TED Radio Hour - Revitalize

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

After an exhausting year for everyone, how can we bring what's been dormant back to life? This hour, TED speakers explore ways to revitalize our minds, bodies, buildings--and even populations. Guests include psychologist Guy Winch, visual artist Amanda Williams, biophysicist Andrew Pelling, and writer Wajahat Ali. 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.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. Today on the show, revitalize. How we restore what is broken, dilapidated, or exhausted. And we'll start with our own psyches. When it all feels like another chore, it's because you're burnt out. You're not engaged. You're not excited.

You just feel angry and resentful because you just feel drained. This is Guy Wynch. I'm a psychologist and author and speaker, and I write books, and I have a private practice. Early on in his career, Guy had an incident that helped him see that the way he was working was totally draining him. It was my first year of my practice, and when you're starting a practice, you work really hard to fill it, and you kind of do whatever you need to do. do. And in doing so, I really lost sight of how much I was doing and how troubled I was by, am I doing enough, am I doing a good enough job with my patients? And I didn't realize that I was getting really burnt out. Because even though I closed the door at the end of the evening to my office,

that does not mean I closed the door in my mind. And so what happened was it was the one year anniversary of my opening my practice, which is supposed to be celebratory. It was July. I was walking home. It was New York City. It was really, really hot that day. And I got into the elevator in my building with a neighbor who was a physician in an ER. And the elevator rose a couple of floors, then shuddered and stopped. And then my neighbor, who deals with emergencies all day, literally started poking at all the buttons going like, oh my God, this is my nightmare. This is my nightmare and literally was having a panic attack. And I, who I'm usually a quite compassionate person, found myself rolling my eyes and saying,

and this is my nightmare. And he looked at me. He was so... Oh, did you say it aloud? Not just in your head? I kind of mumbled it. And I, and I, you know, like, and he just turned. And I was, I just felt so, so bad.

It was horrifically insulting and unkind. And I, I knew what to say to calm him down. and I could have done the thing I should have done. And that's what made me think like, wow, what happened? And I realized I had nothing left. I was so depleted. And that's what made me realize, wow, I am really burnt out. I'm a year in.

And I'm burnt out. That's a problem. That feeling of burnout, it's become really familiar. It's a sense of being stuck, I guess, as if it will be like this. That's the end of time. Many of you have told us you're feeling it too. I find myself, you know, becoming very high-strong. Cloudy.

And irritable at worst. I mean, I'm teaching to little, like, square boxes. Like, I don't even know if people are actually behind those boxes. It's a feeling of I can't. My brain is full. Like, I'm like, how did I get here? It really can feel like hope is hard to come by. So, how do we start again?

see things anew. Well, today on the show, we're exploring ideas about revitalization, from rejuvenating our exhausted minds to abandoned buildings, broken down bodies, and even sluggish economies. It won't be easy, but maybe we can bring what is dormant back to life. For psychologist Guy Wynch, that moment in the elevator made him doubt everything. Here he is on the TED stage. For a few terrible weeks, I questioned whether I'd made a mistake. What if I had chosen the wrong profession? What if I had spent my entire life pursuing the

wrong career? But then I realized, no, I still loved psychology. The problem wasn't the work I did in my office. It was the hours I spent ruminating about work when I was home. That's the interesting thing about work stress. We don't really experience much of it at work. We're too busy. We experience it outside of work when we're commuting, when we're home, when we're trying to rejuvenate.

It is important to recover in our spare time to de-stress and do things we enjoy. And the biggest obstruction we face in that regard is ruminating. And the problem with rumination, like healthy forms of self-reflection, is that it actually activates a stress response, because the difference between emotional distress and physical distress is that if I ask you to think back on a time your tooth hurt or you broke your leg, one thing I can promise, your leg won't hurt in the recollection, either will your tooth. But if you think back to something that

really distressed you, either irritated, annoyed, upset, hurt your feelings, and you really get into that, your feelings will be hurt. You're going to activate that wound. You're going to feel distressed and upset again. So when you ruminate, you are swirling that up over and over and over. And you're not getting anything out of it because you're not learning anything new. You're just in this emotional hamster wheel going round and round. So you gave your talk before the pandemic. But how much do you think that rumination has actually gotten worse in that we don't have breaks anymore?

