TED Radio Hour - Shock Value

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Being jolted out of the everyday can be a good thing. From an elaborate farce, to benign naughtiness, to a life-altering event—this hour, TED speakers explain the productive side of the provocative. Guests include bird truther Peter McIndoe, psychologist Paul Bloom and cognitive scientist Maya Shankar. 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 Anoush Zamoroti. I want to start with a story that, well, it might seem unbelievable. On October 15th, 2022, thousands of protesters gathered in Washington Square Park in New York City. I get flashbacks to that moment, to that rally all the time. Because it was the most beautiful moment of my life. There were 3,000 people of all ages, all races, all beliefs, coming together for a shared truth, something we can all agree on.

We flooded the streets. We had banners, we had signs, we had our bagpiper with us just to commemorate and remember why we're there, which is because of a tragedy, because 12 billion birds died at the hands of the United States governments, and they've never received justice for that. So we're here to avenge them. We're the ones around New York City. I want to take this kid it.

This is Peter McIndoo. I'm the public information officer for the Birds Aren't Real movement, which has been active since 1976. Since 76, but you've not been involved since then. Oh, no, I'm 25 years old. Kind of a brief history of the movement is it's started when animal rights activists and anti-surveillance activists learned about the government's plot to replace every bird with the surveillance drone. And they teamed up to create a movement called Birds Aren't Real to protest this. From 1969 through 2001, the U.S. government murdered over 12 billion birds in the American skies.

Here's Peter McIndoo on the TED stage. They did this using poisonous animals. toxins dropped from airplanes. It was contagious and murdered all of the birds over the course of about 40 years. For each bird the government killed, they replaced it with a surveillance drone replica in disguise designed to spy on the American people. The proof that birds are robots is all around us if you start looking. For starters, birds charge their batteries on power lines. They also track civilians using a liquid tracking device. Over the years, as I began putting

this information together, there were times I wished I never even learned this. My life would be so much easier. But I always come back to this. It is my moral obligation as one of the few privileged enough to know this to share it with you.

So this whole thing, it got big. You went to CNN headquarters to protest their coverage of the movement. You went to Twitter headquarters. to protest their logo. We are here today to protest. What's your overall strategy here?

How does it work? Yeah, so we have a van that we drive around the country. We hold rallies. That's my primary responsibility as public information officer. I drive around the country in a van that we covered in decals, kind of full of facts and, you know, questions that we want people to ask when they're driving. Like, have you ever seen a baby pigeon? You ever wonder?

I've never seen a baby pigeon? Why? They come out of the factory as adults. Whoa! Throughout my time, doing birds aren't real. I've had multiple kind of people come forward and seen some leaked documents that prove that they come out of the factory as adults. Hmm. So there's no organic growth from baby to adult pigeon.

So back to Washington Square, you had the van park there, presumably, since it was Washington Square Park in New York City, there were a lot. of pigeons. There were a lot of pigeons. And any time that, you know, a flock of pigeons flew over, the crowd, there would be just a cacophony of booze. It was like a heavenly choir to my ears, just hearing everyone collectively, you know, come together and let the government know that we know what they're doing and we don't like it. How shocked would you say people are when they first hear about your, your theory that birds aren't in fact real. Yeah, that's a tough one.

Unfortunately, I try to tell people what's going on, and they look at me like I'm a freak and they'll scream at me, telling me, I'm the problem with this country. You're so stupid. But that's why I'm doing this. It's clear we have a lot of work to do. And so I'm hoping, you know, my grandchildren will be living in a world where being a bird's the norm, you know, where it's weird if you believe in birds, you know, that's this old, that's boomer belief, you know, no what? You know, we know, we know the truth. So that's the

world I'm working toward. And, you know, that is, that is what's, what drives me forward every day. All right. Tell us who you really are. That was really fun, by the way. That was fun. My name is Peter Macken, but I do not believe the birds are robots. And that is a character that I just did, that I've been playing for years and years now. I started this by accident in 2016. What? How does one do that by accident?

