Points & Insights

• Introduction to Reggie Watts:
  Renowned for his live musical improvisations, Reggie embodies a life led by going with the flow, avoiding tradition, and responding fluidly to the moment.
• Minoush (planner) vs. Reggie (improviser):
  The conversation highlights the friction and fascination between those who plan and those who improvise.
• Looping, Layering, and the “Idea Sphere”:
  Reggie discusses how looping in music lets him create and reinvent in real time—a metaphor he expands to all of life.
• “Method of Awareness”:
  He sees improvisation not as chaos, but as a flexible state of heightened awareness and possibility.

Notable Quotes

• On Being Present:

  “I like things that pull me out of context and put me in different contexts. ... I like the challenge of trying to make sense of chaos.”
  — Reggie Watts (03:02)

• On Improvisation as Core to Existence:

  “Improvisation is the center of existence to me, and that allows me to reformat any situation at any given [moment].”
  — Reggie Watts (05:09)

• On Musical Communication:

  “Music is probably the most accurate, most honest, fastest form of communication that humans have—even before language.”
  — Reggie Watts (07:28)

• On Avoiding Structure:

  “No, there’s never any structure at all... I just go out, I start, and then I try to monitor myself for not repeating things too much.”
  — Reggie Watts (08:54)

• Advice for “Regular Folks”:

  "You're improvising all the time... Even tiny, mundane things are improvisational moments. ... Suddenly, you have this life game that makes the tiniest things absolutely exciting.”
  — Reggie Watts (11:33)

Memorable Moments

• Reggie pretending to be a football player during his intro (02:18), setting the tone for the unpredictable interview.
• The playful, meandering musical riffs and digressions, including a bizarre ketamine story (03:14), illustrate his improvisational thinking.

[Transition: (12:50)]

Manoush frames the stakes: what is the right approach when you feel stuck? The discussion shifts from improvisation to lives radically changed by unexpected news.

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Segment 2: Pivot — Sonja Valeb (15:14–33:12)

Key Points & Insights

• Sonja's Story:
  Sonja was a Harvard law student when her mother suddenly declined and died due to genetic prion disease.
• Life Upended:
  The revelation that Sonja herself had a 50-50 chance of having the fatal gene changed everything. After testing positive for the mutation (20:43), she and her husband, Eric, grieved—but soon pivoted their careers to biomedical research in search of a cure.
• Turning Grief into Mission:
  The couple took night classes in biology, then entry-level jobs in labs (23:29). Within two years, both began PhDs in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard to focus on prion disease therapies.
• Launching a Lab:
  By 2019, they defended their dissertations and now lead a 14-person lab dedicated to preventing prion disease.
• Facing Challenges and Criticism:
  Sonja discusses skepticism, the chaos of learning something completely new as an adult, and whether their bold optimism was hubris.
• Redefining Grace and Resiliency:
  Sonja shares her view that we don’t know our potential until circumstances demand it.

Notable Quotes

• On Facing Incurable Disease:

  “There was nothing to say. There’s no plan. Like, eating blueberries isn’t going to help. There’s no drug.”
  — Sonja Valeb (21:45)

• On Pivoting Careers:

  “There was a spirit of optimism. We’re going to throw ourselves at this problem because it is a worthy problem.”
  — Sonja Valeb (25:01)

• On Resilience:

  “We might not know what we’re made of until the moment we have to know ... There’s a bending upward of the human spirit through hardship that my word for it is grace.”
  — Sonja Valeb (31:54)

Memorable Moments

• The moment Sonja and Eric receive the fatal diagnosis, holding each other in the geneticist's office (21:52).
• Pivoting from their established careers to the daunting world of science for the sake of survival and hope (23:41).
• Reflecting on optimism vs. hubris in the face of impossible odds (31:26–32:12).

[Transition: (33:12)]

Manoush shifts focus from improvisers and pivoters to the power of the plan—a methodical, long-term path to seismic change.