Like I go from one Zoom session to another. I don't have my subway ride anymore to kind of like sit and think about what's happened, process it and move forward. Do you think that in some ways that might be exacerbating rumination for some people? Absolutely. You gave a great example. I don't have my subway ride to process what happened. And the idea there is that you do that on the subway ride home. It's a limited amount of time.

And then I'm assuming you get off the subway and then you shift your mindset and I'm coming home and the kids and the family and all of that. And so there was an automatic, okay, once I get home, time to start the evening, time to pivot to my personal life. But without that delineation, that becomes much harder to do. And we don't have the intentionality most of us to do it. So we often forget to do it. But you don't really have the option now to not be mindful about that separation. You really have to pay attention to having this break, a psychological break, artificial break, having some delineation. It's the engagement in the things that bring us pleasure and emotional nourishment.

And that means relationships, and that means passions, and that means socializing. And to do those things, well, you have to be present and have your mind present. Now, habit change is hard. It took real diligence to catch myself ruminating each time, and real consistency to make the new habits stick. But eventually, they did. I won my war against ruminating. and I'm here to tell you how you can win yours.

To convert a ruminative thought into a productive one, you have to pose it as a problem to be solved. The problem-solving version of I Have So Much Work to Do is a scheduling question. Like, where in my schedule can I fit the tasks that are troubling me? Or what can I move in my schedule to make room for this more urgent thing? All those are problems that can be solved. I have so much work to do is not.

Ground zero for creating a healthy work-life balance is not in the real world. It's in our head. It's with ruminating. If you want to reduce your stress and improve your quality of life, you don't necessarily have to change your hours or your job. You just have to change how you think. All right. So take me, let's do an ideal sort of day. If I was your client and I was like, listen, I just can't switch off at the end of the day.

I'm having trouble sleeping. I'm exhausted. What should I do? So a couple of things. First of all, and I can tell you what I do. First of all, I do have guardrails. I have defined for myself, and I think people should to the extent that they are able to, with the expectations of their work and their employers. But people should define when the day ends.

You have to be strict about really staying with at the end of the day is the end. of the day. Now, let's say, people say to me, well, I have to check emails. I'm like, great, but if you're finishing at six or at seven, then designate. Okay, at 9.15, I'll spend 15 minutes checking emails and that will be it. So I'll give myself the 15 minutes, but the people around me will know it so that we can plan accordingly. And if we want to watch a movie, then maybe it'll be 10, but I'll let them know. And that means that I'm not dealing with it in between. Those guardrails are important. I also think it's a very, it's very important to ritualize the transition from the end of the work day to your start of your home life. And for many people,

that is I'm still in the same place on the couch. So not a lot has changed. But what can change and what I suggest you change are, for example, your clothes, because we tend to, our clothes can have a big impact on how we feel. You know, the studies that show that you put a lab coat on someone, they become more, you know, their attention to detail gets better. So, you know, change clothes. Have the clothes that are your house clothes versus your work clothes. Change the lighting, put on music, have a way to really change the atmosphere, especially if you're working from home and you don't have those opportunities. There's one person I work with who at the start of the pandemic left their, you know, finished work at six every day, went outside, got in the car, drove around the block,

came in and said, no, no, no, no, seriously. For them, it was really symbolic. It just – and then they announced that they were home, and their young kids looked up like, yeah, you just left. But for them, it was super useful because it was like, this is what I'm used to doing. This is what – when I say I'm home, they get excited about coming home, even if they've been home. It's like it's a mental exercise they do. But it was useful for them. I will say, though, I mean, I think we need to acknowledge that it's not always possible for everyone, especially people who have had very difficult circumstances during the pandemic. essential workers, parents struggling to also take care of their kids and work.

