Maya Shankar, Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google and former White House Behavioral Science Advisor, discusses how human behavior is driven by identity, group membership, and psychological biases rather than pure rationality. She explains that people resist changing their minds because beliefs are deeply tied to their sense of belonging and self-identity, as demonstrated by research showing fans perceive identical events differently based on team loyalty. Effective behavioral change requires moral reframing—presenting arguments that affirm people's existing values rather than threatening their tribal memberships—and creating fresh starts by leveraging major life transitions to break old habits. Shankar emphasizes that sustained behavioral change is difficult because humans are fallible and prone to temptation, requiring strategies like temptation bundling (pairing desirable activities with undesirable ones) and building consistency through community support. Her journey from violinist to behavioral scientist illustrates how forced pivots can reveal deeper life purposes when we attach identity to underlying traits rather than specific activities.
Embracing Change and Finding Purpose: A Behavioral Scientist's Guide
Added:when i lived as a monk i was trying so hard to be a monk and now i've realized that that's just one part of me i love being a messenger through media i love being a thinker i love being a content creator i love being so much more than that and that's such a big part of my identity it still is a massive part of my life it's it's the foundation of who i am but it's not all of me [Music] hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you for learning listening and growing with us every single week now you know that i'm always trying to find new minds new people thought leaders who have insights that can help me learn listen and grow and then i want to share that with you and today's guest when i first read about her i was blown away immediately and i knew i had to have her in the studio for this conversation and so we finally are here she came all the way she's with us in person i'm talking about none other than maya shankar now for those of you that don't know she's the senior director of behavioral economics at google and is the creator host and executive producer of the podcast a slight change of plans where she interviews fascinating guests that i can't wait to talk to her about she previously served as a senior advisor in the obama white house where she founded and served as chair of the white house's behavioral science team a team of scientists tasked with improving public policy using research insights from human behavior maya thank you so much for being here uh your resume is phenomenal you have an incredible set of expertise i secretly wish i was a behavioral economist so i'm hearing that that comes from my behavioral economics has been like my passion since i was 15 years old and i'm not smart enough to be one uh but i get to sit with you today and get to pick your brain so thank you for being here oh my gosh thank you so much for having me it's such a pleasure to be with you and to be in person with you uh which feels so special at this point in time yeah and we've already been talking offline and getting on so anyone who's listening to this podcast you're in for a real tree uh maya is so warm so uh relaxed so just just such you have such a warm energy about yourself i know you were saying that about my wife but you you have the same i need to tell your listeners um so knocked on the door and ravi jay's wife opens the door has no idea who i am um i'm with my friend madeline and she's greets us in absolutely the warmest way she's like hello welcome to my home i have no idea who you are but i'm going to be effusive and warm anyway and i was so struck by um her presence and and that kind of energy and then of course you walk up the stairs and you have exactly the same vibe so i know why you guys are married it's very sweet to see that in action well we felt the same from you immediately as well and i feel like we're old friends already yeah in the way that we're talking and i want to go back because i do want to use this as an excuse to get to know you better uh but let's go back to the beginning of your journey and i read that you were off to become a really successful violinist and that was the path that you were on until you experienced an injury i want to hear about that journey your fascination with music and tell us about how it all started out yeah so when i was six years old my mom went up to her attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had brought with her all the way from india when she immigrated to this country so it's one of those few things that she carried with her and when i was six she brought it down from the addict and and showed it to me and she'd only meant for me to see it she said oh you know i want you know this is this is your potty's instrument right that's how you say grandmother and thummel and um i i looked at it and she noticed that i was so quickly taken by the instrument um i very quickly asked for a pint-sized violin of my own and she went to the store and got me a quarter-sized violin and i was infatuated i mean my mom never had to tell me to practice every day i'd rush home from school go upstairs open my instrument and i assure you jay i didn't feel that way about everything i was studying in school but the violin was something that just felt like it came so naturally to me and so when i was nine years old and i was that classic kid with really big dreams and no idea how to get there my mom and i were in new york and now my parents have no connections at this point into the classical music world um and so you know my dad's a theoretical physicist my mom helps immigrants get green cards in this country they had no idea how to facilitate you know this transition for me um but then my mom is such a fearless go-getter so we're walking by the juilliard school of music in new york one saturday i happen to have my violin with me and she said maya why don't we just go in what do you mean why don't we just go in we don't have an invitation that's why we don't go in that's nuts and she's like let's just go in let's see what happens what's the worst thing that can happen i was like well i'll tell you the worst thing that can happen i'm gonna get rejected and it's gonna be terrible and my mom didn't care she was like we're going in so we walk into juilliard uninvited and we stumble upon um a fellow classmate and my mom says hey would you mind if uh my daughter auditions for your teacher uh today i know you know we don't have the formal invitation but that would be wonderful and they were so generous and kind and i auditioned for him and he accessed me into a summer program and then six months later i auditioned for juilliard and get accepted so wow yeah my mom is she's taught me so many lessons but one of them was don't wait for you know that silver plate just create it right um and so that began my journey of just being so in love with violin and when i was a teenager itzhak perlman asked me to be his private violin student and i'm sure a lot of your listeners can relate to this but when you're in a deeply competitive environment like juilliard you don't really know if you have what it takes to succeed and so when perlman took me on as his student that was the vote of confidence that i needed that like oh maybe i do actually have what it takes and so i was even able to convince my parents that i should you know i wanted to go pro and they were finally like okay fine you don't have to do the liberal arts education you can go to a conservatory for college so i had everyone on board and then like you mentioned when i was 15 i had a son-in-hand injury and um basically overnight doctors told me that i could never play the violin again and as you can imagine i was just completely despondent because the violin had played such a formative role in my life up until that point i felt like i was first and foremost a violinist right it was my identity and you know there's this interesting uh insight from cognitive science which says uh which is about this concept called identity foreclosure and refers to the fact that we can get really fixed in certain identities especially in adolescence i mean it can carry through into adulthood but certainly in adolescence and i fell prey to that i kind of felt like for the first time ever i was asking all these existential questions about myself like who am i you know who am i without the violin i'd never thought to ask myself that question before and in many ways um having being forced to pivot at that moment in my life has given me a much more malleable sense of self a much more malleable identity and i think that's served me well as i've you know endured life's twists and turns yeah wow i mean i can't imagine what it feels like to be that age and be told you can't play an instrument again and you know something that you've built up such a close relationship with over nine years i mean tell us about what you were feeling how did it affect your confidence because i'm guessing at that time as well when your identity is wrapped up in being a performer or being a violinist and you have this incredible mentor and then that's taken away what is that what did that feel like and you know what what did that kind of push you towards what what changed about you at that point yeah it's a fantastic question um i resisted it for a while i was the impatient teenager that was like i'm gonna get through this damn those doctors i don't care what they say well actually those doctors were super right and i needed to just have listened to them from the beginning but i think what it taught me was something very important which was it was much more stable and sturdy for me to attach my identity not to a specific thing but to the traits of that thing that lit me up and so when i dug deeper i realized you know my child brain thought well i love the violin i love the instrument i love the way it feels i love the sounds it produce but actually jay the thing that really got me ticking is the fact that my instrument allowed me to forge a close emotional connection with people almost effortlessly so imagine i'm a kid right nine years old i go onto a stage there's thousands of people in the audience that i've never met before they've never met me and within moments i'm allowing them to feel something they've never felt before right we have some sort of emotional intimacy and bond that's forming between us just because the music that i'm playing and i realized like well that's what i'm actually passionate about it's human connection i mean that's probably why i responded so much to your warmth right because that's genuinely what makes me tick in life is connecting with other human beings trying to understand what motivates them what pains them what brings them joy and i feel like that led me down this path to studying