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Segment 3: Plan — Christine Tompkins (35:40–52:14)

Key Points & Insights

• Christine’s Background:
  Former CEO of Patagonia, Christine (with her husband Doug Tompkins, founder of North Face) planned an ambitious life after business: conserving wild land in South America.
• The Big Plan:
  They resolved to invest their resources to buy and restore vast ecologically critical tracts—over 2 million acres ultimately—to donate as national parks.
• Complex Execution:
  Acquisitions required careful planning: prioritizing ecological impact, navigating local politics, and physically scouting land via bush planes.
• Resistance and Controversy:
  Locals and governments treated them with suspicion—accusing them of imperialism or covert intentions. They faced political backlash, public anger, even death threats and tapped phones (42:28–44:22).
• Persistence Through Tragedy:
  After Doug’s sudden death in a kayaking accident (46:15), Christine recommitted. The team pushed forward, donating land and working with Chilean and Argentinian governments to create a network of new and expanded national parks.
• Global Impact:
  Their work has roughly doubled the national park system in Chile and Argentina—creating, expanding, or restoring land equaling the size of Costa Rica.
• On Conservation, Economics, and Purpose:
  Christine argues that protected areas, when thoughtfully managed, generate valuable economic activity and safeguard future prosperity—not just “locking up” land.
• Advice for Others:
  She believes anyone—regardless of wealth—can contribute by identifying their own skills and giving them away in service of others.

Notable Quotes

• On Commitment:

  “Some of it was moderately planned, some of it was just ‘commit, and figure it out later.’”
  — Christine Tompkins (36:35)

• On Optimism & Persistence After Loss:

  “It was a tomahawk to my forehead ... In this moment in my life, I knew, we have to finish this.”
  — Christine Tompkins (46:15)

• On Civic Responsibility:

  “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.”
  — Christine Tompkins (50:35)

• On Human Change:

  “We humans only really change our behavior in a crisis. Otherwise, it’s just too difficult.”
  — Christine Tompkins (50:35)

Memorable Moments

• The harrowing stories of public suspicion, phone taps, and death threats as the couple bought land for conservation (42:28–44:22).
• Christine’s full-tilt, all-in approach to seeing the project through after Doug’s fatal accident (46:15–47:18).

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Episode Highlights — Timestamps

• Reggie Watts on improvisation and musical communication: 03:02–08:54
• Advice on embedding improvisation into daily life: 11:33
• Sonja Valeb’s family crisis and pivot: 15:35–25:01
• Explaining prion disease and their research approach: 25:46–28:46
• Defining grace in the face of hardship: 31:54
• Christine and Doug Tompkins’ plan for conservation: 36:35–38:49
• Suspicion, challenges, and perseverance: 42:28–44:22
• Advice on making a difference: 50:35

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Tone and Takeaways

The episode weaves humor, vulnerability, optimism, and realism. Reggie’s playfulness underscores the creativity of improvisation; Sonja and Eric’s determination grounds the possibility and limits of radical life pivots; Christine’s stoicism and moral clarity illuminate the primacy of steadfast planning.

Though the guests' approaches differ wildly, they converge around embracing uncertainty, relentless self-inquiry, and a drive to make meaning—whether by riffing, pivoting, or executing a grand vision.

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Closing Thoughts

The discussion leaves listeners reflecting:

• When should we let go and improvise?
• When is it time to make a deliberate pivot?
• Where does a long-term plan guide us through adversity?

As Manoush Zomorodi frames it:

"Should you improvise, plan or pivot?”
The answer, in the stories of her guests, seems to be: Sometimes, all of the above.

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You can find the full talks by Reggie Watts, Sonja Valeb, and Christine Tompkins at TED.com

Transcript

[Announcer]

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[Anoush Zomorodi]

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[Reggie Watts]

Our job now is to dream big.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

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[Eric Minikel]

The future we want to see around the world.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

To understand who we are. From those talks, we. We bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

[Reggie Watts]

You just don't know what you're gonna find challenge you.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

We truly have to ask ourselves, like.

[Announcer]

Why is it noteworthy and even change you.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

I literally feel like I'm a different person.

[Christine Tompkins]

Yes. Do you feel that way?

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Ideas worth spreading from TED and npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi, and this is Reggie Watts.

[Reggie Watts]

Now, because this is looping, it gives me time to think about what I want to do next.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Standing on the TED stage, armed with an assortment of audio equipment, Reggie beatbox layering and looping his voice.

[Reggie Watts]

Now, maybe I'd like to subdivide looping and layering until. And then I might just stop.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So he has the audience in the palm of his hand. If you don't know him, Reggie Watts is a singing rapper, beatboxing, keyboard playing, joke, making chaos, creating force, who just kind of makes up his performances as he goes along.

