(upbeat music) As a young kid, I had big dreams of becoming a concert violinist and really poured every ounce of my being into this pursuit from the time that I was six years old. I saw that as my past present and future, and I think it held me back. I would've benefited a lot from having a more malleable sense of self. What is my version of my through line? Like if you strip away all the superficial features of a pursuit what's left, that really ignites passion in me. If there is a central theme to this podcast, and I think there is, it is transformation. In other words, the mechanics of growth, how to change and what to do when life changes around us. Well, this subject matter also just so happens to be the core expertise of today's guest, the delightful and highly esteem. Dr. Maya Shankar Dr. Shankar is a cognitive neuroscientist, as well as the host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans. She earned her postdoc and said discipline from Stanford, as well as a PhD from Oxford on a road scholarship and a BA from Yale. In addition, Maya was a senior advisor in the Obama white house where she founded and served as chair of the White House, behavioral science team. She also served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations and is currently Google's global director of behavioral economics. Now, if none of that is enough to impress you, in which case, I don't know what's wrong with you. Get this, Maya entered Juilliard at age nine and was a private violin student of its a Perlman. It's an incredible story. I'll let her tell it in the podcast. In the meantime, just chew on that. In any event, today we discuss her path from violinist to the white house, through a behavioral science take and the nature of change. We talk about the power of something called nudges, as well as the importance of transparency. We discuss something called identity foreclosure. And we talk about the downside of present mindedness as well as many other very interesting topics. As you will soon see, Maya's just absolutely. I think you're gonna love this one, so please make sure you hit that subscribe button. And here we go. Me and Dr. Maya Shankar. Welcome to the podcast studio. I'm so excited to talk to you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Before we even get into anything. I have to say that, the most recent podcast that we just put up is with Scott Barry Kaufman. And so I was emailing with him yesterday, like letting him know the shows up and you know, we're promoting it and people are enjoying it. And I was like, by the way, I have Maya coming in. Is there anything I should, you know, that you think would be cool to talk to her about? And he was like, oh my God, we were classmates at Yale. Yeah. What are the chances of that? He just sent me a message this morning. Oh, he did?
Yeah. He's wonderful. Yeah, that was an awesome conversation. You guys were literally classmates. I was listening on my Lyft drive over. Oh, cool.
To your conversation. He's great.
Yeah's great, he's great. So I love that kind of synergy. So I feel like the timing is right for this. I know we had gone back and forth or I'd gone back and forth with somebody on your team about doing this a while back and things were crazy. I just couldn't fit it in, but really appreciative that you're making the time to do this. And I think in thinking and trying to wrap my head around kind of how to launch it into this with you. I mean, first of all, it's like a privilege to share space with somebody so distinguished and accomplished. I'm gonna do my best to not appear as intimidated as I actually am. But in thinking about today, I'm reflecting on kind of the themes of my cast and what you're all about in the work that you do and the podcast that you do. And really, you know, I have conversations with all different kinds of people, but if there is a central theme it's transformation really like this inherent power and potential energy that we all have within ourselves to change our lives with positive intention. So the subject of change, like what change is, the mechanics of change, how we change, what happens when life change changes around us is so central to your work. So why don't we just begin with that? Like how do you conceptualize change? Yeah, I mean I've never conceptualized it the same way, but I had some early experiences with change that at least lit up my imagination about what change could be. And also just peaked my curiosity and it was unwanted change. So as a young kid, I had big dreams of becoming a concert violinist and really poured every ounce of my being into this pursuit from the time that I was six years old. So I feel like I define myself exclusively, you know, first and foremost as a violinist. Well, tell the story about how you discovered the violin and kind of what happened. It's really quite remarkable. Yeah, so my mother had played Indian classical violin and when my mom had immigrated from India to this country in the 70s, she brought the instrument along with her. And one day she went up to the attic and took it down for me to see. And she really had only meant to show me the instrument. It wasn't even playable. It was so large and out of tune and whatnot, but I so taken by it. There was something about it that appealed to me. And so I very quickly asked my mom to get me a pint sized version of my own. And she'd also introduced the violin to my older three siblings who deemed it too uncool for them. So they went with clarinet trumpet and flute. Way cooler. I know way cooler, right. I mean you can see where the reference point of coolness is in the Shankar family, that we were ranking classical music instruments. But yeah, there was something about it that I was clearly taken by. And I don't know what that was, 'cause when you are six years old I mean it just, some, it has to be a natural connection of some kind. And my mom to this day marvels at the fact that while she, would need to motivate me to do other things. She never had to ask me to practice the violin, which was astonishing for her because, you know, I kind of rushed home from so school and pick it up and, and go at it. And you're seven, eight years old at the time. Yeah, and I mean looking, I'm not sure today I have that kind of work ethic that I had as a six year old but I think it was just genuine passion. And so my mom could very quickly see that, okay, this is a kid with big dreams, but she was also humbled by the fact that we had no connections into the classical music world. I mean, my dad's a theoretical physics professor. My mom was a physics major. Like I come from a family of scientists and while my grandmother had played very recreationally Indian classical violin, certainly we had no connections in the Western classical scene, right. Right, but if I can interject mean a couple things, first of all, it's almost as if you're channeling your grandmother through this passion on some level. And beyond that, perhaps like some kind of past life thing, like I know you're a hardcore scientist. I don't believe in past lives. But you know, the idea of a young person cottoning onto something was such a degree of passion at a young age is an unusual and unique thing. Yeah, I was very emotionally close with my grandmother. We would visit India for a long for, weeks and weeks and weeks on end in the summertime. And I felt a kind of intimacy with her, that was very rare. She was big on prayer and meditation. I remember as a young kid, I would sit next to her and try to just imitate her rituals and her chanting of the various Indian slogans, Hindu slogans. And even the physical movements, like swaying back and forth. You'd see me as a little kid next to her trying to do all those things. So I very much looked up to her. She was kind of into meditation before meditation was cool. And so I certainly had, I certainly felt a very deep emotional bond with my grandmother. This is my mom's mother, but I don't know if I put two and two together when it came to the violin. No, of course not. You know, it's more instinctual, right. And then with respect to your parents, both being physicists is not music like math plus inspiration or math plus creativity. Like there is a math piece to that, right? Absolutely, yeah I think, I mean, I don't know where the research stands today, but yeah. There's certainly some research showing certain connections between the mathematical parts of our brains and the musical parts. I imagine certainly in the area of composition, I mean, Beethoven was clearly a brilliant mathematician of sorts, right. I can't compose for my life, but yeah I mean, I think they, I think I came from a family of musical lovers, but when it comes to translating that into concrete steps to help a child reach her dreams, that's where my mom was seeing her limits, right. And I think, you know, so quickly my ambitions surpassed where she thought of would. And then all of a sudden she's realizing, okay, I think we need to get creative in this business. And so I still remember, so my big goal was to get into the Juilliard school of music in New York. So I grew up in Connecticut. It was about two hours away by car or train. And I just had no shot because for the longest time, because my teacher really nice guy had never taught anyone before. He was a grad student at a local school of music. And I didn't build any of the technical foundation needed in music. So I learned everything by ear, just play recordings and try to kind of emulate what I was hearing with my hands. And I literally had not learned how to play a scale or an (indistinct) So for people who are listening to this who are well trained in classical music, that's gonna sound completely nuts that I started playing pieces before I built any of the foundational elements. And so we kind of knew that I needed some in, with a teacher who had had more experience, who could kind of up level me quickly. And so my mom and I were in New York, I had my violin with me. We were walking by the Juilliard school and she said, why don't we just go in? Like why don't we just go into the building? I was like, you just go in. She's like, what's the worst thing that can happen. I'll tell you one thing, security guards are gonna escort out of here because we weren't invited. That's one thing that can happen, mom. But these were back in the days when, you know, we were allowed to do such things. And so we go inside and my mom strikes up a conversation with a fellow student and her mom in the elevator. And we learn that she's studying with a really renowned violin teacher. And my just ask, you know, would it be okay if my daughter meets your teacher? If you just make a brief introduction to her after your lesson. And it's amazing to me still that people will say yes, like the people will just be nice in this world and generous. Yeah, people wanna help. They wanna help, yeah. But were you dying of embarrassment inside? Of course, oh my God I was absolutely dying of embarrassment and don't forget Rich, like I wasn't planning on having to audition that day for a total stranger, right. So I was definitely like putting, being put on the spot and thankfully I was practicing a lot, so I was relatively prepared for the moment. But you brought your violin with you. Yeah, I mean, I was playing for another, another audition that day. And so I had it with me and, but I wasn't, you know, prepared to play for a Julliard teacher with a new piece that day. You're you're nine, right? Yeah, I was nine exactly. And, but yet I think I inherited some of my mom's fearlessness about the whole thing. So while I was totally embarrassed about the walking to Juilliard approach, clearly I had some of that fearlessness in me because when I was given the opportunity to play for the teacher, I wasn't running out of the room. I was firmly planting my feet in the ground, thinking, this is my moment. Like, this is the moment it's come. Finally, and I have to seize it. And so I played for him on the spot and he accepted me into a summer program that ended up changing my life because it was a summer music festival bootcamp of sorts for me. And, you know, five or of weeks he brought me from, and he said this after the fact that when he first heard me, he thought I had no chance. Of getting into Juilliard. I think he literally said he just liked my personality. So I was like the personality card. Right, I mean, you have a lot of humility around this. Like you always, you know, push back on the notion that you're some kind of prodigy, right. Yeah, I truly do not believe I was prestigious. And I don't say that with any sort of false humility it's that I was actually exposed to real prodigy. So I saw what actually defines a prodigy and I wasn't there, but I'm fine with it. Like, I think that there were certain, there are certain advantages almost to being, to having limits on your talent, which is that you spend more of your life just living normal life and having a diverse set of emotions that you can bring into your music. And I think while, you know, so, you know, I had this bootcamp with this teacher who eventually got me to the point where I did audition for Juilliard and I was accepted, but my technique trailed behind my musicality for the entirety of my career. And I think that might be, but I think there might have been an advantage to that, which is, I think maybe something that we're getting at together here, which is that when you have limits on your technical abilities or your raw talent in certain domains, your attention goes else swear. And for me it was, well, I think my goal is just to produce beautiful music. And it just became, that sort of a. In that regard, you're not held captive by this incredible talent that then drives your life. I know in my own life, you know, I've entered realms where I certainly was nowhere near the most talented, but I also had a work capacity to kind of narrow that talent deficit gap. And my sense is that when, you know, you're not as talented as these other people, you have to shoulder the responsibility of doing the work. Whereas people who are brimming with talent have a different relationship with process because they can always fall back on the talent. Yeah, I think, I mean, that definitely resonates with me in other areas of my life, but I'm not sure that it applied in the music space and I'll tell you why, which is I was not out working my peers. So that was something that was pretty defining in terms of what my childhood was like versus the classmates that I had. I had classmates, I remember one in particular Shunsuke Sato, who is now a professional violinist who lives in France or something. And he was practicing his age equivalent. And I know this because we were neighbors at summer camp. So I was next to him, his apartment. And I could hear him practicing eight hours a day, nine hours a day, 10 hours a day. And my mom was kind of like a couple hours, dude, that's it. That's our max here in the Shankar family. I want you having other hobbies. You know, I played soccer when I was in elementary school. I did art classes, tried out for the school plays. Like she was really intent that I have some kind of balance in my life. And so I think that, but again, I think that there are various ways that that balance can manifest, right. It did make me the least technically strong player in my peer group. But I think it made me one of the stronger musical members of my peer group. Because I do feel like I had just more to call upon in life to bring to my music. You you're living a richer life experience. So you have more, you have more to bring to the music to personalize it and add your flare because you're actually living your life and not just sitting in a room practicing. Yeah, which is, I mean, it's such a lonely sport, you know I mean, I think that's the one thing I don't miss about my violin years. Which is a very lonely enterprise when you're a soloist that's it's you and the bow and the violin in a room for hours. Pure about that too, I guess. But I didn't even know that I mean, I've always thought of Juilliard as this conservancy, that that is sort of a collegiate experience. I didn't even know that they had programs outside of that for younger people. So yeah, there's a pre-college division. Right, so that's what you were in. Was that every day, I mean, you're living in Connecticut. You couldn't have been going down to Manhattan everyday. No, exactly so the pre-college program demands that kids are enrolled in some sort of full-time school outside of it, for some kids it was homeschool. 'Cause they took the violin so seriously. So they would, I mean, I saw families torn apart over these musical ambitions, right. Two people are living in a studio apartment in a family in Manhattan and then the other two are based in soul living all the way across the world, right. To make things work and ends meet. And so I was in just our public elementary school, middle school, high school throughout. And then Saturday I would have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, my mom and I would take the Metro north train from Connecticut to New York. Again, she says wild to her. She wakes me at 4:30 in the morning. She's expecting me to complain. And instead I jump out of the bed. You know, and again, I did not show that enthusiasm for other things so this is definitely special. And then I would participate in up to 10 hours of lessons and classes the whole day and come home super late at night. That was my whole Saturday. And then when I was a teenager, when I was 13 and its Perlman asked me to be his private violin student, things really picked up. And now I was traveling to New York sometimes multiple times a week for private lessons with him, for studio classes, he was teaching me chamber music, like everything got, I already thought it was amped up. And then the dial just went way up at that point. I mean, that's so crazy. Explain for people who don't know like who he is and what a legend he is. Yeah, I mean, arguably the best, the best violin player of all time. And what did he see in you? You're so humble about your, you know, skill and talent. Like why did he choose you for this? Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting situation where my mom had asked our joint teacher. So interestingly, Dorothy DeLay was one of my violin teachers at the time who had also taught Perlman. So I was studying with her and my mom being the go-getter she is, was like, hey, do you think, you know, at some point Maya can just play one time for Perlman almost as a fun life experience. She's got some serious mama bear energy. She really does. And, but never was tiger mommy. So that's an, that's the thing, right. Which is sometimes you see those two traits coupled, but she was both like fearless, but then also let us kids have the freedom of choice in terms of what things we cared about and wanted to do. She never pushed us to do things we didn't wanna do, right. Didn't have that unhealthy relationship where she's living. Not at all seriously through your experience. Yeah, definitely not. I mean, I do know though that part of her ambition in exposing us for kids to as much as she did, I have two older brothers and older sister, is that growing up in India, you know, she was encouraged to do well in school and she occasionally would do Indian classical singing. But outside of that, she was mostly in the domain of domesticated duties. And I think she really wanted especially for her girls to have a richer palette of things from which to choose. And your parents, it was an arranged marriage, right. Like they only knew each other like 20 days or something. Yeah, they met on January 1st and they got married on January 21st. So they had a choice. It was an arranged meeting of sorts, but they both had to decide on January 1st, the same day they met, if they'd like to get engaged. And I trace back, I mean, some of my mom's fearlessness is just in her jeans, but she also was put into sort of a training bootcamp of sorts. When, you know, she marries this guy that she doesn't know, 20 days later, she's a fifth grade teacher at the time, ends up uprooting her entire life and moves to the United States with my dad into a little dorm room in Massachusetts. And doing his postdoc or whatever. He's doing his postdoc in physics. And she is, she doesn't know a single person in this country, you know, she's 21 and has to navigate this new life that she has. And she said part of her defense mechanisms were to create a little army around her. That's one of the reasons she had four kids was to create a set, you know, she was so used to, she has 51 first cousins. So she's coming from this extremely vibrant social community. And then she is now living in a small little dorm with just my dad. And so that was part of her way of filling the void. But no, so I, so I think my mom, I think she was filled with a lot of optimism that the United States offered so much promise for her and she was gonna lean the F in. And that's what she did yeah. With herself and, and all of us. Yeah, so, okay. So you're with Perlman. What is that experience like and what do you end up learning from him beyond just, you know, the technique of the violin? Yeah, so I go and play for him and I think it's a one time thing and I am not happy with the way that I've done. So I'm just like also that was around the time that I was getting interested in like MTV and TRL and Britney Spears. And my brain was a little conflicted about whether, or this classical music thing was for me, that was my version of teenage rebellious. How dare you? I know how dare I am, and so I don't know. I don't know if I was really practicing my, at my peak when it mattered most. Meanwhile I'm sure you're getting A pluses and everything in school, right. (Shankar laughing) No, I definitely wasn't, but I remember I played for him and again was not expecting much. And then he told our joint teacher, he said, I like to take Maya on as a private student. And that just knocked my socks off. I mean, he had a handful of students at the time, probably had four students at the time. I just could not believe that I was one of them. I mean, I was truly astonished. What was that about, like, what did he see in you? I asked his wife candidly later, you know, because I wanted to know we met up for coffee just a few years ago in California and I was like, why did Itzhak, take me on out of all the genius kids that were like running around. 'Cause I know that technically I was not that strong. And she said, because he felt you had something to say. Kind of hits on what we were talking about, right. I think we had some sort of emotional connection just in our interactions and the way that we were, what I was saying to him, through my music, for whatever reason touched him. Which is looking back actually like the highest praise I could have gotten at his musician. I don't think I internalized it at the time, because again, I was at all these insecurities but everything else. But I think the thing that Perlman, you know, Perlman is a performer. He is not, he's not trained in pedagogy, right. He wasn't trained to be a violin teacher. And so it's very interesting to see that translation from like star violinist to teacher. I had no idea what his approach was gonna be. And one thing that was so interesting about his approach is that he didn't do a lot of handholding, a lot of his work while was trying to teach me how to teach myself. Which is really maddening in the moment. 'Cause you're thinking like, dude, you're the genius. Just tell me how to do fix it's this phrase, tell me how to make this better. And instead the lessons were filled with lines of questioning. Well, what do you wanna do with this phrase Maya? How do you want this narrative art to sound? I'm like, how do you want this narrative art to sound? You know, you get so frustrated. Twisting it into some kind of Zen Cohen, but how empowering. It is empowering and you know, if you think about it, it's so pragmatic because a musician is spending 99% of their time alone in a practice room. So if you can teach the student to be their own coach, to be their own teacher. Now you've just increased your return on investment a thousand fold, you know, because I'm actually able to translate that into the way that I approach my practice. Beyond that though on that subject of having something to say, I mean ultimately what to distinguishes very good musicians from the greatest is those who have something to say, it's not the most technically skilled. It's the people who figure out how to inject it with their soul or their message or something that is unique to them that elevates it beyond notes on a page. No, I think that's right. And I only had my experience with music. And you're 15. Yeah. Like, how much did you actually have to say at 15? No, exactly. But the idea of identifying that potential, like this is somebody who has something to say and will continue to have, will continue to develop a capacity of that expression. Yeah, and you know, thinking about it also rich, I think there was, I think there was a lightness of spirit that I brought to lessons that might have been unusual because certainly I was in a pressure cooker but it wasn't for me, it wasn't the end all be all in the way that it was for other kids and their families who had literally sacrificed everything to be within these walls. And so I think in addition to Perlman connecting with me musically, I think the fact we were able to like joke in lessons and I approached everything with a bit of a reverence and he was not too holy for me to jab that and make fun of like, I just, I think that stuff matters too, right. Like, do I enjoy my interactions with this person. What a gift, so it wasn't like some kind of black Swan situation. Yeah, no not at all. And I think looking back, I just always had rapport matters to me. Like it took me a long time to realize like, ah, I'm obsessed with human beings and human connection and emotional connection and whatnot. But I felt like I cared much more about the bond I was developing with any person I was learning from than I was even about how much better I became at the violin. It was so much more about the imediacy of that personal connection. And maybe that's part of what he sensed, which is, this is like a curious person. Sometimes it translates into the violin, which is great, but independently it's just fun to have someone who's curious and that I have a rapport with. Right, but the real nugget of wisdom in that, and we're gonna our way up to it is this idea that, you know, the passion doesn't rest with the vehicle, for the passion, you have to look beneath the surface to find what's driving it. So in your case, you had to learn the hard way that it wasn't necessarily the violin that you were passionate about. It was what the violin allowed you to connect with. Right, is that a fair way of describing that? Yeah, absolutely so I mean, I should learn this lesson the hard way, which is against my own desires and will I had to stop playing the violin. So started studying with Perlman when I was 13. And when I was 15, I attended his summer music program on shelter island in New York. And I remember it was a cold morning thing in July and I overstretched my finger on a single note and I heard a popping sound and I knew something bad had happened, but I kind of was in denial. And I was also the recalcitrant inpatient teenager. That was like, I'm gonna will my way, you know, I'm gonna work my way through this horrible injury. And of course I didn't. And even though I tried to play through pain for months and months on end and just fight my way through, eventually doctors told me I could never play again and I just had to listen. And so when that happened, I mean, I was just shattered and shell shocked and then at a loss and I, like you said, you're 15, right. And so you're not always, so maybe some people who are really precocious are like this when they're young and like are very philosophically minded. But for me, this was a thing that I loved doing. And I wasn't fully reflective about the role that it played in my life. I can make those reflections now after the fact, but at the time it was just like, I am the violin, I played the violin, that's it. Right, and you were gonna go to conservancy and this was the life plan and you'd invested a lot. And suddenly the rug gets pulled out from underneath you. On some though very few 15 year olds have a sense of what they want do with their life. But when you're in that situation and your dream is eradicated overnight, it wasn't a progressive injury, right. It was just a one time thing. No it wasn't, it was a sudden thing. And you've got a, you're you have to sit with that and figure out what you're gonna do now. Yeah I mean, even convincing my parents that conservatory was an option was a big deal because I think for the longest time they were thinking let's do the liberal arts education please, you know, a lot more security. And also for both my parents who had had a college experience, that was very much on the one track in India at the time you choose your major at the outset. And that's what you study. My mom was so enamored by the American college system where you could take Chinese literature classes and then you could also take a class on Hinduism and then you could take a math class. Like she was just so excited by that. And so, and they're. Both working at Yale, right. Like he's a professor there and she was working in like student relations. Yeah, exactly now she helps students get green cards to study in the U.S. So she was so excited by the idea of having us go to liberal arts schools and my three older siblings had, but I think when Perlman took me on that was the first moment where I felt my parents were like, okay, yeah, maybe it. Maybe we can do the conservatory thing. It wasn't getting into Julliard at nine. Oh no, because again, to my point about the fact that I absolutely was not a prodigy, like you would need to see the kind of talent within those walls. It is remarkable how amazing these kids are. And so in the same way that, you know, when you're in sports at those elite levels, there's just so few spots for people. The same is true in music, right. It was just gonna be so hard to actually to actually make it. And so, but yeah, I think the conservatory path was definitely in the carts, you know. But here we are a slight change of plans. Yeah, then I had my slight change of plans and I remember thinking, I expected to mourn the loss of the instrument, that's natural. I did not anticipate what it would do to my self structure. Like I did not in anticipate what a profound loss of identity I would feel, truly like the rugs pulled out from underneath you. And the thing that you've defined yourself by, for so long is no longer existent. I mean, to this day my right shoulder slightly elevated compared to my left because of all the hours I spent playing the violin and my spine is slightly curved. My body literally grew around the ergonomics of the instrument. So it was a part of me today still, right. You know, people talk about like, oh, back in the day, oh, my Blackberry is like attached my hands. Like literally my body grew around this thing and now I don't that anymore. And there, there is a concept in cognitive science called identity foreclosure. I highlighted that in my notes actually. 'Cause I wanted to spend some time on that, this idea that we settle into, we can settle into a self identity early and close ourselves off from change. Got an early lesson in that. I absolutely felt prey to identity foreclosure, and didn't even know what it was at the time. First and foremost, a violinist. I saw that as my past, present and future. And I think it held me back feeling that my identity was so fixed. I would've benefited a lot from having a more malleable sense of self and attaching my identity to more stable features of things rather than the thing itself. That's the biggest lesson that I learned from all this, which is. But it's also very natural. We all do it to some extent I am this, I am my business card. I do this thing therefore I am that. Yeah, no, I completely agree and I think for me, what I learned over time and this hits on an, an earlier part of our conversation is what was it about the violin that really lit me up. And I think if you'd asked me as a kid, I would've said, I love the way it sounds. I love the way that I can craft phrases. I love the physical feeling of the instrument. Those were all true. And I had to grieve the loss of that when I lost the violin. But I think if you stripped away all of the physical components of playing, it was the fact that I could forge these really deep, emotional connections with people in the world. Not even just in the music world, in the world, with my teachers, with my classmates, I go on stage in front of tons of people I never met before. And I have, I have the ability, the potential to make them feel something new to make them feel something they've never felt before. And that's very, that's an intoxicating feeling that kind of human connection when that's gifted to you as a young person. And so I found over the years, this fast forwarding a lot, but I found over the years that tying my identity to the feature of the violin that I love namely the ability to forge emotional connections has been a much more durable, steady state for me. And something that's, I've been able, that has been able to persist over time. And many career changes. It's the one through line that exists across many, many, many different sounding careers yeah that I've had. But in every thing that I've ever chosen, human connection was at its core. (air whooshing) (upbeat music) Profits walk among us, as a writer and podcaster for nearly 10 years, I've become or convinced than ever that our world is populated by scores of beautiful and brilliant people who have amazing stories to share. Those that we don't know who can teach us something new and leave us all the better for the experience of their sharing. And so I've dedicated my career to tracking down the most compelling profits on the planet, going deep with each of them on my podcast to elucidate the best of what they have to offer and to sharing the insights gleaned for the benefit of all. But the podcast is not the only medium by which to share their stories, which is why I'm proud to announce the release of my new book, Voicing Change volume two. More than mere words on paper. Voicing Change is a physical manifestation of the magic, inspiration and timeless wisdom that transpires each week on the Rich Roll Podcast. The first edition of voicing change was a beautifully rendered book worthy of display on any coffee table and volume two follows in that tradition by showcasing even more of my favorite conversations in an elegant publication replete with interview excerpts, essays, and stunning photography making for an exquisite companion to the first volume or a satisfying standalone work. And every copy comes with a chance of winning our golden ticket sweepstakes. Six golden tickets will be hidden within a handful of books and will unlock a treasure chest of cool gifts donated by several of our sponsors, see official rules for details. Picking up this book allows you to revisit the wisdom of your favorite everyday profits and physically interact with the life changing ideas contained with it. Voicing change volume two available now while supplies last for a limited time order your copy today only@richroll.com. (air whooshing) Yeah, it's such a beautiful pearl of self-awareness to have that, you know, and I couldn't help, but reflect upon my own life and the slight changes of plans that I've experienced and the many pivots that I've made, you know, I'm very much a late bloomer in really finding a groove that works for me. I love that, by the way, how you articulate, like, you know, 41, 42 45, yeah. Similar to you, when I was a young person, it was swimming for me. That was the thing that I got up at 4:30 in the morning, every day to do without, you know, having my parents to have wake me up or anything that took me to stand for. And I built an identity around that. And ultimately I ended up leaving the team a year when I, my senior year. So I didn't swim my senior year. And I remember mourning that loss. Like it was, it was like somebody had died because my identity was so interwoven with being this person who did this thing. And it took me many years before I could realize that it wasn't necessarily the swimming. It was the community. It was like being part of a team and the comradery and the tight-knit relationships that we had where we were all collectively working towards one ambition. And having goals that you can set that get you excited. And now all those things, right. And then trying to overlay that onto various professions didn't work. And it took me a long time to find something that would give me that same sense of purpose and direction and meaning. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I hope that's helpful for the person listening who is navigating an unwanted change, or even sometimes a will change that surprises you in its impact and destabilizes you in ways that you might not have anticipated to try to figure out what is my version of my through line. Like if you strip all the superficial features of a thing of a pursuit what's left, that really ignites passion in me. And it was funny. I mean, I've needed this reminder every once in a while, I remember I was talking with a good friend of mine, ken Sue, this was, you know, three years ago or so. And I was just feeling a dip in overall like life motivation as we all do. And I was like, I feel like I'm not passionate about anything (indistinct) And he is like, but you're passionate about people. And I'm like, that doesn't count. It's not a real passion. It's like, oh wait, no, it is. So sometimes we also discredit the things that come naturally to us as not as not fall into the realm or to the domains of passion, right. That was, oh, that doesn't count. 'Cause it comes naturally and I love it. And he's like well take it from someone who's not passionate about people, that's what he told me. He's like, take it from an introvert who does not get the kind of high you get from human connection to tell you this is differentiating and you should add absolutely see that as a core part of your identity. It's so broad because if you can really like appreciate that passion, you can plug it into the world or into, you know, any number of career paths. Yeah, exactly and again, I don't wanna pretend that I like had this all figured out when I was younger. It was, no, it was a shit show when I was younger. And I was just really despondent and sad and morose and probably not great company for a while there when I first lost the violin. But ultimately, you know, I've landed in this place where I have a slightly more stable sense of self. Well, in the biopic about your life, the next inflection point is pulling this Stephen Pinker book off the shelf, right. Yeah, that's right. The lifetime movie. The lifetime movie, yeah it'll be an original three people will watch it, including my parents. And so, yeah so the summer before college, again, probably not great company, my loving parents are like, we understand that your counterfactual world involved touring in China, Maya, but instead this summer is gonna be at home with us. And so that's what I did. And I was in the basement, just kind of perusing the bookshelves. And I stumbled across a course book that my sister had had in college and called Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. And I opened it, and again, not expecting anything other than like, what is this? I've never thought about language before. And it was pulling the curtain back on an aspect of our mind that I had 1000000% taken for granted and never thought about before ever really. And revealed to me how sophisticated the cognitive machinery is that underlies our ability to comprehend and produce language. And I was in awe. I think that's the best word to use to describe my reaction in that moment. It's like, wow, if this is what's involved in language learning, what's involved in all the other stuff. Like the high level decisions we make, the philosophical musings we have, falling in love. People who could do math like my dad, you know, what's, what's involved there because I just found it to be in incredibly like incredibly elegant complex system. And I was just in awe of this organ that we all have. And it was a light bulb moment for me. It just all we need at these moments of inflection is just a seedling. Just like a little something. I can't say that in that moment, I was 100% like violin in vibes everywhere. Oh my God I found the replacement. That's not how things work, but I was very excited. Yeah, and I got my hands on. And the another reason why you can't have that full moment of intoxication is that you don't know how this translates into anything moving forward. You don't know if you have aptitude for it. I didn't know that at the time Yale even had a cognitive science program and this is all new to me, right. But all I knew is that I was really interested and what I was sensing in the same way that my mom didn't have to tell me to practice is that I started getting, putting, I started getting my hands on every single book that existed in cognitive science over the summer, which is not typically when I would be reading. You know, cause there wasn't school. And so that was unusual. You know, I was in the break between senior year and college and you know, again, the intellectual among us will read books, but I was that wasn't on my. A couple reflections on this. First of all, like you're, you know, you're an insane students, you know, anybody at that age who's gonna spend their summer like, you know, pulling neuroscience books out and digging into them, like makes you. That was very unexpected. In and of itself. Yeah no, obviously I'm nerdy. Yeah, and you, you brushed it off when I said you were getting A pluses, but clearly you're talented in the classroom and you care about you're, you know, you must have a significant degree of academic rigor to have done all the things that you've done. But I think the lesson here is, you know, when you were saying that it wasn't like, oh, I knew how, you know, this lightning moment where I knew what my life would be. It's really about having the awareness and paying attention to the things that excite you and then, you know, just incrementally giving them energy and like pulling that thread and following it. And I think that plays into the larger topic of change and power of these nudges and things that, you know, are central to the work that you do. And, you know, because people will always say, well, I don't know what my passion is. And I feel like my life doesn't have purpose. And you know that when that question was put to you, you weren't even consciously aware that people is what excited you. And I think everybody within their blueprint has something that excites them. We're living so kind of detached from our higher selves. If you, you know, however you wanna characterize it, that we're not present with, what's actually happening in our life. And when we have those moments, I think a lot of people allow them to pass and they aren't given the energy that perhaps they deserve. Had they been more consciously aware of what was happening. I love what you just said, because I think that's, I think that was exactly right in the case of the book. The book was necessary but not sufficient for me to eventually land a career as a cognitive scientist. And I think the translation piece is sometimes where people get lost. And so I remember, okay, I'm finding this topic, interesting. So I start doing my homework, look into the Yale course book. I realize there's actually this new program called the cognitive science major. It's interdisciplinary. You take classes in a bunch of different areas, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, biology, and you study the brain, but you study it from all of these different vantage points. And I see that it's like an admissions only major. And don't forget, I am having a lot of imposter syndrome right now because I believe I've gotten into Yale because I'm a violinist and now I'm no longer a violinist. So you had already been accepted to Yale, but you hadn't declared a major. I hadn't declared a major yet, exactly. And so I, yeah, and I think, I think given the timing, I already, the violin was already off the table by the time I even applied. So you were feeling like a fraud, because you thought violin was what helped you get into Yale. Get in, oh 100%. And I thought, I mean, certainly when I was imagining going to a liberal arts college, it was going to be with the idea of majoring in music, obviously performance, right. That was gonna be performance studies, whatever it is, that was gonna be my thing. But I certainly felt like, oh, that was the reason I got in. And so I definitely felt imposter syndrome for sure. And so I certain learn its admissions only. And then I feel nervous that I still remember that in the same way that my mom had this kind of entrepreneurial I'm gonna do everything I possibly can to stack the cards in my favor, in my daughter's favor, I had that mindset and I continue to have that mindset with just about everything else that I take on. So when I decided that I wanted to be a CogSci major, I remember I learned in my pre-orientation program that there was a non-human primate cognition lab. I think this is actually how Scott and I, I think we might have taken this monkey together but I showed up for the first day of the monkey lab, which was an admissions only class. And the room was overflowing with people. There were probably 40 students in there for a handful of slots and most of them were upperclassmen. So I was the lowly freshman in the room that was trying to get into this class. And so my chances were very small, but there was an application form and I was like, I'm gonna make this the best application this professor had ever seen. You're like seen it worked out with Juilliard. It's why not, right. And there's no security guards involved in the case of an application. So I remember I wrote down on the application form, I will take the like 6:00 AM shifts on Saturday mornings in New Haven. I remember at that point, my parents then intervene and they were like, it's not safe. We need to protect your safety as our child over this monkey lab. And you know, like Lori, I will do anything and everything again in this class you'd have my unborn children. Like I was willing to offer everything up to try to get into this course. And this professor, Laurie Santo, she's like a happiness guru now. Right, and she, her podcast is with Pushkin also. Yeah, exactly she's a played a critical role in my life ever since this moment, by the way, it's a constant mentor. It's incredible, yeah I'd love to have her on the show as well, but it's hilarious that there's Scott, there's Laurie, there's you now you all have podcasts, you know, it's what is going on? The cognitive scientist prevail. Yeah, no, I represent that makes me very happy but Lori took a chance on me and she, I was the only freshman that she accepted into the class. I thought at the time, by the way, it was because I showed so much enthusiasm on my application. And the pro was perfect. She later told me that I was the only one willing to sign up for the unpopular spots. (Shankar laughing) She has that happiness class, right. Yeah, she does. It gets written about and that's the one that everyone's claiming to get into. Yeah, exactly and so Laurie was my Laurie's only since I was 17, she helped facilitate a big pivot in my life because she's the one who helped me make that transition. I remember my dad at the time told me if you're feeling lost, find someone you admire and then try to reverse engineer how they got from point A to point B and Laurie was that person for me. I really admired her. I liked how she was as a teacher. I liked how she was as a person. I liked how she was as an intellectual, who was like brimming with ideas and curiosity. And so I tried to like bring myself close, you know, and she became a mentor and a friend very quickly. And it was because of that admissions ticket to the monkey lab that in undergrad, I got full exposure to what it meant to be a scientist to actually run novel experiments and to generate data and to make new discoveries or not make new discoveries, which is often the case in science and it's discouraging, which is one of the reasons I eventually left the field. But I was so grateful for that exposure because it meant that I could actually translate this early seedling of an idea into something concrete and you know, eventually got my PhD and my postdoc in these areas. Right, right I mean, you brush over that but basically you complete Yale, you get this road scholarship to go to Oxford where you continue your studies, you get your PhD and then you do a post at Stanford, right. Was Andrew Huberman at Stanford when you were there? I think so. The Huberman lab.
Yeah. Yeah, he's got a podcast too. I think that actually is more representative to the fact that everyone has a podcast rather than it being unique to psychologist. There is something about neuroscientist and podcast. Yeah, maybe well, I think that's great 'cause I think any show that tries to bridge the gap between you know, science and popular discourse is great. I think it's fantastic. The translation of science. And the fact that so many people are enjoying that content is very encouraging, right. Like this is hard science and it's a two hour basically lecture about the brain and millions of people are like tuning in for this free content. And I think that's a beautiful. I think it's beautiful too. And you know, we'll talk more about a slight change of plans later. But in addition to the, the narrative stories that I have my guests come on and share, which are these very personal life stories, we have science expert episodes of people like Adam Grant and Katie Milkman and Annie Duke talking about the science of quitting and Angela Duck were talking about grit and those episodes are so popular. People love learning about the science of change. That is so heartening. I did not know at the outset how those episodes would perform and yet people love them. The most popular episodes on this show tend to be the hard scientists. I mean, Adam came on and that was, you know, hugely popular show people love him. And he's such a great communicator. He is, yeah. There's hard science, but then there are, I think the sweet spot is the scientists who have such a command over the science and of this facility for communicating very complex ideas in a way that the audience can digest it and understand it without feeling hindered to like the, without the condescension that you typically would see. Yeah, you know, this is a skill and an area that I am actually deep really passionate about. And many of my former roles have required translating science into general terms. You know, like my work in the Obama white house at the United nations. And I think I was inspired in many ways by my dad he's working in some of the most inaccessible scientific spaces that exist. It's like theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics.
Nobody understands that. I don't understand any of the stuff, right. And he has made a career in to being a brilliant scientist and made incredible discoveries. He's made a career out of translating physics to general audiences. So back in the day, when, you know, this is before the days of Coursera and whatnot, which of course, you know, he's joined all those trains, but he went online and all of his lectures were on iTunes for the longest. Yeah, 'cause they used to have the iTunes (indistinct). iTunes, yeah, exactly. And they made their way around the world, were streamed millions and millions and millions of times, I don't even know what the numbers are, but I remember thinking they were wildly impressive for physics lectures. And one of my proudest moments as a daughter is when I was at actually at my sister's graduation. She was also at Yale with me and my dad was given the teaching prize for all of Yale. Which I don't think had ever been given to a natural scientist, let a lot of physicist. Well, here's the low hanging fruit joke. So incredible that he did that. Where is his podcast? He needs to come on the show, I know. I think no, he needs his own podcast, right. That's hilarious yeah. Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna have him on your show. He's gonna crush it, right. Yeah and then, and then it'll his own it so popular that like Malcolm Gladwell will be like, we need to create a show for you. Yeah, we'll call it zero to 60. And it'll be getting people up to speed on really hard physics concepts. It's all worked out.
In a matter of seconds. It's all worked out.
