TED Radio Hour - Flip the Script

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

There's a lot to keep us up at night. How do we manage our time, navigate financial uncertainty, escape a doom and gloom spiral? This hour, TED speakers help us flip the script as we face the future. Guests include time management expert Laura Vanderkam, non-profit CEO Aisha Nyandoro, environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie and writer Emily Esfahani Smith.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Minoosh Zamoroti. And on the show today, fresh perspectives on the things that stress us out the most, like having enough time. Yes, that's your plate. All right, everyone. You know, we try to have family dinner a few nights per week. But when you have seven people, five children ranging from ages,

three to 16 can be a little bit hard to get everyone sitting down at the same time. This is Laura Vandercombe. She's a mother, an author, a public speaker. Yeah, she has a lot going on. Somebody has forgotten to grab a fork or somebody wants to go get a cup of milk or spill something on the floor. You know, somebody wants to go get extras of the pasta or whatever it is. And so people are popping up left and right. Including the husband and the dog. Sometimes the dog will start barking. in the middle of dinner, which can add its own little chaos to everything. Helping people cope with chaos is Laura's specialty now.

But she was no expert back when she first became a parent and was feeling really overwhelmed. It really does change your relationship with time. You have this infant that needs somebody with him or her 24-7. And then there's also things that you probably still need. to do in your own life, figuring out, well, how can I still devote the time that is necessary to stay employed or to take care of my own health? Well, I still see my friends and family when I have this new 24-7 responsibility. Laura had a lot of questions, but the advice she found on how to juggle it all wasn't very

satisfying. You know, a lot of what has been written about making space for both work and life, particularly stuff that is aimed at women, has been pretty negative, right, about how challenging it is to have it all or do it all or whatever people want to call it. But there are people who seem to be building careers that they are happy with, who seem to have, you know, fulfilling family lives. And it made her want to know. How are they spending their hours?

Because they don't have any more time. than the rest of us. It may be that they are allocating their hours in interesting ways that the rest of us can learn from. After studying how hundreds of the most effective people use their time, Laura became a time management guru. She writes best-selling books, hosts multiple podcasts, and she made time to do this interview just a few days before Christmas.

And listen, thank you so much for making the time. Well, it was you in wrapping presents today, Those were the two things. And Laura says the most important thing for us to remember is... Complexity isn't the enemy. Chaos is the enemy. You can have a very complex life. But if you know where all the pieces need to go,

then it can feel very orderly and in control. To me, that is the secret of being calm about life. So let's delve into sort of the research that you've done in terms of studying those people. You often talk about the one thing, that we all have, but some of us seem to manage better. Correct. There's 168 hours in a week. And that's a number that a lot of people don't know.

It's weird. We never say 24-7 all the time, but we never multiply it. No, I didn't multiply it through until I started writing about this. And then I was like, oh, yeah, there are 168 hours in a week. And if a full-time job is 40 hours a week and somebody says, sleeps eight hours a night, so that is 56 hours per week, we still have 72 waking, non-working hours. You know, many people are concerned that if I work full-time, I don't have time for anything else. But even if we're working full-time hours, even 50 or 60 hours leaves some time for other

things. So when we approach it from that perspective, I think we start to look at time in a far more abundant way. And that's hard to see on a Tuesday when you're kind of racing home from work to get dinner on the table. But I promise the time is there somewhere. Daily life can feel pretty hectic. And then there's a lot to keep us up at night. Global warming, economic uncertainty, how to manage when it feels like the world just keeps moving faster. So on the show today, we're flipping the script with new perspectives and some reminders to keep us out of that doom and gloom spiral and think more proactively about our futures. Laura Vandercombe says that before we move forward to manage our schedules better, we need to take a hard look at how we're spending our time now. Because if you don't know where the time is going now, I mean, how do you know if you're changing the right thing?

