Latest / INSPIRE STORY / How to Embrace Change Gracefully and Find Purpose in Difficult Times

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How to Embrace Change Gracefully and Find Purpose in Difficult Times · INSPIRE STORY

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  Speaker 1: When I lived as a monk, I was trying so
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  hard to be a monk, and now I've realized that
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  that's just one part of me. I love being a
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  messenger through media. I love being a thinker, I love
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  being a content creator. I love being so much more
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  than that, and that's such a big part of my identity.
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  It still is a massive part of my life. It's
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  the foundation of who I am, but it's.
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  Speaker 2: Not all of me.
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  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one
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  health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every
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  single one of you for learning, listening, and growing with
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  us every single week. Now you know that I'm always
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  trying to find new minds, new people, thought leaders who
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  have insights that can help me learn, listen, and grow,
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  and then I want to share that with you and
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  today's guest. When I first read about her, I was
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  blown away immediately, and I knew I had to in
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  the studio for this conversation, and so we finally are here.
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  She came all the way, she's with us in person.
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  I'm talking about none other than Maya Shanka. Now, for
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  those of you that don't know, she's the senior director
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  of Behavioral Economics at Google and is the creator, host,
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  and executive producer of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans,
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  where she interviews fascinating guests that I can't.
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  Speaker 2: Wait to talk to her about.
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  Speaker 1: She previously served as a senior advisor in the Obama
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  White House, where she founded and served as chair of
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  the White House's Behavioral Science Team, a team of scientists
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  tasked with improving public policy using research insights from human behavior. Maya,
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  thank you so much for being here. Your resume is phenomenal.
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  You have an incredible set of expertise. I secretly wish
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  I was a behavioral economist, so hearing that that comes
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  from my behavioral economics has been like my passion since
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  I was fifteen years old. And I'm not smart enough
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  to be one, but I get to sit with you
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  today and get it, pick your brain.
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  Speaker 2: So thank you for being here.
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  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.
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  Speaker 4: It's such a pleasure to be with you and to
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  be in person with you, which feels so special at
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  this point in time.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've already been talking offline and getting on
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  so anyone who's listening to this podcast, you're in for
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  a real tree. Maya is so warm, so relaxed. So
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  you have such a warm energy about yourself. I know
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  you were saying that about my wife, but you have
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  the same I.
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  Speaker 3: Need to tell your listeners.
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  Speaker 4: So knocked on the door and Rothy Jay's wife opens
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  the door, has no idea who I am. I'm with
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  my friend Madeline, and she greets us in absolutely the
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  warmest way. She's like, hello, welcome to my home. I
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  have no idea who you are, but I'm going to
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  be a feasive and warm anyway. And I was so
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  struck by her presence and that kind of energy. And
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  then of course you walk up the stairs and you
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  have exactly the same vibe. So I know why you
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  guys are married. It's very sweet with that in action.
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  Speaker 1: Well, we felt the same from you immediately as well,
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  and I feel like we're old friends already.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, in the way that we're talking.
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  Speaker 1: And I want I want to go back, because I
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  do want to use this as an excuse to get
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  to know you better. But let's go back to the
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  beginning of your journey. And I read that you were
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  off to become a really successful violinist, and that was
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  the path that you were on until you experienced an injury.
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  I want to hear about that journey, your fascination with music,
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  and tell us about how it all started out.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, So, when I was six years old, my mom
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  went up to her attic and brought down my grandmother's
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  violin that she had brought with her all the way
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  from India when she immigrated to this country. So it
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  was one of those few things that she carried with her.
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  And when I was six, she brought it down from
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  the attict and showed it to me, and she had
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  only meant for me to see it. She said, oh,
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  you know, I want you know this is this is
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  your party's instrument, right, that's how you say grandmother and
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  thumbl And I looked at it, and she noticed that
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  I was so quickly taken by the instrument. I very
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  quickly asked for a pint sized violin of my own,
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  and she went to the store and got me a
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  quarter sized violin. And I was infatuated. I mean, my
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  mom never had to tell me to practice.
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  Speaker 3: Every day.
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  Speaker 4: I'd rush home from school, go upstairs, open my instrument.
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  And I assure you, Jay, I didn't feel that way
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  about everything I was saying in school, but the violin
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  was something that just felt like it came so naturally
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  to me. And so when I was nine years old
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  and I was that classic kid with really big dreams
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  and no idea how to get there, my mom and
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  I were in New York. And now my parents have
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  no connections at this point into the classical music world.
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  And so, you know, my dad's a theoretical physicist. My
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  mom helps immigrants get green cards in this country. They
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  had no idea how to facilitate, you know, this transition
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  for me. But then my mom is such a fearless
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  go get her. So we're walking by the Juilliard School
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  of Music in New York one Saturday. I happened to
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  have my violin with me and she said, Maya, why
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  don't we just go in?
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  Speaker 3: Doan? Why don't we just go in? We don't have
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  an invitation, that's why we don't go in. That's nuts.
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  And she's like, let's just go in.
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  Speaker 4: Let's see what happens. What's the worst thing that can happen.
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  I was like, well, I'll tell you the worst thing
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  that can happen. I'm gonna get rejected and it's going
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  to be terrible. And my mom didn't care. She's like,
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  we're going in. So we walk into Juilliard uninvited, and
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  we stumble upon a fellow classmate and my mom says, hey,
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  would you mind if my daughter auditions for your teacher today.
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  I know, you know, we don't have the formal invitation,
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  but that would be wonderful. And they were so generous
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  and kind, and I auditioned for him and he assessed
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  me into a summer program, and then six months later
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  I auditioned for Juilliard and get accepted.
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  Speaker 3: Sow then amazing.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, my mom is She's taught me so many lessons,
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  but one of them was don't wait for you know
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  that silver plate, just create it right. And so that
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  began my journey of just being so in love with violin.
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  And when I was a teenager, it's a Peerlman asked
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  me to be as private violin student. And I'm sure
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  a lot of your listeners can relate to this, but
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  when you're a deeply competitive environment like Juilliard, you don't
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  really know if you have what it takes to succeed.
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  And so when Pearlman took me on as a student,
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  that was the vote of confidence that I needed. That like, oh,
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  maybe I do actually have what it takes. And so
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  I was even able to convince my parents that I should.
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  You know, I wanted to go pro and they were
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  finally like, okay, fine, you don't have to do the
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  liberal arts education and you can go to a conservatory
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  for college. So I had everyone on board, and then,
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  like you mentioned, when I was fifteen, I had a
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  son in hand injury, and basically overnight, doctors told me
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  that I could never play the violin again. And as
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  you can imagine, I was just completely despondent because the
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  violin had played such a formative role in my life
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  up until that point. I felt like I was first
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  and foremost of violinists, right, it was my identity. And
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  you know, there's this interesting insight from cognitive science which says,
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  which is about this concept called identity foreclosure and refers
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  to the fact that we can get really thick in
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  certain identities, especially in adolescence. I mean, it can carry
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  through into adulthood, but certainly an adolescence, and I felt
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  prey to that. I kind of felt like, for the
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  first time ever, I was asking all these existential questions
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  about myself, like who am I? You know who am
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  I without the violin I'd never thought to ask myself
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  that question before, and in many ways, having being forced
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  to pivot at that moment in my life has given
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  me a much more malleable sense of self, a much
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  more malleable identity. And I think that served me well
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  as i've you know, endured life twists and turns.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow, I mean I can't imagine what it feels
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  like to be that age and be told you can't
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  plan instrument again, and you know something that you've built
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  up such a close relationship with over nine years. I mean,
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  tell us about what you were feeling. How did it
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  affect your confidence? Because I'm guessing at that time as well,
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  when your identities wrapped up in being a performer or
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  being a violinist and you have this incredible mentor and
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  then that's taken away, what is that? What did that
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  feel like? And you know what did that kind of
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  push you towards? What changed about you at that point?
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I resisted it for a while.
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  I was the impatient teenager that was like, I'm going.
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  Speaker 3: To get through this. Damn those doctors. I don't care
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  what they say.
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  Speaker 4: Well, actually those doctors were super right, and I needed
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  to just have listened to them from the beginning. But
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  I think what it taught me was something very important,
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  which was it was much more stable and sturdy for
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  me to attach my identity not to a specific thing,
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  but to the traits of that thing that lit me up.
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  And so when I dug deeper, I realized, you know,
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  my child of brain thought, well, I love the violin.
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  I love the instrument, I love the way it feels,
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  I love the sounds that produce. But actually, Jay, the
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  thing that really got me ticking is the fact that
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  my instrument allowed me to forge a close emotional connection
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  with people almost effortlessly. So imagine I'm a kid right
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  nine years old. I could go on to a stage.
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  There's thousands of people in the audience that I've never
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  met before, they've never met me, and within moments, I'm
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  allowing them to feel something they've never felt before. We
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  have some sort of emotional intimacy and bond that's forming
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  between us just because of the music that I'm playing.
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  And I realize, like, well, that's what I'm actually passionate about.
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  Speaker 3: It's human connection.
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  Speaker 4: I mean, that's probably why I responded so much to
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  your warmth, right, because that's genuinely what makes me tick
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  in life is connecting with other human beings, trying to
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  understand what motivates them, what pains them, what brings them joy.
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  And I feel like that led me down this path
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  to studying the human mind in all of its intricacies,
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  the science behind the human mind, and in many ways
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  it led me to this new podcast. I've been creating
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  a slight change of plans where I have this license
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  now to go into a room and interview people like
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  Hillary Clinton and Tiffany Hattish and others and say, hey,
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  Hillary apropos of nothing, what is your biggest insecurity, what's
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  the hardest moment of your life? You know, you can
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  cut through all the pleasantries and just really dig deep.
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  Speaker 3: And I think when I look.
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  Speaker 4: Over the course of my life, that is the common thread.
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  It's this deep desire to emotionally connect with those around me,
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  and I just try to find that in other pursuits.
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  And you know, for those listening, I feel like, if
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  you're going through a hard time where you're being forced
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  to pivot, try to identify what features or traits of
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  things that you like and then try to engage in
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  an exploration to figure out where else they might exist
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  in other domains.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm so glad you raised that point. I think
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  that's so powerful. Like we get so obsessed with activities
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  and identity shaped around activities, and it's not about activities.
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  It's about the aspects, the subtle things, the role you
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  get to play, the relationship you have with that thing
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  that makes a difference. I often say to people, like
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  people think like your purpose is to be a speaker,
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  or your purpose is to be a podcaster, And it's like, well,
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  none of those are a purpose. They are vehicles and
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  they are platforms and their modes of sharing a message.
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  But the purpose is the reason why you do it
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  and your intention and what you put into it. I
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  think we all get so lost with like, well, what's
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  the activity that I want to do? So I love
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  how you broke that down and simplified that. But you
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  also gave me a few good You also gave me
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  a few good questions to ask you now based on
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  what you've been asking other people, So I'm going to
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  be using them on you.
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  Speaker 2: I was going in that direction.
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  Speaker 1: I wanted to know Since then, what do you think
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  is the most difficult experience you've personally gone through since then.
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  So that was obviously a big thing at fifteen sixteen,
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  What since then has been probably the biggest personal challenge
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  that you feel you've been faced with.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, in many ways, it's hard to identify
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  a discrete moment. I think the biggest challenge one faces
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  is growing into themselves. And I think for me, if
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  I were to summarize the biggest challenge in my own life,
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  it is.
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  Speaker 3: The acceptance of.
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  Speaker 4: Certain parts of my personality that I wish were different,
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  that I just need to be okay with and to
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  manage in life in spite of those things. Right, I'm
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  incredibly impatient. I want everything to have happened yesterday, and
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  that impatience can have lots of negative I mean, my
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  mom would always say when I was a kid that
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  she's like, before i'd know what you were running across
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  the street, you wouldn't wait for the light to turn.