What do you mean? It was an actual accident, I swear. I was in Memphis, Tennessee, visiting a friend. It was shortly after Trump got elected. and there was a rally happening in Memphis. It was a woman's march. And there were also people in red hats shouting things at them, and it was just kind of this chaos.

And I'm not really sure why I did this. I think I was just maybe overwhelmed, or maybe it felt like there was so much madness happening. But I decided to pick up a sign and write my own thing on it. So I wrote on the same thing. signed the three most random words I could think of to pair together. And as you can guess, they were birds aren't real. And then I started walking around chancing birds aren't real.

And people were asking me, what does that mean? And unbeknownst to me, I was being filmed the entire time. The next week, I started being sent pictures of birds aren't real spray painted on walls in Memphis. And high school classrooms, writing it on the chalkboard, chancing it in the cafeteria. No. No kidding. And I was sitting looking at all this and just thinking I would always regret it if I didn't try to lean into that energy that was already there. We live in an attention-seeking age with companies and influencers vying for our eyeballs, one-upping each.

one-upping each other with outrageous and shocking images. It can feel exhausting and exploitative. But what if being jolted out of the every day can actually be helpful? Today on the show, shock value. Ideas about how provocative stories, surprising actions, and bolts from the blue can set the stage for productive dialogue, connections between adversaries, and ultimately positive change. For Peter McIndoo, birds aren't real started as a funny bit to make people laugh or to ruffle some feathers. But he decided he wanted to see how far he could take the farce.

Our goal was to convince the public that our satirical movement was a real one and see if the media would believe what we were saying. To do this, I played this character that I just showed you. We held rallies, put up billboards. We even sent the media a lot of fake evidence. We hired an old actor to pose as an ex-CIA agent confessing to his crimes. We sent them a historic email leak called Poultry Gate that came out of the Pentagon, where we forged hundreds of fake emails exposing elites and government officials

in the bird drone surveillance plot. It didn't take much to convince the media. after just one summer holding rallies like this, it became nationally syndicated news on tons of local news stations that we were a real movement that had been around for 50 years. And there was a resurgence happening

where it was coming back, and there was a radical new leader, myself, bringing the movement back as the rise of conspiracy theories swept the nation. At this point, I'm sitting on my couch, watching the media report on my fake movement as a real one. And third is probably time to come out of character.

One, because we'd accomplished what we came there to do. But also, I didn't want this to snowball on anything it was never supposed to. So in 2021, I broke character, revealed the movement was a farce on the front page of the New York Times. I mean, it's pretty impressive how much you committed to the bit. And I read that it was partly because you identified with the character because you grew up in an environment where you were. exposed to some conspiracy theories. So what was your childhood like? Yeah, like you said, I grew up in kind of a hyper-conservative religious community where I was homeschooled in the outskirts of town, in Arkansas, actually. And a big reason why I was homeschooled is because there's a

conspiracy theory that's still very prominent to this day. that the common core school system is brainwashing children. So that's a big reason why I was homeschooled, but still had some access to the real world. And I had neighbors when I was very, very young who were Muslim. And I remember asking my parents about what they believed in, and they said that they believed in their God, just like we believe in ours. And I remember thinking, oh, well, then how do we know that ours is the one?

You know? And that was before I was 10. A family friend gave me a book called The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. So that was one of the first books I read in like my teenage years. Wow. A family member gave you that book? Well, he's a very close friend of my dad, which I've always respected. They do have very different beliefs.

I mean, that's actually a very constructive way to talk to you by giving you a copy of Joseph Campbell. Yeah. And showing you the power of story. Yes, it really was because that book talked about the power of story and myth and how maybe we weren't so different from those neighbors after all. And yeah, I think that a big part of the way that I got through that was through humor and not making fun of my surroundings, but definitely joking about them a lot. When we come back, how Peter channeled that curiosity to grow his fake movement

and walk the fine line between comedy and condescension. On the show today, shock value. I'm Manusia Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Hey, it's Manus. Before we get back to the show, if you donate to public media or you're a TED Radio Hour plus supporter, I just want to say thank you. Everything you hear from the NPR network really does depend on your contributions. So if you've been thinking about getting involved, right now is a great time to help us inform more people.