the human mind in all of its intricacies right the science behind the human mind and in many ways it led me to this new podcast i've been creating a slight change of plans where i have this license now to go into a room and interview people like hillary clinton and tiffany haddish and others and say hey uh hillary apropos of nothing um what is your biggest insecurity what's the hardest moment of your life you know you can cut through all the pleasantries and just really dig deep and i think when i look over the course of my life that is the common thread it's this deep desire to emotionally connect with those around me and i've just tried to find that in other pursuits and you know for those listening i feel like if you're going through a hard time where you're being forced to pivot try to identify what features or traits of things that you like and then try to engage in an exploration to figure out where else they might exist in other domains yeah i'm so glad you raised that point i think that's so powerful like we get so obsessed with activities and identities shaped around activities and it's not about activities it's about the aspects the subtle things the the role you get to play the relationship you have with that thing that makes a difference i i often say to people like people think like your purpose is to be a speaker or your purpose is to be a podcaster and it's like well none of those are a purpose they are vehicles and they are platforms and their modes of sharing a message but the purpose is the reason why you do it and your intention and what you put into it i think we all get so lost with like well what's the activity that i want to do so i love how you broke that down and simplified that but you also gave me a few good uh you also gave me a few good questions to ask you now based on what you've been asking other people so i'm going to be using them on you i was going in that direction i wanted to know since then what do you think is the most difficult experience you've personally gone through since then so that was obviously a big thing at 15 16.
what since then has been probably the biggest personal challenge that you feel you've been faced with yeah i mean in many ways it's hard to identify a discreet moment i think the biggest challenge one faces is growing into themselves and i think for me if i were to summarize the biggest challenge in my own life it is it is the acceptance of certain parts of my personality that i wish were different that i just need to be okay with and to manage in life in spite of those things right um give me an example i'm incredibly impatient i want everything to have happened yesterday and that impatience can have lots of negative i mean my mom would always say when i was a kid that she's like before i know it you were running across the street you wouldn't wait for like the light to turn she's like i was always terrified something was going to happen to you so i've always seen my impatience as being a negative thing but then i think about the parts of my life in which that impatience has really served me well so a good example of this is um so quick backstory so as i mentioned to you i discovered cognitive science and i ended up becoming an academic so i did my phd i did my postdoc in cognitive neuroscience and i remember there was this moment um i was in the basement of i was at stanford at the time so i was in the basement of fmri laboratory and i was scanning this guy's brain i'd probably been in this windowless room in the basement for about five hours at this point so he comes in and within moments i'm peering into his brain and i'm thinking to myself given my personality i feel like the order of operations is a little off here like i don't know whether this guy has kids i don't know what he's passionate about i don't know if he has children i don't know what his favorite ice cream flavor is these are important questions jay i don't know anything about him and yet i'm peering into his brain which feels really intimate so i remember thinking to myself i'm too social for this like i i need to pivot in some way and i didn't know what to do because what does the postdoc in cognitive neuroscience do other than become an academic become a professor so i ended up talking with my undergraduate mentor who i know you know laurie santos i didn't realize that yeah yeah so she was like i love laura i did not know that i don't know how i missed that yeah she's one of my closest friends and um has been an incredible mentor to me ever since freshman year of college i can share the story how we met at some point later but anyway um i call her up and i'm i'm saying to her uh laurie so the thing i've been doing for the last 10 years i'm kind of in like a jk moment where i no longer want to be doing this but what the hell do i do next should i try to become a general management consultant like i don't understand what i can do so she tells me maya um there's this incredible work happening in the white house right now where they are using insights from our field from the science of decision making and it is changing people's lives so for example they are changing the default settings in this school lunch program that helps low-income kids eat lunch every day and instead of it being an opt-in program they're making it an opt-out program so that all eligible kids are automatically enrolled without the need for a burdensome application or this stigma associated with signing up your kids for a public benefits program and now parents only need to take a step if they want to actively unenroll their kids from the program so as a result of that change 12 and a half million more kids were eating school at lunch every day so i'm thinking to myself um so this gets to the impatience piece right thinking to myself oh my gosh i want to have that job um but that job doesn't exist it just was work that was happening there's no role for a behavioral scientist and so i go home that day and uh i laurie makes you know some connections for me and you fly to dc and walk into the white house like you walked into julia that's that's what happens right it's actually pretty close to that day i sent a cold email to an obama advisor he doesn't know who i am i'm riding off the coattails of famous people like laurie santos and cass sunstein who wrote the book nudge and they're helping guide the way um but i basically interview with the white house official two days after i send this email i moved to dc without having a formal offer letter i remember i sold everything in california other than my bike i signed a one-year lease in dc and i was like i'm here whether you all like it or not because i need to be here so that impatience kicked in and then it really kicked in when i was at the white house where i had this big grand goal to build a team of behavioral scientists and i wasn't given a mandate or budget to do so and that impatient personality really helped me thrive there where i refused to take no for an answer i push people every day i was like every day matters in this administration and look we had no idea what's coming next but even from that vantage point you know every every day mattered so much and so i um i feel like accepting the parts of myself that i haven't always liked and trying to figure out if there are silver linings to those traits like my husband and i will often do this even in our relationship right where i'll be like i'll be like jimmy you're being too much of a people pleaser like you need to just say no to the person and he'll remind me he'll be like you know maya the fact that i can be a people pleaser sometimes does make me a very loving husband you know i am very kind i'm like oh you are really kind and loving you're so right and so i think my husband jimmy has helped me if we can do that with each other remind each other that traits are complicated and complex and they have pros and cons and we should give ourselves the same compa you know we should we should constantly remind ourselves um and he you know he was teaching me by role modeling it with himself um i should remember that there are also some pros i love that is he a behavioral economist too he's actually uh a software engineer okay right okay i was just like where is he like you know but he's very wise i feel like he is a behavioral economist at times can i can i ask you that same question though which is is there a trait in you where you didn't always embrace it but you've learned over time that there might be a you know it's a double exposure no it's really interesting when i think about i i have to stop to think about if there's a trait i i feel that way about when you started talking about that the first thing that came to my mind was and i've been feeling this a lot lately and i've been talking about it's this idea of when i lived as a monk i was trying so hard to be a monk and now i've realized that that's just one part of me i love being a messenger through media i love being a thinker i love being a content creator i love i love being so much more than that yeah and that's such a big part of my identity it still is a massive part of my life it's it's the foundation of who i am but it's not all of me i'm an entrepreneur i'm a married man and i and i love being married and i love being an entrepreneur and i love strategy and marketing and i love all these things which wouldn't you wouldn't think a monk likes all those things and so it took me a lot of time to kind of unravel what that identity was where i saw myself for such a long part of my life or such a deep part of my life as a monk and now to realize that's a part of me and not all of me yeah and and i think so i'm i'm trying to think of a trait to give you a more specific answer i think i've always been pretty self-assured and so i think i've turned stuff probably earlier than yeah people would and that's either that's my illusion or delusion and i'm okay with that but yeah i'd say that intensity i always talk about intensity as one of my traits i'm a very intense person if i'm focused i'm very laser focused i and that causes a lot of issues because i can have tunnel vision i can be completely dedicated and obsessed with something and not care about everything else for that time but i've also realized that's what helps me learn and grow quicker and accelerate and move forward and so i i actually think if you look at every one of your traits you're right you'll find a pro and a con for every trait we have exactly and and you have to i think we have to learn how to use them in a way that helps us serve ourselves and serve others as opposed to use them in a way that forces other people to have to change and i think that's the part i think that's the part that i'm becoming more and more conscious of as a trait is the trait of being extremely focused on something shouldn't stop you from being aware of other people's feelings and i think if i can get that subtlety right then then i'm gonna win yeah but if i don't have that subtlety i've worked