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  She's like, I was always terrified something was going to
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  happen to you. So I've always seen my impatience as
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  being a negative thing. But then I think about the
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  parts of my life in which that impatience has really
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  served me well. So a good example of this is
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  so quick backstory. So, as I mentioned to you, I
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  discovered cognitive science and I ended up becoming an academic.
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  So I did my PhD, I did my postdoc and
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  cognitive neuroscience, and I remember there was this moment I
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  was in the basement of I was at Stanford at
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  the time, so I was in the basement of Ephormeri
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  Laboratory and I was scanning this guy's brain. I'd probably
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  been in this windowless room in the basement for about
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  five hours at this point. So he comes in and
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  within moments I'm peering into his brain, and I'm thinking
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  to myself, even my personality, I feel like the order
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  of operations is a little off here, Like I don't
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  know whether this guy has kids. I don't know what
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  he's passionate about. I don't know if he has children.
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  I don't know his favorite ice cream flavor. Is these
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  are important questions today. I don't know anything about him,
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  and yet I'm peering into his brain, which feels really intimate.
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  So i'me ever thinking to myself, I'm too social for this,
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  like I need to pivot in some way. And I
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  didn't know what to do, because what does a postdoc
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  and cognitive neuroscience do other than become an academic become
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  a professor. So I ended up talking with my undergraduate
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  mentor who I know, you know, Laurie Santos.
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  Speaker 2: I didn't realize that. Yeah, yeah, I did not know that.
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  I don't know how I miss that.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, she's one of my closest friends and has been
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  an incredible mentor to me ever since freshman year of college.
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  I can share the story having met at some point later,
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  but anyway, I call her out that I'm saying to her, Laurie,
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  So the thing I've been doing for the last time years,
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  I'm kind of in like a JK moment where I
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  no longer want to be doing this, But what the
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  hell do I do next? Should I try to become
• 14:07
  a general management consultant? Like, I don't understand what I
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  can do? So she tells me, Maya, there's this incredible
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  work happening in the White House right now where they
• 14:17
  are using insights from our field, from the science of
• 14:19
  decision making, and it is changing people's lives. So, for example,
• 14:24
  they are changing the default settings in this school lunch
• 14:28
  program that helps low income kids eat lunch every day,
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  and instead of it being an opt in program, they're
• 14:34
  making it an opt out program so that all eligible
• 14:36
  kids are automatically enrolled without the need for burdens and
• 14:39
  application or this stigma associated with signing up your kids
• 14:42
  for a public benefits program. And now parents only need
• 14:46
  to take a step if they want to actively unenroll
• 14:48
  their kids from the program. So, as a result of
• 14:50
  that change, twelve and a half million more kids we're
• 14:53
  eating school at lunch every day. So I'm thinking to myself,
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  So this gets to the impatient's face, right, and myself,
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  Oh my gosh, I want to have that job. But
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  that job doesn't exist. It just was worked, that was happening.
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  There's no role for a behavioral scientist. And so I
• 15:09
  go home that day and Laurie makes you know, some
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  connections for me, and you.
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  Speaker 1: Fly to DC and walk into the White House like
• 15:17
  you walked into Julia. That's that's what happens, right.
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  Speaker 4: It's actually pretty close to that day. I sent a
• 15:22
  cold email to an Obama advisor.
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  Speaker 3: He doesn't know who I am.
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  Speaker 4: I'm riding off the coattails of famous people like Laurie
• 15:28
  Santos and Cas Sunstein who wrote the book Nudge, and
• 15:31
  they're helping guide the way. But I basically interview with
• 15:35
  the White House official. Two days after I send this email,
• 15:38
  I moved to d C without.
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  Speaker 3: Having a formal offer letter.
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  Speaker 4: I remember I sold everything California other than my bike.
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  I signed a one year lease in DC, and I
• 15:46
  was like, I'm here whether you all like it or not,
• 15:49
  because I need to be here.
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  Speaker 3: So that impatience kicked in. And then it really.
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: Kicked in when I was at the White House, where
• 15:55
  I have this big, grand goal to build a team
• 15:57
  of behavioral scientists and I wasn't given a mandate or
• 16:00
  budget to do so. And that impatient personality really helped
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  me thrive there where I refuse to take no for
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  an answer.
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  Speaker 3: I push people every day.
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  Speaker 4: I was like, everyday matters in this administration, and look,
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  we did no idea what was coming next. But even
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  from that vantage point, you know, every every day mattered
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  so much.
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  Speaker 3: And so I feel like accepting the parts.
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  Speaker 4: Of myself that I haven't always liked and trying to
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  figure out if there are silver linings to those traits.
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  Like my husband and I will often do this even
• 16:30
  in our relationship, right where I'll be like, I'll be like, Jimmy,
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  you're being too much of a people pleaser, Like you
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  need to just say no to the person, and he'll
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  remind me. He'll be like, you know, Maya, The fact
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  that I can be a plea people pleaser sometimes does
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  make me a very loving husband. You know, I am
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  very kind of like, oh, you are really kind and loving.
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  You're so right, And so I think my husband Jimmy
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  has helped me. If we can do that with each other,
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  remind each other that traits are complicated and complex, and
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  they have pros and cons and we should give ourselves
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  the same compactity.
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  Speaker 3: You should.
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  Speaker 4: We should constantly remind ourselves. And he, you know, he
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  was teaching me by role modeling it with himself. I
• 17:07
  should remember that there are also some pros I love that.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Is he a beavoral economist too?
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: He's actually a software engineer?
• 17:13
  Speaker 5: Okay? Right?
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: Okay? I was just like, is he like, you know.
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  Speaker 3: She's very wise behavioral condoms at times? Can I can?
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  I ask you?
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  Speaker 4: That's the question though, is there a trait in you
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  where you didn't always embrace it, but you've learned over
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  time that there might be you know, No, it's.
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  Speaker 1: Really interesting when when I think about I'd have to
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  stop to think about it. If there's a trait I
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  feel that way about what When you started talking about that,
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  the first thing that came to my mind was and
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  I've been feeling this a lot lately, and I've been
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  talking about it. It's this idea of when I lived
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  as a monk, I was trying so hard to be
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  a monk, and now I've realized that that's just one
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  part of me. I love being a messenger through media.
• 17:55
  I love being a thinker, I love being a content creator.
• 17:58
  I love being so much more than that. Yeah, and
• 18:02
  that's such a big part of my identity. It still
• 18:05
  is a massive part of my life. It's the foundation
• 18:08
  of who I am, but it's not all of me.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: I'm an entrepreneur.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: I'm a married man, and I love being married, and
• 18:14
  I love being an entrepreneur, and I love strategy and marketing,
• 18:17
  and I love all these things which wouldn't You wouldn't
• 18:19
  think a monk likes all those things. And so it
• 18:22
  took me a lot of time to kind of unravel
• 18:25
  what that identity was where I saw myself as such
• 18:28
  a long part of my life or such a deep
• 18:29
  part of my life as a monk, and now to
• 18:32
  realize that's a part of me and not all of me.
• 18:35
  And I think, so I'm trying to think of a
• 18:37
  trait to give you a more specific answer. I think
• 18:40
  I've always been pretty self assured, and so I think
• 18:43
  I've turned stuff probably earlier than people would and that's
• 18:48
  either that's my illusion or delusion, and I'm okay with that.
• 18:51
  But i'd say that intensity. I always talk about intensity
• 18:54
  as one of my traits. I'm a very intense person.
• 18:56
  If I'm focused, I'm very laser focused, and that causes
• 19:00
  a lot of issues because.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: I can have a tunnel vision.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: I can be completely dedicated and obsessed with something and
• 19:07
  not care about everything else for that time. But I've
• 19:10
  also realized that's what helps me learn and grow quicker
• 19:13
  and accelerate and move forward. And so I actually think
• 19:16
  if you look at every one of your traits, you're right,
• 19:18
  you'll find a pro and a con for every trait
• 19:20
  we have exactly and you have to I think we.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: Have to learn how to.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Use them in a way that helps us serve ourselves
• 19:31
  and serve others, as opposed to use them in a
• 19:33
  way that forces other people to have to change. And
• 19:36
  I think that's the part. I think that's the part
• 19:38
  that I'm becoming more and more conscious of as a trait.
• 19:41
  Is the trait of being extremely focused on something shouldn't
• 19:48
  stop you from being aware of other people's feelings. And
• 19:51
  I think, if I can get that subtlety right, then
• 19:54
  then I'm going to win. Yeah, but if I don't
• 19:56
  have that subtlety, I've worked with so many clients that
• 20:00
  that's exactly the subtlety they didn't have, and then that
• 20:02
  led to destruction their families, their marriage, their personal lives,
• 20:06
  or whatever it may have been in the pursuit of
• 20:08
  greatness in a certain regard.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: It does make sense, And it's making me think too.
• 20:13
  As I'm listening to you share this with me, I think, well,
• 20:16
  of course you should embrace that, Jay, that's what makes you.
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: So special and unique and rare.
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: And of course there's a silver lining, like look at
• 20:24
  your life, look at the positive impact you've had on
• 20:26
  so many And what I'm realizing is that I so
• 20:28
  effortlessly see other people through that lens. But because I
• 20:33
  think as people, as humans, we're just so hard on ourselves.
• 20:36
  We rarely turn it around and say, well, why don't
• 20:39
  you view yourself with that same complexity? And maybe that's
• 20:42
  been the hardest thing I've gone through, is trying to
• 20:45
  use that same amount of compassion with myself.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if it's not our place to say, I
• 20:49
  also think it's the difference in gender and men and
• 20:52
  women too. I do think that I have male privilege
• 20:56
  in that you are just a bit more self assured
• 20:58
  and more confident because it's been reaffirmed, whereas from the
• 21:01
  studies I've read, and you could probably speak to this
• 21:02
  a million times more than I can, but women are
• 21:05
  more likely to look at a job description and think, oh,
• 21:06
  my gosh, I can't do seven out of those ten things,
• 21:09
  whereas a man will look at it and go, oh,
• 21:11
  but I could do three out of ten, that's good enough,
• 21:14
  and that kind of discrepancy. I don't know how you
• 21:15
  feel about that and how that affects it, but.
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I definitely.
• 21:19
  Speaker 4: I mean the studies are really compelling showing that there
• 21:21
  are disparities, and you know, it's reminding me nobody's immune
• 21:27
  to those effects, so I remember. So for my podcast,
• 21:30
  a slight change of plans, you know, the honor of
• 21:32
  interviewing Hillary Clinton. And what that interview taught me is
• 21:36
  that Hillary Clinton didn't come out of the box.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton.
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: She had to go through her own personal journey and
• 21:43
  development and also resolve a lot of the insecurities and
• 21:46
  anxieties that you and I are talking about right now.