That's how ideas are born. So anyway, I love this notion of the translation and I've always felt like when it felt challenging for me, you know what dude, your dad did it in the physics domain and made physics accessible to people. You would give general audience lectures all the time when I was growing up. And so I felt like there were very few boundaries. And so I've actually worked as a practitioner for, in of cognitive science for so long, you know. So walk us through this, you're at Stanford. You're you know, in this FMRI lab. And you have the next inflection point in the lifetime movie occurs. (Shankar laughing) Yeah, did we do a commercial break yet? I think people are getting bored. But I was in the FMRI laboratory and ooh, I was not, not loving it my friend, which is a pretty devastating reality to confront when you've now invested what seven years or so into academia and then plus undergrad, right. And so I remember thinking, oh crap, I don't know what comes next. I had no idea what a cognitive neuroscience postdoc can go on to do. So I thought, well, okay, one, you become a professor which I'm realizing I don't wanna do after being in this windowless, FMR laboratory forever. And having no social interactions with any of the people whose brains I'm scanning. And then secondly, maybe I could be a general management consultant. Like, can I start at that circuit? So I call my trusted friend and mentor Laurie Santos, and I tell her, hey, so that thing I've been doing forever and you were like a really generous kind charitable mentor to me, I don't wanna do it anymore sorry. I'm gonna try to interview for all the general management consultancys. And she's like, okay, before you do that, let's, let's talk for a second. Before I lose my student who I've invested so much energy and time into let's talk. And she shared this incredible story that I did not know about how the federal government was using insights from my field, from the field of decision making, which is where I eventually landed in my postdoc, right. (indistinct) work around judgements and decisions and biases and was using insights from that field to help low income kids get access to school lunch. So long story short government offers this program. The national old school lunch program offers it two millions of kids, but millions of kids were still going hungry every day at school. And it's because applications had not been submitted successfully for the program. And so when they did behavioral audit, they realized that there were at least two barriers for parents enrolling their kids. The first was that the form was extremely burdensome to fill out and so imagine, you know, you're asking a single mom who's making, who's working three shifts to make ends meet, to fill out this extremely complicated form that requires referencing multiple tax documents. And oh, by the way, if you get something wrong, you can face a huge penalty and you have to go to the post office on this day, in the middle of the day and get time off of work. And then you have to make sure you have (indistinct) like it was not practical given the feasibility constraints that face a lot of people's lives. And then the other one of the other barriers was stigma. I mean, later on I learned in talking with school principles and whatnot, that a lot of parents felt look, I work really hard for a living and I don't want my kid relying on the government. And so for that reason, they weren't signing their kids up for the program. So they ended up using a behavioral economics insight known as the power of the default. You're probably familiar with this. And all that happened is they changed the program from an opt-in program to an opt-out program. So they used administrative data they had collected on these kids to automatically enroll them in the school lunch program. And now parents would only have to take an affirmative step if they wanted to actively unenroll their kids from the program. So now the, the onus has changed, right. And you've reduced, you've eliminated stigma actually, because everyone's now just automatically enrolled in the program. Right, these zero cost changes. That rely on behavioral insights that have, you know, tremendous real world ramifications. If they're just well thought through. Yeah, in this case 12 and a half million, more kids were now eating lunch at school every day. It was unbelievable to me. And so I had, I had read about the theoretical potential of nudges and behavioral science, but to hear this story told to me, it pulled on my emotional heartstrings. You know, and I thought, wow, I kind of wanna be doing that stuff. And so the barrier was that there was no job to apply for. And I had no connect since the political world. I mean, as just in academia forever. Like no one political had ever even crossed my radar. But Laurie had heard Cass Sunstein, the co-author of the book Nudge. It's kind of one of the fathers of this space and had worked for Obama for four years, had heard him speak at a conference. And so she gave me his email address and I just sent him a cold email. And to our earlier point about insecurities, I wrote in my email 'cause I was just, I was so I was so anxious about him, even thinking that I thought that I could maybe ever even have a slight chance of having a job in the Obama White House. While also the recurring theme being, you're not afraid to knock on doors. Yes, it's not afraid to knock on doors. A cold email being a version of that. Yeah, so I wrote to him and I said, you know, 'cause I have no public policy experience. I don't feel I've published much of significance. And I'm telling him in this email, I know you worked with Obama. And I wrote in parentheses, I know I'm not cool enough to work with the likes of Obama, but if there's a local or state government opportunity, please let me know. I couldn't even bear to ask about. The negotiating against yourself, right out of the gate. And thankfully for me, I mean, one Cass is married to Samantha Power. So he's like he's used to having strong or he believes in strong women. And so he just ignored all that insecurity and wrote back to me within moments and said, here's the president's science advisors email. Here's his deputies email, send them a note and let them know, I sent you along. So every email, by the way, the subject line is changing from one person is more important me to this person is more than me. So the first email to cast was recommendation from Laurie Santos. And then the second email to the Obama people was recommendation from Cass Sunstein. So I'm just using all their names to try to get, you know, generate some clout in a space where I have zero. And I mean, I remember still, so I was, I took a swimming actually when I was in my twenties. It was, it it's a very meditative sport and it's I mean, you were in a very competitive space for me it was always just recreational. And it's still meditative though. Did you do it while you were at Stanford? I did.
Yeah. In their gorgeous Olympic size pool where the national.
That was my home for. Oh my gosh. What was your, I'm just curious to know what your, what was your stroke. Butterfly.
Butterfly, okay that's pretty, I can't do butterfly. Keep going though. You have, there's plenty of things that you're very good at, don't worry about that. So I was, I think I was actually at the, I was at the local, YMCA swimming because the outdoor pool was getting, too cold. And so I was biking home and I stopped at a stoplight and I looked at my phone as one should not do by the way, public service announcement. And I see this email response from him and I nearly fell off my bike. I mean, I just couldn't believe that the white house people were getting back to me. 'Cause I, I wrote, you know, Cass email that I sent the signs of my email. And then this guy writes back, Tom, who ends up being my future boss and says, you know, just so happens, coincidentally, that I live in California and I actually commute to DC for three out of four weeks of every month. And I happen to be here this week. And if you can come to my house like one and a half days from now, you can interview with me. And so I'm pretty scared about this thing because I don't know what a white house interview is gonna look like. And so I spend the next 24 hours calling everybody smart that I know in my entire life and mining them for wisdom and insights. The good student. On what I could do. The good version of Tracy Flick is coming out. And so I call everyone, and I'm like, what ideas would you have? Going up on policy? Yeah, like for what you wanna translate from behavioral science into policy. And I have to get like a business suit. Like I just don't, I mean, as a postdoc, who's riding a bike everywhere. I only have that leisure. And so I go get, you know, business suit. I have to borrow my friend's car. I don't have a car to drive to this guy's house and I show up and it's not at all what I'm expecting. I'm expecting this like stiff government bureaucrat. And instead I come in and there's like toys, string everywhere and he's got his shirt untucked in, It was like a very familiar, cozy home. And you know, his family was super nice and warm. So anyway, I sit down with him and don't forget, there's no role I'm interviewing for. So the onus is on me to pitch him on the idea of even creating a new role for a behavioral scientist. Right, you have to present some kind of value proposition that would, you know, substantiate them, hiring you for something they haven't even really thought of. That's exactly well said, that's exactly right. And so I start talking about the different ideas I have. And at one point I talk about how the first lady Michelle Obama's language for her let's move initiative could be improved using some insights from behavioral science and his response to that is, oh, well, yeah. I mean, I know the first lady and her chief of staff so we can make that happen. Right, your head's exploded. What, yeah I mean, again, I was in the, you know, ivory tower, so to speak where in my world ideas went to die and suddenly this guy's telling me I've got a translation system for you in the form of you actually working in the federal government and actually getting to apply all these insights that are in your head or out in the field and out in research, into measurable improvements in people's lives. And this is happening near the end of the first term, right? Yeah, so this is actually weeks before Obama's second term election. So I think it was like in yeah, maybe early October or something. And so I remember at the end of the conversation, which was so much fun by the way, like I went there so nervous and then all of a sudden, it just felt like this extremely fun, you know, kid in a candy shop talking about all these fun ideas. And did he give you the job though, how did it? So it was very confusing at the end. He said, well, I'd love to keep in touch. And I was like, okay, is that like a. What does that mean? Don't call me, I'll call you situation. Like I enjoyed our chat, talked to you in three years or I enjoyed our chat wanna give you a job. So I kind of asked for clarity I was like, hey, so let's just unpack that for a second. What exactly does that mean. In Hollywood that means I'm never speaking to you again and you'll never get a phone call from me. I'd love to keep in touch, that's some very lukewarm feedback and so he said, no, here's the deal. First of all, no plans can be made until we find out if Obama wins his reelection in a few weeks. And I was like, oh yeah, right. Oh, totally fair. By the way, at the time, the biggest threat the Democrats face was Mitt Romney. So haha joke on us if you fast forward. How clean of a time. And so yeah, I wanted to work for Obama, not Romney, just personal preference. And so we had to wait for that. And then he said, I have to pitch the entire office on creating this new role. So that's gonna take me a little bit of time. You have to interview with the chief of staff and the deputy chief of staff and then third, and this is where my west wing visions kind of crumbled. He was like, we're gonna just have to make sure we can find you a desk. That's when I realized actually the white house is quite resource constrained and it really just comes down to how many chairs and desks are allowed in there with the fire safety codes. So might come down to as something as simple as they're not being (indistinct). It was the woman who was hired for the general counsel's office in west wing, who ended up in the basement, the boiler room. Some of the most important people in the white house are working in the west wing basement with no windows. That's how you know, you really made it when there's no, there's no windows in sight. And so, I mean, I'm already waiting for that election result, but I'm really fricking waiting for that election result in that year in 2012 and what was, again, I can't believe I did this, but I ended up breaking my lease in California and signing a one year lease in DC before I even had a written job offer. That's pretty ballsy. I sold everything, but my bike, which I kept in my aunt's garage and I was like, I might need this. He must have given you a decent amount of. He gave me enough verbal hope and like maybe a light email here and there but 100%, I mean, you don't get to control the process, right. There's security clearances. Like the FBI will randomly call your sister and be like, so tell me about Maya. And so you, you don't get to control all of it that I really wanted this to happen. Sorry, I keep stepping on your interrupt. But it is an extrapolation of the theme of knocking on doors. You're like, I'm just gonna show up and I'm gonna, you know, if I've waited long enough, I'm gonna go knock door and manifest make this thing happen. I had that visual in my mind, which is like, I'm just gonna be on the white house doorsteps. And I'm just gonna wait until it happens. And I'm just gonna show how much I want this job. Be friends with a security guard outside the white house. Yeah, they won't let me just march in there with good reason. I grew up in DC, so. Oh, did you? Okay, I lived in yeah, lived in DuPont Circle. It was, it was a lovely experience. And DC is so charming. So yeah, so I moved to DC and I mean that's when the real challenge begins. It's like I, every time you pivot, there's the path of getting you the thing. And then there's coming to terms of the fact that you now have the. Now you have it and you got to, you got to actually show something of it for it. You have to show up for it. And I again had no public policy experience and I felt like a fish out of water. I mean, I had no idea how things worked and I made it my goal. I really benefited from, let me just say also at this point in the conversation, mentors have been a game changer for me in my life. I don't know if I would've, if I would have gotten to have the kinds of experiences that I've had in the absence of people who took me under their wing and mama beared me. Yeah, well talk a little bit more about that. I mean, you have you live in rarefied air with respect to mentors. I mean, it's like Itzhak Perlman, Laurie Santos is like incredible human beings. But for the average person who is looking to level up and realize are recognizes on some level that they could benefit from having a mentor, like how do you think about that? I'm sure people, young people reach out to you. They want you to be their mentor. So this is the interesting thing about mentors, which is I never entered a relationship hoping for a mentor on the other end. It was always a very organic process. I said with Laurie that when I met her, I was so inspired by her. I just wanted to like bring her close, you know. And I never, now we talk a lot about having mentors. That's like a formal category, like a role that people play in your life. And I just never saw things through that lens. Like I never ever thought of Perlman as like a mentor. It's like, Perlman's my teacher. But I think because I'm so curious about human beings. And I think because I always prioritize the interpersonal relationship above all else. They naturally lead themselves to friendships. And that's actually how I had mentors. Like I'm thinking about Tom, my boss who taught me so much, he became a fast friend for me. And I don't think a lot of people approached that relationship in the same way they were were like, this is a boss direct report relationship. And granted that's sometimes how things happen. Everyone has their own degree of comfort in blurring the distinctions between, you know, work and just real life relationships. For me it's always been a very blurry line. I'm friends with a lot of the people that I work with because it's just more enjoyable to live my life this way. But I think I'm effusive about my excitement about people. And so I think in turn friendships form, you know. And friendships are a two way street you're contributing to the relationship. I think a lot of people look at mentorship relationships as purely extractive. Like I need to be with this person and I'm gonna pull out them as much as I can and not understanding the, you know, the social psychological component of being in the shoes of the mentor. Like, what am I getting out of this? That's a great point, that's an excellent point. I had not thought about that before. Even if you're young and don't have experience, you can still, you know, bring something to the equation that's gonna, you know, like sort of nourish the mentor. And I think if you think of it in terms of like a more, a more of a service-minded approach to it you're in a better situation to actually, you know, be on the receiving end of whatever wisdom you're looking to to get. That's a great insight. And I'm just thinking back to Laurie telling me that she found my energy enthusiasm for cognitive science, really infectious when I was an undergrad. And that sustained her through difficult days. Yeah, it makes her feel. Professor, you know, you invariably have a tough day with a paper rejection or a tough student, or, you know, you're mentoring all these students that are at times struggling even psychologically. And I think absolutely that relationship was very mutually beneficial. And you know, now thinking back to the Perlman relationship, I was telling you, like I approach a lot of things with a hint of a reverence, and I'm sure Perlman was very used to sycophantic relationships. Just people, you know, bowing down to him everywhere he went and maybe he found it refreshing that I didn't do that. You and I just saw him as my teacher and as someone is who I obviously respected to the sky and back, but that I could have fun with too. And maybe there was a light that lightness, which we talked about earlier is something that he appreciated. So I really, yeah I really appreciate that you said that. I think there has to be bidirectional benefit and I still remember we were organizing a team event in DC and I invited my boss to come along. I was like, oh Tom, you should come along. And he actually made a passing comment like, oh, it's actually rare that I get invited to these things because I think everyone was like, oh, he's the fancy guy at the top. We shouldn't invite him to these things. And, but he actually, you know, he was separated from his family who were all living in California. So his social life in DC was not exactly hoping. And he loved the opportunity to spend time with all the fellow policy wants. You know, in the neighborhoods. So that was a good reminder too, that we can bring things to the people who mentor us. Yeah, I think to put a button on the mentorship discussion, it's also important to understand that that mentorship doesn't have to come in the form of Itzhak Perlman or Laurie Santos. Totally not, yeah. We tend to think that the only mentors of value are the fancy people who have written best selling books or who are famous or whatnot. And I think most people are surrounded by people that have some kind of wisdom that like you said earlier, like people want to help, right. And if you come to it with the right spirit, I think you'll, I think mentors abound more than people recognize if you open up your eyes.