with so many clients that that's exactly the subtlety they didn't have and then that led to destruction their families their marriage their personal lives or whatever it may have been in the pursuit of greatness in a certain regard does that make sense it does make sense and it's making me think too as i'm listening to you share this with me i think well of course you should embrace that jay that's what makes you so special and unique and rare and of course there's a silver lining like look at your life look at the positive impact you've had on so many and what i'm realizing is that i so effortlessly see other people through that lens but because i think as people as humans we're just so hard on ourselves we rarely turn it around and say well why don't you view yourself with that same complexity yes and maybe that's the that's been the hardest thing i've gone through is trying to use that same amount of compassion with myself yeah and and if it's not our place to say i also think it's it's the difference in gender and men and women too i do think that i have male privilege in that you are just a bit more self-assured and more confident because it's been reaffirmed whereas from the studies i've read and you could probably speak to this a million times more than i can but women are more likely to look at a job description and think oh my gosh i can't do seven out of those ten things whereas a man will look at and go oh but i could do three out of ten that's good enough and that kind of discrepancy i don't know how you feel about that and how that affects it but yeah no i definitely i mean the studies are really compelling showing that there are disparities and um you know it's reminding me nobody's immune to those effects so i remember so for my podcast a slight change of plans you know i had the honor of interviewing hillary clinton and what that interview taught me is that hillary clinton didn't come out of the box hillary clinton she had to go through her own personal journey and development and also resolve a lot of the insecurities and anxieties that you and i are talking about right now so i remember she was telling me she was sharing this story about how she just left the white house as first lady and she'd always been tethered to her husband's identity right um that had been the role that she had played and she was very productive in that role but it wasn't her role and she so fervently believed that women should run for offices and be in leadership positions and be in power so she was motivating all these people around her to do that and one day she was an event promoting women in sports and this basketball player leaned down and whispered into her ear dare to compete mrs clinton dare to compete and she said she was astonished in that moment because no one had said it to her like that but she realized suddenly maybe i'm too afraid to do the thing that i've been asking everybody else to do maybe i don't think i'm good enough maybe i don't know if i have what it takes and if people will like me and if i have the right presence for politics and that was so powerful to hear from someone like her yeah you know wow even hillary at times felt this and then to see where she's come from there i mean talk about inspiring right she was able to overcome all of that and um go on to accomplish incredible things and i think that experience showed me that we all have this kind of i mean it sounds so cliche but it's so true it's like we all have some degree of self-doubt yeah and it's just a matter of finding ways to manage that and learning from other people's experiences absolutely i want to i want to backtrack a bit to first of all having south asian parents and being encouraged to play the violin and go to juilliard and then like just your whole journey i'm i'm fascinated by your parents sound amazing you're wonderful tell us a bit about what it was like like what did you feel that other children in the south asian diaspora were encouraged in the same direction did you feel like an anomaly i wanna i wanna hear about how you felt on that journey because it's very unique yeah i mean i'm not sure whether other south asian kids were following that journey at that time because i grew up yeah i was going to say i grew up in a primarily caucasian wow um hometown and we were one of the few families of color anywhere um how did that feel with like tell me a bit about that because i think that the south asian experience in england is very different than the south asian experience in the u.s so yeah i i think i was so eager to assimilate everything from you know i have like textured hair and i remember going to a birthday party and all the girls with the smooth shiny hair got got like the pretty scrunchies and i was given a headband it was like the one girl that didn't get i mean clearly i'm over this jay it's not like i still remember it i don't know i'm laughing and i'm laughing that's the worst totally but it's like these small things um i just so desperately wanted to be um like the girls that i saw at school and you know my dad remembers when i'd write all these stories as a kid i wouldn't use indian names for my characters it was always katherine and lindsay and katie and you know and so um it took me a long time to really feel comfortable in my skin and i think one thing that actually helped me on that front is well one i'm one of four kids so i always felt huge sense of tribalism like it's my family against the world you know um and my parents were always deeply proud of being indian and i loved that i mean especially looking back you know it's like my mom is a brilliant chef she made us amazing meals at the time i was like we should just get pizza and i'm like oh my god i had gourmet food in my home growing up how could i not have appreciated it um so they were fiercely proud of being indian and while i rejected it as a child i think i grew into it and then you know now i'm fiercely proud to be indian and it's funny one of the jobs that i had right before grad school was working at sesame street and um i worked on the indian version of the show no way and yeah there's an indian version of what i love about sesame street jay a lot of people don't know that i love it is that it changes young children's minds um in ways that families can embrace so for example in this was back in the day i don't know the show how the show's evolved but in the south african version the main muppet character is hiv positive she's always taking her medications on time it's reducing the stigma around hiv and then in israel the main muppets one is an arab muslim and one's the israeli jew and they're best friends and they both love hummus and they bond in all these ways and in the indian version the main character chumky is always wearing her backpack she's committed to going to school it's all about you know young girls thriving in school and so what i did was um i worked to domesticate the indian version of the show so that families in the united states could have it so that young kids growing up could feel the sense of pride that i wish i had felt it as a youngster if it only came later so they could grow up hearing languages like hindi in their homes and grow up seeing young kids young muppets eating indian food eating with their hands you know um and so yeah i mean it was a very interesting experience for my parents to come here and you know my older three siblings had a lot of exposure to thumbel our mother tongue by the time i came around you know they were like i think the kids should just assimilate you know like no everywhere we're all just figuring this out for ourselves um but i did spend my graduate years um in england i did my my d fill uh and it did feel like the south asian experience was very different there so i don't know if any anything i've shared resonates or doesn't resonate with your experience yeah no i i think a lot of it does actually like the idea of i think in your early years to kind of be embarrassed or shy or unconfident about your indian experience so like when my mom would make me an indian lunch to take to school like i would eat it in the corner and hope that no one could smell it or whatever and and now i feel the same way as you do my mom made amazing food and you know i you're right we had gourmet meals at home and i'm i was when you were saying that all i was thinking it was josiah i'm a massive fan you know but the idea of just like starting to understand the value of that culture and then sharing it out but i love what you were sharing about sesame street i didn't i had no idea so i wish i had that to watch too i didn't have any of that to watch when i was growing up so i can imagine the the impact of that tell us about you know you've been studying human behavior that's your fascination it's your it's your deep passion you've done it at the highest levels and are doing it at the highest levels what's something that you've learned through that about human behavior that scares you about humans like what's something that's kind of like difficult or uncomfortable as a researcher to come across and then you're trying to figure out or reconcile how to hopefully aid it or cure it that's a fascinating question i've never been asked that before and it's such an important one to ask because we have to be honest about the human condition and human nature i think the scariest thing um given the state of the research right now is that while it can be easy to inspire behavior change in people it is incredibly hard for people to change their minds and i think as a culture as a society we are experiencing this in spades right now in a time when things feel incredibly divided and divisive and um you know we can't even have a normal thanksgiving dinner anymore right it's tragic what i've learned is that you know we know that people can disagree even on empirical matters right like is climate change real or is the coronavirus real or does gun control reform actually reduce gun deaths and it's tempting for people who have a more empirical mind to think well i'll just give them more facts this is just the result of an information gap right i can easily fill the gap just by showing them the data showing them the evidence but we know from research that this is missing a huge part of the puzzle and the piece that's missing is people do not generate their attitudes and beliefs just based on facts they generate their attitudes and beliefs about the worlds in part based on their membership to different groups and the values those groups hold and so there's this really interesting um study it's actually from the 50s and it involved uh controversial referee calls during a football game and they had people who were fans of opposing teams watched this footage of these controversial calls and even though they were watching exactly the same footage their assessments of these calls vary considerably based on their group membership based on their team loyalty so those people who were fans of one team tended to feel like the