• 21:48
  So I remember she was telling me. She was sharing
• 21:50
  this story about how she just left the White House
• 21:53
  as first Lady and she'd always been tethered to her
• 21:57
  husband's identity, right, that had been the role that she
• 22:01
  had played, and she was very productive in that role,
• 22:04
  but it wasn't her role. And she so fervently believed
• 22:08
  that women should run for offices and be in leadership
• 22:11
  positions and be in power. So she was motivating all
• 22:14
  these people around her to do that. And one day
• 22:17
  she was an event promoting women in sports, and this
• 22:22
  basketball player leaned down and whispered into her ear, dare
• 22:27
  to compete, missus Clinton, dare to compete? And she said
• 22:31
  she was astonished in that moment because no one had
• 22:34
  said it to her like that. But she realized, suddenly,
• 22:37
  maybe I'm too afraid to do the thing that I've
• 22:40
  been asking everybody else to do. Maybe I don't think
• 22:43
  I'm good enough. Maybe I don't know if I have
• 22:46
  what it takes and if people will like me and
• 22:48
  if I have the right presence for politics. And that
• 22:52
  was so powerful to hear from someone like her, you know, Wow,
• 22:56
  even Hillary at times felt this. And then to see
• 22:59
  where she's come from there, I mean, talk at that inspiring. Right,
• 23:02
  she was able to overcome all of that and go
• 23:05
  on to accomplish incredible things. And I think that experience
• 23:09
  showed me that we all have this kind of I mean,
• 23:13
  it sounds so cliche, but it's so true. It's like
• 23:15
  we all have some degree of self doubt and it's
• 23:17
  just a matter of finding ways to manage that and
• 23:20
  learning from other people's experiences.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, I want to I want to backtrack a bit
• 23:24
  to first of all, having South Asian parents and being
• 23:28
  encouraged to play the violin and go to Juilliard and
• 23:30
  then like, just your whole journey. I'm fascinated by your
• 23:34
  parents sound amazing. Tell us a bit about what it
• 23:37
  was like, Like, what did you feel that other children
• 23:41
  in the South Asian dasporo when caurage in the same direction,
• 23:44
  did you feel like an anomaly. I want to want
• 23:46
  to hear about how you felt on that journey because
• 23:48
  it's very unique.
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure whether other South Asian
• 23:52
  kids were following that journey at that time, a lot
• 23:54
  of South Asian because I grew up Yeah, I was
• 23:56
  going to say, I grew up in a primarily Caucasian
• 23:58
  Wow hometown and we were one of the few families
• 24:01
  of color anywhere.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: How did that feel like?
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Tell me a bit about that, because I think that
• 24:07
  the South Asian experience in England is very different than
• 24:10
  the South Asian experience in the US.
• 24:12
  Speaker 4: So yeah, I think I was so eager to assimilate
• 24:18
  everything from you know, I have like textured hair, and
• 24:21
  I remember going to a birthday party and all the
• 24:24
  girls with the smooth, shiny hair got got like the
• 24:27
  pretty scrunchies, and I was given a headband. I was
• 24:30
  like the one girl that didn't get I mean, clearly
• 24:33
  I'm over this jay.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: It's not like I still remember it laughing.
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: And I'm laughing that's the worst totally, But it's like
• 24:40
  these small things. I just so desperately wanted to be
• 24:46
  like the girls that I saw at school, and you know,
• 24:48
  my dad remembers when I'd write all these stories as
• 24:50
  a kid, I wouldn't use Indian names for my characters.
• 24:52
  It was always Catherine and Lindsay and Katie and you know.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: And so.
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: It took me a long time to really feel comfortable
• 25:02
  in my skin. And I think one thing that actually
• 25:05
  helped me on that front is well, one, I'm one
• 25:07
  of four kids, so I always felt a huge sense
• 25:09
  of tribalism, like it's my family against the world, you know.
• 25:13
  And my parents were always deeply proud of being Indian,
• 25:16
  and I loved that. I mean, especially looking back. You know,
• 25:19
  it's like, my mom is a brilliant chef. She made
• 25:22
  us amazing meals. At the time, I was like, we
• 25:24
  should just get pizza, and I'm like, oh my god.
• 25:25
  I had gourmet food in my home growing up. How
• 25:28
  could I not have appreciated it. So they were fiercely
• 25:30
  proud of being Indian. And while I rejected it as
• 25:34
  a child, I think I grew into it and then,
• 25:36
  you know, now I'm fiercely proud to be Indian.
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: And it's funny.
• 25:40
  Speaker 4: One of the jobs that I had right before grad
• 25:42
  school was working at Sesame Street, and I worked on
• 25:45
  the Indian version of the show, and yeah, there's an
• 25:48
  Indian version.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: And what I love about Sesame Street.
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: J A lot of people don't know that is that
• 25:52
  is that it changes young children's minds in ways that
• 25:58
  families can embrace. Example, in this was back in the day.
• 26:01
  I don't know the show, how the shows evolved, but
• 26:03
  in the South African version, the main Muppet character is
• 26:05
  HIV positive. She's always taking her medications on time. It's
• 26:08
  reducing the stigma around HIV. And then in Israel, the
• 26:12
  main Muppets one is an air of Muslim and ones
• 26:14
  that Israeli Jew and they're best friends and they both
• 26:16
  love hummus and they bond in all these ways. And
• 26:18
  in the Indian version, the main character, Chunky is always
• 26:22
  wearing her backpack, is committed to going to school. It's
• 26:24
  all about, you know, young girls thriving in school. And
• 26:28
  so what I did was I worked to domesticate the
• 26:32
  Indian version of the show so that families in the
• 26:34
  United States could have it, so that young kids growing
• 26:38
  up could feel the sense of pride that I wish
• 26:40
  I had felt as a youngster, but it only came later.
• 26:43
  So they could grow up hearing languages like Hindi in
• 26:46
  their homes and grow up seeing young kids, young muppets,
• 26:49
  eating Indian food, eating.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: With their hands, you know.
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: And so yeah, I mean it was a very interesting
• 26:55
  experience for my parents to come here. And you know,
• 26:58
  my older three siblings had a lot of exposure to
• 27:00
  bumb all our mother tongue. By the time I came around,
• 27:02
  you know, they were like, oh, I think the kids
• 27:04
  should just assimilate, you know, like, no, we're all just
• 27:06
  figuring this out for ourselves. But I did spend my
• 27:09
  graduate years in England.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: I did my.
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: Defail, and it did feel like the South Asian experience
• 27:15
  was very different there. So I don't know if anything
• 27:17
  I've shared resonates or doesn't resonate with your experience.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I think a lot of it does.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Actually, like the idea of, I think in your early
• 27:23
  years to kind of be embarrassed or shy or unconfident
• 27:27
  about your Indian experience. So like when my mom would
• 27:29
  make me an Indian lunch to take to school, like
• 27:31
  I would eat it in the corner and hope that
• 27:33
  no one could smell it or whatever. And now I
• 27:35
  feel the same as you do. My mom made amazing food,
• 27:38
  and you know, you're right with gourmet meals at home.
• 27:41
  And I was when you were saying that, all I
• 27:43
  was thinking was a Jossa and I'm a massive fan,
• 27:45
  and so I was, you know, but the idea of
• 27:48
  just like starting to understand the value of that culture
• 27:51
  and then sharing it out.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: But I love what you was sharing about Sesame Street.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: I didn't.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: I had no ideas. So I wish I had that
• 27:56
  to watch too.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: I didn't have any of that to watch when I
• 27:59
  was growing up, So I can imagine the impact of that.
• 28:03
  Us tell us about you know, you've been studying human behavior.
• 28:06
  That's your fascination, it's your deep passion. You've done it
• 28:11
  at the highest levels and are doing it at the
• 28:13
  highest levels. What's something that you've learned through that about
• 28:17
  human behavior that scares you about human It's like, what's
• 28:21
  something that's kind of like difficult or uncomfortable as a
• 28:26
  researcher to come across and then you're trying to figure
• 28:28
  out or reconcile how to hopefully aid it or cure
• 28:32
  it or help.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: A fascinating question.
• 28:34
  Speaker 4: I've never been asked that before, and it's such an
• 28:36
  important one to ask because we have to be honest
• 28:38
  about the human condition and human nature. I think the
• 28:42
  scariest thing, given the state of the research right now,
• 28:46
  is that while it can be easy to inspire behavior
• 28:50
  change in people, it is incredibly hard for people to
• 28:54
  change their minds. And I think as a culture, as
• 28:57
  a society, we are experience seeing this in spades right now,
• 29:02
  in a time when things feel incredibly divided and divisive,
• 29:06
  and you know, we can't even have a normal Thanksgiving
• 29:11
  dinner anymore, right, It's tragic. What I've learned is that,
• 29:16
  you know, we know that people can disagree even on
• 29:19
  empirical matters, right like is climate change real?
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: Or is the coronavirus reel?
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: Or does gun control reform actually reduce s gun deaths?
• 29:29
  And it's tempting for people who have a more empirical
• 29:33
  mind to think, well, I'll just give them more facts.
• 29:35
  This is just the result of an information gap, right.
• 29:38
  I can easily fill the gap just by showing them
• 29:40
  the data, showing them the evidence. But we know from
• 29:43
  research that this is missing a huge part of the puzzle.
• 29:48
  And the piece that's missing is people do not generate
• 29:52
  their attitudes and beliefs just based on facts. They generate
• 29:56
  their attitudes and beliefs about the world in part based
• 29:59
  on their membership to different groups and the values those
• 30:04
  groups hold. And so there's this really interesting study. It's
• 30:09
  actually from the fifties, and it involved controversial referee calls
• 30:13
  during a football game, and they had people who were
• 30:17
  fans of opposing teams watch this footage of these controversial calls,
• 30:22
  and even though they were watching exactly the same footage,
• 30:25
  their assessments of these calls vary considerably based on their
• 30:30
  group membership, based on their team loyalty. So those people
• 30:34
  who were fans of one team tended to feel like
• 30:38
  the unfair calls were in their direction and vice versa, right.
• 30:41
  And what's astonishing to me about that research, and the
• 30:45
  reason I mentioned it, is it's not like these folks
• 30:48
  are consciously aware, Oh, I know that I'm not able
• 30:51
  to be biased. I know that I'm seeing a warped
• 30:53
  version of reality.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: Of course not. This is their reality.
• 30:56
  Speaker 4: And it shows how potent these group memberships are that
• 31:00
  they can actually affect people's perception of reality. And so
• 31:05
  what that means in practice is that when it comes
• 31:08
  to bridging divides, we need to use different techniques than
• 31:11
  just throwing information at people. One of my favorite findings
• 31:16
  from behavioral economics to your point about whether we can
• 31:18
  ameliorate some of these concerns comes from a domain called
• 31:23
  moral reframing, and it's research that shows that it's much
• 31:28
  more effective to hold people's values as fixed and present
• 31:34
  an argument or present a position in ways that affirm
• 31:37
  those values rather than threaten them. So, for example, if
• 31:42
  you are trying to convince a conservative to care more
• 31:45
  about the environment, you might frame it as caring about
• 31:49
  the environment means preserving our nature's beauty, our natural beauty, right,
• 31:55
  it is patriotic to care about the environment. You're talking
• 31:59
  with a live you might focus on the fact that
• 32:01
  investing in climate change reform can actually help elevate those
• 32:06
  with socioeconomically underprivileged status, right, it can help them thrive.
• 32:11
  And so in both cases, it's the same policy objective.
• 32:15
  You're trying to get people to care about the climate,
• 32:18
  but you are taking to account what their existing value
• 32:21
  systems are. So if they don't feel that in agreeing
• 32:24
  with you, they're threatening their tribal membership. And that helps
• 32:29
  me build a lot of empathy for people right now
• 32:32
  because let's take the coronavirus.
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: Right, It's so easy to think it's just a mask, is.
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: Just a damn piece of cloth, Like, just wear one already,
• 32:40
  I promise you it'll make you safe. But when you
• 32:42
  look at it through the lens of psychology, through cognitive science,
• 32:46
  you realize wearing a mask for a person can carry
• 32:49
  huge symbolic significance and it could potentially threaten the relationships
• 32:54
  in their life that they hold most sacred. And so
• 32:57
  when you have that in mind, I just think it's
• 32:59
  the In general, I think studying the human mind is
• 33:02
  the greatest empathy builder that exists out there, because the
• 33:04
  minute you uncover why it is that a person has
• 33:07
  a particular belief, then there's an element of understanding that
• 33:12
  allows you to approach the person differently, and for them
• 33:14
  to approach you differently potentially, and for you to try
• 33:17
  to make to meet halfway.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. That was a beautiful answer,
• 33:21
  by the way, And you know, as scary as it is,
• 33:25
  you are right that the study of the human mind
• 33:27
  is potentially the only antidote, because then you start to
• 33:30
  see how you're caught in your own trap yourself, and
• 33:34
  I think that's the hardest part, as you're saying, with
• 33:36
  those fans, they couldn't see that they were being really
• 33:40
  biased or you know, that they were getting lost on
• 33:43
  one side because of their affiliation and they just couldn't
• 33:46
  see that, and not being able to see that, not
• 33:49
  being able to step back and be an observer and
• 33:51
  take the home jersey off, take the away jersey off,
• 33:55
  and just be the referee yourself. And that's almost like
• 33:59
  we need referee this, like you need to be able
• 34:01
  to see the game as hopefully an unbiased referee would
• 34:04
  to be able to truly make the right calls.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: Sorry, yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree with that.