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at donate.npr.org slash ted radio hour, or just sign up for TED Radio Hour plus at plus.npr.npr.org. And thank you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroody. And today on the show, shock value. Before the break, we were talking to Peter McIndoo about how he started a viral and fake conspiracy movement called birds aren't real. From the start, Peter didn't want it to seem like he was making fun of anyone. You know, that was a thought from the beginning of Birds Aren't Real, is that this could be a very shallow project. So I remember at the beginning looking at it,

less like a conspiracy theorist satire, but more like just this absurdist belief satire that could be applied to either side of the political spectrum. And so from, from, there, it was really interesting. When the idea was growing, it sort of became this Rorschach test for who people thought, you know, believed something ridiculous. And a lot of people think that, you know, the other side you could say, or people that, you know, disagree with fundamental core beliefs of theirs are crazy or brainwashed. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of

instances over the years where strangers would approach me, you know, they'd see me in public, and I'd see them notice me. It'd walk up to me with complete disdain on their face. They thought that I was a real conspiracy theorist. And time and time again, they'd come up to me, and it would tell me how stupid I am. My out-of-character self may interpret these interactions as a funny response to someone that fell for the comedy project,

but instead I felt the emotions of the character. I felt emboldened, and I felt sad and angry. like they didn't even take the time to know me. And in those moments when those people were talking to me, they could not have been more ineffective at what I would assume they really want, less conspiracy theorists in the world. What if by talking to conspiracy theorists like their ignorance and stupid,

we're actually pushing them farther away from the truth that we want them to see? Because what happens when someone tells you that you're stupid, stupid, you're all wrong, you're the problem. You'll feel judged and dismissed, and most importantly, you'll feel othered, which may lead you to look for safety in those who are like-minded to do what they have been doing for you. Affirm yourselfhood, give you a sense of identity, belonging. These are some of the most basic human desires.

I think as the time has gone on, we started building more of a character and a person out of this birds aren't real guys. to where he wasn't just this random guy who shouts on the street because that's really not who conspiracy theorists are. A lot of the time, they're talking about these forums that they're on online, and they really don't have a lot of real-life friends or community. And so as the time's going on, it really hasn't even been about the bird robot thing at all. It's been about a character that is finding purpose and meaning and community.

through this idea. And that is what's making him go deeper and deeper into it. Did you ever have conversations with real conspiracy theorists? There was one time that I, and I'm happy that it was just one time. You know, because at the first rally we ever held was in Springfield, Missouri, I didn't know who's going to show up. I didn't know if we'd have 20 people show up. I didn't know if we'd have a bunch of, you know, old men show up

who really believed this, you know. And so we showed up and it was just all, and there was a couple hundred actually. It was like Gen Z kids who totally understood and got the wink in the eye. And from there, you know, that's when I learned that that really was our whole audience. But there was one time at the CNN rally, actually. This guy walked up to me and starts talking about how he's a member of this, you know, very elite family with his famous name. And he was saying, you know, I love how a lot of the information, A lot of the information you present is absurd, but it's true.

But it's true. The way you present it is absurd, which is a smart way to get it out to people, but it is true. And later that day, I got an Instagram message from this guy. I said, oh, my God, this is the guy from the rally. And I opened up his profile, and it was just years and years of thousands of posts of conspiracy theories. Oh. Yeah. Which I think that, you know, a lot of times it is, you know, one conspiracy.

theory can lead to another and then reality really can kind of unravel. And yeah, that was the first time that I'd ever experienced that. It kind of shocked me at how similarly he spoke like the character and how much he identified with it. Did you ever have anyone who was angry at you about this? About birds aren't real in general. Yeah, like this is not funny. Like conspiracy theories aren't something to laugh.