[Reggie Watts]

All the people that TED doing, all that they do when they're doing it. Well, when they're doing it.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

If you do know Reggie, it might be because he was band leader of the Late Late Show. He's done all kinds of viral music videos, television, but mostly he is a musical improv maestro. And I wanted to talk to because, well, I'm kind of the exact opposite. I plan in advance. I am a person who loves lists and schedules.

[Reggie Watts]

Good morning.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

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.

[Anoush 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.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

He kind of wandered off.

[Reggie Watts]

Yeah, that's a way of.

[Sonja Valab]

Are you still there?

[Reggie Watts]

I'm right here.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

There you are.

[Reggie Watts]

I didn't do anything.

[Anoush 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, and things.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

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. When I was on ketamine. And because ketamine gives you almost like a. Like a supercomputer mindset. Ketamine, Mindset. Ketamine. Mindset, Ketamine. So you're able to, like, have several realities overlaid on top of each other, but you're experiencing all of them in real time. Ketamine. Ketamines. Ketamine. Ketamines.

[Christine Tompkins]

Ketamine.

[Reggie Watts]

Ketamine.

[Anoush 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 a, 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. I. Anything can be anything at any given time. You don't have to accept things for face value. And so because of that, I do things that I really enjoy that may not necessarily exist, but I try to bring them out if I can.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

What is the best approach to life? Set goals and make a plan. Take a hard look at where you are right now and head the opposite direction, or go with the flow like Reggie, and make it up as you go along. On this episode, Pivot, plan. Improvise. Three speakers who've made extreme life choices. And the advice they have for any one of us who is feeling stuck and not sure which way to go. Which brings us back to musician Reggie Watts.

[Reggie Watts]

Certainly it's a pleasure here to be back here, all of you guys here. Certainly a special show here. Ted. Now, people ask me, why start like that? I don't really have an answer. Many of you are familiar with improvisation because you've heard the word. And sometimes, sometimes that's enough. But what is it really? Improvisation? Why am I speaking like this? I don't know. But I try as much as I can to be as truthful about who I am in the moment, even if I'm using different voices. So I've been dealing with improvisation all of my life, it's hard for me to write things down. Ted was so gracious to allow me to come up here on the stage when they keep asking, can we see that script? And it's like, I'm sorry, I don't have that. But after I perform it, then. Then you'll have that. Improvisation is something that I love very much because it is the center of existence to me, and that allows me to reformat any situation at any given.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

What is your. I don't know how to put this true singing voice, or for lack of a better word, real singing voice, I guess, because you have such range and you can imitate or emulate all different kinds of styles and. And voices that I'm like. But okay, so if he was just being Reggie and singing, what would that sound like? Is there one pure version?

[Reggie Watts]

Not really. It's like I'm channeling, like when I'm doing whatever I'm doing on stage, generally, it's like tuning a radio dial to ideas that exist in what I call the idea sphere. You know, I'm just kind of like, oh, that would be funny. Oh, wouldn't it be cool if I do this?

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Here's what I can't figure out, and I've been trying to since I watched your special, is why do I find it so hilarious when you add reverb to something or put an echo on your voice? Like, why. Why is that funny?

[Reggie Watts]

I mean, I think it's what I was just talking about. It's just. It's, you know, it's recontextualizing and music is like hyper efficient in what it's transmitting. And it's probably the most accurate, most honest, fastest form of communication that humans have. Even before language, even before talking. You could put so much more information in music then I think. You know, having a conversation with someone, it's pretty honest. It doesn't take much. Sometimes I'm doing things, people are laughing their asses off and I'm like, that. I wasn't intending that to be funny at all. It's like a slight mispronunciation of a vowel, waiting a little longer to say something, you know, dropping in this weird drum sound or, you know, taking something out or like building up the effects and then cutting them all out so it's super dry. Again, you know, whatever is possible that you can do in music is very effective on an audience, especially if they know that you're using them creatively.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So are you responding to the audience? Are you like, oh, they Laughed at that drum beat. Let's go there. Is that what you're doing, or do you already kind of have a, like, you know, sort of structure that you think you're gonna hit?

[Reggie Watts]

No, there's never any structure at all.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Nothing?

[Reggie Watts]

No, not really. I'm not going out on stage going, like, I'm gonna do this. Like, I don't really have any of that prepared. I just go out, I start, and then I try to monitor myself for not repeating things too much.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So what's hard for you? Like, what do you avoid? Things that are hard for you. Like, what would you be like? No, I am not doing that.