Right. And it does, you know, there just aren't enough hours in the day for a lot of us. How do we find time to rest and revitalize? So start by really asking yourself, you know, if you could snap your fingers and freeze the world right now and freeze everyone around you and steal hours out of the day, what would you really like to do? you know like what's the thing that will feel revitalizing to you what's the thing that will make you feel like you it's much easier once you've identified that thing that you're missing or that you would love to have to then go to the powers that be in your home whoever that would be or your partner or even yourself if you're a single parent or whatever it is and say like i need an hour or two a week to do this where can i find it once you know what it's for

it's a little bit easier to josh things aside. I know a lot of couples that really tag team and they take their kids out for long walks just to give the other person some quiet time or some privacy time. You know, there's their ways to go about these things. Then it will be effortful at the beginning. But the goal is to find the things

that really do rejuvenate you, that really do feel different and really do make you feel like, oh, wow, that felt like a break. That psychologist, Guy, Winch. He's the host of the podcast, Dear Therapists, and you can hear all his talks at ted.com. Today on the show, revitalize. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour

from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zomerode. On the show today, ideas about reviving things that have been dormant. And our next story starts in the summer of 2015 on a Sunday around dawn. My husband and I woke up really early, probably about 5 or 5.30, and we quietly loaded the car with the paint we had purchased the night before. This is Amanda Williams. She's a visual artist from Chicago. I didn't really have an idea of how much paint I would need, so I just bought as much as I had money for and could fit in the trunk of our mid-green Prius. That morning, Amanda and her husband, Jason, were on a mission to stage. an art intervention.

This wasn't a sanctioned project, and I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen. Their plan was to transform an abandoned, dilapidated house into a bright teal sculpture. Yes. So we should say what Amanda was doing wasn't legal. They didn't own the house. They didn't get permission to paint it.

In fact, the house was tagged for demolition. I'd taken all these steps to make sure that the house was not only on the list for demolition, but also wasn't valuable in any way to people in the neighborhood even. A realtor or developer couldn't save it. Nobody was squatting. It wasn't being used for illegal purposes. So despite all of that, I couldn't sleep the night before because I built up all these things that were going to happen.

We were going to get arrested. Somebody was going to come out and complain. Somebody was going to come out of the house itself. That house sat in Englewood, a predominantly black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, where Amanda says for blocks on end, you could see houses tagged for demolition and vacant lots where houses used to be. But she didn't want them to stay invisible.

These are places that if you drive past in the winter, there are no footsteps. Nobody's mowed the lawn. They're not on any tax list anymore. There's no viable path for them. And so it's really borne out of that kind of frustration over and over again of seeing these environments and seeing little change despite changes in laws or promises from elected officials or quote-unquote leaders. And so really it was like, well, what happens if I just go, what if I just go paint it?

So then what happened? What did you do when you got there? So my husband got out of the car. And as he's starting to get going, the son is also coming up. And the friends and family that I've called to help me are starting to either drive up or walk up, students of mine, art friends of mine, family members, and we just all got to work. And we were painting really fast. Any questions about should something be covered, the answer was always yes.

Windows. Yeah. The stoop. Yeah. Stairs. Yeah. Everything. I think we were done within three or four hours.

And then I wasn't quite sure what would happen next. Because, of course, when you imagine things or when an idea, is bigger than you can see, you don't really see the end. And I'll never forget this moment after we'd finish. We were standing there. And I think maybe everybody sort of dissipated in the same way they'd arrive. People started to trail off and leave. And my husband and I were standing there.

And he's not an artist, but I, of course, had explained the project for a really long time to him. And he nodded and he says, now I get it. Every inch of that house was covered in teal. A color Amanda calls, Ultrasheen. And the ultrashine is unique in that it's this magical blue color that everyone knows, but probably only people like me could describe. So it is the cyanide turquoise teal, and it just has a kind of sheen to it. It is an ultrachine.

I'm going to show you how you an ultrachine can find a fantastic new hairstyle. And it represents hair grease that was created by the Johnson family. which is a African-American family from the South Side. The next time you see me, I'll be wearing an ultra-natural, courtesy of ultra-sheen. And so it sits in most people's grandparents' bathroom cabinet, maybe since the 70s. But these jars, you know what it is right away. It almost doesn't need a label. And so there's a power to having a connection to a color in that way.

