Maya Shankar: The Power Of Slight Changes (And Why We Do What We Do)

In today’s episode, cognitive neuroscientist & former Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, Dr. Maya Shankar joins Rich to talk about the science behind growth & transformation. This is a conversation about navigating change, igniting professional growth, and managing grief through the behavioral science lens of Maya’s personal experience and expertise. Maya shares the therapeutic benefits and empowerment from sharing hardships, grief and shame with those around you, and how to make meaning out of hardships and struggles. The visually inclined can watch the magic transpire on YouTube. As always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Pick up Rich’s lates book VOICING CHANGE Vol. II HERE. For full show notes and to read more about Maya, go HERE. Enjoy the show! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  As a young kid, I had big dreams of becoming a concert violinist and really poured every ounce of my being into this pursuit from the time that I was six years old. So I feel like I defined myself exclusively, first and foremost, as a violinist. I saw that as my past, present, and future, and I think it held me back, feeling that my identity was so fixed. I would have benefited a lot from having a more malleable sense of self. What is my version of my through line? Like, if you strip away all the superficial features of a pursuit, what's left that really ignites passion in me?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Tying my identity to the feature of the violin that I love, namely, the ability to forge emotional connections, has been a much more durable, steady state for me, and something that has been able to persist over time and many career changes. It's the one through line that exists across many, many different sounding careers, that in everything that I've ever chosen, human connection was at its core.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  If there's a central theme to this podcast, it is transformation, the mechanics of growth, how to change and what to do when life changes around us. Well, this subject matter also happens to be the core expertise of today's guest, the delightful and highly esteemed Dr. Maya Shankar. Dr. Shankar is a cognitive neuroscientist and hosted the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple recently awarded as the best podcast of 2021. She earned her postdoc in said discipline from Stanford, a PhD from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and a BA from Yale.

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  She was a senior advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team. She also served as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations and is currently Google's Global Director of Behavioral Economics. If none of that is enough to impress you, on top of everything I just mentioned, Maya was also somebody who entered Juilliard at age nine and was actually a private violin student of Itzhak Perlman before a hand injury ended her music career at 15. So chew on that, everybody. A few more things to mention before the concert of ideas begins, but first.

• 4:02Rich Roll?

  Okay, Dr. Maya Shankar. So this is, again, a conversation about change, a conversation about change through the behavioral science lens of Maya's personal experience and expertise. We discuss her path from violinist to the White House. We talk about the nature of change, how to embrace it, the power of something called nudges. We talk about the importance of transparency, something called identity foreclosure, as well as the downside of present-mindedness, as well as many other topics. Maya is amazing. I really enjoyed talking to her and hope you do as well. So there you have it, and here we go. Me and Dr. Maya Shankar.

• 4:52Rich Roll?

  Maya, welcome to the podcast studio. I'm so excited to talk to you.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Before we even get into anything, I have to say, the most recent podcast that we just put up is with Scott Barry Kaufman. And so I was emailing with him yesterday, like letting him know the show's up and, you know, we're promoting it and people are enjoying it. And I was like, by the way, I have Maya coming in. Is there anything I should, you know, that you think would be cool to talk to her about? And he was like, oh, my God, we were classmates at Yale.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:20Rich Roll?

  What are the chances of that?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  He just sent me a message this morning.

• 5:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, he did?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  He's wonderful.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was an awesome conversation.

• 5:26Rich Roll?

  You guys were literally classmates.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I was listening on my Lyft drive over to your conversation.

• 5:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's great. He's great. So I love that kind of synergy. So I feel like the timing is right for this. I know we had gone back and forth, or I'd gone back and forth with somebody on your team about doing this a while back and things were crazy. I just couldn't fit it in. But I'm really appreciative that you're making the time to do this. And I think in thinking and trying to wrap my head around kind of how to launch into this with you. I mean, first of all, it's like a privilege to share space with somebody so distinguished and accomplished. I'm going to do my best to not appear as intimidated as I actually am. But in thinking about today, I'm reflecting on kind of the themes of my podcast and what you're all about

• 6:16Rich Roll?

  and the work that you do and the podcasts that you do. And really, you know, I have conversations with all different kinds of people, but if there is a central theme, it's transformation, really. Like this inherent power and potential energy that we all have within ourselves to change our lives with positive intention. So the subject of change, like what change is, the mechanics of change, how we change, what happens when life change changes around us, is so central to your work. So why don't we just begin with that? Like, how do you conceptualize change?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've never conceptualized it the same way, but I had some early experiences with change that at least lit up my imagination about what change could be and also just piqued my curiosity. And it was unwanted change. So as a young kid, I had big dreams of becoming a concert violinist and really poured every ounce of my being into this pursuit from the time that I was six years old. So I feel like I defined myself exclusively, you know, first and foremost, as a violinist.

• 7:28Rich Roll?

  Well, tell the story about how you discovered the violin and kind of what happened. It's really quite remarkable.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my grandmother had played Indian classical violin. And when my mom had immigrated from India to this country in the 70s, she brought the instrument along with her. And one day she went up to the attic and took it down for me to see. And she really had only meant to show me the instrument. It wasn't even playable. It was so large and out of tune and whatnot. But I was so taken by it. There was something about it that appealed to me. And so I very quickly asked my mom to get me a pint-sized version of my own. And she'd also introduced the violin to my older three siblings, who deemed it too uncool for them. So they went with clarinet, trumpet, and flute.

• 8:13Rich Roll?