[Reggie Watts]

No scripts are hard for me. It's like, if I have to memorize lines, if I'm in a scene with somebody where I'm exchanging dialogue for like a few pages or something like that, that makes me so incredibly uncomfortable and very terrified because I don't want to get it wrong. And I'm too. It's like. I think the problem is that I'm so analytical of the situation that I'm in. That improvisation tamps that down because I have to be actively participating in the moment. Like, even if people ask me, I have a bunch of MC gigs coming and they want me to rehearse for them and all this stuff, and I'm just like, ah, that makes me. That aggravates me. Can I just show up and you just put stuff in the prompter and I'll just go for it? Is more my take.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Just circling back to the idea of, like, improvising a life. You know, you and I are Gen X. We're not the spring chickens anymore.

[Reggie Watts]

That's true.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Does it feel like you. You have to focus a little bit more? Because, I mean.

[Reggie Watts]

Yeah, I know what you're saying. I mean, I do think about that. I mean, you know, you're 100% right. I think about, like, oh, aging and, you know, getting like, my. I'm not recovering as fast. You know, it's like, well, put on a couple pounds. I want to get rid of the. You know, and it's just like, I tend to try to stay in a kind of childlike mind frame, which doesn't make me feel like I am a particular age. And I put in enough work and enough time that I think my reach is a little bit. I think if I were just an aesthetic performer, I would be worrying a lot more. Your bladder matter. Your bladder matter.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

This idea of being able to be fully yourself and fully present without being self conscious and this idea of Just showing up to something without a plan and being able to enjoy it. That might sound really foreign to some people. Like, I guess I'm wondering, give us some advice. Obviously, you're the maestro at this, but for regular folks, how can they sprinkle a little bit of that into their lives?

[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 like, kind of like the easiest way to understand some things that 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 rote. Or you're like, what should I. Should I add salt or should I not add salt to this soup? Those are all improvisational moments. They're choice points. So we're constantly in a gigantic choose your own adventure. I'll brush my teeth with my 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. You know, I see someone approaching me on the sidewalk. My natural tendency is to drift to the right, but I'm gonna drift to the left this time. And so there are, like, plenty of, like, tiny little things that you're doing every single day that if you put mindfulness into it, suddenly you have this life game that you're playing, and it makes it. It makes the tiniest, most mundane things absolutely exciting. And I think that that's where you feel like you're really alive and you're living life because you're aware of the abundance of choice in your life.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

That was musician, comedian Reggie Watts. You can see both his TED [e-mail]. his memoir is called Great Falls, Montana. Today on the show Improvise, Pivot, Plan. I'm Anoush Zumarodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back. This message comes from Lisa Leesa isn't just about sleep. It's about impact. They donate thousands of mattresses each year to those in need, also partnering with organizations like Clean Hub to help remove harmful plastic waste from Oceans. Visit Lisa.com for 25% off mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code Radio Hour. That's L E-E-S A.com promo code Radio Hour. This message comes from AT&T. There's nothing like knowing someone's in your corner, especially when it really counts, like when your neighbor shovels your driveway after a snowstor or your friend saves you the last slice of pizza. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee to learn more. AT&T connecting changes everything.

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[Anoush Zomorodi]

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. On the show today, ideas about how to approach life and deal with its zigs and zags. Should you plan, improvise or pivot? Back in 2008, Sonja Valab was in her 20s.

[Sonja Valab]

I was living right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

She was a newlywed.

[Sonja Valab]

Eric, my husband, and I had moved here to go to grad school. He got a joint degree in transportation engineering and city planning.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

And Sonya was going to law school at Harvard.

[Sonja Valab]

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.

[Anoush 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.

[Sonja Valab]

And then all of a sudden was almost in complete free fall, 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 her eyesight started to play tricks on her. Neither of these things seemed like either an emergency or like they were connected to each other or to something larger. But then, like very rapidly, we were in a situation where she was getting confused. She was having a hard time putting sentences Together. She was having a hard time remembering to do things or where she had put things or who she was talking to. And nobody went to neurodegenerative disease, right? At first, the possibilities that were thrown out were very, very far flung. She was tested for tons of things, and it just felt like the fabric of reality was, like, tearing apart. It just felt wrong and bizarre.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So what happened? You kept going to law school and spending time with her as much as you could, or how did things progress?