So I always suggest people try tracking their time for a week. Here's Laura Vandercombe on the TED stage. I recently did a Time Diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments, busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept. One of the women whose time log I studied, she goes out for her. Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken. And there is now water all over her basement. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night. Next day,

she's got plumbers coming in. Day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruin carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours? That's like finding an extra hour in the day. But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon? Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people? I'm sure she would have said what most of us would have said, which is no. Can't you see how busy I am? Yet when she had to find seven hours, because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.

And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. And to get at this, I like to use some language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. She was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll. She had six children in her spare time. I remember it was a Thursday morning and she was not available to speak with me. but the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike. So, of course, this makes me even more intrigued.

And when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, listen, Laura, every minute I spend is my choice. And rather than say, I don't have time to do X, Y, or Z, she'd say, I don't do X, Y, or Z because it's not a priority.

You're reminding me of a habit that I started, I think after reading one of your books, which is that I block time on my calendar for relaxing. You know, I was always used to blocking time out for meeting, prep for interview, make sure you'd pick up the kid at this time. But to actually write down that I was going to relax felt very strange. But if it's just as important to me as all those other things, I need to put it on the calendar. I think that's a wise idea because if you don't do that, time will be spent one way or another. I mean, something is going to fill those 30 minutes, but it might not have been what you would have chosen if you had been

a little bit more intentional about it. And so if your goal is to have more relaxed downtime in your life, then absolutely claim the time for that. And then when you get to that time and you're like, well, I could send these six other emails right now. You're like, no, no, no. Now is the time for spending 20 minutes relaxing. Okay. So for people who haven't done this, how do you suggest they start being more intentional? Yeah. For me, it's having at least one designated time during the week where I think about the upcoming week. What needs to happen and what I want to have happen in three spheres of life. My career, my relationship, so that means family and friends, and then for myself.

I find a really good time to do this planning is Friday afternoons. Most of us don't use Friday afternoons well. It is hard to start anything new at that point. We are pretty much sliding into the weekend. But we might be willing to think about what future us should be doing. There might be some people listening who think these two women are insane. Why is it so hard for them to relax? Why does everything have to be so regimented?

Well, I would say that my life actually isn't all that regimented. But if we don't claim time for something, something else will claim that time from us. So this is a way of actively creating the life you want as opposed to just letting life happen. Because for most of us, when you just let life happen, that means you're going to spend the time in ways that aren't that meaningful to you. So a lot of the people you're talking about are people who have their own companies. Maybe they very much are in charge of their own time, in charge of, other people's time. Have you also worked with or talked to people who maybe are not having that much autonomy? Maybe are working multiple jobs, maybe not paid enough to be able to outsource some of the

things that higher paid people can. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I study people in all different walks of life and have seen time logs from thousands of people now. And even if we don't have complete control over our time, we often have the ability to make choices about some of it. Maybe you don't control what time you leave work, but you might control what time you get there. If I am not working on one particular day in the next week, that's the day I'm going to prioritize doing this thing. And I think having that mindset of I can make some choices, even if I can't make as many as I want, it's just much more constructive. Whereas when you say, well, I have no free time whatsoever, there's nothing you can do with that.

In 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. Because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Or otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV.

But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go.

I truly believe this. There is time. That's Laura Vandercom. Her latest book is Tranquility by Tuesday. day, nine ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, flipping the script. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti, and we'll be right back. Hey, it's Manush. Before we get back to the show, maybe you remember an interactive series we did in the fall called Body Electric as part of our investigation

into how our bodies are adapting to our technology, we asked you to join a study with Columbia University Medical Center. And over 20,000 of you signed up to try integrating five-minute, gentle movement breaks into every half-hour, hour, or two hours of sitting time. And for the folks who managed to stick with it, the results were pretty astounding. So now we have taken those findings, added more reporting, and put together a quick startup guide with a new invitation. Take the Body Electric Challenge. Put your health before your inbox this year. Just go to NPR.org slash Body Electric to get started. Or if you did the project before, Bravo. Here's some motivation to keep going. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. On the show today,