• 34:10
  Speaker 4: And I also think the wonderful thing about being in
• 34:13
  my field is that it is serving up solutions and
• 34:17
  is giving us tactics that we can use in our
• 34:20
  day to day life when we converse with those we
• 34:22
  disagree with. So I was talking about this with Adam Grant,
• 34:26
  who I had on my podcast recently. I love Adam,
• 34:28
  a huge fan, He's wonderful. And I was talking about
• 34:32
  how I had interviewed Darryl Davis for my podcast, and
• 34:36
  Daryl Davis is a black jazz musician who was approached
• 34:40
  by a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he
• 34:42
  was performing at a bar one night and the guy
• 34:46
  at the bar said, Hey, I love your music, man,
• 34:49
  It's incredible. And then Daryl finds out that this man
• 34:52
  is from the Klan, and he starts to ask himself
• 34:56
  a series of questions like how is it that these
• 34:59
  people hate me without even knowing me? And so he
• 35:03
  ends up pivoting in his life, talk about a slight
• 35:05
  change of plans and ends up inspiring hundreds of people
• 35:10
  to leave white supremacy groups. And it's an astonishing story
• 35:16
  of how someone who has every card stacked against them,
• 35:21
  even in terms of personal safety, having these conversations, conducting
• 35:25
  these interviews with members of the Klan could find a
• 35:28
  way to penetrate their minds and ultimately get them to
• 35:31
  make one of the greatest leaps we can see in
• 35:33
  terms of mindset change, which is going from believing an
• 35:36
  absolute vitriol to turning their backs.
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: On the clan.
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: And what I loved about my interview with him Jay
• 35:43
  is that so much of what he was sharing is
• 35:46
  corroborated by the science, so we know when it comes
• 35:48
  to changing people's minds, certain tactics are very effective. You
• 35:52
  want to show genuine curiosity for why that person has
• 35:55
  their beliefs. You want to increase your question to statement ratio,
• 35:59
  So you're asking them, well, how did you arrive, you know,
• 36:02
  at this belief in the first place, and what evidence
• 36:05
  would in theory change your mind? What would you have
• 36:07
  to learn in order to think differently about this? And
• 36:10
  one reason I love that question is that it presupposes
• 36:12
  that they ought to be willing to change their mind
• 36:14
  in the face of evidence, which is not something we
• 36:16
  can always take for granted. And then there's other techniques,
• 36:19
  like you try to affirm that you're not questioning their morals,
• 36:23
  you're not questioning their values or their humanity. Over the
• 36:26
  course of the conversation, you're just simply trying to understand
• 36:29
  why it is that they believe in something. And I
• 36:31
  think the most powerful one, and this is something Daryl
• 36:33
  shared with me, is he doesn't like to say that
• 36:37
  he changed people's minds. He likes to say that he
• 36:39
  inspired them to change their own minds. And the science
• 36:44
  there corroborates that beautiful, poignant statement, which is you want
• 36:48
  to recruit their own sense of agency. You want to
• 36:51
  make them feel that it was them who decided to
• 36:54
  change their minds. You arm them with new perspectives, with information,
• 36:58
  with your own personal story, but let them wrestle with
• 37:01
  all that, and then the sturdiness of a mindset change
• 37:05
  that a person themselves inspires is far greater than trying
• 37:10
  to impose a set of beliefs on someone.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can agree more.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: I often find that when when we're presenting something to
• 37:17
  someone and they're not taking up to it, we think
• 37:19
  it's because of their weakness. Often it's our weakness in
• 37:23
  the presentation, right. It's like, if something's not been clearly
• 37:26
  articulated or presented to someone or in a way they
• 37:29
  can digest it, they may not remember it and they
• 37:32
  may not understand it. But the responsibility of that force
• 37:35
  so much more on those of us that feel we
• 37:39
  know and are sharing this new way.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: Or alternative path.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: And I found that so much so in you know,
• 37:45
  the work I do when I'm working with people on
• 37:47
  which effectively is changing their behavior.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: And I very early on a lot of.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: People would ask me, like, don't you get frustrated when
• 37:55
  someone doesn't start meditating after you've been telling them about
• 37:58
  meditation whatever? Maybe, like, I don't because I know how
• 38:01
  long it took me to start meditating.
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: I tell you now that I don't meditate, even though
• 38:05
  I know because I know you're going to be ethics.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, exactly, because it's just, first of all, I
• 38:10
  know how long it took me. Second of all, I
• 38:13
  know I know how hard it is. And I've seen
• 38:16
  this research on people's minds and I haven't done it,
• 38:18
  but I've seen it and read it, and I can
• 38:20
  also just recognize that I still haven't said something that
• 38:26
  lets the penny drop for them, right, Like I I
• 38:28
  there's somewhere where I need to go and then and
• 38:31
  usually what I found is it's not what I say
• 38:33
  or even what I do, it's an experience they need
• 38:36
  to have. And that's kind of the question I've always
• 38:38
  been asking, is what experience has this person not had
• 38:41
  yet that will help them change their mind? Because if
• 38:44
  they have that experience, then that's theirs. Kind of what
• 38:47
  you're saying, like, then that's theirs to keep. But if
• 38:50
  their experience is only through what I tell them, then
• 38:52
  that's not their experience.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: It's my experience.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: And so for me, it's always been about creating and
• 38:56
  facilitating experiences and experiments for people to help them get
• 39:01
  their own research and data in their own conclusion rather
• 39:04
  than saying or doing anything. And so I'm always fascinated
• 39:08
  by how you can use experiments and experiences to help
• 39:13
  people have a new you know, a newfound solution that
• 39:16
  they didn't even comprehend before. Yeah.
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: I love the way that you just said it. That's
• 39:19
  my experience, not theirs, and it reminds me. You know,
• 39:24
  one of the women that I interviewed for a slight
• 39:26
  change of plans, her name is Meghan Phelps Roper, and
• 39:28
  she grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. I don't
• 39:30
  know if you're familiar with this church, but it is
• 39:34
  the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think refers to them
• 39:36
  as the most rabid hate group in America. So they
• 39:39
  are homophobic, anti Semitic. Basically, they hte everybody who's not
• 39:43
  a member of the church, and they do abhorrent things
• 39:47
  like show up at military gay like gay military funerals.
• 39:51
  They wanted to protest the Sandy Hook shooting. I mean,
• 39:53
  it's horrible. And Meghan grew up in this church. Her
• 39:58
  grandfather was the founder, and she was absolutely indoctrinated. I
• 40:02
  mean she was steeped in the ideology from a very
• 40:05
  very young age, and she grew up to become one
• 40:07
  of those, one of their most ardent, vocal advocates for
• 40:11
  the church, and people engage end up engaging with her
• 40:16
  on Twitter actually in this very compassionate way that you
• 40:19
  and I've been talking about, where they tried to just
• 40:22
  help her understand that maybe there were a few holes
• 40:25
  here and there. That's how the you know, the very
• 40:26
  slow process, and they would reaffirm her humanity, and they
• 40:31
  would just point out some inconsistencies like the moral reframing
• 40:33
  stuff that I was saying. But they wouldn't say, Megan,
• 40:35
  what you believe is batchit crazy? They would say, you know,
• 40:38
  actually there's a few issues here and there, and what
• 40:41
  she says. So she ended up leaving the church in
• 40:43
  her mid twenties, which meant leaving her family behind and
• 40:47
  leaving basically everything she ever believed to be true behind.
• 40:50
  And I asked her this question, right, I said, how
• 40:54
  do you think about your family, right, and the fact
• 40:56
  that they haven't left, like what gives you hope? How
• 41:00
  do you think about your former self?
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 41:02
  Speaker 4: And she said, I don't try to detach myself from
• 41:06
  my former self, even though I disagree one million percent
• 41:10
  with what that former self was like, because I can
• 41:15
  then feel close to the person that I was and
• 41:18
  the person that I was with someone who is persuaded
• 41:20
  by absolutely terrible ideas and then one day saw the light.
• 41:24
  And that gives me hope that if my family experiences
• 41:28
  the same thing that I experience, if people treat them
• 41:30
  and exactly the way they treated me, maybe there's hope
• 41:33
  for them too. So it's exactly what you just described
• 41:37
  where she knows I can't just I'm not able to
• 41:39
  just tell them that this is wrong. But I'm hopeful
• 41:43
  because I saw that journey in myself. I am a convert,
• 41:46
  and so I believe that if I can just set
• 41:49
  up the right environments for them to get that kind
• 41:51
  of exposure, they could potentially leave to.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that idea of like people don't have a
• 41:57
  remote control that has the fast forward on life, so
• 42:01
  you can't see the future implications of your current action,
• 42:05
  and you can see around you, but it never feels you.
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: It never feels like it's about you.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: And so the reason why it resonates so strongly with
• 42:13
  me is because and we spoke about this a bit
• 42:15
  earlier before off line. But I was someone who experimented
• 42:19
  with a lot of drugs when I was young, but
• 42:21
  I never got addicted, obsessed, or never really got into
• 42:24
  doing something for a long period of time. And the
• 42:26
  only reason why that happened is I met one of
• 42:29
  my friend's aunt who was an addict, and I saw
• 42:32
  her have a fit in front of me, and it
• 42:36
  was such a traumatic experience where we thought she was
• 42:39
  going to die and she didn't, thankfully.
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: You know, we call the ambulance and everything.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: Else, but it was like it was such a like
• 42:46
  traumatic live event of seeing someone who was an addict
• 42:51
  to a particular substance to then go through that in
• 42:54
  front of us as young men, and for me to go, okay,
• 42:56
  I'm never messing around with this stuff ever again.
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: And it was like an epearence.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: And it's the same way I think about what you
• 43:01
  were saying earlier that facts don't work. Like we know
• 43:04
  every cigarette pack has the label, the label and it's
• 43:07
  never worked, Like you know, that doesn't stop people, But
• 43:10
  when someone loses someone in their life, or when someone
• 43:13
  hears about someone getting an unfortunate diagnosis because of one
• 43:17
  of their habits.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: It starts to change their mind.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Tell me about something that we talked about, traits that
• 43:23
  you've started to see both sides of.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Do you think that works for everything?
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: Or have there been certain behavioral changes you've made in
• 43:29
  your life that you felt just had to be transformations
• 43:32
  for you.
• 43:33
  Speaker 4: So I think for me, exercise has been the thing
• 43:36
  that I really had to introduce behavioral changes around because
• 43:41
  I've seen I almost don't do it for fitness reasons, Jay,
• 43:45
  I do it from my mind, and it is so
• 43:48
  powerful from my mind, like the days that I work
• 43:51
  out versus the days that I don't feel totally different
• 43:53
  to me. And I've actually used some behavioral change insights
• 43:59
  to motivate me to exercise, So I'll share one of
• 44:02
  those with you. It's an insight that was generated by
• 44:05
  my friend Katie Miltman, who's a professor who studies change,
• 44:10
  and it's called temptation bundling. And the logic behind this
• 44:13
  is to pair up an undesirable activity with a desirable activity,
• 44:19
  and you're only allowed to do the desirable activity if
• 44:23
  it accompanies the undesirable one.
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: So one of my favorite.