And so I just knew that I wanted this entire house shrouded in this color that was very important to me. and my upbringing in the neighborhood that I grew up in. Amanda Williams continues her story from the TED stage. Now, if I walk down 79th Street right now and I ask 50 people for the name of a slightly greenest shade of cyan, they would look at me sideways. But if I say what color is ultrashim, oh, a smile emerges,

stories about their grandmother's bathroom ensues. I mean, who needs turquoise when you have ultracine? Who needs teal when you have ultracine? Who needs ultramarine when you have ultracine? This is exactly how I derive my palate. I would ask friends and family and people with backgrounds that were similar to mine for those stories and memories. The stories weren't always happy,

but the colors always resonated more than the product itself. I took those theories to the street. Ultra Sheen. At this point, Amanda's showing slides of her color palette, which she calls colored theory. It's a palette reminiscent of places and products of black Chicago, the colors of her childhood. If you're from Chicago, Harold's Chicken Shack.

A fire engine red. Pink oil moisturizer. A chalky light pink. Currency exchange, and safe passage. A bright bumblebee yellow. And finally, the boldest, darkest purple you can imagine of a crown royal bag. I wanted to understand scale in a way that I hadn't before. I wanted to apply the colors to the biggest canvas I could imagine.

Houses. I really wanted to understand what it meant to just let color rule, to trust my instincts, to stop asking for permission. No meetings with city officials, no community buy-in. Just let color rule in my desire to paint different pictures about the south side. A lot of people can relate to the idea that you drive past something all the time, and you remember when it was an ice cream shop. And it could be a deli now or it could be an insurance office.

But in your memory, you associate it with a moment. And often it is really mundane, but it's really, foundational to your memory of childhood or family or safety or a time where you weren't burdened. And so those memories hold strong and we make these associations with architecture or environments or colors or sounds or smells. For me, it's color. And so color theory was this project where I wanted to bring some of those colors that were familiar, even if you couldn't name them immediately, that color pattern.

that color palette is very familiar to a certain generation of people and a certain geography. And so seeing those colors in that geography, but not quite in their context, was very intriguing to me. But you are bringing those memories. You're adding that splash of color to something that's going to be destroyed. And actually, all the houses have been knocked down by now, right? The last house was demolished two weeks ago, pink oil moisturizer. I cry every single time. And so I cried, and my husband said, but this was always the plan.

And so it's really beautiful for him to remind me the temporary nature of this, both to accentuate the pain of what it's like to live somewhere where things constantly are going away and new things are not coming, but also the beauty of just letting something be for the time that it is and not trying to turn it into something else.

something else. It's sometimes just as important as the efforts we need to make to create systemic change. Then we also need the ephemeral and to just enjoy the present. I have to ask, did the police ever show up? The police did show up. The police showed up a few times. And, you know, even when you ask the question, my heart stops for a second and I'm saying, the police. Yeah, the police showed up. Again, this is early Sunday morning. like a small group of people painting the only house left on a block, right? And so the police know that like what is going on here, right? And it turns up to be like curiosity, right?

Because this doesn't make any sense. So they roll up and they say, what's you doing? And I end up panic. My husband says, paint it, paint the house. Are you going inside the house? Nope. Are you going to steal the copper? Nope. What are you doing this for? An art project? Okay. And then I came back like two hours later and checked and like gave a thumbs up on the color and say like, great job where it looks good. I mean, it's like totally crazy. You know, this Harold's Chicken Shack Red House. And the, you know, the police are like, that's Harold's. That color spot on. They recognize it.

It was accessible. Conceptual art was completely accessible to them. And they were then invested enough to at least come back and like. comment that they thought that we'd nail the color. That's great. You know, as an artist, it's often hard to translate art that is not representational. It's hard for people that don't have art backgrounds to understand. And so to know that people can understand after you kind of explain, and also more through your actions,

that you're doing something that makes no sense to them, so it calls attention and makes them really think about why on earth would you be up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday and a. hundred degrees, putting your old money into a property that's going to go away. And then the question is, yeah, why would I do that? And why wouldn't you? Right? We all have the power.