flipping the script, fresh perspectives on some of the things that keep us up at night, like money. And how do we know when we have enough? It took our next speaker a long time to understand that wealth means different things to different people. We're talking today about something very important. Like some people have more money than others. Like so many folks in the 90s, I was a devout, Oprah-Win-Win-Win-Frey Show Watcher. This is Ayesha Yandoro. She loved watching Oprah and Oprah's on-stage pal, Susie Ormond. Favorite money expert, Susie Orman. She's got it. And so I was introduced to 401Ks by Susie Ormond of all people.

People first, then money, then things. What Avery and Monica. I remember her. Totally. She would, like, I think for a lot of women, she was the first time you heard about financial planning. I think so, exactly. Every month until you're 65 at a 12% return, you'll have $1 million. Dollard woman with these really white teeth that was looking at you, telling you to get your financial act together, right?

Exactly. And telling you to save yourself first. And this is what you needed to do, to be an empowered woman. Together we can show the world. We'll be right back. Back in a moment. Growing up in Mississippi, Aisha knew her parents weren't rich, but they had everything they needed. Food on the table, presents at Christmas time. And so we didn't have conversations about money. We'd always. I didn't think about it. I didn't feel like I was missing anything. But when she got to grad school and started working on a PhD in community psychology, Aisha met people who were loaded.

I saw people who were going to Greece and international travel just to lay on beaches. I met people who had more than one home, like multiple vacation homes. And so there was this clear separation of, oh, this is what money looks like. A few years later, a little more sophisticated and ambitious and armed with lots of degrees, Aisha was ready to take on the world. I got my first job postgraduate school, and it was the most money at the time that I had ever made. I was making $70,000. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so much money. And I was 27, so I was like, oh, my God, I'm rich.

This is it. With Susie Orman's voice in her head, she made an appointment with. with a financial advisor. Aisha wasn't sure how to get started, but her basic financial goals were clear to her. I was very clear that my goal was to be able to take care of my mom and to be able to retire by a specific age. And like I remember when I met with the financial advisor, you know, I told him my name, you know, Aisha Yandoro. And he was like, oh, that last name is just a bit too much. So I'm just going to call you Aisha. And instead of, sitting down and recognizing that I had very specific goals with limited information,

they talked to me as if I was not deserving of what it was that I was trying to accomplish. So it wasn't, okay, you are interested in opening up a 401K. Do you really understand what that means? Let me walk you through what a 401k is. Let me walk you through what saving each month will look like. I wasn't spoken to like that. I felt like I was being talked down to. And instead of accepting those as being my goals, his response was,

I don't know why taking care of your mom is your responsibility. So even with that, it's an othering. It's an, oh, do I belong here? Is this for me? And maybe this world of wealth and riches aren't meant for low black girls from Jackson, Mississippi. This meeting made Aisha feel completely terrible, invalidated. Like her ideas about what money is for, were naive. And if she felt this way, with a Ph.D. and a well-paid job,

how were other women of color without the same opportunities being treated? She never went back to that financial advisor and moved on with her life. She got married, had kids, worked in criminal justice, grant-making, and affordable housing. And then Ayesha moved back to her home state of Mississippi. to start a nonprofit called Springboard to Opportunities, a group that runs after-school programs, health care clinics, and job training. And it really was a very simple idea that we had.

It was how do you go about supporting families that are some of the most impoverished in this country, families that live in affordable housing, how do you go about supporting them as they work to support themselves and their families? That was our very basic goal when we started 10 years ago. But something extraordinary happened when in 2017, Aisha decided to pose a very simple question to the women they were serving, something that she'd wished she'd been asked in that financial planner's office all those years ago.

What do you need? And how can I help? When we listened, it was moms just needed more money, and it's not like they needed a significant amount of money. It wasn't $10, $15,000 problems. These were not middle class problems. These were $500 problems, $250 problems, $25 problems. And so I said, okay. Aisha Yandoro continues from the TED stage.