unfair calls were in their direction and vice versa right and what's astonishing to me about that research and the reason i mention it is it's not like these folks are consciously aware oh i know that i'm not able to be biased i know that i'm seeing a warped version of reality of course not this is their reality and it shows how potent these group memberships are that they can actually affect people's perception of reality and so what that means in practice is that when it comes to bridging divides we need to use different techniques than just throwing information at people yes um one of my favorite uh findings from behavioral economics to your point about whether we can ameliorate some of these concerns um comes from a domain called moral reframing and it's research that shows that it's much more effective to hold people's values as fixed and present an argument or present a position in ways that affirm those values rather than threaten them so for example um if you are trying to convince a conservative to care more about the environment you might frame it as caring about the environment means preserving our nature's beauty our nation our natural beauty right it is patriotic to care about the environment you're talking with a liberal you might focus on the fact that investing in climate change uh reform can actually help elevate those with socioeconomically underprivileged status right it can help them thrive and so in both cases it's the same policy objective you're trying to get people to care about the climate but you are taking into account what their existing value systems are so if they don't feel that in agreeing with you they're threatening their tribal membership yes and that helps me build a lot of empathy for people right now because let's take the coronavirus right it's so easy to think it's just a mask it's just a damn piece of cloth like just wear one already i promise you it'll make you safe but when you look at it through the lens of psychology through cognitive science you realize wearing a mask for a person can carry huge symbolic significance and it could potentially threaten the relationships in their life that they hold most sacred and so when you have that in mind i just think it's the in general i think studying the human mind is the greatest empathy builder that exists out there because the minute you uncover why it is that a person has a particular belief then there's an element of understanding yes that allows you to approach the person differently and for them to approach you differently potentially and for you to try to make uh to meet halfway you know yeah i couldn't agree more that was a beautiful answer by the way and and you know as as scary as it is you are right that the study of the human mind is potentially the only antidote because then you start to see how you're caught in the in your own trap yourself and i think that's the hardest part as you're saying with those fans they couldn't see that they were being really biased or you know that they were getting lost on one side because of their affiliation and they just couldn't see that and not being able to see that not being able to step back and be an observer and take your take the home jersey off take the away jersey off and just be the referee yourself and it's that's almost like we need referee vision like you need to be able to see the game as hopefully an unbiased referee would to be able to truly make the right calls and sorry yeah yeah no i i completely agree with that i also think the wonderful thing about being in my field is that it is serving up solutions um and is giving us tactics that we can use in our day-to-day life when we converse with those we disagree with so um i was talking about this with adam grant who i had on my podcast recently i love adam huge fan um he's wonderful and i was talking about how i had interviewed daryl davis for for my podcast and daryl davis is a black jazz musician who was approached by a member of the ku klux klan when he was performing at a bar one night wow and the guy at the bar said hey i love your music man it's it's incredible and then daryl finds out that this man is from the clan um and he he he starts to ask himself a series of questions like how is it that these people can hate me without even knowing me and so he he ends up pivoting in his life talk about a slight change of plans um and ends up inspiring hundreds of people to leave white supremacy groups and it's an astonishing story of how someone who has every card stacked against them even in terms of personal safety having these conversations conducting these interviews with members of the clan could find a way to penetrate their minds and ultimately get them to make one of the greatest leaps we can see in terms of mindset change which is going from believing in absolute vitriol to turning their backs on the clan and what i loved about my interview with him jay is that so much of what he was sharing is corroborated by the science so we know when it comes to changing people's minds certain tactics are very effective you want to show genuine curiosity for why that person has their beliefs you want to increase your question to statement ratio so you're asking them well how did you arrive you know at this belief in the first place and what evidence would in theory change your mind what would you have to learn in order to think differently about this and one reason i love that question is that it presupposes that they ought to be willing to change their mind in the face of evidence which is not something we can always take for granted and then there's other techniques like you try to affirm that you're not questioning their morals they're not questioning their values or their humanity over the course of the conversation you're just simply trying to understand why it is that they believe in something and i think the most powerful one and this is something daryl shared with me is he doesn't like to say that he changed people's minds he likes to say that he inspired them to change their own minds and the science there corroborates that beautiful poignant statement which is you want to recruit their own sense of agency you want to make them feel that it was them who decided to change their minds you arm them with new perspectives with information with your own personal story but let them wrestle with all that and then the sturdiness of a mindset change that a person themselves inspires is far greater than trying to impose a set of beliefs on someone yeah i can agree more i often find that when when we're presenting something to someone and they're not taking up to it we think it's because of their weakness and often it's our weakness in the presentation right it's like if something's not been clearly articulated or presented to someone or in a way they can digest it they may not remember it and they may not understand it but the responsibility of that force so much more on those of us that feel we know and are sharing this new way or alternative path yeah and and i found that so much so in you know the work i do when i'm working with people on which effectively is changing their behavior and i very early on a lot of people ask me like don't you get frustrated when someone doesn't start meditating after you've been telling them about meditation whatever it may be and i'm just like i don't because i know how long it took me to start meditating to tell you now that i don't meditate even though i know i should do it that's awesome because i know you're gonna be empathetic yeah i know exactly because it's just first of all i know how long it took me second of all i know i know how hard it is and i've seen this research on people's minds and i haven't done it but i've seen it and read it and i can also just recognize that i still haven't said something that lets the penny drop for them right like i i there's somewhere where i need to go and then and usually what i found is it's not what i say or even what i do it's an experience they need to have and that's kind of the question i've always been asking is what experience has this person not had yet that will help them change their mind because if they have that experience then that's theirs kind of what you're saying like then that's theirs to keep but if their experience is only through what i tell them then that's not their experience it's my experience and so for me it's always been about creating and facilitating experiences and experiments for people to help them get their own research and data and their own conclusion uh rather than saying or doing anything and so i'm always fascinated by how you can use experiments and experiences to to help people have a new you know a newfound solution that they didn't even comprehend before yeah i love the way that you just said it that's my experience not theirs and it reminds me you know one of the women that i interviewed for a slight change of plans her name is megan phelps roper and she grew up in the westboro baptist church i don't know if you're familiar with this church but it is um the southern poverty law center i think refers to them as the most rabid hate group in america so they are homophobic anti-semitic basically they hate everybody who's not a member of the church and they do abhorrent things like show up at military gay like gay military funerals they wanted to protest the sandy hook shooting i mean it's horrible and megan grew up in this church her grandfather was the founder and she was absolutely indoctrinated i mean she was steeped in the ideology from a very very young age and she grew up to become one of those one of their most ardent vocal advocates for the church and people engage end up engaging with her on twitter actually in this very compassionate way that you and i have been talking about where they tried to just help her understand that maybe there were a few holes here and there that's how they you know the very slow process and they would reaffirm her humanity and um they would just point out some inconsistencies like the moral reframing stuff that i was saying but they would they wouldn't say megan what you believe is batshit crazy they would say you know actually there's a few issues here and there and what she says so she ended up leaving the church in her mid-20s which meant leaving her family behind and leaving basically everything she ever believed to be true behind and i asked her this question right i said how do you think about your family right and the fact that they haven't left like what gives you hope how do you think about your former self you know and she said i don't try to detach myself from my former self even though i disagree one million percent with what that former self was like because i can then feel close to the person that i was and the person that i was was someone who was persuaded by absolutely terrible ideas and then one day saw the light and that gives me hope that if my family experiences the same thing that i experienced if people treat them in exactly the way