I didn't have anything that anybody else did. It wasn't a million-dollar project, but I was doing it, right? It meant that much to me. That's visual artist Amanda Williams. You can see her full talk at ted.com and see some of Amanda's colored project homes at at ted.npr.org. On the show today, ideas about revitalizing and rebuilding. And what if all we need to revitalize parts of our bodies is the right tool?

Could we think about biology kind of like hardware? Could I take the pieces I'm interested in and sort of rewire them and put them together physically in different ways? This is Andrew Pelling. He's a biophysicist at the University of Ottawa. And I run a research lab that, creates augmented living biological systems. Okay. Augmented living biological systems.

What the heck is that? Can you explain, please? So we're really kind of interested in creating living tissues that might not normally be found in nature. We've also discovered ways to heal and regenerate living tissues in the human body. And what my lab has become very well known for is creating an apple ear. And it's essentially an apple that we carved into the shape of a human ear. We processed it, decelerized it, pulled out all the plant cells, and then repopulated it with human cells.

Okay, wait a minute. Hold up. I just want you to say that one more time. You made an ear that has human cells out of an apple. Can you just back up and explain this to me? It's a long story. A lot of us have heard of approaches to biomedicine right now that might involve something called CRISPR or DNA technologies that you might engineer or change our DNA. And that's all really fascinating and very hard work.

But my response to that type of effort has always been like, well, can we actually control our cells and tissues without even touching the DNA? So what we needed was a sort of scaffold. sort of a three-dimensional architecture we could grow ourselves into. And we had found a way to take plant tissues we find in the grocery store. We can strip out all the plant cells. And all you're left with is this fibrous material,

the stuff that gets stuck in your teeth when you're eating in a salad or whatever. And that material, cellulose, was the three-dimensional scaffolding we were looking for. And it was really cheap. We could get it in the grocery store. And our cells could grow inside of it. Okay, wait, though. So you get an apple, but then how do you make an ear out of it? So what we did, we had been doing a lot of work with apples.

And if you've ever cut an apple in half and looked at it, it does kind of look like two ears side by side, at least to me. And the only person in our orbit that we knew who could carve anything was actually my wife. She's a violin maker. And so I asked her, you know, could you carve me? ear from this piece of apple. And I have a very loving and patient wife. And she's kind of used to me at this point. Sure, honey.

She got to it. I was modeling. And she carved us several ears. And I took them back to the lab. And so now I've got this like Tupperware container full of these pieces of apple that look like human ears. And what we do with them is we essentially put them into a large beaker. and inside of the beaker is the solution that we use to pull out all the plant cells.

It's like a soap or a detergent. And it slowly sort of shakes and spins over several days. It's a slow process to remove all of the cells. But at the end, what you get is it's almost completely white and it still holds its shape. It looks like an ear. And this scaffold or this implant, we can then put in a petri dish. We can put cells onto it, and we let them grow. And over time, they'll start to invade inside of the scaffold and fill it up with as they replicate.

And what you end up with is a really nice proof of concept of a plant-based human implant. What kind of cells do you put into the scaffolding? So we can actually put all sorts of cells. We've done work with muscle cells and sort of vascular cells and neurons and, you know, name it. Over the years, it's become fairly straightforward. You can grow almost anything in there. That's how generalizable it is. So you said it's a proof of concept. So tell me what you learned from being able to grow cells like this and why it's not being used to help people yet. Well, I hope it will be helping people soon. And that's what we're working on now.

that ear was the first proof of concept. It really convinced me and the whole team that what we had wasn't just some goofy, funny discovery, but was something that could actually be quite impactful in terms of human health and well-being. And so what has happened since that time is now translating these materials into the clinical space. And we've actually since that year, being able to demonstrate that not only can we make three-dimensional structural objects, but at least in the case of spinal cord, actually repair spinal cords in small animals. And this is really, really exciting and potentially revolutionary.