  Way cooler.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I know, way cooler, right? I mean, you can see where the reference point of coolness is in the Schonker family, that we were ranking classical music instruments. But I, yeah, there was something about it that I was clearly taken by. And I don't know what that was, because when you're six years old, I mean, it has to be a natural connection of some kind. And my mom, to this day, marvels at the fact that while she would need to motivate me to do other things, she never had to ask me to practice the violin, which was astonishing for her. Because, you know, kind of rush home from school and pick it up and go at it.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  And you're seven, eight years old at the time.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, I'm not sure today I have that kind of work ethic that I had as a six-year-old, but I think it was just genuine passion. And so... My mom could very quickly see that, okay, this is a kid with big dreams. But she was also humbled by the fact that we had no connections into the classical music world. I mean, my dad's a theoretical physics professor. My mom was a physics major. Like, I come from a family of scientists. And while my grandmother had played very recreationally Indian classical violin, certainly, we had no connections in the Western classical scene, right?

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  Right. But if I can interject, I mean, a couple of things. First of all, it's almost as if you're channeling your grandmother through this passion on some level.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:36Rich Roll?

  And beyond that, perhaps like some kind of past life thing. Like, I know you're a hardcore scientist, but you may bristle at that. But, you know, the idea of a young person cottoning on to something with such a degree of passion at a young age is an unusual and unique thing.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was very emotionally close with my grandmother. We would visit India for weeks and weeks and weeks on end in the summertime. And I felt a kind of intimacy with her that was very rare.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  She was big on prayer and meditation. I remember as a young kid, I would sit next to her and try to just imitate her rituals and her chanting of the various Indian slogans, Hindu slogans, and even the physical movements, like swaying back and forth. You'd see me as a little kid next to her trying to do all those things. So I very much looked up to her. She was kind of into meditation before meditation was cool. And so I certainly felt a very deep emotional bond with my grandmother. This is my mom's mother. But I don't know if I put two and two together when it came to the violin.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  No, of course not.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  You know, it's more instinctual, right? And then with respect to your parents, both being physicists, is not music like math plus inspiration or math plus creativity? Like, there is a math piece to that, right?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I think, I mean... I don't know where the research stands today, but yeah, there's certainly some research showing certain connections between the mathematical parts of our brains and the musical parts. I imagine certainly in the area of composition. I mean, Beethoven was clearly a brilliant mathematician of sorts, right? I can't compose for my life. But yeah, I mean, I think I came from a family of musical lovers. But when it comes to translating that into concrete steps to help a child reach her dreams, that's where my mom was seeing her limits. Right. Right? And I think, you know, so quickly my ambition surpassed what where she thought it would. And then all of a sudden, she's realizing, okay, I think we need to get creative

• 11:39Speaker 01

  in this business. And so I still remember, so my big goal was to get into the Juilliard School of Music in New York. So I grew up in Connecticut. It's about two hours away by car or train. And I just had no shot because for the longest time, because my teacher, really nice guy, had never taught anyone before. He was a grad student at the at a local school of music. And I didn't build any of the technical foundation needed in music. So I learned everything by ear, just play recordings and try to kind of emulate what I was hearing with my hands. And I literally had not learned how to play a scale or an etude. So for people who are listening to this, who are well trained in classical music,

• 12:23Speaker 01

  that's going to sound completely nuts, that I started playing pieces before I built any of the foundational elements. And so we kind of knew that I needed some in with a teacher who had had more experience, who could kind of up level me quickly. And so my mom and I were in New York. I had my violin with me. We were walking by the Juilliard School. And she said, why don't we just go in? Like, why don't we just go into the building? It's like, you just go in? She's like, what's the worst thing that can happen? I'll tell you one thing, security guards are going to escort us out of here because we weren't invited. That's one thing that can happen, Mom. But these were back in the days when, you know, we were allowed to do such things. And so we go inside and my mom strikes up

• 13:07Speaker 01

  a conversation with a fellow student and her mom in the elevator. And we learned that she's studying with a really renowned violin teacher. And my mom just asked, you know, would it be okay if my daughter meets your teacher? If you just make a brief introduction to her after your lesson? And it's amazing to me still that people will say yes, like people will just be nice in this world and generous.

• 13:29Rich Roll?

  People want to help.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  They want to help, yeah.

• 13:31Rich Roll?

  But were you dying of embarrassment inside?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Of course. Oh, my God, I was absolutely dying of embarrassment. And don't forget, Rich, like, I wasn't planning on having to audition that day for a total stranger, right? So I was definitely like being put on the spot and thankfully I was practicing a lot. So I was relatively prepared for the moment.

• 13:50Rich Roll?

  But you brought your violin with you.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were, I mean, I was playing for another audition that day.

• 13:55Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And so I had it with me and, but I wasn't, you know, prepared to play for a Juilliard teacher with a new piece that day.

• 14:02Rich Roll?

  And you're nine, right?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was nine, exactly. But yet I think I inherited some of my mom's fearlessness about the whole thing. So while I was totally embarrassed about the walk into Juilliard approach, clearly I had some of that fearlessness in me because when I was given the opportunity to play for the teacher, I wasn't running out of the room. I was firmly planting my feet in the ground, thinking, this is my moment. Like, this is the moment, it's come, finally, now you have to seize it. And so I played for him on the spot and he accepted me into a summer program that ended up changing my life because it was a summer music festival boot camp of sorts for me. And in, you know, five or so weeks, he brought me from, and he said this after the fact,

• 14:46Speaker 01

  that when he first heard me, he thought I had no chance of getting into Juilliard. I think he literally said he just liked my personality. So I was like the personality card.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, you're, you're, you have a lot of humility around this. Like, you always, you know, push back on the notion that you're some kind of prodigy, right?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I truly do not believe I was prodigious and I don't say that with any sort of false humility. It's that I was actually exposed to real prodigies. So I saw what actually defines a prodigy and I, I wasn't there, but I'm fine with it. Like, I think that there were certain advantages almost to being, to having limits on your talent, which is that you spend more of your life just living normal life and having a diverse set of emotions that you can bring into your music. And I think while... You know, so you know, I had this boot camp with this teacher who eventually got me to the point where I did audition for Juilliard and I was accepted, but my technique trailed behind my musicality for the entirety of my career.