at. Yeah, there have been, there have been people who have said that. And I really think it's important that we can talk about these things in a space that's not intense. I think comedy is a very disarming way to enter a thought space. You can enter this idea through something with, with levity, and then once we're past that, then we can maybe get into some ideas in a more disarmed way. You know, obviously, there are a lot of harmful conspiracy theories, and that's important to talk about, too. is that there are some ideas that are truly hateful and very hurtful. But I think that with the general person in our life that believes in conspiracy theories or that friend group where someone says something that makes us raise an eyebrow

and responding to that in a way that isn't shaming. But that is curious about how they got there. If we can have more people talking about it like that, looking at the problem as an issue of belonging. rather than belief, that might be the most productive thing we can do to fight the problem of misinformation. That's Peter McIndoo. He's the founder of the fake movement. Birds aren't real. We are planning on running for president ourselves as a movement, not as a person. In 2024, this is a TED Radio Hour exclusive. Oh, thank you for that. Of course.

And you can see his full talk at TED.com. On the show today, shock value, which can include the irresistible desire to do something bad. And if we're going to talk about being bad, psychology professor Paul Bloom suggests that there's no better person to start with than the original bad boy, St. Augustine. So Augustine wrote a very famous book called The Confessions about 1600 years ago. And it's famous because it tells the story of his youthful descent into sin and a subsequent conversion to Christianity. And he begins book two, this great line. I propose now to set down my past wickedness and a carnal corruption of my soul.

Which sounds like Augustine's about to dish out some pretty racy stuff. But... The sin he spends the most time talking about is, you might think it's fairly mild. There was a pear tree near our vineyard, weighed down with fruit, alluring neither in appearance nor in flavor. And one day, 16-year-old Augustine and his buddies decided they were going to steal those pears. And we carried off from there enormous loads of fruit, not to our meals, but rather to cast before swine. And that was it. That was it.

That was the beginning and the end of the sin. But it fascinated Augustine. Because he said, look, why did I do this? Behold my heart, God. Behold my heart. I wasn't hungry. I threw most of the pairs to pigs. I had nothing against the person who owned the orchard. And he concluded that he did it because he had no motivation for wickedness except for wickedness itself. If any part of one of those pairs passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.

I had no motivation for wickedness except wickedness itself. I was foul and I loved it. He wanted to do it simply because it was wrong. And unlike his sexual sins where he had, you know, motivations, he had drives, he understood what he was up to, this fascinated and horrified him. This seemed to him like a glimmer of pure evil. Paul loves stories like these. I love it because it's so paradoxical. Because sure, we sometimes do bad things.

Because we think that we're actually in the right, that morality is on our side. We fight back because we're overwhelmed with anger and injustice. Or because we want to get revenge against someone who's wronged us. Usually we have some sort of reason. But stealing pears just for the hell of it? These perverse acts fall outside all of that. Preverse, as in illogical, irrational. They seem to be cases where people know something is wrong and they do it,

not despite the fact that it's wrong, but because it's wrong. So in an attempt to understand what drives us to do these thoroughly unhelpful acts, Paul launched the Perversity Project, where he asked people to submit their everyday examples of doing wrong, just for the sake of it. So one of her first stories I got was flirted her with a woman's boyfriend knowing fully well he liked me. I knew I could steal him if I wanted,

but I didn't want to do that. I just wanted her to feel uncomfortable whenever the three of us were in the same room. Here's Paul Bloom on the TED stage. Causing people pain is wrong, but that's exactly why I did it. And in fact, this is the plot of the Dolly Parton song, Jolene. Sometimes it's self-destructive.

A young man wrote to me, ice skating on a pond, dark and frozen spot 30 yards out. Instead of avoiding it, I skate towards it, knowing but wondering, knowing but wondering, and splash. But not all the stories I got had that kind of nature. Some were a little bit more benign. Here's one of my favorites. When I was in a professional choir, at every concert, I felt the desire to sing a few notes very incorrectly on purpose. To this day, I don't completely understand why. Someone else wrote me in this is going to sweetest, sadness, little example.

modest perversity. Sometimes I walk on the grass instead of the path just because I know it's wrong. You know, I think my favorite from your survey is the ice cream guy. You remember that one? This was, I think, the first entry I got from the perversity project. You hit the jackpot right from the start. I just loved it. And he wrote, on one occasion in my early 20s, I was out with a friend.