• 44:27
  Speaker 4: Things in life is to discover a new pop song Okay,
• 44:30
  I'm into all of it. Like Courus Taylor Swift, I
• 44:34
  guess Kasey Muskras isn't Pops. She's someone I interviewed my podcast,
• 44:37
  and I love her music, but she's you know, she's
• 44:39
  genre defying.
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: But I love discovering a new song.
• 44:42
  Speaker 4: But I know, because of the way the brain adapts,
• 44:45
  that I'll only get like thirty or forty really good
• 44:48
  listens out of a song before it becomes old hat, right,
• 44:52
  and so I save it. I only listen to these
• 44:56
  songs when I'm on the treadmill or on lifting weights,
• 44:59
  or I'm on the lift goal. And my poor husband
• 45:01
  because he'll be like, oh my gosh, we're cooking dinner,
• 45:03
  let's play the new Casey Muskra's album. And I'm like,
• 45:05
  but we do not play recreationally, Okay. It needs to
• 45:08
  be saved for these sacred moments when I'm working out.
• 45:11
  And so it's been wonderful to like, you know, even
• 45:14
  though I study change for a living, even though a
• 45:17
  behavioral economist, I fall prey to all the same human
• 45:20
  biases that we all fall prey to, of course, and
• 45:23
  so I'm using these strategies every single day in my
• 45:26
  life to try to optimize and reach some of these
• 45:29
  longer terms.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: I love that one.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: So wait, is there reasons that he says you're only
• 45:32
  going to get thirty to forty plays out of a song?
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: Is there reasons that goes, no.
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: This is just the Maya formula. I have no idea
• 45:37
  what it is for you, Jay. I think given you
• 45:40
  your Monk days, you're probably closer to like one hundred,
• 45:42
  because you'll see dimensions of the song that I can't
• 45:45
  possibly appreciate, giving your death and my relative superficiality. But
• 45:50
  for me, it's about thirty and then I've done That's.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: That is such a no. But you know that's brilliant.
• 45:55
  I love that.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: That is the most interesting, unique piece of advice that
• 45:59
  I think. You know that that's going to help so
• 46:01
  many people who I can imagine everyone now talking to
• 46:04
  their partner or their friend today going I turned that
• 46:07
  song off right now, like I'm only I'm only using
• 46:09
  it for those painful moments of life.
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: That's genius.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: I love that, And that's a Maya Shanka original special.
• 46:17
  I love that it's brilliant. Tell us a bit about
• 46:20
  what you're doing on a day to day basis. I find, like,
• 46:23
  you know, you have this role at Google and you're
• 46:26
  studying human behavior on a day to day basis. I
• 46:28
  find there's two questions here. The first question is, tell
• 46:31
  me what you do on a day to day basis
• 46:32
  what's fascinating about it? Because I have no idea what
• 46:35
  you do on a day today basis. The more the
• 46:37
  more interesting question for you probably will be the second one,
• 46:41
  which is what is an area that you think behavioral
• 46:44
  economists haven't really uncovered or understood yet? Because so when
• 46:48
  I've read books about behavioral science and behavioral economists, it's
• 46:52
  been about the relationship between money and human behavior, the
• 46:55
  relationships between everything from lying and stealing in human behavior
• 47:00
  through to you know about the different character traits or
• 47:03
  the idea of giving in service in human behavior. But
• 47:06
  I'm wondering, what's an area that you're fascinated to uncover
• 47:09
  and you think we're just scratching the surface on we
• 47:11
  don't actually know a lot about.
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that question.
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: I think one area, and this is actually something I
• 47:17
  was also talking about with Katie Milkman, is how durable
• 47:21
  some of these behavioral change insights are.
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, such a good question.
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: It's so hard because behavior change that's a one time thing,
• 47:30
  like the decision to sign up for retirement or get
• 47:33
  your COVID vaccine, or remember to call your mom on
• 47:36
  her birthday.
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: That's a maybe a once.
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: A year type of commitment or maybe a once in
• 47:41
  a lifetime type of commitment, and then you're done. And
• 47:44
  from a public policy perspective, we become excellent at this.
• 47:46
  So I remember when I was working in the Obama
• 47:48
  White House, I was able to work on a lot
• 47:51
  of these nudges where you shift just one thing and
• 47:55
  then the person's life potentially has changed forever. So I
• 47:58
  talked to you about the school lunch program. Make that
• 48:00
  one change, and now millions of kids are getting lunch
• 48:03
  at school every day. Or I worked with military service
• 48:05
  members in order to help them get enrolled in retirement
• 48:10
  savings plans. And again that's like a one time decision
• 48:13
  and then they're done. The ones that are much harder
• 48:15
  are the day to day behaviors where we have to
• 48:18
  build these habits over time and sustain those habits over time.
• 48:23
  And we just haven't cracked the nut fully on how
• 48:27
  to encourage long term behavior change on the things we
• 48:30
  value most. And that's because We're human, Jay, Right, We're fallible,
• 48:35
  we fall prey to temptation left and right. I mean,
• 48:38
  it's just very, very hard to be a highly disciplined person.
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: That's probably one of the reasons why you recommend everyone
• 48:45
  that they meditate, because I can help with sustained behavior change,
• 48:49
  but it would be wonderful to see additional innovations within
• 48:54
  that space.
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: I love hearing you say that, because I've found that,
• 48:59
  at least through my own mechanisms and work, I've kind
• 49:03
  of found like a trifecta that gets closest and the
• 49:06
  challenges that a lot of behavioral changes you said, is
• 49:09
  not around anything that is consistent. And so for the
• 49:13
  three levels that I've found that at least in my
• 49:15
  work that really do help people are coaching, consistency, and
• 49:18
  community that have a massive impact on people. And we
• 49:21
  built a program three years ago now that was centered
• 49:25
  around these three areas, and through our research and studies,
• 49:28
  we've been able to see how people have become happier,
• 49:31
  more successful, more financially free through the program. Yeah, and
• 49:34
  of course we're dealing with we're dealing with thousands of people,
• 49:36
  not millions of people in that program, but it's phenomenal
• 49:40
  to see how those three things together, coaching, consistency, and
• 49:43
  community are so powerful that coaching gives you that inside
• 49:46
  and advice. Consistency is the one I think is ignored
• 49:50
  in everything. It's like you said, you do that one
• 49:53
  nudge and that doesn't create a cascading life changing effect.
• 49:57
  And so that consistency of weekly check in and then
• 50:00
  finally the community aspect of having a group of people
• 50:03
  that you're doing it with has been so powerful. But yeah,
• 50:08
  tell me what you're doing on a day to day
• 50:09
  basis and what you're discovering and learning.
• 50:11
  Speaker 4: I think the consistency piece that you just mentioned is
• 50:14
  really interesting, and there is one potentially powerful antidote for
• 50:18
  this that comes out of behavioral economics research, and that's
• 50:20
  called the fresh start effect. And it's the idea that
• 50:24
  when we have these really big life changes, these big
• 50:28
  milestones like we move to another town, or we buy
• 50:32
  a home for the first time, or we get married,
• 50:34
  or we have kids, or we take a new job,
• 50:37
  those moments in time can serve as breaks from our
• 50:40
  past and all the habits that.
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: We used to have.
• 50:43
  Speaker 4: In many ways, we can take on a new identity
• 50:46
  in this new role. And what research shows is that
• 50:49
  people are far more effective at introducing a new kind
• 50:54
  of consistency or sustained behavior change when their surroundings are
• 50:58
  physically different. They don't have some the same cues and
• 51:01
  reminders every day that might inspire them to, you know,
• 51:03
  eat the chocolate cake versus the fruit salad. And their
• 51:06
  commute to work is different, so now maybe they're going
• 51:08
  to walk versus.
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: Take their car. And so I do believe in.
• 51:13
  Speaker 4: The power of fresh starts, and you don't as still
• 51:16
  have to wait for a major milestone. Sundays can serve
• 51:18
  as fresh starts, like certainly January first can serve as
• 51:21
  a fresh start.
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: Every Monday is a fresh stop for me. I'm one
• 51:24
  of those people to.
• 51:28
  Speaker 3: Day exactly.
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: But we found, for example that military service members, again
• 51:33
  this is work I was doing in the Obama White House,
• 51:34
  were more likely to sign up for retirement savings plan
• 51:37
  on the first day of Spring when they were reminded
• 51:39
  that it was a new beginning and a new start
• 51:41
  to their to their future lives. And so I really
• 51:44
  do believe that if if your listeners are struggling with
• 51:47
  that kind of consistency and are looking to build a
• 51:50
  new set of habits that that are aligned with their
• 51:51
  long term goals. Look out for that moment, those moments
• 51:54
  in your life where you're breaking from the past and
• 51:57
  you can re establish yourself and the kinds of behaviors
• 52:01
  that you aspire to associate yourself with can be more present.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can agree more.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: I think I've always used a new job or moving
• 52:09
  to a new town or joining a new group as
• 52:11
  being an opportunity to redefine my identity in that space
• 52:14
  of who I want to be. But yeah, no, the
• 52:17
  idea of just using I remember when I moved from
• 52:20
  So I got introduced to spirituality, like just on the
• 52:24
  cusp of leaving high school and going to college. And
• 52:27
  so college is where I got to redefine who I was,
• 52:30
  Whereas at high school I was a rebel and a
• 52:33
  troublemaker and all the rest of it. And then all
• 52:35
  of a sudden, I went to college and I was
• 52:36
  like the kid who meditated and everything else. And it
• 52:39
  was so great for me because I was no longer
• 52:42
  held down by that baggage of the identity I had
• 52:45
  crafted for myself where people expected me to be a
• 52:48
  certain way. And then, of course after leaving being a
• 52:51
  monk and coming back into the world. It was easier
• 52:54
  to always come back and be like, Oh, I don't
• 52:56
  go to that, or I don't drink, or I don't
• 52:58
  do this, because I'd had this life experience, whereas if
• 53:01
  I would have joined the corporate world before, maybe I
• 53:03
  would have had a very different experience. So I completely
• 53:07
  can relate to so much of that advice.
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I love seeing this insight play out in your life.
• 53:11
  I'm wondering, you know, when you went to college, was
• 53:13
  it a really intentional action to change, Like, yeah, seizing
• 53:17
  that moment it was.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: It was because I think I'd created such a role
• 53:21
  that I played at high school, where I was, like
• 53:24
  I said, the rebel, the troublemaker, the person who was
• 53:28
  a funny drunk, Like I just had a role that
• 53:30
  I'd created.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: It was a role. It wasn't me.
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: It was just just an identity that I enjoyed being
• 53:35
  because people enjoyed that version of me, and none of
• 53:40
  my and I took a gap year before I went
• 53:42
  to college, which was great because all my friends went
• 53:45
  off to their respective colleges and lived their first year
• 53:48
  lives and all the rest of it, and I went
• 53:50
  to a college where none of my school friends went,
• 53:52
  and so I had a complete blank slate where no
• 53:54
  one knew who I was and there was no history,
• 53:56
  and I could completely reframe who I wanted to become.
• 54:00
  And so I ran a philosophical society every week at college,
• 54:03
  and I meditated, and everyone would come to me to
• 54:07
  learn these skills and techniques I was learning from monks,
• 54:09
  and it was almost like I could be the person
• 54:12
  I wanted to be. And I think that helps so much.
• 54:14
  Speaker 4: You know, this reminds me of another insight from behavioral economics.
• 54:17
  It's called identity priming, and it refers to the fact
• 54:20
  that our behaviors often align with the identities, the social
• 54:24
  identities that we either associate ourselves with now or aspire
• 54:28
  to associate ourselves with. And I think your experience underscores
• 54:32
  the importance of, especially when you're young, not allowing people
• 54:36
  to give you labels, because the moment you're given a label,
• 54:39
  the rebel, the funny, drunk, whatever it is, you feel
• 54:44
  some degree of pressure to assimilate to that or to
• 54:48
  ensure that your behaviors are aligning with that identity day
• 54:51
  to day. In part is just to reduce cognitive dissonance
• 54:54
  within yourself, right, you want to believe that your identity
• 54:56
  means something and that you're living it out every day.