• 15:46Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  But I think there might have been an advantage to that, which is, I think, maybe something that we're getting at together here, which is that when you have limits on your technical abilities or your raw talent in certain domains, your attention goes elsewhere. And for me, it was, well, I think my goal is just to produce beautiful music.

• 16:04Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  And it just became that simple.

• 16:05Rich Roll?

  It's freeing in that regard. You're not held captive by this incredible talent that then drives your life. I know in my own life, you know, I've entered realms where I certainly was nowhere near the most talented, but I also had a work capacity to kind of narrow that talent deficit gap. And my sense is that when you know you're not as talented as these other people, you have to shoulder the responsibility of doing the work.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  Whereas people who are brimming with talent have a different relationship with process because they can always fall back on the talent.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, that definitely resonates with me in other areas of my life, but I, I'm not sure that it applied in the music space, and I'll tell you why, which is I was not outworking my peers. So that was something that was pretty defining in terms of what my childhood was like versus the classmates that I had. I had classmates, I remember one in particular, Shunsuke Sato, who is now a professional violinist who lives in France or something. And he was practicing his age equivalent, and I know this because we were neighbors at summer camp, so I was next to him, his apartment, and I could hear him practicing eight hours a day, nine hours a day, 10 hours a day. And my mom was kind of like, a couple hours, dude.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  That's it. That's our max here in the Shankar family. I want you having other hobbies. You know, I played soccer when I was in elementary school. I did art classes, tried out for the school plays. Like, she was really intent that I have some kind of balance in my life. But again, I think that there are various ways that... That balance can manifest, right? It did make me the least technically strong player in my peer group. But I think it made me one of the stronger musical members of my peer group.

• 17:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Because I do feel like I had just more to call upon in life to bring to my music.

• 18:01Rich Roll?

  You're living a richer life experience, so you have more. You have more to bring to the music, to personalize it and add your flair because you're actually living your life and not just

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Just in the confines of a practice room.

• 18:15Rich Roll?

  Sitting in a room practicing nine hours a day.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, I mean, it's such a lonely sport.

• 18:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, I think that's the one thing I don't miss about my violin years, which is it's a very lonely enterprise. When you're a soloist, that's, it's you and the bow and the violin in a room for hours.

• 18:32Rich Roll?

  But there's something pure about that, too, I guess. But I didn't even know that, I mean, I've always thought of Juilliard as this conservancy that that is sort of a collegiate experience. I didn't even know that they had programs outside of that for younger people.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a pre-college division.

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Right, so that's what you were in.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  That's what I was in.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  Was that every day? I mean, you're living in Connecticut, you couldn't have been going down to Manhattan every day.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  No, exactly. So the pre-college program demands that kids are enrolled in some sort of full-time school outside of it. For some kids, it's homeschool because they took the violin so seriously. So they would, I mean, I saw families torn apart over the, these musical ambitions, right? Two people are living in a studio apartment in a family in Manhattan, and then the other two are based in Seoul, living all the way across the world.

• 19:18Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Right, to make, to make things work and meet. And so I was in just our public's elementary school, middle school, high school throughout. And then Saturday, I would have to wake up at 4:30 in the morning. My mom and I would take the Metro North train from Connecticut to New York. Again, she says, wild to her, she wakes me at 4:30 in the morning, she's expecting me to complain, and instead I jump out of bed, you know? And again, I did not show that enthusiasm for other things. So this is definitely special. And then I would participate in up to 10 hours of lessons and classes the whole day and come home super late at night. That was my whole Saturday. And then when I was a teenager, when I was 13,

• 20:01Speaker 01

  And Itzhak Perlman asked me to be his private violin student. Things really picked up. And now I was traveling to New York, sometimes multiple times a week for private lessons with him, for studio classes, for, he was teaching me chamber music, like, everything got, I already thought it was amped up, and then the dial just went way up at that point.

• 20:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's so crazy. Explain for people who don't know, like, who he is and what a legend he is.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, arguably, the best violin player of all time.

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  And what did he see in you? You're so humble about your, you know, skill and talent. Like, why did he choose you for this?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting situation where my mom had asked our joint teacher, so interestingly, Dorothy Delay was my, one of my violin teachers at the time, who had also taught Perlman. So I was studying with her, and my mom, being the go-getter she is, was like, hey, do you think, you know, at some point, Maya can just play one time for Perlman? Almost as a fun life experience.

• 20:58Rich Roll?

  She's got some serious mama bear energy.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  She really does. And, but, but never was tiger mommy. So that's, that's the incredible thing, right? Which is, sometimes you see those two traits coupled, but she was both, like, fearless, but then also let us kids have the freedom of choice in terms of what things we cared about and wanted to do. She never pushed us to do things we didn't want to do.

• 21:21Rich Roll?