He decided to get himself ice cream. and before he had a chance to try it, I stuck my finger in it. I played it off as a joke, but really I had a sudden thought, man, it would be messed up if I just jammed my finger in his ice cream. And for full clarity, he didn't use the word messed up. I mean, there's something about a person who decides to give you an entry for your perversity project, that they have a sort of self appreciation or they're trying

to understand their own motivation. It does not pass them by that something wicked was within them

or they wanted to shock someone. They know themselves well enough to have recognized that this was

what was happening when they committed these acts. I think that's exactly right. It is the kind of

sweet spot where people know this is strange. This is outside of the usual. And a lot of the perversity examples that we could talk about don't make sense to the person doing them. And one of the theories that I'm interested for why we do this, which is to shock

others, to shock and scare and impress others. In a nice way, you just want to surprise or sometimes to amuse other people. It could be funny. On the other hand, in the extremes, perversity becomes terrible. It becomes people doing cruel, rotten, violent things simply, you know, for the sake of doing them. Psychologists have long been interested in violent,

disruptive perverse acts and the kinds of people who do them. An example people often give is a Joker from the Batman comics. And Christopher Nolan's film, The Dark Knight, Alfred, Batman's Butler, describes a Joker by saying, some men can't be bought, bullied,

reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn. And psychologists have thought up a need for chaos scale. That event, it gives you a bunch of statements and how much you agree with them will tell you how much you want to watch the world burn. So just do this quietly in your head. I need chaos around me. It's too boring if nothing is going on. Sometimes I just like destroying beautiful things. I've spent back in the day covering a lot of political protests and often, Sometimes we saw that they would be completely nonviolent and rational. And then you would see the anarchists show up in black hoods.

And things would just descend into utter chaos, not because they felt strongly for either side of the issue that people were protesting, but because they just wanted to mess things up. Yeah. And I think there you see the dark side of perversity where there are some people around. who just want to make trouble. And sometimes the making trouble can be funny. They may want to amuse people or surprise people in a benign way. But sometimes they really want to hurt people. They might want to destroy things and hurt people.

And there's something apolitical about it. You know, they'll dress up, they'll put on masks. And at root, they don't care what the demonstration is about. No. But if they could throw some rocks and get some trouble going, their day is done. They tend to be male. They tend to be young. I think many people age out of it.

It's kind of in a sort of hormonal rage of being a teenager. But it is the scary side of perversity. And then there's another side, which I think is more common and something really worth knowing, which also connects to politics where people don't like being told what to do. Part of a perverse act. actor is somebody who wants to maintain their autonomy. They want to maintain their freedom. And there's a lot of evidence that if you tell people, look, you are forbidden to smoke. Look, you must take these vaccines. Look, anybody who votes for this person is a total moron.

Don't vote for this person. Some proportions say, okay, I'll do what you tell me to. And some proportions say, hell of that, I'm going to do the opposite. And I think political scientists underestimate how often people put their polls and do what they are told not to do just because they are told not to do it. Okay, so these acts can be troublesome. But you also think that they can be pretty interesting, maybe even positive. And you use the example of the art world and certain pieces of art. Yes. Maybe the most, the newest one.

was by Banksy. Yeah, we had a lot of interest on it, as you can imagine. Where he had a canvas girl with a balloon. It was on auction at Sotheby. It was all set up in a frame. And then the moment the gavel went down, a machine in the frame started to activate. And the artwork was partially shredded.

And if you go to YouTube and you watch your people, they had never seen it. You'd be like, they're horrified. But this became a classic, and people thought it was wonderful and ingenious and clever. Maybe the origin of modern art started when Marcel Duchamp,

when there was an art competition in New York, and they said, send in any artwork you want, so he sent in a urinal. And they said, no, no, no, no, we're not accepting that. We're talking about art. And he said, it is art. And there's a big debate. And then the conception of what art is changed.