The problem was the lack of cash. No money for pizza on a Friday night was causing stress. Unexpected car repair through leading to unemployment because people could not get to and from work. So we began to research. How do you give money? not another program to people experiencing poverty. In 2018, we launched the Magnolia Mother's Trust. This country's first modern guaranteed income program

and the first in the world to center its efforts on black women. A guaranteed income is a specific amount of money given to a specific population over a set amount of time. It's not a new idea. Jenny Tillman, a mom and welfare activist, is called for a guaranteed income way back in 1972. And even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Nixon indicated that a guaranteed income could help solve for poverty. It's not a new idea, but like I said, we are pioneers and our efforts are working.

We provide $1,000 a month for 12 months to black mothers, and our goal is simple to provide these women with the breathing room they need by giving them the financial resources they need to dream a little bigger. So Magnolia Mother's Trust is now the country's longest running guaranteed income program. For people who maybe you're wondering how this works, can you explain it? Yep. We're doubling the income for most of the women that we work with because on average, our population makes about $13,000 a year. And it's a life-changing amount of money because folks are always like, oh, my God, $12,000 isn't that much money. I'm like, $12,000 isn't that much money to people who have money.

If you go from making $12,000 to making $24,000, think about how your life would change. How many moms are on the program right now? Right now we have 134 moms. Oh, wow. Can you tell me about one of them? Yeah, so one of the moms who's in it right now is Keisha. She has two kids. She worked full-time in the health care field as a certified nursing assistant,

and she wants to be a nurse. And so what this means about her ability to go. back to school, but not only her ability to go back to school, what it means for her and her ability to say yes to some of the things that her kids won't, not just her kids needs. So I guess I'm thinking, like, that's great that for a year you get $12,000 and you get, you know, a little bit of breathing space as a mother. But what happens when the year is over? So that's the thing. I think we don't, I don't think we give enough credit to breathing space. And I don't think we give enough credit. And I don't think we give enough credit or understanding about what it means to have your ban with text.

When you're living in poverty and you're constantly just waiting for the other shoe to drop, you're just on that hamster wheel, you're just going, going, going, going, going. So for a year, yes, you get $12,000, which is amazing. But what it allows you to do is to not operate in scarcity. So you're able to operate an imagination. You're able to plan for the first time. You're able to see your future for the first time. And that's what we have so many of our moms telling us that, oh, for the first time, I actually got to think about what I want. One day I was having a conversation with Coco, a mom within a Magnolia mother's trust, and I asked her, what is wealth to you? Without skipping a beat, she said, if anything were to happen to me,

my family would have the money to cover my burial expenses. Asking more and more women in the same question. I have come to learn that wealth is dignifying funerals, the privilege of privacy, the ability to complete school, own a business, or the thrill of being the extravagant auntie. All of these are definitions of wealth to them. I have never had a mother say to me, wealth is having stocks and bonds, equity in her home, or even a retirement account. Instead, they dream about what a life of ease and care would look like. I was having a conversation with a mom I worked with, and I asked if she had six months worth of savings to cover an emergency.

She started laughing. She could not even see herself an equation that I was offering. She said that before the Magnolia Mother's Trust, I didn't even have a savings account, let alone one month worth of savings. I said, okay, let me ask the question differently. What is wealth to you? She said, oh, that's easy. All of my bills paid every month.

with a little leftover for anything extra. She knew exactly what she needed. Our narrow definition simply did not address her needs. Just to tie it back to your own experience, it sounds like these moms want to give their kids what your parents gave you, which was not having to think about money, not even really giving it a second thought or talking about it

because it wasn't an emergency. And that's what felt. made you feel like you were rich or made you just not even think about it. Okay, now you're going to make me cry because you're right. You're not talking about big fancy vacations. You're talking about, like you said, just being able to get pizza on a Friday night. Yeah, that's exactly right. But that's what we do when we say no wealth is, have an equity in your home, 401K retirement account,

this much in savings, this type of vacation, this type of home. we can all have different definitions of wealth that matter to us. The reality is we should recognize that they all matter. So it's been, as you say, over five years since you first started, do you see long-term effects of being given a little bit of breathing room financially, a little bit of not feeling so much stress about money? So we have seen moms, like I said, who had gotten out of debt, going back to school, moved into homeownership, moved out of market rate housing.