  Right, didn't have that unhealthy relationship where she's living vicariously through your experience.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely not. I mean, I do know, though, that part of her ambition in exposing us four kids to as much as she did, I have two older brothers and an older sister, is that, growing up in India, you know, she was encouraged to do well in school, and she occasionally would do Indian classical singing, but outside of that, she was mostly in the domain of domesticated duties. And I think she really wanted, especially for her girls, to have a richer palette of things from which to choose.

• 21:55Rich Roll?

  And, and your parents, it was an arranged marriage, right? Like, they only knew each other like 20 days or something?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they met on January 1st, and they got married on January 21st. So they had a choice, it was an arranged meeting of sorts, but they both had to decide on January 1st, the same day they met, if they'd like to get engaged. And I trace back, I mean, some of my mom's fearlessness is just in her genes, but she also was put into sort of a training boot camp of sorts when, you know, she marries this guy that she doesn't know 20 days later. She's a fifth grade teacher at the time, ends up uprooting her entire life and moves to the United States with my dad into a little dorm room in Massachusetts.

• 22:40Rich Roll?

  Cause she's doing his postdoc.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  He's doing his postdoc in physics and she doesn't know a single person in this country, you know?

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  She's 21 and has to navigate this new life that she has. And she said part of her defense mechanisms were to create a little army around her. That's one of the reasons she had four kids was to create a sense of, you know, she was so used to, she has 51 first cousins. So she's coming from this extremely vibrant social community and then she is now living in a small little dorm with just my dad. And so that was part of her way of filling the void.

• 23:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So I think she was filled with a lot of optimism that the United States offered so much promise for her. She was gonna lean the F in. And that's what she did with herself and all of us.

• 23:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, okay, so you're with Pearlman.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  What is that experience like? And what do you end up learning from him beyond just, you know, the technique of the violin?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I go and play for him and I think it's a one-time thing and I am not happy with the way that I've done. So I'm just like, also that was around the time that I was getting interested in like MTV and TRL and Britney Spears and my brain was a little conflicted about whether this classical music thing was for me. That was my version of teenage rebelliousness.

• 24:00Rich Roll?

  How dare you.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I know. How dare I? And so I don't know, I don't know if I was really practicing at my peak when it mattered most.

• 24:06Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, I'm sure you're getting A pluses in everything in school, right?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  No, I definitely wasn't. But I remember I played for him and again, was not expecting much. And then he told our joint teacher, he said, I like to take Maya on as a private student. And that just knocked my socks off. I mean, he had a handful of students at the time, probably had four students at the time. I just could not believe that I was one of them. I mean, I was truly astonished.

• 24:33Rich Roll?

  And so what is that? Like, what was that about? Like, what did he see in you?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  I asked his wife candidly later, you know, because I wanted to know, we met up for coffee just a few years ago in California. And I was like, why did Itzak take me on out of all the genius kids that were like running around? Because I know that technically I was not that strong. And she said, because he felt you had something to say.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Kind of hits on what we were talking about, right? I think he, I think we had some sort of emotional connection, just in our interactions and the way that we were, what I was saying to him through my music, for whatever reason, touched him. Which is, looking back, actually, like, the highest praise I could have gotten as a musician. I don't think I internalized it at the time. Because again, I was at all these insecurities about everything else. But, you know, Perlman is a performer. He is not, he's not trained in pedagogy, right? He wasn't trained to be a violin teacher. And so it's very interesting to see that translation from like, star violinist to teacher. I had no idea what his approach was going to be. And one thing that was so interesting about his approach is that

• 25:42Speaker 01

  he didn't do a lot of handholding. A lot of his work was trying to teach me how to teach myself, which is really maddening in the moment, because you're thinking, like, dude, you're the genius. Just tell me how to fix this phrase. Tell me how to make this better. And instead, the lessons were filled with lines of questioning. Well, what do you want to do with this phrase, Maya? How do you want this narrative arc to sound? I'm like, how do you want this narrative arc to sound? You know, you get so frustrated.

• 26:11Rich Roll?

  Twisting it into some kind of zen, Cohen. But how empowering, ultimately, right?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  It is empowering. And, you know, if you think about it, it's so pragmatic, because a musician is spending 99% of their time alone in a practice room. So if you can teach the student to be their own coach, to be their own teacher. Now you've just increased your return on investment a thousandfold, you know, because I'm actually able to translate that into the way that I approach my practice.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  Beyond that, though, on that subject of having something to say, I mean, ultimately, what distinguishes very good musicians from the greatest is those who have something to say. It's not the most technically skilled. It's the people who figure out how to inject it with their soul or their message, or something that is unique to them that elevates it beyond notes on a page.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  No, I think that's right. And I only had my experience with music.

• 27:13Rich Roll?

  And you're 15.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Rich Roll?

  It's like, how much did you actually have to say at 15?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 27:19Rich Roll?

  But the idea of identifying that potential, like this is somebody who has something to say and will continue to have, will continue to develop the capacity of that expression.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, thinking about it also, Rich, I think there was, I think there was a lightness of spirit that I brought to Lessons that might have been unusual.

• 27:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Because certainly I was in a pressure cooker, but it wasn't, for me, it wasn't the end all be all in the way that it was for other kids and their families who had literally sacrificed everything.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Uh, to be within these walls. And so I think, in addition to Pearlman connecting with me musically, I think the fact we were able to like joke in Lessons.

• 28:03Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And I approached everything with a bit of irreverence. And he was not too holy for me to jab at and make fun of. Like, I just, I think that stuff matters too, right? Like, do I enjoy my interactions with this person?