they treated me maybe there's hope for them too so it's exactly what you just described whereas where she knows i can't just i'm not able to just tell them that this is wrong but i'm hopeful because i saw that journey in myself i am a convert and so i believe that if i can just set up the right environments for them to get that kind of exposure they could potentially leave too yeah it's that idea of like people don't have a remote control that has the fast forward button on life so you can't see the future implications of your current action yeah and you can see it around you but it never feels you it never feels like it's about you and so i the reason why it resonates so strongly with me is because and we spoke about this a bit earlier before offline but i was someone who experimented with a lot of drugs when i was young but i never got addicted obsessed or never really got into doing something for a long period of time and the only reason why that happened is i met one of my friend's aunt who was an addict and i saw her have a fit in front of me and it was such a traumatic experience where we thought she was going to die and she didn't thankfully we you know we call the ambulance and everything else but it was like it was such a like traumatic live event of seeing someone who was an addict to a particular substance to then go through that in front of us as young man and for me to go okay i'm never messing around with this stuff ever again and it was like an experience and it's the same way i think about what you were saying earlier that facts don't work like we know every cigarette pack has the label the label and it's never worked they're like you know that doesn't stop people but when someone loses someone in their life or when someone hears about someone i'm getting an unfortunate diagnosis because of one of their habits it it starts to change their mind tell me about something that we talked about traits that you've started to see both sides of do you think that works for everything or have there been certain behavioral changes you've made in your life that you felt just had to be transformations for you so i think for me uh exercise has been the thing that i really had to introduce behavioral changes around because i've seen i almost don't do it for fitness reasons jay i do it for my mind and it is so powerful for my mind like the days that i work out versus the days that i don't feel totally different to me um and i've actually used some behavioral change insights to motivate me to exercise so i'll share one of those with you yeah um it's an insight that was generated by my friend katie milkman who's a professor who studies change and it's called temptation bundling and the logic behind this is to pair up an undesirable activity with a desirable activity and you're only allowed to do the desirable activity if it accompanies the undesirable one wow so one of my favorite things in life is to discover a new pop song okay i'm into all of it like of course taylor swift um i guess casey muskrace isn't pop she's someone i interviewed my podcast i love her music but she's you know she's genre defying yeah um but i love discovering a new song but i know because of the way the brain adapts that i'll only get like 30 or 40 really good listens out of a song before it becomes old hat right right and so i save it i only listen to these songs when i'm on the treadmill or i'm lifting weights or i'm on the elliptical and my poor husband because he'll be like oh my gosh we're cooking dinner let's play the new casey mustard album and i'm like we do not play recreationally okay it needs to be saved for these sacred moments when i'm working out and so uh it's been wonderful to like you know even though i study change for a living even though i'm a behavioral economist i fall prey to all the same human biases that we all fall prey to of course and so i'm using these strategies every single day in my life to try to optimize and reach some of these longer terms i love that one so wait is there research that actually says you're only going to get 30 to 40 plays out of some is there reasons that goes along no this is just the maya formula i have no idea what it is for you jay i think given your your your monk days you're probably closer to like 100 because you'll see dimensions of the song that i can't possibly appreciate given your death and my relative superficiality um but for me it's about 30 and then i'm done that's amazing that is such a no but you know that's brilliant i love that that is the most interesting unique piece of advice that i think you know that's gonna help so many people who i can imagine everyone now talking to their partner or their friend today going i turn that song off right now like i'm only i'm only using it for those painful moments in life that's genius i love that and and that's a maya shankar original special i love that it's brilliant uh tell us a bit about what you're doing on a day-to-day basis i i find like you know you have this role at google and you're studying human behavior on a day-to-day basis i find there's two questions here the first question is tell me what you do on a day-to-day basis what's fascinating about it because i have no idea what you do on a day-to-day basis uh the more the more interesting question for you probably will be the second one which is what is an area that you think behavioral economists haven't really uncovered or understood yet because so when i've read books about behavioral science or behavioral economists it's been about the relationship between money and human behavior the relationships between uh everything from lying and stealing in human behavior through to you know about the different character traits or the idea of giving and service and human behavior but i'm wondering what's an area that you're fascinated to uncover and you think we're just scratching the surface on we don't actually know a lot about yeah but i love that question i think one area and this is actually something i was also talking about with katie milkman is how durable some of these behavioral change insights are yes such a good question it's so hard because behavior change that's a one-time thing like the decision to sign up for retirement or get your covet vaccine or remember to call your mom on her birthday that's a maybe a once a year type of commitment or maybe a once-in-a-lifetime type of commitment and then you're done and from a public policy perspective we become excellent at this so i remember when i was working in the obama white house um i was able to work on a lot of these nudges where you shift just one thing and then the person's life potentially has changed forever so i talked to you about the school lunch program right you make that one change and now millions of kids are getting lunch at school every day or i worked with military service members um in order to help them get enrolled in retirement savings plans and again that's like a one-time decision and then they're done the ones that are much harder are the day-to-day behaviors where we have to build these habits over time and sustain those habits over time and we just haven't cracked the nut fully on how to encourage long-term behavior change on the things we value most and that's because we're human jay right we're set we're fallible we fall prey to temptation left and right and it's just very very hard to be a highly discipli disciplined person right that's probably one of the reasons why you recommend everyone that they meditate because i can help with sustained behavior change um but it would be wonderful to see additional innovations yeah um within that space yeah i love hearing you say that because i found that at least through my own mechanisms and work i've kind of found like a trifecta that gets closest and the challenge is that a lot of behavioral changes you said is not around anything that is consistent and so for the three levels that i found that at least in my work that really do help people are coaching consistency in community that have a massive impact on people and we built a program three years ago now that was centered around these three areas and through our research and studies we've been able to see how people have become happier more successful more financially free through the program yeah and of course we're dealing with we're dealing with thousands of people not millions of people in that program but it's it's phenomenal to see how those three things together coaching consistency and community are so powerful that coaching gives you that insight and advice consistency is the one i think is ignored in in everything it's like like you said you do that one nudge and that doesn't create a cascading life-changing effect and so that consistency of weekly check-ins and then finally the community aspect of having a group of people that you're doing it with has been so powerful but yeah tell me what you're doing on a day-to-day basis and what you're discovering and learning i think the consistency piece that you just mentioned is really interesting and there's one potentially powerful antidote for this that comes out of behavioral economics research and that's called the fresh start effect and it's the idea that when we have these really big life changes these big milestones like we move to another town or we buy a home for the first time or we get married or we have kids or we take a new job those moments in time can serve as breaks from our past and all the habits that we used to have in many ways we can take on a new identity in this new role and what research shows is that people are far more effective at introducing a new kind of consistency or sustained behavior change when their surroundings are physically different they don't have some of the same cues and reminders every day that might inspire them to you know eat the chocolate cake versus the fruit salad and um their commute to work is different so now maybe they're gonna walk versus take their car um and so i do believe in the power of fresh starts and you don't just have to wait for a major milestone sundays can serve as fresh starts like certainly january first can serve as a fresh start um every monday is a fresh start for me i'm one of those people there yeah me too they're just looking i'm just waiting for a new day exactly but we found for example that military service members again this is work i was doing in the obama white house were more likely to sign up for retirement savings plan on the first day of spring when they were reminded that it was a new beginning and a new start to their to their future lives and so i really do believe that if if your listeners are struggling with that kind of consistency and are looking to build a new set of habits that better align with their long-term goals look out for that mo those moments in your life where you're breaking from the past and you can re-establish yourself and the kinds of behaviors that you aspire to associate yourself with can be more present yeah i can