I'll tell you. One of my greatest mentors in my, in my daily life is the guy who does fitness training with me, his name's Matt and I met him several years ago. And just to give you a quick backstory, I have a history of inflammation and a lot of injury and kind of chronic pain that I've had to work through over the years and try to unpack. And every time I tried to work with a personal trainer, it would end in some sort of disaster. Either I'd get terribly hurts or something bad would happen and just, or they would go too strong, too fast and not understand my body. And Matt is the first person I'd ever met in my life who showed an unbelievable amount of patience towards me. I'm not kidding when I say those first, like few months we were doing chest press with no weights in my hands. Okay, that's the level. This guy is like, you know, six two, like very strong. And this is not the normal workout he's used to doing with his clients. Like he's a hit instructor and there was like a calm and wisdom and peace and compassion in his approach that blew me away and has gotten me to a point where, I mean, I've exceeded every dream goal I could ever have had for myself. Where I have a consistent strength training workout that I do every other day that I've been able to do for years now. And I had never, before in my life been able to do that without getting injured or having some horrible, debilitating pain that would last forever. And Matt took me under his wing and figured out my body alongside me. Like he was like an, he was like a scientist trying to figure out out like, okay, how do her biceps respond to this motion? You know, he's looking at that level. And it made such a huge difference. And so I consider him one of my biggest mentors in life in terms of someone who's had a profound impact on my wellbeing and my psychology and my sense of self. I'm still not strong enough to like lift my bag into the overhead compartment. So I'm working on that. Still need the house for help, but I'm like, you know, orders of magnitude stronger than I ever was before. And that's an amazingly empowering feeling to have to my history. Shout out to Matt.
Love Matt Fuller. Matt Fuller.
Yeah. What's up Matt?
What's up Matt? Lots of love for you here today. All right so you get the job at the white house. I'm envisioning, you're walking through the west wing, doing a walk and talk with Josh Lyman. He's taking you down to the basement to show you your office where you discover. I've got a briefcase in my hand. Oh you do right.
Just to make sure. Like you're possibly overdressed Josh hasn't slept in three days. You're bright eyed and ready to go. Only to discover you have no budget. There's no plan. There's no roadmap for what you're supposed to do here and here you are sitting at your desk and it's just you and you. And here you're like, okay, well now what. Now what yeah okay. So, first of all, on the overdress piece, my nickname in the white house was sneakers and that was because I always chose comfort in ergonomics overlooking good. So I would wear, I would wear, you have to wear business on top, but I would always be wearing sneakers until I had some really important meeting in which I'd flip into. Actually I did that with you here too. I came with sandals and then wore these nicer shoes. But better for the walk and talk. Yeah yeah, totally.
Right. To have some comfort. Okay so I get to the white house and I learned some very valuable pieces of wisdom from my boss, Tom, who had the, had a lot of institutional knowledge because he had spent eight years in the Clinton administration had left during Bush and then came back for another eight years of Obama. So I was catching him four years into that stint. And what he told me is that he had spent so much time as an individual contributor, if you will, while he was in Clinton, Clinton's administration. And that when Bush came into power, it was as though he had built this elaborate sandcastle on the beach for eight years and then one big wave came and just destroyed the entire apparatus. Right, welcome to Washington. Right, so his advice to me was Maya you can try to have as much impact on individual level as you can. However, my advice to you would be, you want to leave, you wanna leave a blueprint for this work in parts of government that aren't susceptible to leadership changes or political changes that don't fall prey to this, you know, these political cycle. The four year cycle.
Exactly. And so he knew my dreams of being, you know, a practitioner of behavioral science. And then I quickly got into my head after that conversation. I think I wanna build a team of behavioral scientists that can operate in a bipartisan part of government. And their day to day job can be to translate behavioral science into policy. As a matter of course, and importantly, again, it's not gonna be in the white house. If we build it in the white house, then I know it's gonna disappear as soon as I leave. Or as soon as this administration ends. You gotta find those really boring corners of the internet, where the lifers are hold up, right. Turns out I was.
Immune from the (indistinct) of the political cycle. That's exactly right and that's what I did. So I, you know, coming in though, I had no budget and I had no mandate. And the president wasn't exactly saying at the time, like there shall be a nudge team. He didn't even know who I was, right. And so I had to approach building this team completely differently than one would if they did have that high level mandate, which was, I started on the ground, I talk about door knocking. I probably knocked on 300 doors in that first year. Every person that I could possibly meet with, I would sit down with and tell them about the skills that the skillset that I had and what insights behavioral science could bring to bear on the problems they were already trying to solve. And I was just so eagerly trying to get any government agencies to collaborate with me and just get some early wins on the board. Right, all right well, before we dig into that a little bit further, when you look at tech, for example, they're very comfortable with this landscape in which you are expert because these platforms are built upon behavioral insights like. How do you remove all the friction to get the person to click on the thing you want them to click?. All the way down to the color palette. And, you know, the way that the, you know, the button looks like all that kind of stuff. Like there's so much money in science that goes into all of that. Like startup culture, tech culture is completely about that.
100%.. Government not so much. Not at all. And the incentives are not there because, you know, when you're talking about trying to pitch these people who are, you know, in a different part of government and have been there for a very long time, you being a bright eyed, young person coming in saying, I'm gonna do this new thing. Like what's in it for them. Like, they have their little way of doing things. And it's about not rocking the boat and anybody who. Stopped on the wrist wrist, if it doesn't go up. You just become a pain in the ass to everybody. Yeah, 100%, I was everyone's pain in the ass in that first year for sure. And the only way I was gonna succeed is if I inspired organic interest in my government colleagues, because nobody had to say yes to me, in fact, most people wanted to say no to me. I got more no's than any human being. I think it's gotten, I mean, the number of people where maybe there show (indistinct) of interest, that it wouldn't go anywhere, or they show no interest off the bat. Like it was my ratio. Because you have everything to lose. Like there isn't a lot to gain for them. Yes, absolutely and like, what if our AB test reveals that their program isn't as effective as I thought, then there's a liability involved. So they were taking a risk in partnering with me with very little upside and I was aware of this. And so I had to get pretty clever about the tactics that I used, try and align incentives to create an incentive structure where they had maybe at least not more to gain than to lose, but at least even right. And so, and I also was faced with this question early on, which is what is the right order of operations here, right. 'Cause they don't have a budget and I don't have a mandate. So there's one world in which I wrote elegant policy proposals and drafted them up and tried to keep pitching them to senior leaders and like at some point, could someone just sign off and give me a few head count? So that was one version of the world. The other version of the world was to reverse engineer that where you do the opposite, you start by actually just getting some work, done, showing proof of concept that this methodology works and can have a positive impact. And you just get your, your feet wet and you just get the job done. And I very quickly learned that the only way that this was gonna succeed is if I did the latter nobody was waiting around with resources for my proposal to get, you know, land on their desks for them to sign. That was never gonna happen. And so in that first year, I you know, eventually was able to get a few government agencies to say yes. And one of them was the department of veterans affairs. They were trying to get vets to sign up for, employment and educational benefit that they were entitled to upon leaving their time in the military. And we worked with them to try to convince them that our techniques could be helpful to them in boosting participation rates, similar to the school lunch program, not enough that's, we're signing up for this, even though that transition from military to civilian life is so fraught with so many child challenges. And so it can be so helpful to them to have these resources, but they were very budget constrained and they only had one email to work with. And we changed one word in the email. We told, we simply reminded veterans that they had earned the benefit through their times and service time and service rather than. Eligibility versus earn.