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what a gift. So it wasn't like some kind of black swan situation?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not at all. And I think, um, looking back, I just always had rapport matters to me. Like, it took me a long time to realize, like, ah, I'm obsessed with human beings and human connection and an emotional connection and whatnot, but. I felt like I cared much more about the bond I was developing with any person I was learning from than I was even about how much better I became at the violin. It was so much more about the immediacy of that personal connection. And maybe that's part of what he sensed, which is, this is like a curious person. Sometimes it translates into the violin, which is great, but independently, it's just fun to have someone who's curious and that I have a rapport with.

• 28:58Rich Roll?

  Right, but the real nugget of wisdom in that, and we're gonna work our way up to it, is this idea that the passion doesn't rest with the vehicle for the passion. You have to look beneath the surface to find what's driving it. So in your case, you had to learn the hard way, that it wasn't necessarily the violin that you were passionate about, it was what the violin allowed you to connect with.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:21Rich Roll?

  Right? Is that a fair way of describing that?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So I, I mean, I had to learn this lesson the hard way, which is against my own desires and will, I had to stop playing the violin. So, started studying with Perlman when I was 13, and when I was 15, I attended his summer music program on Shelter Island in New York. And I remember it was a cold morning, I think in July, and I overstretched my finger on a single note, and I heard a popping sound. And I knew something bad had happened, but I kind of was in denial, and I was also the recalcitrant, impatient teenager that was like, I'm gonna will my way, you know, I'm gonna work my way through this horrible injury. And, of course, I didn't. And even though I tried to play through pain for months and months on end, and just fight

• 30:08Speaker 01

  my way through, eventually doctors told me I could never play again, and I just had to listen. And so when that happened, I mean, I was just shattered and shell-shocked.

• 30:19Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And then at a loss. And I, like you said, you're 15, right? And so, you're not always su-, maybe some people who are really precocious are like this when they're young, like are very philosophically minded, but for me, this was a thing that I loved doing, and I wasn't fully reflective about the role that it had played in my life. I can make those reflections now, after the fact, but at the time, it was just like... I am the violin. I play the violin. That's it.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  Right. And you were going to go to conservancy and this was the life plan and you'd invested a lot and suddenly the rug gets pulled out from underneath you.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Rich Roll?

  On some level, though, very few 15-year-olds have a sense of what they want to do with their life.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Rich Roll?

  But when you're in that situation and your dream is eradicated overnight, it wasn't a progressive injury, right?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't. It was a sudden thing.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  And you've got to, you have to sit with that and figure out what you're going to do now.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, even convincing my parents that conservatory was an option was a big deal because I think for the longest time they were thinking, let's do the liberal arts education, please.

• 31:22Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  You know, a lot more security. And also, for both my parents who had had a college experience, I was very much on the one track in India at the time. You choose your major at the outset and that's what you study. My mom was so enamored by the American college system where you could take Chinese literature classes and then you could also take a class on Hinduism and then you can take a math class. Like, she was just so excited by that. And so...

• 31:48Rich Roll?

  And they were both working at Yale, right? Like, he's a professor there and she was working in, like, student relations?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And now, now she helps students get green cards to study, to study in the US. So she was so excited by the idea of having us go to liberal arts schools. And my three older siblings had, but I think when Perlman took me on, that was the first moment where I felt my parents were like, okay, yeah, maybe.

• 32:11Rich Roll?

  It wasn't, it wasn't...

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Maybe we can do the conservatory thing.

• 32:13Rich Roll?

  It wasn't getting into Juilliard at nine?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  No, no. Because, again, to my point about the fact that I absolutely was not a prodigy, like, you would need to see the kind of talent within those walls. It is remarkable how amazing these kids are. And so, in the same way that, you know, when you're in sports at those elite levels, there's just so few spots for people. The same is true in music, right? It was just going to be so hard to actually, to actually make it. And so, but yeah, I think the conservatory path was definitely in the cards, you know?

• 32:48Rich Roll?

  But here we are, a slight change of plans.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, then I had my slight change of plans. And I remember thinking, I expected to mourn the loss of the instrument. That's natural. I did not anticipate what it would do to my self-structure. Like, I did not anticipate...

• 33:04Speaker 01

  What a profound loss of identity, I would feel. Truly like the rugs pulled out from underneath you and the thing that you've defined yourself by for so long is no longer existent. I mean, to this day, my right shoulder slightly elevated compared to my left because of all the hours I spent playing the violin and my spine is slightly curved. My body literally grew around the ergonomics of the instrument. So it was a part of me today still, right? You know, people talk about like, oh, back in the day, oh, the black, my BlackBerry is like attached to my hands. Literally, my body grew around this thing. And now I don't have it anymore. And there is a concept in cognitive science called identity foreclosure.

• 33:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And

• 33:43Rich Roll?

  I highlighted that in my, in my notes, actually, because I wanted to spend some time on that, this idea that we settle into, we can settle into a self-identity early and close ourselves off from change.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:56Rich Roll?

  You've got an early lesson in that.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  I absolutely felt prey to identity foreclosure and didn't even know what it was at the time. First and foremost, a violinist, I saw that as my past, present, and future. And I think it held me back, feeling that my identity was so fixed. I would have benefited a lot from having a more malleable sense of self and attaching my identity to more stable features of things rather than the thing itself. That's the biggest lesson that I learned from all this, which is

• 34:31Rich Roll?