[Sonja Valab]

Basically, yes, I went home when I could and, you know, it was only. She had those very first symptoms in February. She was, like, completely confused. In March, she was too weak to walk In May. She went into the hospital basically full time in June. And after that, the degree to which it was possible to communicate with her fell off super dramatically. We still didn't have a diagnosis. And the longer this went on, the more I realized that I no longer believed she could recover. And I remember specifically in the fall of that year, I went for a walk in the. A park near my home where I grew up. And the fall colors were, you know, in full splendor. And I was walking by myself. And I realized that I had already said goodbye to my mom, that she was in so much pain. She was in a place that was so far away from us. It just seemed insurmountable. It just seemed like too much.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Sonia Vala picks up her story from the TED stage.

[Eric Minikel]

By the time she dies.

[Sonja Valab]

It has.

[Eric Minikel]

Been months since she was really there, and we still have no idea what happened. And then we get the results of my mom's autopsy. 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 1 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. What does this mean for me? For us, genetic prion disease is Always fatal. We can't say when it will strike, only that it'll be some point in adulthood. And once it does, you die in months. We have just watched it happen.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

One of the things that happens after a genetic test is you get genetic counseling and you get recommendations for how to go on with living your life. What did they tell you?

[Sonja Valab]

Ah, well, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus here, but because you asked, I'll tell you that before my test report was given to me, the genetic counselor said, no matter what the result, we're going to sit down together and we're going to make a plan for your health and wellness. What you eat or, like, whatever. And then the result was given to me. And then the medical professionals in the room said, you probably want some time, and left me and my husband sitting there and didn't come back. And in retrospect, that kind of captures it. There was nothing to say. There's no plan. Like, eating blueberries isn't going to help. There's no drug. I knew all this before I got tested. So it was just kind of, in some ways, a very fitting close to the appointment.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So you and your husband are sitting in this empty room looking at each other, and what did you say to one another?

[Sonja Valab]

He cried and I held him. We had two friends who were sitting in the waiting room, and my dad flew in the next day, and the five of us kind of spent the weekend together, just grieving, but also just doing normal things. And what I managed to get sort of front of mind during that weekend was the idea that I was basically no more likely to die that day or that week than I had been. In fact, nothing had changed at all. Right. Like, this mutation had always been in my body that established a little bit of a protective bubble where I could do the things, do the things that were involved in, like, living. And it was just a few weeks in that a friend of ours came over and he brought a bunch of scientific articles on a thumb drive. And he said, you guys should read these. There are people working on this whose day to day is thinking about this disease. What causes it, what goes wrong. Potentially even how can we stop it? And that was like a mesmerizing thought.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Yeah. What did it make you and Eric think?

[Sonja Valab]

I mean, at first it just made me think I need to take a sabbatical. I need to get up to speed on this new thing that has come crashing into our lives, and then I'll go back to my regularly scheduled life.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

But that is not what Happened because from there things got a little weird. First she enrolled in some night classes just to learn more about biology.

[Sonja Valab]

That itself then, sort of without me having totally planned or foreseen it, led to a next thing.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

She ended up getting a job as an entry level research assistant in a lab.

[Sonja Valab]

And that was the beginning. I mean, I worked in that lab for two years.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Eric, her husband, did something similar. He got a job in a bioinformatics lab.

[Sonja Valab]

I could feel that there was like a momentum pulling us in this direction. And now here we were doing low on the totem pole, science jobs, being able to make a living from it. And we sort of looked at each other and said, huh, if we can actually work in this field, don't we have to be thinking about how we move towards doing exactly the work that we think needs to be done and developing a drug for prion disease?

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So two years after leaving their professions, both Sonja and Eric went for PhDs in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard.

[Sonja Valab]

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.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

I mean, it's kind of wild. You and Eric are now leading a lab that is looking for a therapy for prion disease. But like, at the time, did people think you had lost it? How did people around you respond to this big change that you all made?

[Sonja Valab]

I'm sure there were people who thought that we were way out of our depth. They would not have been wrong. Certainly it wasn't easy. And this is something I've really come to appreciate about science, is that there's no bottom to how complex it can be. It's under no obligation to be knowable in your lifetime. Like, it's just, it's constantly moving under your feet. But even if it stood still, it would be like unmappably vast. But I think that there was a spirit of optimism. We're going to throw ourselves at this problem because it is a worthy problem. And we will move the ball down the field by being totally focused and dedicated to this problem.