Simply saying that they were eligible. Yeah and that, that one word led to a 9% increase in access to the veterans program. And, they threw a pizza party. It was the first time they'd ever run an AV test. You know, we were spent most of the time that my colleague and I were spending, working with them on this was spent just building the technological apparatus to run an email AV test, which didn't even exist. And so that was part of my mandate was bringing experimental methods, not just behavioral science to the table. But it was really, really hard work for every one of those wins. I swear there were 50 things that were in the fire that never went anywhere. 'Cause it seems so simple, right. Like how hard can this be? Like, change this word, you'll get a better result. It's so not. Broader point, just being like these, these tiny little tweaks that have zero cost when you're, when you're implementing them at the highest levels of government with respect to giant programs. Can end up saving the billions of dollars, benefiting millions of people. And, so the results end up being like really huge for these small things. Absolutely and as huge as the results are, is the effort that goes into actually convincing all of the relevant people, everyone at every level of government to say, yes. To change one word change one word. And then sometimes we had much bigger changes, right. Program design, the structure of defaults, things like that. And so it was really hard work, but in that first year, year and a half, we were able to just get a few points on the board enough that, you know, it caught the attention of the president's office. And we ended up having a briefing with president Obama and the oval. This was in early 2015. And I was able to share with him work that we had actually done. Like, you know, here's the before and here's the after and oh my gosh, it was such an exciting and energizing meeting for all kinds of reasons, including that he's just remarkably charming. But also because it was the first time that someone was acknowledging the existence of this very makeshift team that I've been pulling together through all these creative hiring codes and whatnot. And he called it the social and behavioral sciences team, which is the name that I've given. And he called, he thought of us as an actual entity that existed, and it didn't exist anywhere other than in the impact we were having, we weren't any clauses in any documents, like anywhere, it wasn't a thing. We were just a group that I was pulling together. And so having him say in that moment, like you are a real team and I value your team's work was such a satisfying moment. And in the fall of that year, I think because of this in initial briefing, he ended up signing an executive order that made my team a permanent part of government. And that was just a huge win. So that, prevents the sandcastle from getting washed away. Yes, exactly and the team they're called the office of evaluation science. They still live in the general service administration. They're still running amazing trials and doing great work in a very bipartisan fashion across the government. Yeah, continued through the Trump administration. Although it didn't find its way back into the white house. I just banded the white house component on my way out the door. Yeah, whatever was still there. I was like, ah, no, I don't want any of this to be used at any way. That's anything other than positive. So I just kind of didn't, didn't renew that charter. Right, talk to me about Obama a little bit though. Sure. You know, what is the, you know, you hear these stories, he's so charismatic. He's the person who makes you feel like a million bucks. And he's completely attuned to you when you're in his presence and all of that. Like, what is that magic? I was taken aback by it, so yeah it's, it's real. I remember the night before, so I had an interesting experience with this briefing in the oval because I was both leading the meeting as the lead of the team, but I was also helping to organize the meeting behind the scenes, by writing the president's talking points for the meeting. So, you know, I had my. Meadow. Yeah I was very meadow. I was like, and here's what you should say to the team about this result with the department of defense and here's the work that we did. So it's so funny, right. To be both part a participant. And then also part of the team that's helping put this you know, enter the meeting. So I was pulling together all the briefing docs of all the wins that we had and historical work and giving him some general talking points. And then they asked for bios of all the members of the team. So I was curating the bios and it was alphabetical order. So, or I made sure it was an alphabet order. And so I was somewhere, you know, farther towards the end. And I remember pulling the bio together and thinking, you know, there's that line the end about how used to be a violinist? And I studied with Perlman like that doesn't really seem relevant to my current role as a policy person. I should probably take that out for this very formal briefing doc. And then I thought, you know what? He's not gonna have time to read this anyway, who cares? So I just kept it in. He opens the door the next day to the oval. And first thing that comes out of his mouth is, oh my gosh, Maya, he studied with my buddy Itzhak. He played at my inauguration along with Yo-Yo Ma blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, talk about making one of your random staffers, feel like a million and a half bucks in that moment. He either took the time to read the briefing doc, which I actually believe he did. And he was just that studious that he did do all of his homework all the time. I'm sure he did. And or someone told him about this and either way, I don't care what system was in play behind the scenes, the thoughtfulness, you know, we worked so hard in that administration. Every single one of us just was like hauling every minute of every day for those four or eight years in the case of my colleagues who worked for the two terms and to feel valued for our full story in life, you know, it was wonderful. And so I instantly, I was just like, the meeting could end right now and I'm good, you know. And so, and then also just, you just said like a, we just had a jokey rapport, you know. Is it the kind of thing where you would see him in the hallways then from time to time? Like in my like mind or trying to envision like the real life experience of like working in the, in the west wing? Yeah, not that many people are seeing the president day to day. I'm sorry to say, but we were grateful whenever we had the opportunity too. I'll say that but of course, I mean his actual, like the really legitimate senior advisors were like regularly in the mix with the president, but I certainly wasn't. So, and the other thing that was so wonderful about this meeting is that he was so engaged with the material. Like you learn later all the things that were on the president's plate that day, including national, you know, concerns around national security and whatnot, and the fact that he was able to be laser focused on our team for the entirety of that meeting was astonishing. That's the gift and the job. Yeah, no, exactly. I remember at one point he said to me kind of cheekly, he's like, Maya, can we get your team on Congress? Like, can you guys just like fix what's going on over there? And I, and I remember saying, you know, with all due respect, Mr. President, we try and take on projects that are difficult, not impossible. And so, yeah, he was just, he was so engaged and he, he made it very clear by the end. You know, if you run into any obstacles, I feel like he knew that up until this point. I'd been like the lonely person. I mean, obviously had my teammates, but I was still top of the hill being like, hello, listen to me, everybody, can you please think behavioral science important. And he knew that if he could lend some of that gravitas that he has towards my cause it could be very effective. And so helping, you know, at the end, you know, he was joking. Like you got my number, right. Any problems anyone gives you, you just let me know, you call me directly. So he's a huge supporter of the initial. Incredible. The executive order, which is amazing. Unbelievable, yeah I mean, how did that come into being the executive order? So it's equivalent to a Julliard moment. There's no executive order. And then you just kind of create a draft one day and you start circulating it. And there's a lot of resistance and you just keep plugging and plugging and plugging. And one day the top of the document gets changed to say executive order. And yeah, for the longest time actually I think there was a feeling that like behavioral science isn't sexy enough to get executive order treatment. But my point was, well, that's exactly the point is that it should, as you were saying, this, some of this stuff just feels so obvious. This is just good government practice. And oftentimes it is very low cost, light time interventions that can be make or break for families everywhere. And so I think that's what helps solidify the argument, which is this is, this is what it means to just engage in best practices as we run this massive entity, which is the federal government. A while back, you let slip with this phrase, behavioral economics, but I'm not sure I understand exactly what that is. Yeah, so there's a lot of umbrella terms that are used in this space. So I think maybe the broadest one is just behavioral science, which is essentially the study of the human condition, behavioral economics, technically I guess on a definitional level is just blending insights from psychology, with insights, from economics to a more robust understanding of how humans operate in different settings. I see the idea being that we're not logical actors, that we're prone to these emotional states and these defaults that, that lead us to make decisions that on paper, it looks like we wouldn't otherwise. Yeah and I mean, there are some philosophical disagreements about what is logical. I mean, it is actually logical sometimes for a human to act on their emotional states. And so there's questions about that, but I think that's exactly right. It's that there's a lot of hidden, surprising factors that our decisions and our judgements outside of our conscious awareness. I think one of the most illustrative examples of this is in the context of voting. We like to think that we will just vote for the candidate. We'd most like to see elected into office. That feels pretty straightforward, but there's research from Texas showing that the order in which the candidate's names appear ballot has an outsized influence on voter behavior. So if your, if your candidate's name is listed first, that candidate will receive a 10% point boost in vote share relative to if they're listed last. And obviously this is in low information environments. Of course, if you're dealing with a national election, probably those ordering effects are gonna be a lot less relevant or important. But I feel like when we know that when we know that we as humans have this first in line bias, it can lead us to design more equitable solutions, right. To design policy accordingly. And what's happened is now that now we randomize the order in which Candidates appear in a lot of places and a lot of election and context, and that helps make things fair overall. So the reason I'm so fascinated by this field is that when we learn about it, when we uncover insights in turn, we can become smarter in correcting for those biases solving for them in the DNA of how we design policies and programs. What are what are some of the initiatives you would've like to have seen happen when you were at the white house that didn't happen or got nos, but you feel like were good ideas. That's a great question. So one of the projects I was most passionate about, about just came to a, an abrupt end. My team, and I started working on the ground in Flint, Michigan, and with, with our colleagues there during the lead and water crisis. And initially we were working in collaboration with white house offices and also with the environmental protection agency to make sure that safe water information was getting into the hands of Flint residents. But then when we visited the ground and we actually went there and we talked to heads of churches and heads of local, YMCAs, and just people who were leading the troops, we learned that the challenges went so far back and that in, in many ways, the lead water crisis was a symptom of a much bigger crisis, which was decades, a disenfranchisement and systemic racism and people of color in the community feeling like they had no voice and rightly feeling like they were betrayed by their government and consistently lied to. And so when you recognize that you realize that the problem you're solving for is in part water in the short term, of course, you need to make sure you don't poison an entire generation, which is what was happening, but it was trust. And that introduced a whole set of interesting questions in the psychological domain, which is how does a community rebuild trust when they don't have good reason to trust their government. And you can imagine how erosive that is, right. And this would play out. Even the decisions we made around the way that we are getting this water safety information in the hands of Flint residents. I remember so we think a lot about who the messenger is in this field, right, so what we've learned from research is that sometimes it's as important to consider what the message is as who, or who it is. Who's delivering the message as what the message itself is. And I think naturally our instinct is to go to the environmental protection agency, right. Like they are the leading authority figures in when it comes to environmental safety. And so they should be the ones delivering this message to people on the ground. But then rich, you think about the backdrop here, right. Which is that Flint residents had been lied to four years by their local government. If they had been doing its job. They wouldn't be in that situation to begin with. Or their local government had let them down. And you could absolutely imagine that that would translate to the federal government, like your feelings about government aren't boxed into, oh, I don't trust my, whatever my mayor or my whatever. No, you just have a general feeling sometimes towards whether the government is an entity you can trust or not. And there was no reason that they should trust the government. So what ended up happening is that the, I mean, the local EPA, which was a fantastic group of people to work with, I'm not sure that they were the ones who were behind all the deception, but the ones, at least I came into contact with were fantastic. They organized a canvasing effort on the ground in which a recruited, trusted members of the community to deliver these information packets to people. And so we're talking heads of churches, heads of the red cross members of the YMCA people that you're running into as part of your day to day life. Oh, my kid goes to, you know, baseball practice with your kid. I see you every week. I reason to trust you.
Sure. And so those folks would go door to door knocking and saying, hi, I come a trusted member of your community can vouch for the information that's in this flyer. And that's very important when misinformation and disinformation is on the run, right. And you actually have trusted people who can deliver these messages. So I was really sad I remember. So that program was discontinued. Yeah it was an effort. I mean, gosh, this is so painful. So I'd gone to Flint. And then the election, the 2016 election happened. And I actually went back to Flint shortly after. And you could see, you could see how traumatized people were by this leadership change. Like they already felt that they were not getting the support they needed. And now it was like, is it, are we gonna get anything? Are we gonna get negative support? Are we, what, like, what is, what does the future hold? That was so that was so sad to be there knowing that there wasn't a future where we could help them through that. It's so crazy that this problem. It was really hard. Which persists in Flint. Yeah, I know and it's gonna be a problem for a long time. So I just, I remember knowing in that last, in that trip right after the election, like,, this is kind of our goodbye trip. And we gotten to know a lot of these folks on a personal level and developed beautiful friendships with them, you know, and heard about their grandkids and, you know, their role as the head of a church or whatnot. And so it was pretty heartbreaking to see that come to an end. Yeah well, extrapolating on that idea of, of leveraging cognitive science to engender trust where that trust is broken, scaling that up to the broader kind of national declining trust in institutions. Like what does behavioral science say about how we might address that? Do you have thoughts on that? Like it's sort of this epidemic right now that we're dealing with where people just don't trust institutions in general or that trust is at, I don't know if it's at an all time low. But it's at a low that is feels unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Yeah, one of my favorite insights from behavioral science in the area of trust building is around what's called operational transparency. And it refers to the idea that when we pull the back and we just let people in on what's happening behind the scenes, whether, in terms of what constitutes our decision making process, why we chose X over Y the messiness behind the scenes. I think my instinct as a leader of my team is to protect people from all the mess. It's like, oh, my job is to protect you. But actually it's kind of counterintuitive to learn that back and be (indistinct). Let me tell you about the mess. Yeah, towards building trust to shelter people too much from that process. And so there was a really interesting study run by some Harvard psychologists with the city of Boston, in which people were complaining about various challenges around the city. So broken stoplights, broken stop sign, potholes in the ground. And they're like, when is this stuff gonna get fixed? Like we gotta keep living our lives here in Boston. And what the city did is they created a virtual map in which they simply ID that all these problems were happening and they showed where those problems were. And then they had these little progress meters, right. Where you could actually see that like, oh, this road sign, you know, could maybe get fixed on Thursday, or at least it's next in line. And even though the speed with which the problems were gonna be fix was unlikely to change. The mere transparency into the process was extremely assistive in building trust. And in this case, the study showed I believe that it led people to be more civically minded. They were more interested in participating in their government as a result. And I mean, I saw this as a, as a regular of dominoes. I don't know if you're aware of pizza tracker. You're probably not 'cause you're Mr. Health nuts so anyway. But I do know. As (indistinct) occasionally eat. You're talking about some kind of social media.