Yeah. I think society and science and art wouldn't work unless most people played by the rules. But these geniuses who are often weird people and often perverse in other ways as well, make things more interesting. They push us to different levels. When we return, Paul explains why telling someone not to do something will just make them want to do it even more. More. On the show today, shock value.

I'm Anush Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay tuned. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. And on the show today, shock value. We were just talking to psychology professor Paul Bloom, who is endlessly fascinated with what he calls acts of perversity. basically being bad just because you can. Edgar Allan Poe describing perversity described, talk about imps, little magical demons in our heads

that cause us to do terrible things. But like I said, I'm a psychologist. I don't believe in imps. I think what we do has reasons, has motivations, and I think for perverse actions, there's a range of them. One of them was mentioned by Augustine. So later on, after describing the incident of DePairs, he writes,

myself. My satisfaction did not lie in the pair that lay in the crime itself committed and leaked with a gang of sinners. The social force drove him. A warning for parents tonight, the Tide Pod Challenge is the latest fat among Tijuana. Jonah Berger gives this great example of the Tide Pod Challenge, where it was a few years ago. Kids would just be sticking Tidepods in their mouth and filming it. I mean, this is nothing to laugh at. It's no joke. They do look yummy. I understand. They do. We are going to get an illegal problem.

We should really say it is not safe to put tide pods in your own. No. But actually, maybe we shouldn't say this because the company had owned tidepaws, I think Procter and Gamble, put up some extremely expensive ads. Keep laundry packs out of reach and away from children. Burger points out when this ad came up, consumption of the pods, shot up. Not down there, nobody's going to tell me what to do. I'm going to be an autonomous free being. Or take threats of reprisal.

There's a lovely study by a team of, of political scientists, which asked the subjects to imagine that they're an ambassador to a country, and they're deciding whether or not to have sanctions towards that country. In one condition, the dictator says, if you do sanctions towards our country, that's okay. I won't do anything. In the second condition, the dictator says, if you do sanctions towards our country, I will unleash terrorist attacks against you. What's the stunning finding from this is that in the second condition, not the first,

they were more likely to do it. A lot of our perverse actions are in response to people telling us not to do what we want to do. And it makes us want all the more to do that thing. So much of global conflict involves sending off a message saying, don't expect me to be reasonable. Don't expect me to only care about my own best interests. And people talk about the evolution of our minds. evolution of emotions say, this is where emotions like losing your temper, like rage, come from. Rage is an honest signal that I am about to make threats that are not reasonable, but nonetheless,

I'm going to follow up on. It's one of the great quirks in human interaction that a perfectly rational being, a perfectly intelligent, rational being who weighs the cost and benefits, a Mr. Spock, it's going to be less effect of that life than someone who's a little bit crazy. And we're being grim, but it also works for positive things too. Who would you find most compelling? Somebody who says to you, I want to be with you, I want to spend a rest of my life with you because the benefits of being with you outweigh the costs.

You were the most attractive, promising mate I have seen based on you. searching for last little while. And up until I find somebody better than you, I will stick with you. Or would you rather have somebody who's sobbing at your feet and said, I am so crazy in love with you. I will never leave you. You are the one for me. And now the second person isn't thinking rationally.

You know, dude, cause benefits. But he's much more of a compelling, making a much more compelling deal. Love is basically a sort of irrational bet that when somebody better comes along, you're not going to stray. Human relations. We are so weird and complicated and strange and delightful. We are, we are perverse. That's Paul Bloom. He's a psychology professor at the University of Toronto and Professor Emeritus at Yale University. His latest book is Psych, the Story of the Human Mind. You can see his talks at ted.com.

And thank you so much to J.C. Howard for giving voice to St. Augustine. On the show today, shock value. We've talked about perverse thoughts and outrageous conspiracy theories. But what about a shock that's more personal? The kind of shock that can upend our big plans in life. When it comes to navigating change and trying to sustain hope during hard times. As someone who's not a particularly spiritual or religious person,

I try to have as open a mind as I can day to day. That's my soft landing. It's human psychology. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist. That was not what she wanted to be when she grew up. When I was six, my mom went up to her attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had brought with her from India to the United States.