And that brings us to what you're working on right now, right, to repair spinal cord tissue using not an apple but another food. Yeah, it's funny. I was in the early days, literally, we would go to the grocery store, just buy everything you can see. The lab would look like a farmer's market, like just bags and bags of produce. And we'd just deseratulaturizing everything and throwing cells on them. And in the midst of all this, one day I was at home and I was cooking asparagus for dinner. I had cut the ends of the asparagus off.

And I was sort of looking at the sort of stock and noticing all of those long. capillaries, those little tubes inside the stock. I started to wonder, you know, could we actually use those conduits as a way to guide neurons back together in the case of

spinal cord injury? In a minute, more from Andrew Pelling on the extraordinary possibilities of rebuilding the body with produce. On the show today, ideas about revitalization. I'm a new

Zahmurody and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. On the show today, ideas about revitalization. And before the break, we were talking to Andrew Pelling about his mind-boggling experiments, including a new idea to rebuild human spinal cords with asparagus. And this wasn't a totally original idea or anything like that. There's been plenty of work on synthetic materials with tunnels and conduits and all that sort of thing. But again, I was wondering, you know, could it be this simple? Could I just go to the grocery store and find my scaffolding there?

And the interesting thing about plant-based biomaterials is they don't break down. They're actually quite stable, long-lasting. So we, again, stripped out all the cells and made some asparagus scaffolds. And then I thought, well, I got to talk to an expert. at this point because I'm so far out of my sort of comfort zone at this stage. So I looked around and one of the top neurosurgeons in Canada happened to be right here in my own city in Ottawa and we brought her some scaffolds and she spent time thinking about this and looking at them. And her first question to me was, can I take these today and use them in a patient? What? Yeah, it was like, you neuro people are crazier than me, man. Wow, yeah.

One of the problems that she had seen and experienced was that scaffolding that she had used previously had always broken down. And this is what really excited her about what we were proposing was a scaffold that was long-lasting and stable. And so thankfully, she was willing to collaborate and helped us sort of design some preliminary animal studies to first look at, you know, the efficacy. of the scaffold in repairing a severe spinal cord injury. And so you basically started a study where you put this asparagus implant in some animals with spinal cord injuries, right? And what happened? One of the most fascinating things I've ever witnessed in my life started to happen a few weeks after this, about two weeks. The animals that received the implants, they started,

they looked like they were having sort of pins and needles in their legs. They were sort of scratching at their rear legs and biting at them. It was like they were gaining some feeling back. And over the course of about 12 weeks, we watched these animals go from being paralyzed from the waist down to starting to move their legs, so left, right, left, right, and then starting to lift themselves up on their back legs and lift their bellies off the ground.

This is a really important step in recovery. And this is also showing that those core muscles are getting activated, the legs are getting activated, healthy cells, migrate inside of the scaffold. And it really just becomes a living tissue within the body. It becomes something that's kept alive by the heart. And by no means were the animals perfectly walking or anything like that. But this for us was an incredible moment because what seemed like such a far-fetched, you know, idea appeared to actually have legs to it and potentially could impact tens of thousands,

if not millions of lives on the planet. And I've never, never expected as a scientist to be involved in something that important. And late last year, we announced that this technology was just designated a breakthrough medical device by the FDA. This is going to dramatically speed up the timeline between when, you know, from going from the bench to, you know, from the bench, to eventually to the patient. So how do you get to the point where asparagus can actually be a potentially viable therapy for someone who is a spinal cord injury? Like what does that look like?

Are we talking five years, 50 years? That is a good question. I mean, you know, it's interesting. As I've met and spoken with many people who live with spinal cord injury, you know, walking, of course, is sort of held out as that holy grail. but there are these really just these things that we take for granted that you lose, you know, the ability to control your bladder, you know, sexual function, scratching an itch, feeling an itch, you know, there are these dramatic, these things that that seems small but can have

dramatic impacts on human life. Now, the timeline, I think it's difficult for me to give you an answer on that. I mean, we've heard timelines before and been disappointed. So I think we need to be realistic here. But those human trials are about two years down the road from now. But we've got, we still have to meet certain milestones and prove to the FDA that we're ready for that. And that's part of what we're working on every single day now. And it's what keeps me up pretty much all the time.