But we also saw the impact that it had on their kids. We saw kids who were more hopeful about their future because they saw how their moms weren't stressed and how their moms were able to show up differently in that year. And that made them really excited about their future and their future goals. And I know that 10, 15 years from now, there is going to be some kid giving their valid Victorian speech, and they're going to talk about the year that their mom got some money from some random place and how it changed their life. They're not going to know my name. They're not going to know Magnolia's trust name. They're not going to know any of that. But they are going

to know how that one year changed their family. So when it comes to most of us and our expectations around wealth and, you know, questions we have, like, are we going about our finances the right way? all of this is really stressful for a lot of us. But I'm guessing that you would say, you know, maybe let go of some of those expectations and just ask yourself, how do you really define wealth? Define wealth, right? Yeah, I would. I would say, how do you define wealth?

And is your definition of wealth truly connected to who you are? Or is your definition of wealth connected to what you're seeing on TikTok? When I truly sat down, it's like, okay, what is wealth to me? What do I believe in? What matters? It wasn't about having a house backed up against the lake, which is what I thought. It wasn't about having so much assets liquid, which is what I thought. It wasn't about any of that.

It was about being a loving daughter. I am a pretty solid mom most days. My 13-year-old might disagree. right now we're sort of having a ruckus. And I get to do work on purpose. And so those are pieces that make me really, really wealthy. And it's not confined or limited to what my balance sheet looks like or any of those pieces. Aisha Yandoro is the CEO of the nonprofit Springboard Two Opportunities. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, flipping the script for yourself and way more broadly.

Tonight, the planet reaches an alarming milestone. No human has ever seen it hotter. This message is everywhere anytime we watch, listen, or scroll. Out of controlled wildfire. Devastating floods. From a tropical storm to a category five hurricane in the space. It's scary. People's lives are being ruined. But also, it's exhausting to constantly hear.

that climate change is getting worse. Not just climate, but also air pollution, food production, deforestation, biodiversity loss. We have a long list of environmental problems that we're facing. This is data scientist Hannah Ritchie. I'm a senior researcher at the University of Oxford, and I'm deputy editor of Our World and Data, which tries to use data on research to understand the world's largest problems. It's very hard to see any kind of signs of progress

just looks like things are getting worse and worse and worse. And while it's true, the world is getting warmer, there are trends going the wrong direction. Hannah says there is a more productive way to look at it. Yeah, I think there's some downside to only surrounding yourself and just headline after headline after headline of negative impacts. So when you actually step back to look at the data and look at historical trends, we can see that progress is possible.

and it has happened. And I think we need to see that to be able to understand that we can make things better in the future. Hannah Ritchie continues from the TED stage. A large international survey asked 10,000 young people about their attitudes to climate change.

Within half said they think humanity is doomed, three quarters find the future frightening and more than one in free are hesitant to have children of their own. Young people today truly feel like it could be the last generation. Now I get this feeling. I've been there.

I used to feel like humanity was doomed. Despite having multiple environmental degrees, felt completely helpless to do anything about it. But I'm a data scientist, and after years pouring over the data on how far humanity's come and how quickly things are now moving, my perspective on this has changed.

I think we've got this framing upside down. Far from being the last generation, I think we'd be the first generation. I think we'd be the first generation, the first generation to be sustainable. We could be the first generation that is sustainable. Can we, that kind of blew me away in some ways, because I was like, no, you're going to be the first generation that's not even here. That's the message that we're getting. Right. Yeah, I think it's quite a controversial statement.