  But it's also very natural. We all do it to some extent. I am this, I am my business card, I do this thing, therefore I am that.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think for me, what I learned over time, and this hits on an earlier part of our, our conversation, is what was it about the violin that really lit me up? And I think if you'd asked me as a kid, I would have said, I love the way it sounds. I love the way that I can craft phrases. I love the physical feeling of the instrument. Those were all true, and I had to grieve the loss of that when I lost the violin. But I think if you stripped away all of the physical components of playing, it was the fact that I could forge these really deep emotional connections with people

• 35:20Speaker 01

  in the world, not even just in the music world, in the world, with my teachers, with my classmates. I go on stage in front of tons of people I've never met before. And I have, I have the ability, the potential to make them feel something new, to make them feel something they've never felt before. And that's very, that's an intoxicating feeling, that kind of human connection, when that's gifted to you as a young person. And so I found over the years, this is fast forwarding a lot, but I found over the years that tying my identity to the feature of the violin that I love, namely the ability to forge emotional connections,

• 36:03Speaker 01

  has been a much more durable, steady state for me. And something that has been able to persist over time and many career changes. It's the one through line that exists across many, many, many different sounding careers that I've had. But in everything that I've ever chosen, human connection was at its core.

• 36:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's such a beautiful pearl of self-awareness to have that. You know, and I couldn't help but reflect upon my own life and the slight changes of plans that I've experienced and the many pivots that I've made. You know, I'm very much a late bloomer in really finding a groove that works for me.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  I love that, by the way. How you articulate like, you know, 41, 42, 45.

• 36:53Rich Roll?

  People love that tweet.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:55Rich Roll?

  Similar to you, when I was a young person, it was swimming for me. That was the thing that I got up at 4:30 in the morning every day to do without, you know, having my parents to wake me up or anything. That took me to Stanford and I built an identity around that. And ultimately, I ended up leaving the team a year, my senior year. So I didn't swim my senior year. And I remember mourning that loss. Like it was, it was like somebody had died because my identity was so interwoven with being this person who did this thing. And it took me many years before I could realize that it wasn't necessarily the swimming, it was the community. It was like being part of a team and the camaraderie

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  and the tight-knit relationships that we had where we were all collectively working towards one ambition.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:45Rich Roll?

  And having goals that you can set that get you excited and all those things, right? And then trying to overlay that onto various professions didn't work. And it took me a long time to find something that would give me that same sense of purpose and direction and meaning.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I think that's right, and I hope that's helpful for the person listening who is navigating an unwanted change, or even sometimes a will change that surprises you and its impact, and destabilizes you in ways that you might not have anticipated, to try to figure out, what is my version of my through line? Like, if you strip away all the superficial features of a thing, of a pursuit, what's left that really ignites passion in me? And it was funny, I mean, I've needed this reminder every once in a while. I remember I was talking with a good friend of mine, Hyun Su. This was, you know, three years ago or so, and I was just feeling a dip in overall,

• 38:44Speaker 01

  like, life motivation, as we all do. And I was like, "I feel like I'm not passionate about anything, Hyun Su." And he's like, "But you're passionate about people." And I'm like, "That doesn't count? That's not a real passion." It's like, "Oh, wait, no, it is." So sometimes we also discredit the things that come naturally to us, as not falling into the realm, or into the domains of passion, right? "Oh, that doesn't count because it comes naturally, and I love it." And he's like, "Well, take it from someone who's not passionate about people." That's what he told me. He's like, "Take it from an introvert who does not get the kind of high you get from human connection to tell you this is differentiating, and you should absolutely see that as a core part of your identity."

• 39:26Rich Roll?

  And so broad, because if you can really, like, appreciate that passion, you can plug it into the world, or into, you know, any number of career paths.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And again, I don't want to pretend that I, like, had this all figured out when I was younger. It was no, it was a shit show when I was younger, and I was just really despondent, and sad, and morose, and probably not great company for a while there, when I first lost the violin. But ultimately, you know, I've landed in this place where I have a slightly more stable sense of self.

• 39:55Rich Roll?

  Well, in the biopic about your life, the next inflection point is you pulling this Steven Pinker book off the shelf, right?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 40:05Rich Roll?

  The Lifetime movie.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  The Lifetime movie, yeah. It'll be an original. Three people will watch it, including my parents. And so, the summer before college, again, probably not great company. My loving parents are like... We understand that your counterfactual world involved touring in China, Maya, but instead the summer is going to be at home with us. And so that's what I did. And I was in the basement, just kind of perusing the bookshelves. And I stumbled across a coursebook that my sister had had in college and called Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. And I opened it and again, not expecting anything other than like, what is

• 40:43Speaker 01

  this? I've never thought about language before. And it was pulling the curtain back on an aspect of our minds that I've 1 million percent taken for granted and never thought about before, ever, really, and revealed to me how sophisticated the cognitive machinery is that underlies our ability to comprehend and produce language. And I was in awe. I think that's the best word to use to describe my reaction in that moment. It's like, wow, if this is what's involved in language learning, what's involved in all the other stuff? Like the high level decisions

• 41:27Speaker 01

  we make, the philosophical musings we have, falling in love, people who could do math, like my dad, you know, what's involved there? Because I just found it to be an incredibly like incredibly elegant, complex system. And I was just in awe of this organ that we all have. And it was a lightbulb moment for me. It just, it just, all we need at these moments of inflection is just a seedling, just like a little something. I can't say that in that moment I was 100% like violin vibes everywhere. Oh my God, I found the replacement. That's not how things work. But I was very excited. And I got my hands on it. And the, another reason why you can't

• 42:10Speaker 01

  have that full moment of intoxication is that you don't know how this translates into anything moving forward. You don't know if you have aptitude for it. I didn't know that at the time Yale even had a cognitive science program. And this is all new to me, right? But all I knew is that I was really interested. And what I was sensing in the same way that my mom didn't have to tell me to practice is that I started getting my hands on every single book that existed in cognitive science over the summer, which is not typically when I would be reading.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  You know, because there wasn't school. And so that was unusual. You know, I was in the break between senior year in college and, you know, again, the intellectual among us will read books.