That's biophysicist Andrew Pelling. you can check out his talks at ted.com. On the show today, we are talking about how we revitalize, our neighborhoods, our bodies, our spirits, and even entire populations. I thought we were going to talk about Legos. Well, I could actually talk a lot about Legos as a fellow parent and how much pain they've inflicted on the bottoms of my feet. Oh, yeah.

You don't have calluses now and now? It's just like, whatever. You could stab me with a Lego. This is writer Wajahad Ali. I think most people know me as a writer and a guy who builds Lego sets with his kids. How old are yours right now? Ibrahim is 6, Nuseba's 4, and the tyrant is about to wake up. But she's so sweet.

She's one. I love it. Okay, so you're a father of three. But that is not what you gave your TED talk about. You actually, well, you started your talk saying that in some of the world's biggest economies, people are having fewer and fewer kids and that that could be a big problem. Why? There was just this topic that was just circling in my brain.

I had read about it almost every year for the past three years that every year the birth rate in the United States was falling. And specifically, over the past 50 years, the birth rate around the world has halved, right? And I was like, why are people not having as many kids, especially in the United States? in Japan, in China, in Eastern Europe, right? People aren't having kids. And so I was just really curious about just digging a little bit deeper into why.

Wajahat Ali continues on the TED stage. Why is the birth rate declining in these countries? In some cases, it's because women are more literate, more educated. They have more economic opportunities. All good things. Yes, all good things. Women also have more access to birth control.

more control over their reproductive lives, all good things. But in the United States, in particular, a lot of young people are opting out of having kids largely cite the same reason. Financial concerns. The United States is the most expensive country in the world to give birth. And guess what? The United States is the only industrialized country in the world

that does not require employers to offer paid parental. to leave. Many of you are sitting there right now saying, watch, there's also overpopulation. There's also orphan kids who still need parents. And oh, by the way, we have a ginormous carbon footprint that is destroying this planet. And yet, despite all this chaos, I still think we should have babies. Now, I just want to acknowledge that choosing to have babies is a deeply, profoundly personal choice and that many who want to are unable. But just for today, let's examine the flip side of the coin at how not having enough new people is going to be a major problem moving forward. So I want to just make sure that we have it very concise and clear about what the downside

is of fertility rates going down for a country. Why do we need to maintain a certain level of population. What happens to a society if you don't have enough people? Sure. So the data shows that the global total fertility rate needs to be at least 2.1 children per women today so that one generation has enough people to replace the other, right? So the question is, what happens when the total fertility rate decreases below that level? And we don't have enough people. Specifically, what we're seeing in the United States, Japan, China, in the EU is that a plummeting population leads to rising labor shortages in the world's biggest economies.

Less workers means less tax revenue. Less tax revenue means less money in safety net programs that provide valuable benefits like pensions and health care. So there's going to be this huge, ginormous imbalance between young people and old people, right? It means that the consequences that will affect everyone, the elderly, the young generation, right, that will have to now take care of the elderly. Then putting more burden on a younger population already burdened and challenged with

climate change and income inequality and racism. And so is your thesis that actually to revitalize world economies, to revitalize entire nations, we need to have more kids? So the talk is, it's talking about, okay, so we have this problem where the global fertility rate has halved. But what we've seen is that if we actually invest in communities, if we actually promote women's health, promote progressive pronatal policies such as giving families affordable health care, giving paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, then what we've seen in countries like Sweden, the birth rate actually ticked up. And you see that people say, oh, we actually do want to have kids. Okay. But hold up. I do have to point out that some people listening might be thinking like, Wajahat, you're a man. And you are essentially telling women that they should choose to have children.