agree more i think i've always used a new job or moving to a new town or joining a new group as being an opportunity to redefine my identity in that space of who i want to be but uh yeah no the idea of just using i remember when i moved from so i got introduced to spirituality like just on the cusp of leaving high school and going to college and so college is where i got to redefine who i was whereas at high school i was a rebel and a troublemaker and all the rest of it and then all of a sudden i went to college and i was like the kid who meditated and and everything else and it was so great for me because i was no longer held down by that baggage of the identity i had crafted for myself where people expected me to be a certain way and then of course after leaving being a monk and coming back into the world it was easier to always come back and be like oh i don't go to that or i don't drink or i don't do this because i'd had this life experience whereas if i would have joined the corporate world before maybe i would have had a very different experience so i i completely can relate to so much of that advice yeah i love seeing this insight play out in your life i'm wondering you know when you went to college was it a really intentional action to change like yeah were you seizing that moment it was it was because i think i'd i'd created such a role that i played at high school where i was like i said the rebel the troublemaker the person who was a funny drunk like i just had a role that i'd created it was a role it wasn't me it was just just a identity that i enjoyed being yeah because people enjoyed that version of me and none of my and i took a gap year before i went to college which was great because all my friends went off to their respective colleges and lived their first year lives and all the rest of it and i went to a college where none of my school friends went and so i had a complete blank slate where no one knew who i was and there was no history and i could completely reframe who i wanted to become and so i ran a philosophical society every week at college and i i meditated and everyone would come to me to learn these skills and techniques i was learning from monks and it was almost like i i could be the person i wanted to be and i think that helped so much you know this reminds me of another insight from behavioral economics it's called identity priming and it refers to the fact that our behaviors often align with the identities the social identities that we either associate ourselves with now or aspire to associate ourselves with and i think your experience underscores the importance of especially when you're young not allowing people to give you labels because the moment you're given a label the rebel the funny drunk whatever it is you feel some degree of pressure to assimilate to that or to ensure that your behaviors are aligning with that identity day-to-day in part it's just to reduce cognitive dissonance within yourself right you want to believe that your identity means something and that you're living it out every day and um you know this was true in in when i was talking with daryl davis who says you know it's sometimes it's important to label behaviors as racist versus people as racist if you feel like they're redeemable that they can change um because if you give people a label they will carry that with them and it might not facilitate the same kind of change and i remember when i was working with the re-entry population while at the white house we were designing guides for people who were leaving prison and you know the transition back to civilian life can be a very challenging one but it's also a fresh start in which we want people to tap into their best selves and reach their goals and we were very careful in this guidebook this transition book to not refer to people as former convicts or ex-convicts or ex-prisoners instead we called we made sure that the the na the labels we were using were community members job seekers those kinds of labels are forward-looking can allow people to use those identities so yeah it's just your personal experience transitioning from high school to college allows me to see how important it is that we just we don't let others label us and we also don't label ourselves yeah yeah and i love that i love that how simple even when you were describing that just hearing those words changes how you view that person even for the new people that are going to get to meet them and i think so many of us are carrying around old labels and old baggage and old identities that we don't want to be anymore i think i meet so many people are like yeah i don't want to be this person anymore but all my friends think i'm this person and so i love the idea of you know at least starting to test who we want to be in new new phases of our life and new places of our life uh you've mentioned the podcast throughout the conversation with these amazing conversations that you're having tell me about why you decided to start a podcast and why you called it a slight change of plan because i love that i love the title but i want to know the reason for why you did that yeah um i think it was in part inspired by my personal experience with change you know losing the violin at a young age and asking myself all these existential questions about identity it's in part inspired by my role as a cognitive scientist right someone who studies the mind and i was eager to marry you know these two the the narrative storytelling part of my life with the cognitive science part of my life but the catalyst for this happened in 2020 and i was feeling really overwhelmed by the pace of change that was happening around me and i know everybody was it was this collective moment in the world where we all so acutely felt a loss of control we realized how much of an illusion control is and it was easy to feel intimidated that would be the best word i could use to describe my state of mind as someone who loves planning and and likes knowing how things are going to end out and then also seeing all the tragedy around me and the racial upheaval like it was just it was just a hard a very very hard time and then i tried to put on my cognitive science hat and what i realized is while the specifics of what 2020 threw our way wasn't was absolutely unprecedented our human ability to navigate change is not in many ways our minds are built for change and that's really important for us to recognize because as you know as a human civilization we've done this rodeo many times before this change thing but there's no textbook out there with answers it's not like in the throes of a huge life change you can go to your textbook and open it up to page 90 and be like oh yes here's the path that i should take and so i thought to myself why don't i try to find people who have been through extraordinary change in their lives right people like tiffany haddish and hillary clinton and casey musgraves and tommy caldwell and then just a bunch of people i've either heard about or met in in my personal life and hear their reflections and try to mine their stories for insights and lessons that we as listeners can take back into our own lives that might help us think differently about change in our own lives and it has been an absolute joy to make this podcast i mean i've never felt more closely aligned with something given who i am remember i told you about the basement of that fmri lab the podcast that is actually the thing that i i just i mean i've fallen in love with it and i think the reason is that you can meet people with two very similar sounding stories but how they define their change moment will be radically different the lessons that they learn will be radically different and so i feel like i mean this talk about eating a slice of humble pie i have been so humbled doing this podcast because my guests have taught me so much about change that i never would have appreciated absent listening to their stories and it's been wonderful to go on this expedition with them about how it is people have navigated some of the toughest changes that you can imagine in life yeah no absolutely living living or not living who'd be someone that you are fascinated about the amount of changes in their life or or those transitions in their life i mean there's always oprah but that's the obvious one you know what's interesting jay is that when you meet someone you don't always appreciate the full depth of their life stories i'll give you one example one of the people that i interviewed for this podcast his name is scott he's just a friend and colleague of my husband's i'd had dinner with him once back in 2019. and he is a self-proclaimed health nut so he sounds like you and roddy now right so he's vegan he does intermittent fasting he does high intensity interval training he adds turmeric and chia seeds to like his food whenever possible now look we're both indian so we know that turmeric is a delicate spice you cannot pour it on anything this guy is out of turmeric food so if it's in a book somewhere saying that something's healthy he's done it and then in 2020 scott got a stage four bone cancer diagnosis and within weeks he had to get his right leg amputated he had to pack up his bags move to md anderson in texas do 18 administrations of chemotherapy he also had to get a vertebra removed from his spine and i think his tibia was removed from his other leg scott's worst nightmare came true he he had literally spent his entire adult life trying to avoid this outcome now i talked to him and i'm interviewing him for for this podcast and he's telling me he's in the throes of it all when i'm interviewing him um he actually just finished up his treatment yesterday he says to me you know maya my worst nightmare came true but i'm sitting here in my backyard sipping a cup of coffee and i'm realizing the emotional thermostat has prevailed i am more or less as happy as i was before the diagnosis sure the bad moments are worse i'll give you that nausea is intense the pain is terrible i have moments of fear but the good moments are just as good and he said if i had known that i would respond this way psychologically i would never have been as fearful of cancer as i had been in the first place that's so stirring to me and those are the kinds of insights that i carry with me you know because they give me hope and they make me understand just how resilient we are as people um not everybody has scott's story you know i'm not sure i would respond in that way but he didn't think that he would respond in that way and so i love it when a guy i just had dinner once you know i can have this kind of conversation with and he teaches me he gives me so much wisdom and another thing he shared with me is he said you know i put so much emphasis my identity was so intricately entwined with my fitness up until this point like i was smart fit scott like those are the two labels you know he's like a harvard grad and all that stuff and he said this whole experience is allowing me to see that