Pizza delivery. Campaign where they were like, transparent about their (indistinct). No, no no it's actually just a pizza tracker where when you placed your order, you can see where it is along the way. Oh sort of Uber or something like that. Yeah it's like oh Sarah, just put your pizza in the oven. And like, the pizza's gonna come out now. And now the toppings, now they're doing a quality check on it. I wish I could say that I'm reporting this on of friends. You're so emotionally engaged with it and it's coming outta the oven. And so when I'm frustrated, like where's my pizza it's been. So I feel like it's been so long. And then your imagination is thinking, they're not doing anything, All right then they are, and then you're like, oh, I should actually be a lot nicer in this situation because the pizza's on its way and you should be patient. And even though, again, the timeframe which I was gonna get, my pizza is not changed. I feel more trust that things are happening behind the scene. Because you can see it happening in the real time. It is common sense but But it shows vulnerability and its a risk. Yeah, transparency requires a level of comfort with vulnerability and, and it feels like a political liability, right. When in truth, it engenders trust and people respond positively to it. You know, Brene Brown you've put on her podcast. She talks about this all day long. But it feels like the curve is steep in terms of getting people to really understand and start practicing that. But you know, when you were telling the domino story, I was thinking of the many examples of companies on Twitter when they screw up and they just, they they're just, here's what happened. Here's exact, or they send in email to their thing and they're like, here's what's going on. And here's what we trying to do to fix it. That breeds loyalty. And then people feel connected to that because they weren't lied to. And I think, you know, as we become more digitally savvy, our radar for bullshit becomes more finely attuned and we can see the coming further and further away. And I think that means that whether it's corporations or government entities have to shoulder that, that responsibility for transparency in a way that maybe they haven't had to historically. I mean, young people won't tolerate it. They demand a level of transparency that, you know, people my age probably don't think about that much. There, was an interesting study run where in the beginning of a brainstorming session, one group was asked to share something they were proud of. And another group was asked to share something, an embarrassing story. So like, you know, a hundred percent vulnerability you're sharing something that you are actively embarrassed by. And when they measured the productivity of the brainstorming sessions after the fact, the embarrassing session, the embarrassing story group outperformed the proud of group. Because they get all that out of the way. And then they feel liberated to share other dumb ideas. Yeah and it's creates a more open space. I think it was that not only were the, was the magnitude of the magnitude ideas increase, but also the diversity of ideas, like the range that they covered. And so it's not even that it like feels good sometimes to share it can affect productivity and outputs in pretty powerful ways. Yeah, so if you were the czar of behavioral insights for America or whatever, or corporate America or government, I feel like that's mission number one, right. Like getting people comfortable with transparency. Yeah, and I think just reminding people that when you do admit to weakness, when you admit to struggling, it can build a lot of, you can build a lot of credibility and you can help people. I mean, that's the thing that I've seen in my approach to leadership, especially in the last two years when there's been so much loss worldwide, and we've all navigated our own losses, you know over the last two years and our grieving in some cases just lives we used to have that we don't have anymore, but whatever it is, everyone has been changed in some way by COVID, right. Yeah and in many ways I saw, I saw that bring out the best in people when it came to their willingness to share. So on a personal level, I remember in the beginning of quarantine, my husband and I, we, we have to work with a surrogate in order to have a baby and we had, we had a successful pregnancy and then a pregnancy loss. So we lost our, our surrogate miscarried and we were devastated and I didn't share it publicly with the team. So this was in like February of 2020 that this happened. And then fast forward a year and a bit a year and a few months, and our surrogates now pregnant for the second time. And I'm feeling super optimistic and she's actually pregnant with identical twin girls, Jimmy and I are like, wow, can't believe this finally happened after years of fertility stuff and trying to find a surrogate. And we found a beloved surrogate who lives in Arkansas and we love her name's Haley. And we, thought the stars are finally lining and this is gonna happen. And then she miscarries again on exactly the same day as the time before. And we just got unlucky, Haley's healthy, our embryos were tested and normal and it turns out she just had an auto immune response to our embryos. Her body was treating our embryos as kind of foreign material. And I was beyond devastated. I was so torn up by the second loss and I didn't know how to process it and how to navigate my own emotions about all of it. And we were all at home and not having the social supports we're used to, I'm sure there was, at some point probably was dealt it at that time. That was up there's always one. And I remember, I think it was that night. I wrote a note to my entire team at work saying I'm suffering and I'm in pain. And this happened to my husband and me and our surrogate. And I'm gonna be offline for a while, but I wanted you all to know what happened because I want you to feel less alone if something tragic happens in your life. And I heard from so many people, you know, who shared with me that that helped them feel more comfortable sharing when they had something bad happen, you know, that it was modeling, that kind of behavior. And we haven't talked about the podcast yet, but I turned to my own show in that moment of grief, which was so surprising for me. I mean, I can be an open book about certain things, but this felt so deeply personal. And I never expected to share it with anyone outside of my immediate family and close friends. Like it was just not a thing that felt comfortable for me. And yet when I was in the throws of this change and felt so overwhelmed by it, I realized that, okay, I have this show called A Slight Change of Plans in which I'm inviting all these people to come on and talk with such vulnerability about how they navigated their slight change of plans. And while I'm the throws of production, the host of a slight change of plans has her own right storm thrown her way and doesn't know how to manage it. I felt like I needed the show in that moment. And so I actually turned the mics and had my producer interview me about my experience with loss. And it was so therapeutic to do. And, you know, the episode's called Maya Slight Change of Plans. You know, it was never expected that that would ever be an episode. And I think one thing that we know that's positive that can emerge from loss and grief is meaning making and purpose making. And I can't count the number of emails that I've gotten from people all over the world who have navigated losses in this domain or losses in any other domain who felt emotionally connected to me because I was willing to share or with them. Yeah, it's community. And that overwhelms me to this day. Like I get a little emotional thinking about the impact that it's had on so many people. And I feel like that's maybe I never really thought about this before. I feel like that's probably been the greatest area of growth for me on a personal level is a willingness to show when I'm suffering and to process things out loud, maybe the podcast has helped me get there, but I think it's also just growing up and maturing and realizing what's the point of keeping it all up here, no. No, it doesn't do well when it's kept up there. Doesn't do well, when it leaves there on. You know, grief is best shared and it does engender a level of, you know, emotional connection and trust. And for you being the host of this podcast, where the very theme of it is how we navigate hardships and what we do in the face of life, throwing curve balls at us, had you not shared that it would ring unauthentic to who you are. So I think it was really important, you know, as well as courageous to do that, but I'm not surprised at the response. You know, I'm somebody who's been in recovery for a very long time and, you know, has the gift of, of being exposed to communities on the daily who, who share their pain and their vulnerability and their, you know, the terrible things that they've done with such a a level of courage and comfort at the same time. And there's something very unique and special about that. That makes you feel connected to those people and trusting of them, and also empower to do the same yourself, right. Like had I not born witness to thousands and thousands of people, you know, standing up in front of groups, big and small to share their, their deepest shame and their most embarrassing moments without any more shame attached to it is incredibly powerful in terms of like, how you think about the, the things that you're ashamed of, that you are hiding from the world that you're afraid to share. And I think the more that we get comfortable doing it, like you said, you get all these emails from people like that was a self to them and makes them feel like they can have a different relationship with their own pain and together we grow. And I think there's something really beautiful about that. And I think, you know being a member of that community has made me a more, has made me a better podcast host because I am more empathetic to the people that I'm sitting across from, because I've been exposed to so many, you know, version of individual pain and mishap in life that it's, it's impossible for me to judge someone's lived experience. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's really powerfully said. And I think one thing that has surprised me and heartened me when it comes to making a slight at change of plans is how universal our change stories are and how the psychological strategies we use to navigate change and the coping mechanisms we use and the insights we generate, they seem to transcend circumstances. And so I think before making this podcast, I would've thought, oh, you know, I'm having someone who's in the throes of a stage four cancer diagnosis. The people that this story's gonna resonate the most with are people who are going through a cancer diagnosis, but instead I'm seeing fascinating crossover effects that seem to align people along psychology rather than circumstance. So a recent divorcee shares how the betrayal that one of my guests shared in, in getting a stage four cancer diagnosis, even though he had spent his whole life trying to be, to optimize for his future and be a health nut is a similar kind of betrayal that she felt in her marriage, in her marriage ending. And I shared with you that I shared my own story of loss. And I heard from a woman who lost her 21 year old son to an overdose. And she said it was in hearing your story, that I finally found healing that I saw a new way of thinking about my son's death and that has helped me so much, you know, and those circumstances are wildly different. She lost a 21 year old son, and yet something about how I shared something about the way in which I psychologically responded to this and the realizations I had, or the reflections I had, touched something in her and helped her. And so I love that, that we can learn from stories that don't look like our own. It means that we have this infinite resource of wisdom that we can tap into when we're navigating change. Of course and although someone's life experience is so different. As they say in recovery, like the facts of the, you know, don't pay attention to the facts of the experience, look for like what you can identify with. And, you know, humans come in a, a variety of archetypes and there are only so many stories, right. The facts are infinite, but the themes are lesser. Right, so there's something about storytelling stories told authentically, and with honesty and vulnerability that resonates so deeply with the human psyche, that a nonfiction book, can't like, you can write out all the facts. Here's how humans work, and here's how they undergo this. And here's what you need to do to work your way out of whatever it is as you're dealing with. And it's in one ear or not the other, like you can intellectualize this stuff, but short of making an emotional connection with a version of your story, you're hard pressed to, you know, find that sense of peace and hope I think, that only can come through storytelling and podcasting is such a powerful medium for that. And, you know, I applaud to you for, you know, being very focused on this subject of change and finding these amazing humans through which you can, you know, share these stories of transformation that, you know, for your behavioral scientist mind, I'm sure create this like, map of meaning, like, how are you mapping psychology? Like, what are the, what are the, you know, similarities between these stories, from which you can extrapolate certain truths that can tell us more about what it means to be human. Yeah, that's exactly right. And a large part of my motivation for starting a slight change of plans is that the science invariably will fall short at some point, you know, it's not like in the throws of grief, you can open up some book to page 78. Oh, there's my answer. Instead in those moments, we sometimes do just have to rely on the collective wisdom from other, from other people's stories. You know, it's like the wisdom is in people's actual lived experiences. And we can derive strength from another strength. Like I'm thinking about the episode you did with your friend who, who was this health nut and, you know, suffered this cancer diagnosis and, and shares very openly and honestly about what it has been like for him. Yeah and what's been, oh my gosh, this, this has been such an uplifting thing too, which is seeing how listeners from all over the world have like fallen in love with the cast of characters that we've had on the show. So I had Scott, the, the guy you're talking about on the show last year, I think it was last summer. And he talks, you know, he's an early 30 something who is probably like you in terms of your fitness and healthy. Vegan fitness freak. Yeah so vegan, intermittent fasting, high intensity interval training. Definitely is not ordering dominoes as you are not as well. And I was sufficiently shamed earlier when I brought up that example, but. Oh my, how dare you?
(Shankar laughing) And you're talking about your inflammation. It's like, I, we need to talk. Yeah, I know I should probably yeah stop with the cheese anyway, but also cheese like makes my heart so happy. So there's a trade off there. I have a solution for that too. Yeah, a solution okay. Oh, wow this is so great okay. I'll need to get all your pro tips on this. So Scott has done everything he possibly can to try to optimize for the future. And then he gets this in the middle of quarantine stage four bone cancer diagnosis. And within weeks he has his right leg amputated below the knee. He eventually has to get a vertebra removed from his spine. He has to get surgery on his other leg. Part of femur was removed and he has 18 administrations of chemotherapy in Texas. So he's uproot his whole life, okay. And there's a huge loss of identity. He's prided himself for so long on being Mr. Fit. And so in addition to losing so much of what he has in life and just enduring so much physical pain, I mean, he talks about it. Like the like amputation is being civil war pain. That's how he described it to me. He says that on any given day, he was more worried about losing his six pack than he was about dying so interesting. Yeah, I appreciated that honesty. Like just fasting up to his own vanity. Exactly and being like, it's not like when you get a cancer diagnosis, you suddenly stop caring about all the things you used to care about. I'm still Scott. I still have some values in my life, my value system. And you don't, it doesn't all evaporate in the face of some higher goal or purpose right. And so he's talking about these identity shifts and is starting to learn slowly over time that maybe his identity is more negotiable than he thought. That's the phrasing he used, which really touched me. And when I first interviewed him, he was about two thirds of the way through his treatment. And I just kept hearing from listeners, how's Scott doing? How's Scott doing everyone to know how's Scott. And so I was able to invite him back on the show, just recently his episode aired, what a guy, his scans show no evidence of cancer today, which is amazing so thrilled. And it's not even an end. It's a, but, but what's so fascinating about Scott's story is that his change didn't end with the completion of cancer treatment. It's a whole new set of challenges and questions that are arising in his life. Some of which he's finding more challenging than the awfulness that he endured during treatment questions like. What does it live, what does it mean to live a full life? Like I was willing to fight so hard for this life that I'm now living right now before he was just following doctor's orders. And it was very clear what was expected of him, what was required of him. People were defining his life. So even though some agency was taken away from him, he knew what it meant for any given day to be successful. And now that was taken away from him because now it's up to him to figure out what it means to live a full life and. Right, that's scary. It's scary and, oh my gosh, that second conversation just blew me away. I mean, I still think I find myself, even though I'm in the interviews and the interviews will run long sometimes, you know, like you actually air the full thing right. So we do edited, produced episodes. Sometimes the conversations run an hour and a half. So I'm in the interviews and we're editing it down to about 30 or 40 minutes. And so I'm hearing this tape like so many times in the production process, probably like 14 or 15 time in full by the time we get to the end. And that's not even including all the mini sections I'm hearing. And yet five months after an interview, I'll just be making a peanut butter sandwich. And some guests profound line enters my head and it hits me in this new way because of the very specific thing that I happen to be going through in my life. I hear their, their words in my mind differently. I interpret their words differently than I did the first 15 times around. And so, so much of what Scott shared with me about his changing identity and how he views old Scott versus new Scott. I mean, it's just, it's a fascinating conversation that takes so many philosophical turns that it's one of those episodes that I even, I put out in the world, I continue to listen to. Like, I feel like I need a few times to digest all of it and so, yeah. Anyway, my guests are just amazing. I just feel like I can go on. You've got tons of cool people and we should point out that Apple named it the best podcast of 2021. That was amazing. When I got that call, I was just like, first I felt like Taylor swift at the Grammy's. Yeah, it's crazy. But when they said it was the best show the year, I just couldn't believe it, honestly, because, but maybe that's part of it. It's like this whole thing just was so organically generated. I never had dreams of being a podcaster. I never thought that I would ever have a podcast. And it was really just passion from day in and day out. And I think that's in part with people, see in the show, which is, it is a host who's kind of on a personal expedition to try to understand herself and the world better. Sure. And it just, it's all come from from just a very personal place. You know, starting with my life is a violinist and the changes I endured during that time. So it's kind of led to this point, but I've fallen in love with podcasting. I mean, you've been at this for a lot longer than I have. I don't think there's anything I've ever enjoyed so much. It's a pretty great gig. I mean, really. You get to meet all these cool people. Look at you I'm holding you hostage today. Can you ask all these questions for hours and hours?
It's really incredible. And it's incredible to me how when you're willing to share yourself in a conversation, people are very willing to open themselves up and share things you've never heard. I love it when I go, this happened in three conversations. I had an interview with Tiffany Haddish, Amanda Knox and Hillary Clinton. Oh and Tommy Caldwell, the professional rock climber who lost a finger. And yet is still one of the greatest, big world climbers in the world OMG. He would've figured out how to play the violin with like four fingers. There's few things that guy can't do. Yeah, exactly. And I remember for all of those interviews, ' cause these are relatively public figures. I had done so much research on them, read every word they'd ever written, listen to every single interview they'd ever done. Just like mind the archives and the internet watch all the documentaries around them. So I went into those interviews thinking I had a relatively good command of their lives and their big inflection moments. And each of those guests proved me wrong. The moment they revealed to me as actually being the turning point for them was not at the moment that I would've thought based on what I'd heard from the news and what I'd read in articles about them. And that's really fun and fascinating when your guest shows up and is like, nope, everyone's got it wrong. That's actually not.