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  Well, all right.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  But that wasn't on my roster.

• 42:50Rich Roll?

  A couple reflections on this. First of all, like you're, you know, you're an insane student, you know, anybody who, anybody at that age who's going to spend their summer vacation, like, you know, pulling neuroscience books out and digging into them, like makes you unique in and of itself.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and obviously I'm nerdy.

• 43:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you brushed it off when I said you were getting A pluses, but clearly you're talented in the classroom and you care about your, you know, you must have a significant degree of academic rigor to have done all the things that you've done. But I think the lesson here is, you know, when you were, when you were saying that it wasn't like, oh, I knew how, you know, this lightning moment where I knew what my life would be, it's really about having the awareness and paying attention to the things that excite you and then, you know, just incrementally giving them energy and like pulling that thread and following it. And I think that plays into the larger topic of change and the power

• 43:50Rich Roll?

  of these nudges and things that, you know, are central to the work that you do. And, you know, because people will always say, well, I don't know what my passion is and I feel like my life doesn't have purpose. And, you know, that, when that question was put to you, you weren't even consciously aware that people is what excited you. And I think everybody within their blueprint has something that excites them.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:10Rich Roll?

  But we're living so kind of detached from our, our higher selves, if you, you know, however you want to characterize it, that, that we're not present with what's actually happening in our life. And when we have those moments, I think a lot of people allow them to pass and they aren't given the energy that perhaps they deserve had they been more consciously aware of what was happening.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  I love what you just said, because I think that, I think that was exactly right in the case of the book. The book was necessary, but not sufficient for me to eventually land a career as a cognitive scientist. And I think the translation piece is sometimes where people get lost. And so I remember, okay, I'm finding this topic interesting. So I start doing my homework, look into the Yale Course Book. I realize there's actually this new program called a cognitive science major. It's interdisciplinary. You take classes in a bunch of different areas, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, biology, and you study the brain, but you study it from all of these different vantage points. And I see that it's like an admissions only major.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And don't forget, I am having a lot of imposter syndrome right now because I believe I've gotten into Yale because I'm a violinist. And now I'm no longer a violinist.

• 45:21Rich Roll?

  So you had already been accepted to Yale, but you hadn't declared a major.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I hadn't declared a major yet. Exactly. And so, yeah, and I think, I think, given the timing, I already, the violin was already off the table by the time I even applied.

• 45:36Rich Roll?

  So you were feeling like a fraud because you thought violin was what helped you get into Yale.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Get in. Oh, 100%. And I thought, I mean, certainly when I was imagining going to a liberal arts college, it was going to be with the idea of majoring in music, obviously, performance, right? That was going to be performance studies, whatever it is, that was going to be my, my thing. But I certainly felt like, oh, that was the reason I got in. And so I definitely felt imposter syndrome, for sure. And so, so I learned it's admissions only, and then I'm, and then I feel nervous. But I still remember that in the same way that my mom had this kind of entrepreneurial, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to stack the cards in my favor, in my daughter's favor. I had that mindset, and I continue to have that mindset with just

• 46:27Speaker 01

  about everything else that I take on. So when I decided that I wanted to be a COGSY major, I remember I learned in my pre-orientation program that there was a non-human primate cognition lab. I think this is actually how Scott and I, I think we might have taken this monkey class together. But I showed up for the first day of the monkey lab, which was an admissions only class, and the room was overflowing with people. There were probably 40 students in there for

• 46:57Speaker 01

  A handful of slots and most of them were upperclassmen. So I was the lowly freshman in the room that was trying to to get into this class. And so my chances were very small, but there was an application form. And I was like, I'm gonna make this the best damn application this professor has ever seen.

• 47:15Rich Roll?

  Well, so you're like, it worked out with Juilliard. So what the hell?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  It's like, why not? Right? And there's no security guards involved in the case of an application. So I remember I wrote down on the application form, I will take the like 6 a.m. shifts on Saturday mornings in New Haven. I remember at that point, my parents had intervened and they were like, it's not safe. We need to protect your safety as our child over this monkey lab. And, you know, like, Lori, I will do anything and everything to get in this class. You'd have my unborn children. Like, I was willing to offer everything up to try to get into this course. And this professor, Laurie Santos, she's like a happiness guru now.

• 47:48Rich Roll?

  Right. And she, her podcast is with Pushkin also, right?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. She's, yeah, she's, she's played a critical role in my life ever since this moment, by the way. It's a constant mentor.

• 47:58Rich Roll?

  It's incredible. Yeah, I'd love to have her on the show as well. But it's hilarious that there's Scott, there's Lori, there's you. Now you all have podcasts. You know, it's like, what is going on?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  The cognitive scientists prevail. Yeah, no, I represent. That makes me very happy. But I, Lori took a chance on me. And she, I was the only freshman that she accepted into the class. I thought at the time, by the way, it was because I showed so much enthusiasm on my application and the prose was perfect. She later told me that I was the only one willing to sign up for the unpopular spots. And so that's why she took me on.

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  She has that happiness class, right?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, she does.