maybe these traits that i saw so core to my identity are more negotiable than i thought he used the word negotiable and i love that he goes yeah maybe i can't do a handstand but like i'm still scott at the end of the day and the final lesson that i learned while i learned so many lessons one of the final lessons i learned from scott's interview was he said you know my would be a shame if my body deteriorated and my personality also got worse so i'm going to use this to become a better person and to me that was a testament to the fact that this is a trait i see across all my guests is we are natural storytellers in our hearts you know no matter what your spiritual or non-spiritual beliefs it is just human nature to try to find meaning and silver linings in adversity and change to almost justify the randomness of it all and um hearing scott be so intentional about that growth and and saying look i need to just make the best of it um i love that and i think that's such a powerful story so maybe maybe the to your earlier question i think my dream guest is someone who just teaches me something new helps me see the world through a different vantage point you know they don't have to be someone i've already heard of i just love seeing the world through different lenses yeah absolutely i think that's a beautiful answer and uh i'm so glad you shared that journey i just um on saturday i got the news that my my best friend who was my almost like my brother who was a monk he just passed away after suffering with colon cancer for four years but it spread far beyond his color and it was everywhere so sorry and so he like i don't know how many cycles of chemo he had like 30 or something like that and it was just every time he would they'd feel it's gone away had gone somewhere else and i got to speak to him on the phone about three days before he passed away and i didn't know obviously you never know yeah and i got a message from one of the senior monks who was with him and said oh we're just talking about you and we're thinking about you and so i called him straight away and it was like he'd gone to london for his treatment it was like 11 40 p.m in london and 3 40 p.m here so i called him up and i got to be on facetime with him and he was like completely emaciated like hunched over but he was smiling like he just had this massive smile on his face and he was like that throughout his whole cancer journey and i could tell that this was the worst i'd ever seen him because up until every time i'd seen him because he was taking treatment he looked normal as in not normal that's the wrong word but he looked his usual self this was the first time i'd seen him uh completely you know emaciated in bed and he was just smiling away and we were joking around and we were both telling each other stories and memories and he'd lost his voice so he could only like really whisper and the senior monk knows us both so he was kind of helping speak for him and translate for him and add for him and it was just remarkable to me to see someone uh at the end of their life be so blissful and all i could see was bliss that when i spoke at his memorial yesterday it was the most blissful memorial i've ever i was on zoom of course everyone was there in person in england but it was the most blissful memorial i've ever been to because that was him yeah and and that's from what you're saying about scott it sounds like a very similar energy of how to deal with this and you know while he was at cancer he was uh he was leading charity initiatives to raise funds for cancer raise awareness for cancer he was organizing meditation retreats for cancer patients that were struggling with him so that they could all grow together because that's what he was doing so he was extending his practices out to them yeah and he just lived with so much purpose in the last four years and so much service in the last four years and yeah that kind of mind is just unbelievable and phenomenal like you said he's not famous he doesn't have followers no one knows who he is he's not having impacts on millions of people's lives but everyone who knew him would say that he changed their life yeah what an honor to do with him yeah best friend yeah i was very lucky to you know he was kind enough to uh be be my best bud for a few years but anyway when you talk about scott i love that answer because i think it's so true that there are just so many people in the world who are going through enormously difficult things and and hearing their stories gives us so much faith yeah and in part i almost see my responsibility as uncovering the hidden stories um there's one there's one interview i did just just recently um it was with a guy named morgan he he was assigned female at birth and he went through hormone therapy to align his body with his true gender identity which is male and for a while morgan is feeling intoxicated by the joy and liberation that comes from being freed from his female body he's a black man and he said his joy was punctured when he was confronted with the harsh reality of what it means to be a black man in society and his first confrontation with this was literally being pulled over by the police in his grandmother's driveway and it's an incredibly um insightful thought-provoking set of reflections from morgan because not only does he share what it means to have gone through this transition and and um you know embrace his himself um but he ends up joining the force he ends up becoming a police officer wow um and with the goal to reform it uh and again those are the kinds of those are the kinds of stories that i live for you know and i want to hear them because i feel like you know we talked earlier about how being a cognitive scientist to me is like the greatest empathy builder yeah well if you marry the science with storytelling it's an unbeatable combo in terms of empathy building and just understanding the full range of human experience and um yeah i guess you could probably see it in my face people can't see it but i just love obsessed with having these interviews because i i do feel like every single one i learn it's not even that i learn something new i learn a new way of interpreting the world around me it's a perspective shift and that's i'm sure you find that when you when you interview different people is it changes the perspective with which you look at the world and that's an incredible gift to be given yeah and it's totally unpredictable like when we started this conversation it's d i felt different to when i first read about you and it's different to when now we're coming to the end of our conversation it's like we can have so many perceptions about someone and what we expect to learn from them yeah and i can honestly say that sitting with you for the past hour this has been a totally unexpected conversation in a good way and i'm like i think that's the power of getting to listen to stories and listening to people and getting to meet people that you'd never meet before or otherwise because i think we're so good at and and i guess that's where behavioral science is so interesting because we do have to box people to make sense of stuff but then we need to unbox them to actually make sense of them like it's a weird paradox right like we always put people in a category so that we can make decisions but then we need to get them out of those to really deeply understand them and so you know i wasn't expecting that our conversation would go down the journey that it has but that's what's so beautiful about it yeah and so yeah i wanna i wanna thank you for you know doing your podcast uh for those of you who haven't listened to it go and check out a slight change of plans uh it's it's beautiful to hear these stories that you've even been sharing with us on the podcast and i can't wait for my audience to actually go and listen to some of these conversations i know i'm going to do that because it sounds like you're just speaking to some people who and and in a way that you know is going to be really insightful for people's change and growth but also for their heart and i think that's what i love i i you're what i love about you from the little time that we've spent together is that it feels like you bring a lot of heart to science and uh that's rare like it's it's very rare i feel like you you're bringing your heart into how to help people change how they think and so you know storytelling's one thing but heartful storytelling is is even a deeper step sir thank you so that's so kind and generous of you to say and such a compliment too because my hope is that i really can marry you know um science and and humanity i guess right i mean they're obviously really interconnected but um that has been my goal with a slight change of plans and it's kind of been my goal living you know it's like how do i bring my heart to as many things as i possibly can so um it was such a pleasure to get to talk with you jay i'm such a huge fan of your show and um i'm just i'm just so grateful for the opportunity so thank you well thank you maya well we're not done yet we end every interview the final five oh ah so this is the fast five round where every question has to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum a sentence i believe or at least i've made this up is seven words maximum so i don't know if that's real or not but seven to ten words maximum so this is your fast five maya your first question is what is the best advice you've ever received find amazing mentors great i love that that's a good one and you shared so many wonderful examples of mentors that you've had in your life absolutely and the amazing impact they've had on you i'm gonna i'm gonna destroy my rules here but it's important to do that how do people find good mentors teach us that because you know i have my own my own thoughts on this and i share that a lot with my audience but i'd love to hear your perspective on how people can find good mentors yeah it's a good question um i've never done it intentionally i've always slipped into the mentee role almost without realizing it but my mentors have played a profound role in my life and the way that it happened in case this is helpful to folks is i'm always searching for people that i admire and whose life i would love to lead yeah you know and and who's who bring that kind of heart to things because that's something that speaks to me personally for me maya right and then when i find those people like laurie santos um i just i cling to them you know i i i say oh laurie like you know addition to you mentoring me um can i work in your lab can we get coffee can you actually be my lifelong friend you know and and i think um as i've gotten older one way to do that more effectively is i've just always i mean everyone has different philosophies on this but i've always learned i've always blurred the line between colleague and friend yeah and it's irresistible for me i i can't not bring that really personal side of myself to my work no matter what it is that i'm working