[Eric Minikel]

Let's talk about how prion disease works and what we need to do about it. Prion disease is unique in all of biology. The causal pathogen isn't a virus and it's not a bacterium. It's this one normal protein called PRP that you normally have in your body. And it's normally not a problem, but it is capable of going rogue. And then it goes around grabbing other copies of PRP and it corrupts those. And if we think about how to treat this disease, we might think, go get those bad guys. But Eric and I have come to see our mission differently. 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 pathogenic protein to please go away. We're lucky to have the series of.

[Sonja Valab]

Clues from nature that indicate you can.

[Eric Minikel]

Live a healthy life without prp. We're scouring the globe for tools to dial it down. Our greatest good isn't a drug that will stabilize me or anyone else mid train wreck. One foot in the void. We have to aim higher. We have to prevent. And maybe you're wondering how it's all going. Here's what I can say. There will be the race to the first drug and the race to the best drug. We're far from the end of this quest, but we're far from the beginning. We don't have any guarantees.

[Sonja Valab]

Darn.

[Eric Minikel]

But what we do have, and gosh, are we lucky to have it, Is jeopardy.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

I hate this question, but I have to ask it. Do you feel like you're racing against the clock? I mean, how old are you now? You're.

[Sonja Valab]

I'm 40.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

You're 40. So are you thinking, like, I gotta figure this out in the next decade before I get to be my mom's age?

[Sonja Valab]

I mean, the interesting thing about genetic prion disease is that age of onset is not predictable. Oh, it could happen anytime. So I don't presume that we have a specific number of years to get this done, regardless of what we thought. For me, even if we did believe that my mom's age of onset predicted my age of onset. There's people for whom we already haven't been on time. Lots of them. Every week. Every week we hear from more of them. So it is a matter of getting there as quickly as we can.

[Eric Minikel]

I got dealt a bad card. And don't get me wrong, I really don't want to die young. At the same time, this bad card has launched me on a quest with a team. And the wonder of this exact life is that I am constantly getting to meet people's best selves, including versions of Eric and me that I wouldn't have encountered any other way. Does everything happen for a reason? Probably not. And yet here we all are, making our own grace out of the darndest raw materials. It is not such a bad thing to Be called to notice. Speaking of grace, I want you to meet these guys. These are our kids. 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. So somewhere, wrapped up in the grief of having lost her so young, is this other thing, this transgenerational gift. I'm walking alongside these kids on their own journeys as best I can. And you know how it is with kids. Sometimes the shape of the future begs to be assumed. X number of years until Y, this parade of milestones, this storyboard. But here again is a luxury not all of us have. And perhaps in ways large and small, it's a luxury none of us have.

[Sonja Valab]

They're seven and four. They know what we do for a living and why they do. You know, they've always known. They've always known that we're scientists, that we work on the disease that killed my mom, that I'm at risk that we do this because we want to develop a medicine so that nobody has to die that way anymore. I just want this to be part of their normal. And I wouldn't have it any other way because this, even at these ages, shows them, I think, that you can love what you do, even if it's hard, that you can like choose a worthy problem and give yourself to it and still have a good life. I think it's an important part of knowing who we are.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Well, that's what I keep thinking about is I can imagine. Or actually, I have told people this story. I'm like, and then she found out she had the disease and they made this crazy life change. And some people are like, wow, that's real optimism to think that you can figure this out. Other people are like, that's real hubris to think that you can figure it out. But regardless, it's strong headedness either way. What reaction do you get?

[Sonja Valab]

People tell me how inspiring they think what we're doing is. And that's very, very kind. But I worry that sometimes people say it in the spirit of like, oh my God, like you. Sonja Valeb had this really specific and incredible reaction and I think that's like the wrong story. I actually think that we collectively might not know what we're made of until the moment when we have to know. And I would not have known I never could have predicted that this is what I would do. You don't know until you have to know. And there's sort of this, this like bending upward of the human spirit through hardship that my word for it is grace. Maybe there are other and better words. But now when I, when I look for it, I see it everywhere. And that's not to be Pollyannaish and say this is all gonna work out, because I don't know, man. So to the people who say it's hubris, I have no assumptions about us succeeding, but I'm really, really happy to be doing our best.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

That's Sonja Valeb. She's a senior biomedical researcher at the broad institute of MIT and Harvard. You can see her full [e-mail] on the show Today, ideas about how to live your life. Should you improvise, plan or pivot? I'm Anoush Zomorodi. Stay with us. This message comes from at&t. Whether you're calling your parents to say Happy Anniversary or checking in with your kids before bedtime, staying connected matters. That's why AT and T has connectivity you can depend on or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT and T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee to learn more. AT and T Connecting changes everything. This message comes from NPR sponsor Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and onshore. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos.