• 55:00
  You know, this was true in when I was talking
• 55:02
  with Darryl Davis, who says, you know, it's sometimes it's
• 55:04
  important to label behaviors as racist versus people as racist
• 55:09
  if you feel like they're redeemable, that they can change,
• 55:12
  because if you give people a label, they will carry
• 55:15
  that with them and it might not facilitate the same
• 55:17
  kind of change.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: And I remember when I was working with the re.
• 55:21
  Speaker 4: Entry population while at the White House, we were designing
• 55:24
  guides for people who were leaving prison, and you know,
• 55:28
  the transition back to civilian life can be a very
• 55:30
  challenging one, but it's also a fresh start in which
• 55:32
  we want people to tap into their best selves and
• 55:35
  reach their goals. And we were very careful in this
• 55:38
  guide book, this transition book, to not refer to people
• 55:42
  as former convicts or ex convicts or ex prisoners. Instead
• 55:46
  we called We made sure that the labels we were
• 55:49
  using were community members, job seekers. Those kinds of labels
• 55:55
  are forward looking. It can allow people to use those identities. So, yeah,
• 55:58
  it's just your personal experience transitioning from high school to
• 56:01
  college allows me to see how important it is that
• 56:03
  we just we don't let others label us, and we
• 56:05
  also don't label ourselves.
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and I love that.
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: I love that how simple, even when you were describing that,
• 56:12
  just hearing those words changes how you view that person,
• 56:15
  even for the new people that are going to get
• 56:16
  to meet them. And I think so many of us
• 56:18
  are carrying around old labels and old baggage and old
• 56:22
  identities that we don't want to be anymore. I think
• 56:24
  that means so many people are like, I don't want
• 56:26
  to be this person anymore, but all my friends think
• 56:28
  I'm this person. And so I love the idea of,
• 56:32
  you know, at least starting to test who we want
• 56:34
  to be in new phases of our life and new
• 56:36
  places of our life. You've mentioned the podcast throughout the
• 56:40
  conversation of these amazing conversations that you're having. Tell me
• 56:43
  about why you decided to start a podcast and why
• 56:47
  you called it a slight Change of plans because I
• 56:49
  love the title, but I want to know the reason
• 56:52
  for why you did that.
• 56:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it was part inspired by my personal
• 56:56
  experience with change, you know, losing the violin at a
• 56:58
  young age and ask myself all these existential questions about identity.
• 57:02
  It's in part inspired by my role as a cognitive scientist, right,
• 57:07
  someone who studies the mind, and I was eager to marry.
• 57:10
  You know, these two the narrative storytelling part of my
• 57:14
  life with the cognitive science part of my life. But
• 57:17
  the catalyst for this happened in twenty twenty and I
• 57:21
  was feeling really overwhelmed by the pace of change that
• 57:24
  was happening around me, and I know everybody was. It
• 57:26
  was this collective moment in the world where we all
• 57:29
  so acutely felt a loss of control. We realized how
• 57:33
  much of an illusion control is, and it was easy
• 57:37
  to feel intimidated. That would be the best word I
• 57:39
  could use to describe my state of mind as someone
• 57:42
  who loves planning and likes knowing how things are going
• 57:45
  to end out, and then also seeing all the tragedy
• 57:47
  around me and the racial upheaval like it was just
• 57:50
  a hard, very very hard time.
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: And then.
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: I tried to put on my cognitive science hat, and
• 57:58
  what I realized is, well, the specifics of what twenty
• 58:02
  twenty threw our way wasn't was absolutely unprecedented. Our human
• 58:06
  ability to navigate change is not. In many ways, our
• 58:09
  minds are built for change, and that's really important for
• 58:14
  us to recognize because, as you know, as a human civilization,
• 58:19
  we've done this rodeo many times before, this change thing.
• 58:24
  But there's no textbook out there with answers. It's not
• 58:26
  like in the throes of a huge life change you
• 58:28
  can go to your textbook and open it up to
• 58:30
  page ninety and be like, ah, yes, here's the path
• 58:32
  that I should take. And so I thought to myself,
• 58:36
  why don't I try to find people who have been
• 58:40
  through extraordinary change in their lives? Right, people like Tiffany
• 58:44
  Hattish and Hillary Clinton and Casey Musgraves and Tommy Caldwell
• 58:47
  and then just a bunch of people I've either heard
• 58:50
  about or met in my personal life and hear their
• 58:54
  reflections and try to mind their stories for insights and
• 58:57
  lessons that we as listeners can take back into our
• 59:01
  own lives that might help us think differently about change
• 59:04
  in our own lives. And it has been in absolute
• 59:09
  joy to make this podcast. I mean, I've never felt
• 59:12
  more closely aligned with something given who I am. Remember
• 59:14
  I told you about the basement of that ephor Mari lab.
• 59:16
  The podcast is the opposite.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: That is actually the.
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: Thing that I just I mean, I've fallen in love
• 59:21
  with it, and I think the reason is that you
• 59:25
  can meet people with two very similar sounding stories, but
• 59:29
  how they define their change moment will be radically different.
• 59:32
  The lessons that they learn will be radically different. And
• 59:36
  so I feel like, I mean this talk about eating
• 59:39
  a slice of humble pie. I have been so humble
• 59:43
  doing this podcast because my guests have taught me so
• 59:47
  much about change that I never would have appreciated absent
• 59:50
  listening to their stories, and it's been wonderful to go
• 59:53
  on this expedition with them about how it is people
• 59:56
  have navigated some of the toughest changes that you can
• 59:59
  imagine in life.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, absolutely, living or not living.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: Who'd be someone that you are fascinated about the amount
• 1:00:05
  of changes in their life for all those transitions in
• 1:00:08
  their life.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's always Oprah, but that's the obvious one.
• 1:00:11
  You know.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: What's interesting, Jay, is that when you meet someone, you
• 1:00:15
  don't always appreciate the full depth of their life stories.
• 1:00:17
  I'll give you one example. One of the people that
• 1:00:20
  I interviewed for this podcast. His name is Scott. He's
• 1:00:23
  just a friend and colleague of my husband's. I'd had
• 1:00:25
  dinner with him once back in twenty nineteen, and he
• 1:00:29
  is a self proclaimed health nut. So he sounds like
• 1:00:31
  you and Rabi now right, So he's vegan. He does
• 1:00:35
  intermittent fasting, he does high intensity interval training. He adds
• 1:00:39
  turmeric and chiass to like his food whenever possible. Now, look,
• 1:00:42
  we're both Indians, so we know that turmeric is a
• 1:00:45
  delicate spice. You do not pour it on anything. This
• 1:00:47
  guy is adding turmeric true food. So if it's in
• 1:00:50
  a book somewhere saying that something's healthy, he's done it.
• 1:00:55
  And then in twenty twenty, Scott got a stage four
• 1:00:59
  bone cancer diagnosed and within weeks he had to get
• 1:01:03
  his right leg amputated. He had to pack up his bags,
• 1:01:07
  moved to m d Anderson in Texas, do eighteen administrations
• 1:01:12
  of chemotherapy. He also had to get a vertebra removed
• 1:01:15
  from his spine, and I think his tibia was removed
• 1:01:18
  from his other leg. Scott's worst nightmare came true. He
• 1:01:23
  had literally spent his entire adult life trying to avoid
• 1:01:26
  this outcome. Now I talk to him, and I'm interviewing
• 1:01:31
  him for this podcast, and he's telling me he's in
• 1:01:34
  the throes of it all. When I'm interviewing him. He
• 1:01:37
  actually just finished up his treatment yesterday. He says to me,
• 1:01:42
  you know, Maya, my worst nightmare came true. But I'm
• 1:01:46
  sitting here in my backyard sipping a cup of coffee,
• 1:01:50
  and I'm realizing the emotional thermostat has prevailed. I am
• 1:01:55
  more or less as happy as I was before the diagnosis. Sure,
• 1:02:00
  the bad moments are worse, I'll give you that. Nause
• 1:02:03
  is intense, the pain is terrible. I have moments of fear,
• 1:02:07
  but the good moments are just as good. And he said,
• 1:02:10
  if I had known that I would respond this way psychologically,
• 1:02:15
  I would never have been as fearful of cancer as
• 1:02:17
  I had been in the first place.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: That's so stirring to me.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: And those are the kinds of insights that I carry
• 1:02:25
  with me, you know, because they give me hope and
• 1:02:29
  they make me understand just how resilient we are as people.
• 1:02:34
  Not everybody has Scott's story. You know, I'm not sure
• 1:02:36
  I would respond in that way. But he didn't think
• 1:02:38
  that he would respond in that way. And so I
• 1:02:41
  love it when a guy I just had dinner once,
• 1:02:44
  you know, I can have this kind of conversation with
• 1:02:46
  and he teaches me.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: He gives me so much wisdom.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: And another thing he shared with me is he said,
• 1:02:51
  you know, I put so much emphasis my identity was
• 1:02:54
  so intricately entwined with my fitness. Up until this point,
• 1:02:59
  I was smart fit. Scott like, those are the two labels.
• 1:03:03
  You know, it's like a Harvard grad and all that stuff.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: And he said, this.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 4: Whole experience is allowing me to see that maybe these
• 1:03:10
  traits that I saw is so core to my identity
• 1:03:14
  are more negotiable than I thought. He's the word negotiable,
• 1:03:18
  and I love that. He goes, yeah, maybe I can't
• 1:03:20
  do a handstand, but like I'm still Scott at the
• 1:03:22
  end of the day. And the final lesson that I learned, well,
• 1:03:26
  I learned so many lessons. One of the final lessons
• 1:03:28
  I learned from Scott's interview was he said, you know,
• 1:03:32
  MAYA would be a shame if my body deteriorated, my
• 1:03:34
  personality also got worse. So I'm going to use this
• 1:03:37
  to become a better person. And to me, that was
• 1:03:39
  a testament to the fact that this is a trade
• 1:03:40
  I see across all my guests is we are natural
• 1:03:45
  storytellers in our hearts. You know, no matter what your
• 1:03:47
  spiritual or non spiritual beliefs, it is just human nature
• 1:03:51
  to try to find meaning and silver linings in adversity
• 1:03:55
  and change, to almost justify the randomness of it all.
• 1:03:59
  And hearing Scott be so intentional about that growth and saying, look,
• 1:04:06
  I need to just make the best of it. I
• 1:04:09
  love that, and I think that's that's such a powerful story.
• 1:04:11
  So maybe to your earlier question, I think my dream
• 1:04:15
  guest is someone who just teaches me something new, helps
• 1:04:18
  me see the world through a different vantage point. You know,
• 1:04:21
  they don't have to be someone I've already heard of.