on it's funny there was a quick anecdote just sorry from from my time in obama's white house so the government had just shut down and there were all these ethical rules about the fact that we couldn't hang out in our quote professional capacity we could only hang out in our personal capacity because otherwise we'd be violating federal rules um but we were just planning we were you know we were all very friendly and we just wanted to hang out as friends so um i was joking with folks i was like ah i can't wait for all of you guys to see me in my personal capacity and you know one of my friend's best is like oh maya you're exactly the same and then another one of my friends goes we're still waiting to see maya in her professional capacity so i think that says everything which is i i've learned that line and i think what ends up happening is i just like naturally end up becoming friends with the people i admire and then i find that they can be that they have been just wonderful mentors um but it's always been i know this might be unsatisfying for listeners to be like oh why did it have to be an organic process for you my i want the like one two three checklist but i think that's kind of the only way to feel genuine you know you really want to be friends with them because they're genuinely curious about the way they think in the way that they live yeah i i love that and i and i love that that's your authentic genuine way that it's happened that's beautiful i think one of the most amazing things for me is that i genuinely believe you can be mentored by people you've never met and so i've spent my life studying the lives the words the teachings of so many people that i admire that are no longer alive and simply sitting with their biographies and their autobiographies and listening to every interview and watching every tv show they went on or whatever they did just looking at the records of their life there's often times where i'll sit there and be like well what would that person do there is an answer it's somewhere there and and i've loved that because i would have loved to been mentored by martin luther king or steve jobs or some of these people that i never got to meet and i can be mentored by the people that met them or i can be mentored by them through their own lives if i studied them deeply enough and of course i agree with you that i'd say any mentors that i've had in reality have not been calculated decisions it's i agree with you it's always been very natural so yeah i love that i was you actually reminded me of something i'm totally going off yeah but anyway your fast fire has changed uh you reminded me of something you asked me that question about what trait has changed and you said something there that actually triggered something you said uh asking people to be my lifelong friend so i've i've always been very much wore my heart on my sleeve kind of person i've always been that way because my mum raised me that way and i always was honest with people and often you were you know often when you're like that as a teenager it's not a strength it's seen as a weakness like you're weird or you're strange or you're you're needy or you're desperate or whatever it may be and i never let go of it because i realized i would rather say what i really want to say to someone and then let it be whatever the result is yeah versus not tell them the truth and then realize we could have been best friends and so till this day uh i've i've got some of my closest friends in my life who when i got to know them the first thing i said to them was like i really want to be friends with you as a tweet as a 30 year old man oh my gosh i love that i do the same thing i think it takes people back but yeah i'm like look i may as well just be straightforward you can say no charlie totally i do this all the time i'm so okay with someone saying no and actually i feel like i'm getting a much more honest take on like whether this is going anywhere and now i'm not living in the wood i coulda shoulda whatever i'm living in okay well it didn't work and that's cool yeah and and i'm so much more happier with that sense of closure and now we're talking about relationships but it's like i'm so much happier with having honest transparent conversations rather than this idea in my head that so anyway you that was the trait i think that i've learned to really see as a strength and and not see as a weakness and you know so yeah i think i have something very similar which is i used to see my openness maybe as weakness or something like that because i am so open with the people in my life that i love um even about just my affections for them right like i'll probably be writing you like a long email after this being like jay you're so amazing um and it's all heartfelt and i sometimes felt like wow you're so open and um it was it was so interesting i was at a wedding this weekend and um i was talking with one of my cousins she was like wow maya you really asked these like deep questions of people and my sister-in-law weighed in and she said but maya always gives you her full self in return yeah she gives you that depth back and i thought that was such a lovely thing to say because i do feel like in reinterpreting that openness as a weakness i've seen it as well actually it's amazing to be able to share so much of yourself with someone else and hope that they can return that in whatever capacity they're comfortable sharing themselves totally totally i love that that i'm gonna make that now the second question i ask you what's the uh what do you think is a wonderful question to ask someone to evoke a connection and create a relationship with someone if you if you had your favorite question to ask in an interview or your favorite question to learn about someone we're on the second question so yeah you can you can you can seven words okay yeah what have you changed your mind about oh i love you and then if i had nine words i think that was seven i'm not sure and why okay beautiful all right third question what have you changed your mind about and why sounds a little bit meta but it's totally true i've changed my mind about why it is people believe the things they do and that's been in studying the science of why it is that people believe the things they do and i've always felt this hits on some of the themes we talked about earlier that if we can fully understand why then we can generate the how how do we change their minds given that if we think it's important for them to change their minds um and what is the why usually whereas where does that come where do you think you see the patterns of why people think the way they do if there are any at all yeah i think um it relates a lot to the the daryl davis story um and it relates a lot to what i was sharing about tribal membership which is yeah at the end of the day i think one of our most primal human instincts is we want to feel like we belong to something we that's bigger than ourselves to a community a group something that validates us and where we feel an implicit sense that values are shared that there's commonality yeah and understanding that i mean it sounds so simple oh of course some of my beliefs would be informed by my group membership but if you really think about it that does run counter to a lot of people's intuition about how it is that we generate our beliefs and so i feel like once you understand that that it's this human desire to belong um you can then tailor make better solutions that don't feel aggressive or confrontational or threatening in any way i love that beautiful all right question number four uh what's the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before you go to bed brush my teeth so boring totally fine um it's needed it is needed you're only a huge fan of you know hygiene yeah um you have great teeth yeah uh you know it's usually it's usually eating a snack before before i go to bed which is i mean you'll probably tell me it's a terrible thing yeah um what would be the snack i'm intrigued now i try to make it healthy it's just gosh i was telling um telling my friend madeline on the way over like i get i would i wouldn't call it hanger i'd say i get heritable if i can make that up okay you just made it up i get heritable and no one likes me when i'm heritable i don't like me when i'm heritable so i just feel like i just need something to take a little bit of the hunger edge off yeah yeah so i'll have some sort of evening sex and thanks i like i i'm i'm very heritable as well and so is my wife when we know when we're here it about for sure i just need to eat a bigger dinner that's the key i know i'm not supposed to be right before bedtime but i definitely can't fall asleep when i'm hungry that's very hard for me that makes sense yeah that definitely makes sense all right fifth and final question and seeing as you've worked in public policy i think this will be fun if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be smile at everyone you see on the street that's beautiful there is a lot of research showing how these small moments that strangers share can have profound impacts on well-being and happiness and a feeling of connectedness and whether or not i'm having a good day i i make a i make a self-commitment to smile at everybody that i see when i'm just taking a walk acknowledge them in some way or another and it's been hard with covet and mass and whatnot but those moments brighten my day um i hope they brighten the people that i'm smiling at and yeah i just think i i think the world would be a much happier place if we could all find it within ourselves to just to just do that small thing i love that that's beautiful thank you so much that's such a great answer everyone maya shankar please please please go and listen to our podcast we will put the link in the description below and the comments uh my it's been such a joy sitting with you honestly i could talk to you for hours and hours and and i really do hope we get to spend a lot more time together me too and uh it's been it's been such a wonderful connection i totally this conversation has gone in so many new different directions that i know we haven't even uh started uncovering but i'm really really excited to get to know you more and excited for my audience to connect with you more as well so thank you so much and everyone has been listening all watching wherever you are make sure that you tag us both on instagram to let us know your biggest insights takeaways any of the stories or studies that stood out to you and please please leave a review as well and let me know that you heard this podcast specifically and how it moved you thank you so much everyone for listening and watching maya thank you so much for sharing so wonderfully thanks so much for having me jay i appreciate uh your time and i appreciate you so thank you thank you so much if you want even more videos just like this one make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today
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