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[Anoush Zomorodi]

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zumarodi. On the show today, radically different approaches to life. We've talked about improvising, pivoting, and now plan.

[Christine Tompkins]

What we had in common, and sometimes it was unspoken between us, is that we wanted these wild lives.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Christine Tompkins has lived an incredible life. She was one of the Patagonia company's first employees. Then she became CEO and ran the company for 18 years. But then she was ready for a change. That's when she met Doug Tompkins, the founder of the North Face Company and co founder of Esprit. He had sold his shares in both companies, moved to Chile and was getting ready to embark on a new mission.

[Christine Tompkins]

Doug was really committed to spending the last third of his life looking at ways to slow down what he saw as the trends of a globalized economy and the degradation of wildlands, nature in general. And I was a year and a half behind him. I wanted to retire from Patagonia, end my role as CEO after so many years. And so when we got together, that's what we had chosen to do with the next and probably final stage of our lives. Some of it was moderately planned, some of it was just commit, as Doug always said, and figure it out later.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Doug and Christine's goal was well unheard of. People talk about dedicating their lives to saving the planet, but they wanted to preserve huge territories of land in South America and eventually create national parks. And similar to some of the most famous places in the U.S. yellowstone, West.

[Christine Tompkins]

Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, all these places that if you protect them, people want to come and see these jewels of a nation.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

But how to pull it off? They made a plan. Use their wealth to buy land, lots of land. It was the 1990s. They moved to the hinterlands of Chile, a place Doug had always loved and which still had a chance at being preserved.

[Christine Tompkins]

Roads were starting to come into the extreme south of Chile, so mining became an issue, logging became an issue. All the things that here in the United States we'd been seeing decades before. And so in many ways, we got there at that inflection moment. For the extreme south of Chile, there were still extraordinary territories, pristine temperate rainforests and massive grasslands that could be acquired and saved and restored.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Here's Christine Tompkins on the TED stage.

[Christine Tompkins]

Thirty 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 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.

[Anoush 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?

[Christine 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. And also, I think you have to remember that we were flying every day in these bush plains that we had. Every day, five days a week, six days a week. We're in this roadless farm in the middle of this million acre temperate rainforest. It rains 250 inches a year, it's on the toe of a wildly ferocious fjord. And all those things. No electricity, no phone, just HF radios. But there's an airstrip within a hundred feet of the front door. So for us, getting around meant running out, jumping in the bush, planes taking off, and we're in the kind of high foothills of the Andes. So this is very tricky flying. We would go all over, looking at land, flying, landing in another grass, maybe 300 meter strip, meeting with team members, take off again, go to another one. So almost everything was by plane.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Lest we give people the impression that you and Doug would just fly over land and say, okay, we'll take that.

[Christine Tompkins]

Oh, no, no, no, no, it doesn't.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Can you explain what the reaction was as you started to buy up acres and acres? Because people were like, who are these two rich white people?

[Christine 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, and not planning to cut the trees, that's when an era of suspicion, mistrust, downright anger toward us began. And it really started with the presidency. 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, this was really hard on them. I mean, I look back on it now, and I'm surprised by how naive we were that that might not take place. I was about to ask, honestly, you know, you learn a lot in 30.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

Years, but was there a point where you thought, why do we even have to be here to do this? Let's just go back to the US and have our team take it from here. Because, you know, literally, your lives were at risk, your phones were tapped, you were getting death threats.

[Christine Tompkins]

No, we never did. We never thought, oh, God, let's get out of here.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

After years of distrust, public sentiment slowly started to shift. Because in 2013, Doug and Christine made their first donation of land, 37,000 acres that expanded Argentina's Parito Marino 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 a lot of.