And I just remember being so captivated. by the instrument. I was really close to my, to my grandmother, and I knew she had played it as a little girl. And so I very quickly asked my mom if I could have a quarter-sized violin of my own to play. Maya's childhood revolved around her violin. My focus, each and every day when I woke up, it was always about the violin. Like, that's what I woke up thinking about. That's usually what I fell asleep thinking about. Kind of remarkably, my parents never had to ask me to practice. Music seemed like it was striking at something. that was so intrinsic. At age nine, she was accepted into the Juilliard School. We lived in Connecticut, and every Saturday, my mom and I would wake up at 4.30 in the morning and take a train into Manhattan,

and I would have up to 10 hours of classes, and then we'd come home and get back at around 10 or so at night. After years of intensive training, her hard work paid off. When I was a teenager, the renowned violinist Itsach Perlman invited me to be his private student. This was around when I was 13 or so. And so I was like, live in the dream, Manus. I really was.

What was the dream? Like, what did you envision for yourself? It was really when Pearlman took me on as a student that I received that vote of confidence that, hey, maybe I could actually do this. Maybe this could really be my career. You know, I had a special schedule at school to accommodate more practicing. Even physically, my body grew around the, violin. So, you know, to this day, my right shoulder is slightly elevated compared to my left. And my spine is

slightly curved because of all the hours I spent, you know, in that violin position. Yeah, it really became an extension of my body. And then that brings us to one day when you were 15. Yeah. So I was, I was at summer music camp. I was practicing this very, very technical, very challenging passage of a Paganini Caprice. I overstretched my finger on a note and I heard a popping sound and was alarmed to find that it wasn't a string that had popped that actually attended in my left hand. How did you respond? Yeah, it responded really poorly. I was frustrated. I was very impatient. And so every day and probably 200 times over the course of the day, I would like touch my hand, move it around and see whether maybe things had improved and then they wouldn't have improved. And then I would

pick up the violin and think, you know what, I'm just going to like bulldoze my way through this injury. And I played through months of pain, you know, just using anti-inflammatories and trying my best at physical therapy. I was just willing to do anything at all. Did it work? Like were you? It didn't work. No? It didn't work. And so eventually doctors suggested surgery. That didn't help me. Finally, I was told I had to stop playing altogether. When I lost the violin, I expected to grieve the loss of the instrument, right, and grieve not being able to play anymore. But I did not expect that I would grieve the loss of myself. Without it, I really felt unmoored.

And sometimes it's when we're thrown these big changes in our lives. But it brings to the surface just how much certain things in our life matter to us, right? And how defining they were. So Maya started to ask herself, who was she? if not a violinist. Because, you know, I was wearing blinders and I was on this speed train trying to become a professional violinist. And so I closed out all these other worlds. And so it's not just about discovering other pursuits.

It's about rediscovering myself at this more fundamental level. But it turned out, once a high achiever, always a high achiever. Maya ended up earning a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Oxford University. From there, she served in the old. Obama administration as founder and chair of the White House behavioral sciences team. Now she's a behavioral scientist at Google. And a couple years ago, she started her podcast, a slight change of plans, which is about, you guessed it, life-changing moments.

So I realized through that experience that it can be more sturdy to anchor your identity, not to specific pursuits, but to the underlying feature. of those pursuits that really make you tick, that light you up. And when it came to the violin, what I really loved about music is that it gave me the ability to emotionally connect with other people. And that underlying passion persisted. I mean, that's a core part of who I am. It gave me, like, a through line because I, well, I lost the violin and since then I've lost the ability to do other things, or maybe life took an unexpected turn. But I can still find that same love of human connection in other pursuits. And so I would urge people who are listening to ask themselves,