Because most of the messaging is around, there's actually activist, groups called Last Generation. And I wanted to turn that on its head and say, no, like, I think we can, we can stop this. We can challenge this. And we could be the first generation to achieve sustainability. Talk me through how you came to that conclusion, that this is possible. And what you even mean by sustainable? So I have quite a specific definition of sustainability. Providing a good life for everyone today, while protecting the environment for future generations. How do we do that? In a minute, why Hannah Ritchie thinks a good life

and protecting the environment is possible and how the data backs her up. On the show today, flipping the script. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zomerode and we'll be right back. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to tell you about what's up on our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour.

Plus. It's more with data scientist Hannah Richie. She breaks down the things you can and can't do to help stop global warming by the numbers. As an individual, like, what's your responsibility? She explains. If you're not a plus subscriber yet, check it out. Join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and all our episodes sponsor free. Just go to plus.npr.npr.org slash ted or give it a try right in the Apple Podcast. app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. On the show today, flipping the script. We were just talking to data scientist Hannah Ritchie. She's the author of Not the End of the World, how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet. I think we have the opportunity to provide 8 billion people with a good life while reducing our environmental impact. It's a message that can feel unbelievable. Well, Hannah wants to change our minds, starting with our assumption that our grandparents had more sustainable lives than we do. Yeah, exactly. I think my grandparents would look at my lifestyle and think, oh, you're using these phones and this computer. And it looks like a really energy-intensive lifestyle. So therefore, I should have much higher carbon emissions. But when you look at carbon emissions in the UK over time, what you see is that when my grandparents were my age, the average CO2 emissions per person were around. 12 tonnes per year. Wow.

That didn't change much between them and my parents. They were still very, very high at around 12 tonnes per person. Now, what we've seen across the last few decades is that emissions in the UK have plummeted. So now the emissions per person in the UK are around 5 to 6 tonnes, which means that my carbon footprint today is about half that of my grandparents when they were my age. A more recent data tells us a slightly different story, a more hopeful story that we can turn things around. My carbon footprint today is less than half that of my grandparents

when they were my age. That despite the fact I live a much more extravagant lifestyle, or as they'd put it, you youngsters, just don't know how good you've got it these days. Now, you might think the UK's cheating here. It used to be this industrial powerhouse. Now it just gets China, India, Bangladesh to produce it stuff, for it. Maybe it's just offshoreed

all of these emissions. There's a bit of truth to this when we adjust for trade emissions in the UK are higher, but we still see this dramatic decline over the last few decades. Offshoring is a bit of the story, but it's not the entire story. At the

same time, the UK has increased its GDP. GDP has gone up while emissions have come down. And it's not the only country to achieve this. A long list of countries have increased GDP will reduce their emissions. The notion that economic growth has to be incompatible

with reducing our environmental impact is simply wrong. Now, rich countries are reducing their emissions, but low and middle income countries are increasing theirs. What does this mean at a global level? Well, total CO2 emissions are now beginning to flatline, but actually emissions per person already peaked a decade ago. That means the emissions of the average person in the world today have peaked and are now falling,

and we will see a peak in total CO2 emissions soon. So CO2 emissions in many countries are actually going down. What are these countries doing that is driving that? Yeah, the big driver of that decline has been a reduction in coal. In the past, most of the UK's energy production was coming from coal, and we're now nearly in the position where coal is completely out of the electricity mix and we're not burning anymore. In many countries in the world, coal is dying.