No, it's great. That's not the moment for me. It's great, what I loved about the Tommy one is this idea that we were talking about earlier between, you know, the loss of the violin and realizing that it wasn't the violin for you, but it was the ability to connect with people and discovering through your conversation with Tommy, that climbing is merely the vehicle for him to access these flow states. And it's really about like how can I experience flow states in my life and climbing is just the device for that. Exactly I mean, when I heard about Tommy's story for those listeners who don't know he was held hostage in Kyrgyzstan nearly died of hypothermia and starvation ended up pushing his captor off of a cliff right at the very end. And I would've thought for sure that that moment was the defining moment for him. And it turns out what he, the thing that really stayed with him through that whole experience was unlocking a state of mind that was novel for him, that he experienced profound mental acuity when he was on the brink of death basically. And he said, he's been chasing those flow states ever since through his climbing and has, has very occasionally achieved that kind of acuity. And those are the kinds of things that unless you dig really deep, you're not gonna get those insight, right. And so I felt we were, we were such a perfect host guest duo because me, the cognitive scientist coming in having studied flow and then Tommy being like flows my jam. It just, yeah, it felt like there was a lot of magic in that conversation. Its also just like the nicest human being. I also love it when I meet people who I really admire and they just turn out to be incredibly kind talk about humility. I mean, you can't get Tommy to say one positive word about himself. It's it's pathological almost, but he is, oh he's so kind and so open and generous and yeah, he's a friend now, which is wonderful. Yeah it's cool climbers are salt of the earth as a general overall. I wanna, I wanna kind of close things out and finish this up with some more general thoughts on, on change and perhaps what you've learned about change, not just as a cognitive scientist, but as a podcast host and the work that you're doing. You know, I know you're in the private sector now through the experiences that you've had over the course of your career. And in thinking about that, 'cause you know, as I said at the outset of this transformation, personal change is really at the core of this show and in my own life, I've had these many pivots, you know, swimmer to alcoholic, lawyer to athlete and athlete, to author podcaster and you know, who knows what's next navigating, you know, setbacks and obstacles along the way and confusion about, you know, who the person is that I wanna become and trying to align my behavior with my values. It's all very ephemeral and confusing when you're in the midst of it right. Totally. It feels like elementary when we map it out and talk about it. And I think that can, if not handle the right way, can land on people like a burden because it feels like, well, if I just did these things, then I would figure out what these people, it figured out and life and doesn't really work like that. So I wanted to leave people with maybe some takeaways or actionable tools or, or just a means by which to think about change in their own life. That can have like a practical, positive impact. So I think, you know, I was just listening to you and Scott talk and you talk about how we're really bad cognitive work casters. And I think that absolutely applies to how we internalize change current day change, future change. One fallacy that I've, I've seen humans fall prey to through just making the show. I didn't have this insight before I started interviewing guests, is that we tend to believe that when they're is a change that's introduced to our life either wanted or unwanted that it happens in a vacuum. It happens in this isolated way where I am Maya, the exact same person, almost walking through a magic mirror. But with that one little change that one tweak made in my life. And the that's just not how human beings work, where these really rich complex ecosystems where change in one part of our lives naturally has lots of spillover effects into other parts of our lives. And I think the lesson I've learned from that is we need to be, we need to approach change with a profound amount of humility because we simply can't anticipate all of the ways in which the change will affect us. So we got Scott on the one hand whose worst nightmares happened and then he actually finds a lot of positive growth that happens as a result. He basically said his, his happiness is at a level that it was before his diagnosis. He says he achieved like happiness. He said, the thermostat has prevailed the happiness thermostat, yeah. And so he said he basically achieved the same levels that the bad moments were of course worse and bad, but the good moments were just as good, which is surprising. And he also felt like he had built more empathy and he was developing into a slightly more flexible human being. And that being as rigid as he was before, maybe he wasn't the best version of Scott right. So he felt he had, he saw considerable growth in himself. And then I talked to people who willed the change, who thought they were gonna have. And unequivocally positive thing happened to them. There's this one woman I interviewed Elna, went on a mission to lose weight and she lost weight, very unhealthily, but she lost, I think over 100 pounds in a very short amount of time. And for a while she thought she was living her dream life until she realized that that weight loss was having all kinds of negative impacts on her personality. Interestingly, she became more self conscious as a result. She kind of was buying into this part of society that had been on savory to her before, but it was now seducing her into it. And she felt she became a worse person and that she worked less hard for things. And she suddenly realized that there was this complication that, and she literally, you know, I talked about the metaphorical mirror. She had the physical mirror. She was motivated initially to lose this weight when she was at an amusement park with her family. And she sees herself in one of those illusion mirrors. And so she imagined herself stepping through it and being thin Elna and did not appreciate all the other ways in which her life would change as a result. And so as a result of hearing these kinds of stories across the board where change didn't unfold in exactly the way that people expected or there was a complication around the change. So another one of my favorite episodes is with a guy named Morgan. When he was a, when he was in his 20s, he ended up having gender reassignment surgery to align his body with his true gender identity, which was male. And initially he's intoxicated by feelings of liberation from his female body. You know, he's enjoying the, the base in his voice and enjoying the growing muscles and finally feels comfortable in his body and is feeling so liberated. And then a few months later is confronted with the realities of living as a black man in society when he gets pulled over by the cops in his grandmother's affluent neighborhood. And so it's just always more complicated because we maybe we will, maybe the wisest among us in human humanity will, uncode exactly how ourselves will respond to a change, but to have a grasp on how the world will change its response to us, how the world will interact with us differently. That's untenable, right. It's unattainable to have that level of insight at the outside. Well, it's also something we have no control over. Yeah, and we have no control. In the context of change, like thinking about the very few things that you can control and being at peace with the fact that there are externalities that are well beyond your control. I feel like the healthier, your appreciation for that lack of control or the more acceptance you have around that, the happier ultimately you're gonna be. And perhaps the more engaged with the change that you're to create in your life. I think that's right. And you've hit on another big theme in the podcast, which is we do love falling prey to this illusion of control. And it comes up time and time again in different interviews that I have with folks who wanted to believe that they were in control. And when this, when their slight change of plans happens, it's a sobering reminder. That control is an illusion and they have to grapple with that. As much as the change of.
God's got other plans, what's the adage like, you know, tell God your plan. If you want to hear God laugh, tell them your plans. (Shankar laughing)
That's exactly. Yeah it's, you know, again, that goes back to like a recovery thing, this idea of surrender and surrender, not being like a giving up, but just developing an appreciation for the fact that your like, instinct to try to hold on tightly to outcomes is, is really an engine for suffering. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's also a distinction between like a lot of the stories on your show are about how people use the word change. But I think of, it's more, more appropriately thought of as like adaptation, like when something happens outside of your control, like how do you adapt to that versus I'm gonna change my life and I'm gonna take these steps and move in this direction. Like those are two, I'm sure those live in two different parts of the brain. Yeah. How do you think about that difference, is that. I mean, I don't know if it's living in two different parts of the brain, but I think they are competing forces and a, just to continual tension that just seems to define existence, right. And there's no right answer to where you should fall, right. But, and I think that cha that dynamic changes over time and depending on the specific change circumstances that you're in but yeah, it's a challenge. One thing I wanted touch on before we close out is, is something we were talking about briefly before the podcast started this idea of, of the present minded movement, like being present minded, being a movement right now. And the kind of irony of that in that, you know, the reality of most people is that we're living in the past or we're living in the future. We're obsessing on things that, that actually aren't real while we're talking about being present. Yeah, so spending too much time in the past or the future can be very unproductive when it kind of races away from you and you enter a state of like anxious rumination. So I absolutely am pro redirecting attention to the present when you're in those moments. But I don't want people to fail to appreciate this incredibly remarkable singular human ability we have to spend time in the past in the future, not all species have this ability. And it is actually remarkable that you can be sitting here at this table, right. And your mind can be somewhere completely different. It can be imagining things about the future. It can be coming up with new ideas. It can be marveling at an experience in the past. It can be dissecting an experience in the past that gives you insight into how you might have been better, how you could be better. It gives you important signals into ways to improve. And I just feel like there's so much emphasis on the present right now that we're starting to maybe move too far in that direction. And I just want a little bit more balance because there's a lot of utility we can derive from spending time in the past or the future. A very clear example is some people's presence sucks. And I wanna give them a respite from that. Like if you're, That's interesting you know I haven't thought of it in that way. If your present sucks, right. If you're Scott in the throes of cancer treatment and you wanna spend all your time in the past or the future have at it, please let's minimize human suffering. And that's not even considering again, the virtues of spend any time in those two spaces, because they can be enlightening thinking about the future can help you figure out what it is you want in life, how you wanna spend your time. Like it allows your imagination to run wild, right. And thinking, reflecting on the past can make you a more thoughtful introspective person, right. Who's actually engaging in self improvement and so. Sure so to, yeah, to be sure, you know, recalling episodes from the past that can make you make better decisions or, or be a better human being in the present moment. Like there's certainly benefits to that. I think to be fair that the thrust of it is aimed at the fact that we actually spend almost no time in the present moment. And even if we give service to it. A very few of us are actually present in any given moment. And the fact that we're constantly obsessing over things in the past or what might happen in the future that, that casting of attention generally is on negative things for a lot of people and that obsession on negative past occurrences or, you know, the disastrous thing that's about to happen, you know, are going to create a negative reality for you or, or force you to make a bad decision or, you know, so just awareness around that. I feel like that's a much bigger problem than the fact that like we're telling people that, you know, like you know what, we're shaming people about being present. So here's my thought on that, which is first of all, we're 100% on the same page. So my initial caveat was that the minute it turns, you know, rummitive obsessive negative in that way, then of course we wanna redirect our attention to the present. What I'm trying to help alleviate is a meadow when people find themselves thinking about the past or the future. I got it. Cause it's not always a bad thing. Even if you're not deriving utility from it. And your mind's just wandering to some episode in the past, that is a feature of the human experience that is rich and textured and interesting. And so like, if you do find yourself thinking about the past, and it's a neutral experience, it's not good or bad, it's just neutral, lean into it a little bit and Marvel at your brain's ability to do that thing. So that's all I'm doing. Try to remove this meta layer of like damn it why can I spend, I'm not able to spend why keep the right. Feeding yourself up from not living a healthy present. Yeah, beating yourself up for not buying in. I'm not like, you know, I mean, clearly I sound like I'm a lobbyist for the past in the future, but I just feel like there, we should maybe not be so hard on ourselves. You're God damn right I'm not present. I'm thinking about this other thing. What do you have to say about it? Yeah I mean, here I am just envisioning my future meal. I'm just saying the, the escapism can sometimes be really assisted for people. And also I think just an incredible thing that our minds can do. And I don't want it to get too bad a wrap because I think it's actually a gift we've been given by virtue of being human. That we can spend time in these different temporal places. Fair enough, fair enough. Well, let's end it there. I could go on, like I said, I have this I, that goes on forever. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. This is really fun.
That was really fun. Yeah.
How do you feel. So flowy?
You feel okay? Oh yeah I feel, I mean. Did pretty good, didn't we? Definitely a marathon.
All right. Your interviews, but I love, I loved it. Well they go, as long as I feel like they should go, I know that's great.
I feel like this one went the appropriate time for what I wanted to talk to you about. So I appreciate engaging you.
This is really fun. Thank you for being so thoughtful in your questioning and clearly doing so much research into. my life in my show. If you wanna learn more about everything that you're up to this place. Yeah, so I finally on social media, that's a thing that only happens as the results to the podcast. I noticed that like you follow no people and you have like very few posts. So I was like, oh, you, you were smart and were not on social media until. I was never, I got rid of all that stuff. The podcast, I'm sure a bunch of people told you, you have to be on now. Yeah, and I think I'm in this, like I'm in this wonderful space where like fans of this know, just get so excited and we get to communicate through this platform. And I love hearing what listeners have to say, Questions they have. You're in the halo period. I'm in the hill period exactly. I'm like, wow, social media is so nice. Eventually it'll turn on you. Exactly so I'm hoping to exit before that shift happens if at all. But I'm at Dr. Maya Shankar. So it's D-R M-A-Y-A S-H-A-N-K-A-R On Instagram.
On Instagram. And the show is A Slight Change of Plans it's available for free anywhere you get your podcasts. All the places. All the places. And it's just a total love project of mine. I think you can see it in my face that I just love this show and I could talk about it forever, but I really hope people love the show because I've fallen in love with the whole process of podcasting. Yeah well, the show's great. You have a natural talent for doing it. So everybody check out the podcast. I love it you won the, that crazy award for good reason. And come back and talk to me again sometime. Yes, I would love to thanks so much for having me. I didn't exhaust you.
(Shankar laughing) Cool, peace. (upbeat music)