like, what is my through line, right? What is the defining feature of the things that I love to do? And can I find that elsewhere when life throws me a curveball? Maya Shankar continues from the TED stage. Change is scary for a lot of us. For one, it is filled with uncertainty. And we hate uncertainty. Research shows that we're more stressed when we're told we have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock, then when we're told we have a 100% chance. I mean, we'd rather be sure that a bad thing is going to happen than to have to deal with any uncertainty. Change is also scary because it involves loss of some kind. By definition, we're departing from an old way of being and entering a new one. And when we experience a change that

we wouldn't have chosen for ourselves, it's easy to feel that our lives are contracting, that we're more limited than before. But when we take this perspective, we fail to account for an important fact, that when an unexpected change happens to us, it can also inspire lasting change within us. We become different people on the other side of change. What we're capable of, what we value, and how we define ourselves. These things can all share. shift. And if we can learn to pay close attention to these internal shifts, we may just find that rather than limiting us, change can actually expand us. So clearly, you have bounced back. Are you, I don't know, is grateful the right word? What do you, when you think back on that moment and where

you are now, can you draw a straight line? Yeah, it's a great question. Um, I mean, I think it's too high at bar for all of us to try and reach gratitude in the face of every change. That might be unreasonable. But one thing that I felt time and time again through all the changes that I've endured is that there's a huge amount of self-discovery and growth that happens along the way. And there's so much mystery around the ways in which change, in turn, changes us inside. You can take two people who are experiencing the same external change, and their internal response is markedly different. And I think when we can tap into people's internal states as they're navigating change, that's

where the true wisdom lies. Often we're united by our psychological response to any situation. So someone going through a divorce might find the most resonance in the story of a cancer patient who feels their body has betrayed them in some way. And I think there's a hopeful message there. I think it helps us feel connected across all of the. challenges that we face in our lives. You mentioned that you are going through another change yourself or you had an idea of what

your life was going to be like and it's not working out exactly how you'd pictured it when it comes to starting a family. Are you okay to talk about that? Yeah. So in 2020, after years of fertility treatment and trying to match with a gestational surrogate, we found this wonderful woman Haley who is pregnant with our baby girl. My husband, Jimmy and I were just over the moon that finally this dream of parenthood was coming true. And then we found out that Haley had miscarried. Oh, gosh. And I remember thinking in that moment, wow, I feel so unprepared for this change. Like I might have navigated change earlier in my life, but man, the emotional like gut punch of this is so overwhelming. And I don't feel like I have the tools needed to get through this moment. And I felt

really discouraged and just felt like I needed help and I needed human connection. Fast forward about a year and a half. And Haley was now pregnant with our identical twin girls. And we were, again, so thrilled. And then unfortunately she miscarried. And I... Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I think more recently I've been reflecting on my current journey when it comes to parenthood. And one thing I learned with the violin was, what is it that I loved about the violin? And can I find that elsewhere? And I think in the domain of parenthood, I'm asking myself a similar question, which is, what was I craving from parenthood? And can I find that elsewhere? I mean, it also sounds like a very organic process. I don't hear you slipping into clinical speak in any way, you know, saying, well, I'm just suffering from PTSD or whatever else.

You don't, you're not labeling it. You're talking about the human experience. Yeah, I think that I, that's how I'm processing this is just as a, as a human experience. So. A hard one. Yeah. I've always wanted to be a mom, but becoming one has been difficult. and my husband and I have had to navigate pregnancy losses

and other heartbreaks over the years. And now I'm not sure what will happen. I'm asking myself how this unexpected challenge might change what I'm capable of, what I value, and how I define myself. I'm still figuring things out, but what I can tell you right now is that I'm imagining a future me who is expanding,

her definition of what it means to parent, who's perhaps finding what she crave from motherhood in other places. At a minimum, this exploration has allowed me to loosen my grip on the identity of mom just a bit, and I found it freeing. I'm beginning to see change with more possibility, and I'm hoping you can too.

Thank you so much. That was Maya Shankar. She hosts the podcast, a slight change. of plans. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. Shock value. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, and Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sanaz Meskampur. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Gehrin. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon.

Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Anish Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NBR.