Taking its place are renewables where it costs are plummeting. Go back a decade, and solar and wind were among most expensive energy technologies we had. But just 10 years on and that script has flipped. In many countries in the world, solar and wind are now the cheapest. Now, if we're going to have renewables, we're going to need energy storage. But there's good news there too. The price of batteries has fallen by 98% since. 1990. If you take the battery you'd find in a Tesla today, go back to 1990, it would have cost

one million dollars. It now costs just 12,000. That has completely transformed the world of energy storage and completely transformed the world of transport. Global sales of petrol and diesel cars have already peaked. They peaked in 2017 and they are now falling. Taking their place are electric cars, where in the space of just a few years, sales are going through the roof. The cost of these technologies has plummeted. You just get this kind of feedback loop where the more you deploy, the cheaper they get. And I think that's actually why I'm much more optimistic on climate than I was a decade ago. Okay, so the data on emissions and renewable energy is really encouraging.

But you also see a more hopeful story in other areas that maybe we haven't considered, like air pollution, which feels like it's just getting worse, but actually isn't? Yeah, I think air pollution has a few key stories in it. So two big ones there are the ozone layer. The ozone problem was kind of before my time. But countries worked together. We brought in policies to stop emissions of the gases that were destroying the ozone layer. And we've reduced emissions by more than 99%. So that's effectively solved. The other big one there is acid rain. Europe and North America put in really strong policies to reduce sulfur dioxide. which causes acid rain. And again, these emissions have fallen by more than 90%. I think there's another dimension to this which is localized air pollution. We often assume that our cities are the most polluted they've ever been. But rich countries actually have dramatically reduced local air pollution.

What about on a global scale, you're mentioning rich countries where it's better, but what about poorer countries in terms of their contributions to the overall air pollution? and the lives of their citizens more locally? I think there is a mix across what we call middle-income countries. China's levels of air pollution, local air pollution, have plummeted actually very, very quickly. So emissions of some pollutants in China have fallen by two-thirds in just seven years. So it has actually taken on very, very strict pollution controls,

and they have been very effective. I mean, levels of pollution in countries like India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, many industrializing countries are still very, very high. They're way, way above healthy guidelines. But we know that middle and low-income countries will go through the same pathway that rich countries have. So our big question is, can we implement these solutions much, much faster, such that we reduce deaths greatly along that pathway? What I love about this is that by getting into specifics and looking at the bright spots,

we see what we can do instead of just feeling like, oh, everything is lumped together into one big climate disaster. Right. And another example is you have researched what's happening to our forests. Sure. And that is surprising too. From energy and transport to the food we eat, you might imagine that global deforestation is its highest level ever.

But actually, global deforestation peaked decades ago and is now falling. But actually, it's better than that. because many countries are now regrowing their old forests, such as the net decline, is even more impressive. Now, why is this happening? A big driver has been an increase in crop yields. Over the last century, across many countries and many different crop types, crop yields have skyrocketed.

Here we see it for the US for corn, where yields have grown sixfold from two tons to 12 tons. Now, what this means is that we can grow a lot more food from a lot less land. My main point here is that in the past, human progress had to come at the cost of the environment. If we wanted energy, we had to burn wood or we had to burn fossil fuels. If we wanted to grow more food, we had to expand farmlands often at the cost of forests. But technology and innovation means we're very quickly decoupling its impacts, such as this conflict, is no longer true. It sounds in some way that you feel like we're humans.

We figure out solutions. We make changes. We will have to operate on this earth in a different way. It will not be the same, but it also will still be here, at least when it comes to environmental action. Yeah, I think too often, and I do it myself, it's very easy to just take where we are or where we've been going and just extrapolate that line out and just assume this is just going to continue on exactly the same path. and by the middle of the century we're going to be gone. But yeah, I don't think that's the case. Like I really believe in human ingenuity.

We are making progress. Yes, these problems are big, they're urgent, but we have many of the solutions and we just really need to get going on deploying them. And then I think what we also need is to have like a northern star of this is where we want to go and this is what our future could look like. Yeah, what is that North Star for you?

Yeah, I think for me, this kind of utopia as a world where eight, nine, ten, bowing people or have a nutritious diet, and we use just a fraction of the land that we do today to produce farming. We reforest and we bring wild habitats back. We live in a world where we have very cheap, abundant, clean energy. Everyone lives in a good home that's got heating or cooling that they need.