No. First of all, it's absolutely right. You know, obviously, this is a woman's choice. I'm a man. Who am I to say? You have kids or don't have kids. But I wanted to point out the problem that we have in certain countries, right? It is absolutely every couple and every individual. individual's choice whether or not they should have kids or not have kids. What disturbed me was why we as a society are punishing women for wanting to have kids. Another thing I want to just touch on is everyone says, oh, I'm going to make my decision and I'm going to live in my silo and I'll be okay. It doesn't work that way. We're all connected. And so shouldn't we have a responsibility to take care of each other? So you are an American. You live in a which, as you've pointed out, does not support parents in much of any way. So why did you and your wife decide to have kids?

You know, I'll admit, growing up, I'm like, there should be no reason why I procreate. But when we had Ibrahim, it sounds like a cliche, but what happens is your capacity for love and sacrifice increases. You know, you didn't even know you had the ability to process these types of emotions. And, you know, it sounds like that. The act of having children has given us tremendous joy. But what it also is, I think it's an audacious Hail Mary of Hope. And what I mean by that is there's a part of me that empathizes with all the concerns,

how are you going to afford this child? Why will you bring the child into a world where there's a rise of white nationalism and he's brown-skinned and has a Muslim name? Why are you bringing into a child that will increase the carbon footprint? But then another part of me says, Children literally represent what? Hope, a renewal. And so investing in having children in a family is my investment literally in humanity.

That maybe this next generation can push things forward. I can only imagine that your sense of that is even more heightened than any other parents because of what you shared in your talk. because I believe just before you were about to give your TED talk, you got some horrific news. Can you explain what happened? Yeah, so this was the irony. Almost two years ago to the day, I'm in Vancouver, in a hotel.

I'm about to go on the TED stage and give my talk. I left my wife and my two children at that time, Abraham and Nuseva, and I get a call in the morning. And my wife calls me sobbing. And she said, I'm calling from the hospital. we had to take my baby daughter Nuseba, who's named after a warrior princess, to the hospital because she found a bump on the stomach.

We got back the results, and there were bumps all around her liver. We found out that she has stage four liver cancer. It has been a challenging week. It has been a challenging week. As a parent, you immediately do a barter prayer. Whether or not you believe in God, you do a barter prayer with the universe

and say, you say, okay, God, my life for the kid, fair trade. and you do this barter prayer knowing full well you won't receive an answer but there seems to be a profound injustice that this two-year-old girl somehow magically over and out has stage four cancer which means you'll need a liver transplant to survive and she'll need just aggressive punishing chemo and so i'm sitting there thinking god have to now go give a talk and what talk do i have to give manu she the case for having kids how can i make the case for having kids when one of my kids now has cancer and we're going to be immersed in just chaos and pain. And so I thought it would be disingenuous to step on that stage and not make it personal. So how is your daughter now?

So Nuseba is four years old, going to turn five in the summer. All of her hair has now come back. So she's like Hallie Berry with this amazing thick curl of hair. And we just got results. You know, you do tests all the time. just yesterday, all her levels came back. She's doing fantastic. And, you know, every day, my wife and I, we just look at him to say about twirling around, dancing, being goofy, playing with her brother. And we just sit there and just say, my God, this is, look at this miracle.

I think it's interesting because we started off our conversation. And actually, you started off your talk in a very macro way. But I think what you've gone is to the sort of micro, which is that your children have really revitalized you in that you see the world as a place for change. Absolutely. I have to say, speaking for myself, I was pretty jaded Gen Xer. And having kids for me, it is like seeing the world new again. Yeah, literally as an adult, it's wonderful because you now have become the teacher. You become the mentor.

You see life through a different lens, right? through a childlike lens where there's joy and there's curiosity and there's conflicting emotions and you see the beauty of Lego sets again. I mean, in this pandemic, as I'm locked down with my three children and my wife, you know, I feel connected to this mirth and this laughter in our home. And there is something about revitalizing your spirit and refining a purpose, especially at this time. That's writer Wajahat Ali.

You can see his full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week, revitalize. To learn more about the people who were on it, go to ted.npr.org to see hundreds more TED talks. Check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz-Meshkampur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James. Stella Hussie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, and Matthew Cloutier, with help from Daniel Shukin.

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