[Christine Tompkins]

The infrastructure that we'd been working on. Trails, restaurant, little hotel, campgrounds, all of that became open for the public.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

So their plan was finally coming to to fruition. But then in 2015, tragedy struck. Doug, always an outdoor adventurer and risk taker, was on a kayaking trip with friends. When the weather turned, he flipped out of the boat and couldn't get to shore, eventually dying of hypothermia. 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?

[Christine Tompkins]

Yeah, it was a tomahawk to my forehead. It wasn't just a moment of grief, but I was always a fighter, really. And in this moment in my life, I knew, we have to finish this. And this, this is the team led by Sofia Henonen in Argentina, Carolina Morgado in Chile. We decided, we have to go do this. The. The big risk was holding all of these big parks and, and all of the costs of all the infrastructure, building it, completing it, maintaining it. So I just went through everything we had, and in each one, okay, this is what done looks like. And within two and a half years, all the parks were national parks. And we did them all at once.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

In 2018, Christine Dean and Chilean President Michel Bachelet signed a decree to create a network of five new national parks in Chile and expand three others, adding a total of more than 10 million acres of new national parklands to Chile's system of protected areas. And they've added more since. To date, Christine's organizations have created 15.

[Christine Tompkins]

New national parks, enlarged three or four others, for a total of around 15 million acres.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

This roughly doubled the national park systems in Chile and Argentina with territory that put together is the size of Costa Rica.

[Christine Tompkins]

This was what we were looking for, pushing ourselves to some new level of commitment in all aspects of our life.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

They wouldn't have worked otherwise.

[Christine Tompkins]

No. You know what I think? I think you're right.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

There are some who don't agree with your approach to conservation, because buying acres of land and keeping it pristine doesn't necessarily add to the GDP of a country. I mean, we hear this a lot when we talk about climate change, that the richest countries, those that caused all these problems, now allow the poorest ones to get a shot at being industrialized and growing the wealth of their population. What do you think?

[Christine Tompkins]

Well, it isn't true that you're taking production out of a territory when you create national parks. I think we have to be careful about imagining protected areas are just closed up, as if the air's been sucked out of them. I say we're changing what it produces. Employment inside the national parks, tourism, business, economic activities in the local communities. If you make a national park or just preserve an area and the local communities and regional communities don't absolutely, visually, tactically benefit from it, where is that 50 years from now or 100 years from now? It's not going to work. And we're not interested in just seeing that nature is protected. We also have responsibility to our own species. The importance is absolutely equal. You can't do one without the other. Dignified, healthy human communities have a much greater chance if natural systems are respected and cared for, because we won't make it in the absence of a healthy ecosystem. I mean, there's a chance for that. Will we know? Certainly I won't in my lifetime.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

How do we get more people to think in that long term, though? Because I think some people would say, well, you had the financial luxury of being able to think that way.

[Christine Tompkins]

Well, I mean, in our case, it helped us work faster. And I'll be really honest with you, your question is a good one. And having really read a lot about the collapse of various civilizations, we humans only really change our behavior in a crisis. Otherwise, it's just too difficult. We don't have the spine, we don't have the willfulness to look at what we're doing and collectively decide we're going to change the way we live so that our grandkids and great grandkids can live even remotely well. It's hard to imagine what we can do, but that's also a fallacy. There are a lot of things people can do. I get asked every time I speak in public, what can I do? What should I do? And I always say the same thing. I'm just meeting you for the first time. I don't know where you live, but mostly I don't know what you're good at. And let me tell you, that's where you have to start. You don't have to have money. You can be anywhere in the world and take a hard look at yourself, what am I really good at? And go give it away. Go do that. Because if we don't participate in our future, it is an abdication of our future. And I don't think most people want to live like that.

[Anoush Zomorodi]

That's Christine Tompkins. She's the president of Tompkins Conservation and former CEO of Patagonia. Her next big plan is in full swing, by the way. She and her team are bringing back keystone species like the jaguar to these national parks and the surrounding regions. Learn more in both of Christine's [e-mail] and you can also see her in the National Geographic documentary Wild Life. Thank you so much for listening to our episode, Improvise Pivot Plan. It was produced by James Delahousy, Rachel Faulkner White and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour, Katie Monteleone and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Harsha Nahada and Fiona Guerin. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Patrick Murray. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne hi, Lash, Alejandra Salazar and Daniela Balorazzo. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

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[Reggie Watts]

Com.