They're not spending half of their income on really high energy costs. We have really efficient, productive cities where we have really connected networks. So I think it's marrying these two thoughts together where you can provide a good life for everyone and we can live that life with a very, very low environmental impact. That's Hannah Ritchie. She's deputy editor at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at Oxford University. Her book is called Not the End of the World, How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. You can see her full talk

at ted.com. On the show today, flipping the script. We've rethought our approach to time, to money, and to tackling climate change. But what about how we approach happiness? Writer Emily Svahani-Smith says that very often, in chasing happiness, many people make themselves miserable. And she thinks she's figured out a better way. Here she is on the TED stage in 2017.

I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, that beautiful apartment. But instead of ever feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and adrift. And I wasn't alone. My friends, they struggled with this too. That raised some questions for me. Is there more to life than being happy?

And what's the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. The first pillar is belonging. Belonging comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well. But some groups and relationships deliver a cheap form of belonging.

You're valued for what you believe, for who you hate, not for who you are. True belonging springs from love. It lives in moments among individuals, and it's a choice you can choose to cultivate belonging with others. For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning, those bonds to family and friends. For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar. Purpose.

Now, finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. Purpose is less about what you want than about what you give. A hospital custodian told me her purpose is healing sick people. Many parents tell me, my purpose is raising my children. The key to purpose is using my children. using your strengths to serve others.

Purpose gives you something to live for, some why that drives you forward. The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way. Transcendence. Transcendence states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away,

and you feel connected to a higher reality. For one person I talked to, transcendence came from seeing art. For another person, it was at church. For me, I'm a writer, and it happens through writing. And these transcendent experiences can change you. One study had students look up at 200 feet tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. But afterwards, they felt less self-centered,

and they even behaved more generously when given the chance to help someone. Now, the fourth pillar of meaning I found tends to surprise people. The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you. I met a young man named Emeka who'd been paralyzed playing football. After his injury, Emeka told himself, my life was great playing football. But now, look at me.

But with time, he started. to weave a different story. His new story was, before my injury, my life was purposeless. I partied a lot and was a pretty selfish guy. But my injury made me realize I could be a better man. That edit to his story changed Emeka's life. After telling the new story to himself, Emeka started mentoring kids and he discovered what his purpose was, serving others. The psychologist Dan McAdams calls this a where the bad is redeemed by the good. People leading meaningful lives he's found, they tend to tell stories about their lives

defined by redemption, growth, and love. When I was younger, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by all of the pillars. Belonging, purpose, transcendence, storytelling. My parents ran a Sufi meeting house from our home in Montreal. Twice a week, Sufi's, would come to our home to meditate,

drink Persian tea, and share stories. Their practice also involved serving all of creation through small acts of love, which meant being kind even when people wronged you. But it gave them a purpose, to rein in the ego. Looking back, I now realize that the Sufi house had a real culture of meaning. The pillars were part of the architecture,

and the presence of the pillars helped us all live more deeply. Several months after I graduated from college, my dad had a massive heart attack that should have killed him. He survived, and when I asked him what was going through his mind as he faced death, he said all he could think about was needing to live so he could be there for my brother and me, and this gave him the will to fight for life. When he went under anesthesia for emergency surgery, instead of counting backwards from 10,

he repeated our names like a mantra. My dad is a carpenter and a Sufi. It's a humble life, but a good life. Lying there facing death, he had a reason to live. Love. His sense of belonging within his family, his purpose as a dad, his transcendent meditation repeating our names. These, he says, are the reasons why he survived.

That's the story he tells himself. That's the power of meaning. Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to. Thank you. That was writer Emily S. Fahani-Smith. Her book is The Power of Meaning, Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness.

You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show, flipping the script. This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, Harshanahata, and Fiona Gehrin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White and Katie Montalione. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez, Gilly Moon, and Margaret Luthor. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe.

Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Danieli. Beloreso. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.