• 1:04:23
  I just love seeing the world through different lenses.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, I think that's a beautiful answer, and I'm so
• 1:04:29
  glad you shared that journey.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 5: I just.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: On Saturday I got the news that my best friend
• 1:04:36
  who was almost like my brother, who was a monk,
• 1:04:38
  he just passed away after suffering with colon cancer for
• 1:04:42
  four years, but it had spread far beyond his colin
• 1:04:44
  it was everywhere.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: So sorry and so he like, I don't know how many.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Cycles of Chimo yet at like thirty or something like that,
• 1:04:49
  and it was just every time it did feel it's
• 1:04:52
  gone away, it had gone somewhere else. And I got
• 1:04:57
  to speak to him on the phone about three days
• 1:05:00
  before he passed away, and I didn't know obviously, you
• 1:05:02
  never know. Yeah, And I got a message from one
• 1:05:05
  of the senior monks who was with him and said, oh,
• 1:05:07
  we're just talking about you, thinking about you, And so
• 1:05:10
  I called him straight away and it was like he'd
• 1:05:13
  gone to London for his treatment. He was like eleven
• 1:05:14
  forty pm in London and three forty pm here. So
• 1:05:17
  I called him up and I got to be on
• 1:05:19
  FaceTime with him, and he was like completely emaciated, like
• 1:05:22
  hunched over, but he was smiling, like he just had
• 1:05:26
  this massive smile on his face, and he was like
• 1:05:29
  that throughout his whole cancer journey. And I could tell
• 1:05:33
  that this was the worst I'd ever seen him, because
• 1:05:35
  up until every time i'd seen him, because he was
• 1:05:36
  taking treatment, he looked normal, as in not normal, that's
• 1:05:40
  the wrong word, but he looked his usual self. This
• 1:05:43
  was the first time I'd seen him completely, you know,
• 1:05:46
  emaciated and in bed, and he was just smiling away,
• 1:05:50
  and we were joking around and we were both telling
• 1:05:52
  each other stories and memories, and he'd lost his voice
• 1:05:55
  so he could only like really whisper, and the senior
• 1:05:58
  Monk knows us both so kind of helping speak for
• 1:06:01
  him and translate for him and add for him. And
• 1:06:03
  it was just remarkable to me to see someone at
• 1:06:08
  the end of their life be so blissful. And all
• 1:06:11
  I could see was bliss that when I spoke at
• 1:06:12
  his memorial yesterday, it was the most blissful memorial I've
• 1:06:16
  ever I was on zoom, of course everyone was there
• 1:06:18
  in person in England, but it was the most blissful
• 1:06:21
  memorial I've ever been to because that was him. And
• 1:06:24
  that's from what you're saying about Scott, it sounds like
• 1:06:27
  a very similar energy of how to deal with this.
• 1:06:30
  And you know, while he was at cancer, he was
• 1:06:33
  he was leading charity initiatives to raise funds for cancer,
• 1:06:36
  raised awareness for cancer. He was organizing meditation retreats for
• 1:06:39
  cancer patients that were struggling with him so that they
• 1:06:42
  could all grow together because that's what he was doing.
• 1:06:44
  He was extending his practices out to them. Yeah, and
• 1:06:47
  he just lived with so much purpose in the last
• 1:06:49
  four years and so much service in the last four years.
• 1:06:52
  And yeah, that kind of mind is just unbelievable and phenomenon.
• 1:06:57
  Like you said, he's not famous, he doesn't have follow us, no,
• 1:06:59
  no who he is. He's not having impacts on millions
• 1:07:02
  of people's lives. But everyone who knew him would say
• 1:07:05
  that he changed their life.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what an honor.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, best friend.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was very lucky to you know, he was
• 1:07:13
  kind enough to be my best bud for a few years.
• 1:07:17
  But anyway, when you talk about Scott, I love that
• 1:07:18
  answer because I think it's so true that there were
• 1:07:22
  just so many people in the world who are going
• 1:07:24
  through enormously difficult things and hearing their stories gives us
• 1:07:28
  so much faith.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and in part I almost see my responsibility as
• 1:07:32
  uncovering the hidden stories. There's one there's one interview I
• 1:07:37
  did just just recently. It was with a guy named Morgan.
• 1:07:41
  He was assigned female at birth, and he went through
• 1:07:46
  hormone therapy to align his body with his true gender identity,
• 1:07:50
  which is male. And for a while, Morgan is feeling
• 1:07:57
  intoxicated by the joy and liberation that comes from being
• 1:08:00
  read from his female body. He's a black man, and
• 1:08:03
  he said his joy was punctured when he was confronted
• 1:08:07
  with the harsh reality of what it means to be
• 1:08:09
  a black man in society. And his first confrontation with
• 1:08:12
  this was literally being pulled over by the police in
• 1:08:15
  his grandmother's driveway.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: And it's an incredibly.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 4: Insightful, thought provoking set of reflections from Morgan because not
• 1:08:30
  only does he share what it means to have gone
• 1:08:32
  through this transition and you know, embrace his himself, but
• 1:08:39
  he ends up joining the force, he ends up becoming
• 1:08:41
  a police officer and with the goal to reform it.
• 1:08:47
  And again, those are the kinds of those are the
• 1:08:50
  kinds of stories that I live for, you know, and
• 1:08:53
  I want to hear them because I feel like, you know,
• 1:08:56
  we talked earlier about how being a cognitive scientist to
• 1:08:59
  me is like the greatest empathy builder. Well, if you
• 1:09:02
  marry the science with storytelling, it's an unbeatable combo in
• 1:09:05
  terms of empathy building and just understanding the full range
• 1:09:09
  of human experience. And yeah, I guess you can probably
• 1:09:14
  see it in my face. People can't see it, But
• 1:09:16
  I just love obsessed with having these interviews because I
• 1:09:20
  do feel like every single one I learn, it's not
• 1:09:23
  even that I learned something new. I learn a new
• 1:09:27
  way of interpreting the world around me. It's a perspective shift.
• 1:09:31
  And that's I'm sure you find that when you when
• 1:09:33
  you interview different people, is it changes the perspective with
• 1:09:35
  which you look at the world. And that's an incredible
• 1:09:37
  gift to be given.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's totally unpredictable. Like when we started this conversation,
• 1:09:42
  I felt different to when I first read about you,
• 1:09:46
  and it's different to when now we're coming to the
• 1:09:49
  end of our conversation. It's like we can have so
• 1:09:51
  many perceptions about someone and what we expect to learn
• 1:09:54
  from them. Yea, And I can honestly say that, sitting
• 1:09:57
  with you for the past hour, this has been a
• 1:10:00
  unexpected conversation in a good way. And I'm like, I
• 1:10:03
  think that's the power of getting to listen to stories
• 1:10:05
  and listening to people and getting to meet people that
• 1:10:08
  you'd never meet before or otherwise, because I think we're
• 1:10:11
  so good at and I guess that's where beaval science
• 1:10:15
  is so interesting, because we do have to box people
• 1:10:17
  to make sense of stuff, but then we need to
• 1:10:19
  unbox them to actually make sense of them. Like it's
• 1:10:22
  a weird paradox, right, Like we always put people in
• 1:10:25
  the categories so that we can make decisions, but then
• 1:10:29
  we need to get them out of those to really
• 1:10:31
  deeply understand them. And so, you know, I wasn't expecting
• 1:10:34
  that our conversation would go down the journey that it has,
• 1:10:37
  but that's what's so beautiful about it. Yeah, and so yeah,
• 1:10:40
  I want to I want to thank you for you know,
• 1:10:44
  doing your podcast. For those of you who haven't listened
• 1:10:47
  to it, go and check out A slight Change of Plans.
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 5: Uh.
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: It's it's beautiful to hear these stories that you've even
• 1:10:53
  been sharing with us on the podcast. And I can't
• 1:10:55
  wait for my audience oct to go and listen to
• 1:10:57
  some of these conversations. I know I'm going to do
• 1:10:59
  that because it's sounds like you're just speaking to some
• 1:11:01
  people who and in a way that you know is
• 1:11:04
  going to be really insightful for people's changing growth but
• 1:11:07
  also for their heart.
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: And I think that's what I love.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: I what I love about you from the little time
• 1:11:12
  that we've spent together is that it feels like you
• 1:11:14
  bring a lot of heart to science and that's rare,
• 1:11:18
  Like it's it's very rare. I feel like you're bringing
• 1:11:21
  your heart into how to help people change how they think.
• 1:11:25
  And so, you know, storytelling is one thing, but heartful
• 1:11:28
  storytelling is is even a deeper step.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 5: So you do.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 4: So that's so kind and generous of you to say,
• 1:11:33
  and such a compliment too, because my hope is that
• 1:11:37
  I really can marry you know, science and humanity, I
• 1:11:43
  guess right. I mean they're obviously really interconnected. But that
• 1:11:47
  has been my goal with a slight change of plans,
• 1:11:48
  and it's kind of been.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: My goal living.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 4: You know, it's like, how do I bring my heart
• 1:11:53
  to as many things as I possibly can. So it
• 1:11:56
  was such a pleasure to get to talk with you.
• 1:11:58
  J I'm such a huge fan of your show, and
• 1:12:00
  I'm just I'm just so grateful for the opportunity.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: So thank you.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you, Mike. Well, we're not done yet. We
• 1:12:04
  end every interview the final five. So this is the
• 1:12:08
  fast five round, where every question has to be answered
• 1:12:10
  in one word or one sentence maximum a sentence, I believe,
• 1:12:15
  or at least I've made this up as seven words maximum,
• 1:12:17
  So I don't know if that's real or not but.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 2: Seven to ten words maximums. So this is your fast five. Maya.
• 1:12:23
  Your first question is what is the best advice you've
• 1:12:26
  ever received?
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 3: Find amazing mentors?
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: Great?
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: I love that. That's a good one.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: And you've shared so many wonderful examples of mentors that
• 1:12:34
  you've had in your life, absolutely and the amazing impact
• 1:12:37
  they've had on you. I'm going to destroy my rules here,
• 1:12:40
  but it's important to do that. How do people find
• 1:12:43
  good mentors?
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: Teach us that?
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: Because you know, I have my own own thoughts on
• 1:12:48
  this and I share that a lot with my audience,
• 1:12:50
  but I'd love to hear your perspective on how people
• 1:12:52
  can find good mentors.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a good question. I've never done it intentionally.
• 1:12:57
  I've always slipped into the mentee role almost without realizing it.
• 1:13:01
  But my mentors have played a profound role in my
• 1:13:05
  life and the way that it happened. In case this
• 1:13:07
  is helpful to folks is I'm always searching for people
• 1:13:11
  that I admire and whose life I would love to lead,
• 1:13:16
  you know, and who's who bring that kind of heart
• 1:13:20
  to things, because that's something that speaks to me personally
• 1:13:23
  for me, Maya, right, And then when I find those
• 1:13:26
  people like Laurie Santos.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: I just I cling to them, you know, I say, Oh, Laurie, like,
• 1:13:35
  you know, addition to you mentoring me, Can I work
• 1:13:38
  in your lab? Can we get coffee? Can you actually
• 1:13:40
  be my life while I'm friend?
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 5: You know?
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 4: And I think as I've gotten older, one way to
• 1:13:46
  do that more effectively is I've just always I mean,
• 1:13:50
  everyone has different philosophies on this, but I've always blurned.
• 1:13:52
  I've always blurred the line between colleague and friend. And
• 1:13:57
  it's irresistible for me. I can't not bring that really
• 1:14:02
  personal side of myself to my work, no matter what
• 1:14:05
  it is that I'm working on.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: It's funny.
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 4: There was a quick anecdote just sorry from my time
• 1:14:09
  in Obama's White House. So the government had just shut down,
• 1:14:12
  and there are all these ethics rules about the fact
• 1:14:14
  that we couldn't hang out in our quote professional capacity,
• 1:14:18
  we could only hang out in our personal capacity because
• 1:14:21
  otherwise we'd be violating federal rules. But we were just planning.
• 1:14:24
  We were you know, we were all very friendly and
• 1:14:26
  we just wanted to hang out as friends. So I
• 1:14:29
  was joking with folks. I was like, ah, I can't
• 1:14:30
  wait for all of you guys to see me in
• 1:14:32
  my personal capacity, and you know, one of my friends
• 1:14:35
  best is like, oh, Maya, you're exactly the same, and
• 1:14:37
  then another one of my friends goes, we're still waiting
• 1:14:40
  to see Maya in her professional capacity. So I think
• 1:14:43
  that says everything, which is I've blurred that line, and
• 1:14:46
  I think one ends up happening is I just like
• 1:14:48
  naturally ended becoming friends with the people I admire, and
• 1:14:51
  then I find that they can be that they have
• 1:14:54
  been just wonderful mentors. But it's always been I know
• 1:14:58
  this might be unsatisfying for listeners to be like, oh,
• 1:15:00
  why did it have to be an organic process for you?
• 1:15:01
  May I want the like one, two, three checklist, But
• 1:15:04
  I think that's kind of the only way particulel genuine.
• 1:15:07
  You know, you really want to be friends with them
• 1:15:09
  because you're genuinely curious about the way they think and
• 1:15:11
  the way that they live.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that, and I love that that's your authentic,
• 1:15:16
  genuine way that it's happened.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: That's beautiful.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: I think one of the most amazing things for me
• 1:15:21
  is that I genuinely believe you can be mentored by
• 1:15:23
  people you've never met and So I've spent my life
• 1:15:26
  studying the lives, the words, the teachings of so many
• 1:15:29
  people that I admire that are no longer alive, and
• 1:15:33
  simply sitting with their biographies and their autobiographies and listening
• 1:15:36
  to every interview and watching every TV show they went
• 1:15:40
  on or whatever they did, just looking at the records
• 1:15:42
  of their life. There's oftentimes where I'll sit there and
• 1:15:45
  be like, well, what would that person do with? There
• 1:15:47
  is an answer, It's somewhere there. And I've loved that
• 1:15:51
  because I would have loved to been mentored by Martin
• 1:15:53
  Luther King or Steve Jobs or some of these people
• 1:15:55
  that I never got to meet. And I can be
• 1:15:59
  mentored by the people met them, or I can be
• 1:16:01
  mentored by them through their own lives if I studied
• 1:16:04
  them deeply enough. And of course I agree with you
• 1:16:07
  that I'd say any mentors that I've had in reality
• 1:16:10
  have not been calculated decisions. It's I agree with you,
• 1:16:14
  It's always been very natural. So I love that you
• 1:16:17
  actually reminded me of something. I'm totally going off, but
• 1:16:20
  your fast fire has changed. You reminded me of someone.
• 1:16:23
  You asked me that question about what trait has changed,
• 1:16:25
  and you said something there that actually triggered something you
• 1:16:27
  said asking people to be my lifelong friend. So I've
• 1:16:32
  always been very much warm, my heart on my sleeve
• 1:16:34
  kind of person. I've always been that way because my
• 1:16:37
  Mum raised me that way, and I always was honest
• 1:16:39
  with people, and often you were. You know, often when
• 1:16:42
  you're like that as a teenager, it's not a strength.
• 1:16:44
  It's seen as a weakness, like you're weird, or you're strange,
• 1:16:47
  or you're you're needy, or you're desperate or whatever it
• 1:16:50
  may be. And I never let go of it because
• 1:16:52
  I realized I would rather say what I really want
• 1:16:54
  to say to someone and then let it be whatever
• 1:16:57
  the result is, versus not tell them the truth and
• 1:17:01
  then realize we could have been best friends.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: And so till this day, I've.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: Got some of my closest friends in my life who
• 1:17:09
  when I got to know them, the first thing I
• 1:17:10
  said them was like, I really want to be friends
• 1:17:12
  with you.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 2: As a I a thirty year old man.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 4: My gosh, I love that I do the same thing.
• 1:17:17
  I think it takes people with back then, I'm like, look,
• 1:17:20
  I may as well just be straightforward.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 3: You can say no total I do this all the time.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: I'm so okay with someone saying no, And actually I
• 1:17:26
  feel like I'm getting a much more honest take on
• 1:17:29
  like whether this is going anywhere. And now I'm not
• 1:17:32
  living in the wood. I could have should have whatever
• 1:17:34
  I'm living in. Okay, Well it didn't.
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 2: Work and that's cool.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm so much more happier with that sense
• 1:17:40
  of closure. And now we're talking about relationships. But it's like,
• 1:17:43
  I'm so much happier with having honest, transparent conversations rather
• 1:17:48
  than this idea in my head that so anyway, you
• 1:17:51
  that was the trait. I think that I've learned to
• 1:17:53
  really see as a strength and not see as a weakness.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 4: And you know, so I think I have something very
• 1:17:59
  similar which I used to see my openness maybe as
• 1:18:03
  weakness or something like that, because I am so open
• 1:18:06
  with the people in my life that I love, even
• 1:18:10
  about just my affections for them. Right Like, I'll probably
• 1:18:12
  be writing you like a long email after this, being
• 1:18:15
  like Jay, You're so amazing and it's all heartfelt, and
• 1:18:18
  I sometimes felt like, Wow, you're so open, and it
• 1:18:23
  was so interesting. I was at a wedding this weekend
• 1:18:25
  and I was talking with one of my cousins. She
• 1:18:28
  was like, wow, Maya, you really ask these like deep
• 1:18:31
  questions of people. And my sister in law waded in
• 1:18:34
  and she said, but Maya always gives you her full
• 1:18:36
  self in return, she gives you that depth back. And
• 1:18:40
  I thought that was such a lovely thing to say,
• 1:18:41
  because I do feel like in reinterpreting that openness as
• 1:18:45
  a weakness, I've seen it as well. Actually, it's amazing
• 1:18:48
  to be able to share so much of yourself with
• 1:18:49
  someone else and hope that they can return that in
• 1:18:52
  whatever capacity they're comfortable sharing themselves.
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 2: Totally, totally. I love that.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: I'm going to make that now the second question, I
• 1:18:59
  ask you, what's the uh? What do you think is
• 1:19:02
  a wonderful question to ask someone to evoke a connection
• 1:19:07
  and create a relationship with someone, if you if you
• 1:19:10
  had your favorite question to ask in an interview or
• 1:19:12
  your favorite question to learn about someone. We're on the
• 1:19:14
  second question, So yeah, you can.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: You can? You can turn seven words?
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, what have you changed your mind about? And
• 1:19:20
  then if I had nine words, I think that was
• 1:19:22
  seven I'm not.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: Sure and why okay, beautiful, all right, bad question? What
• 1:19:26
  have you changed your mind about.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 3: And why sounds a little bit metap but it's totally true.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 4: I've changed my mind about why it is people believe
• 1:19:35
  the things they do, and that's been in studying the
• 1:19:37
  science of why it is that people believe the things
• 1:19:40
  they do, and I've always felt hits on some of
• 1:19:44
  the themes we talked about earlier that if we can
• 1:19:46
  fully understand why, then we can generate the how how
• 1:19:52
  do we change their minds? Given that if we think
• 1:19:55
  it's important for them to change their minds, and what
• 1:19:58
  is the why?
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 5: Usually?
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: Where where's that come? Where do you think you see
• 1:20:02
  the patterns of why people think the way they do?
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it relates a lot to the Darryl
• 1:20:10
  Davis story, and it relates a lot to what I
• 1:20:13
  was sharing about tribal membership, which is, at the end
• 1:20:17
  of the day, I think one of our most primal
• 1:20:19
  human instincts is we want to feel like we belong
• 1:20:22
  to something that's bigger than ourselves, to a community, a group,
• 1:20:27
  something that validates us and where we feel an implicit
• 1:20:30
  sense that values are shared, that there's commonality and understanding that.
• 1:20:36
  I mean, it sounds so simple. Oh, of course, some
• 1:20:39
  of my beliefs would be informed by my group membership.
• 1:20:41
  But if you really think about it, that does run
• 1:20:44
  counter to a lot of people's intuition about how it
• 1:20:47
  is that we generate our beliefs, and so I feel
• 1:20:51
  like once you understand that that it's this human desire
• 1:20:55
  to belong, you can then tailor make better solutions that
• 1:21:01
  don't feel aggressive or confrontational or threatening in any way.
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: I love that beautiful.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: All right question, I'm before, what's the first thing you
• 1:21:10
  do in the morning and the last thing you do
• 1:21:11
  before you go to bed?
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: Brush my teeth? So boring, but I do.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 2: It's needed.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 3: It is needed, you know hygiene.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: You have great teeth. Yeah, uh, you know.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 4: It's usually it's usually eating a snack before before I
• 1:21:31
  go to bed, which is I mean, you'll probably tell
• 1:21:32
  me it's a terrible.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what would be the snack? I'm intrigued.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: I try to make it healthy. It's just gosh.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 4: I was telling my friend battle another way over, like
• 1:21:44
  I get I would I wouldn't call it hanger. I'd say,
• 1:21:48
  I get heritable. If I can make that up, you
• 1:21:51
  just made it up. I get heritable. And no one
• 1:21:55
  likes me when I'm heritable. I don't like me when
• 1:21:56
  I'm heritable, so I just feel like I just need
• 1:21:59
  something to take a little bit of the hunger edge off,
• 1:22:02
  so I'll have some sort of evening sexol.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: I like I'm very heritable as well, and so is
• 1:22:07
  my wife. When we know when we're heretable, for sure, I.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 3: Just need to eat a bigger dinner.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: That's the key.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 4: I know I'm not supposed to be right for bedtime,
• 1:22:14
  but I definitely can't fall asleep when I'm hungry.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: That's very hard for me.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: That makes sense, all right.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: Fifth and final question, And seeing as you worked in
• 1:22:23
  public policy, I think this will be fun. If you
• 1:22:25
  could create one law that everyone in the world had
• 1:22:28
  to follow, what would it be?
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 3: Smile at everyone you see on the street.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: That beautiful.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 4: There is a lot of research showing how these small
• 1:22:38
  moments that strangers share can have profound impacts on well
• 1:22:43
  being and happiness and a feeling.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: Of connectedness and whether or not I'm having a good day.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 4: Make I make a self commitment to smile at everybody
• 1:22:54
  that I see when I'm just taking a walk, acknowledge
• 1:22:57
  them in some way or another. And it's been hard
• 1:23:00
  with COVID and mass and whatnot. But those moments brighten
• 1:23:03
  my day. I hope they brighten the people that I'm
• 1:23:06
  smiling at. And yeah, I just think I think the
• 1:23:10
  world would be a much happier place if we could
• 1:23:12
  all find it within ourselves to just to just do
• 1:23:14
  that small thing.
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: I love that. That's beautiful. Thank you so much.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: That's such a great answer, Eva Maya Shanka. Please please
• 1:23:21
  please go and listen to a podcast. We will put
• 1:23:23
  the link in the description below and the comments. It's
• 1:23:26
  been such a joy sitting with you. Honestly, I could
• 1:23:28
  talk to you for aaris and Amazon and I really
• 1:23:31
  do hope we get to spend a lot more time
• 1:23:32
  together you too, And it's been such a wonderful connection.
• 1:23:36
  I totally this conversation has gone in so many new
• 1:23:39
  different directions that I know we haven't even started uncovering.
• 1:23:42
  But I'm really really excited to get to know you
• 1:23:45
  more and excited for my audience to connect with you
• 1:23:47
  more as well.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: So thank you so much.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: And everyone's been listening or watching wherever you are, make
• 1:23:52
  sure that you tag us both on Instagram to let
• 1:23:54
  us know your biggest insights takeaways, any of the stories
• 1:23:57
  or studies that stood out to you, and please please
• 1:24:00
  leave a review as well and let me know that
• 1:24:03
  you heard this podcast specifically and how it moved you.
• 1:24:06
  Thank you so much everyone for listening and watching Amaya.
• 1:24:09
  Thank you so much for sharing so wonderfully.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 4: Thanks so much for having me Jay. I appreciate your
• 1:24:14
  time and I appreciate you so thank you, Thank you
• 1:24:16
  so much.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 5: If you want even more videos just like this one,
• 1:24:20
  make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here.
• 1:24:23
  I'm also excited to let you know that you can
• 1:24:25
  now get my book, Think Like a Monk from Thinklike
• 1:24:29
  a monkbook dot Com.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 2: Check below in the description to make sure you order today.