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  That gets written about, and that's the one that everyone's clamoring to get into.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so Laurie was my, Laurie's known me since I was 17. She helped facilitate a, a big pivot in my life because she's the one who helped me make that transition. I remember my dad at the time told me, if you're feeling lost, find someone you admire. And then try to reverse engineer how they got from point A to point B. And Laurie was that person for me. I really admired her. I liked how she was as a teacher. I liked how she was as a person. I liked how she was as an intellectual who was like brimming with ideas and curiosity. And so I tried to like bring myself close, you know? And she became a mentor and a friend very quickly. And it was because of that admissions ticket to the monkey lab

• 49:24Speaker 01

  that in undergrad, I got full exposure to what it meant to be a scientist, to actually run novel experiments and to generate data and to make new discoveries or not make new discoveries, which is often the case in science. And it's discouraging, which is one of the reasons I eventually left the field. But I was so grateful for that exposure because it meant that I could actually translate this early seedling of an idea into something concrete. And, you know, eventually got my PhD and my postdoc in these areas.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Right, right. I mean, you brush over that, but basically you complete Yale, you get this Rhodes Scholarship to go to Oxford where you continue your studies. You get your PhD and then you do a postdoc at Stanford, right? Was Andrew Huberman at Stanford when you were there?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 50:10Rich Roll?

  The Huberman Lab?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's got a podcast too.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  I think that actually is more representative of the fact that everyone has a podcast rather than it being.

• 50:18Rich Roll?

  But there's something about neuroscientists and podcasts.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 50:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's great because I think any show that tries to bridge the gap between, you know, science and popular discourse is great.

• 50:32Rich Roll?

  I think it's fantastic.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  The translation of science.

• 50:34Rich Roll?

  And the fact that so many people are enjoying that content is very encouraging, right? Like, this is hard science and it's a two-hour, basically lecture about the brain. And millions of people are like tuning in for this. Free content and I think that's a beautiful, fantastic thing.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, we'll talk more about a slight change of plans later. But in addition to the narrative stories that I have my guests come on and share, which are these very personal life stories, we have. Science expert episodes with people like Adam Grant and Katie Milkman and Annie Duke talking about the science of quitting and Angela Duckworth talking about grit. And those episodes are so popular.

• 51:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  People love learning about the science of change. That is so heartening. I did not know at the outset how those episodes would perform and yet people love them.

• 51:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The most popular episodes on this show tend to be the hard scientists. I mean, Adam came on and that was a hugely popular show. People love him and he's such a great communicator.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  He is, yeah.

• 51:35Rich Roll?

  There's hard science, but then there are, I think the sweet spot is the scientists who have such a command over the science and have this facility for communicating very complex ideas in a way that the audience can digest it and understand it without feeling pandered to, like without the condescension that you typically would see.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a skill and an area that I am actually deeply passionate about. And many of my former roles have required translating science into general terms, you know, like my work in the Obama White House, at the United Nations. And I think I was inspired in many ways by my dad. He's, as I say, he's working in some of the most inaccessible scientific spaces that exist.

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  It's like theoretical physics.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Theoretical physics.

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Quantum mechanics.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  Nobody understands that.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  I don't understand any of this stuff, right? And he has made a career, in addition to being a brilliant scientist and made incredible discoveries, he's made a career out of translating physics to general audiences. So, back in the day when, you know, this is before the days of Coursera and whatnot, which of course, you know, he's joined all those trains, but he went online and all of his lectures were on iTunes for the longest time. And

• 52:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because they used to have the iTunes

• 52:58Speaker 01

  iTunes, yeah, exactly. And they made their way around the world. Were streamed millions and millions and millions of times. I don't even know what the numbers are, but I remember thinking they were wildly impressive for physics lectures. And one of my proudest moments as a daughter is when I was at my sister's graduation. She was also at Yale with me. And my dad was given the teaching prize for all of Yale.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Which I don't think had ever been given to a natural scientist, let alone a physicist.

• 53:28Rich Roll?

  Well, here's the low hanging fruit joke.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Incredible that he did that.

• 53:31Rich Roll?

  Where is his podcast?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  He needs to come on the show, I know.

• 53:34Rich Roll?

  I think, I think, no, he needs his own podcast.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  That's hilarious, yeah.

• 53:38Rich Roll?

  Well, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna have him on your show. He's gonna crush it, right?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:42Rich Roll?

  And then, and then it will be so popular that like Malcolm Gladwell will be like, we need to create a show for him.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll call it Zero to Sixty.

• 53:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  And it'll be getting people up to speed on really hard physics concepts.

• 53:54Rich Roll?

  It's all worked out.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  In a matter of seconds.

• 53:55Rich Roll?

  It's all worked out.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  These ideas are born. So anyway, I love this notion of the translation. And I've always felt like when it felt challenging for me, you know what, dude? Your dad did it in the physics domain and made physics accessible to people. He would give general audience lectures all the time when I was growing up.

• 54:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  And so I felt like there were very few boundaries. And so I've actually worked as a practitioner for, of cognitive science for so long, you know?

• 54:21Rich Roll?

  So walk us through this. You're at Stanford.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  You're, you know, in this fMRI lab.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  And you have, the next inflection point in the Lifetime movie occurs.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, did we do a commercial break yet? I think people are getting bored.

• 54:35Rich Roll?

  No.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But I was in the fMRI laboratory and, ooh, I was not, not loving it, my friend. Which is a pretty devastating reality to confront when you've now invested, what, seven years or so into academia and then plus undergrad, right? And so I remember thinking, oh crap, I don't know what comes next. I had no idea what a cognitive neuroscience postdoc can go on to do. So I thought, well, okay, one, you become a professor, which I'm realizing I don't want to do after being in this windowless fMRI laboratory forever and having no social interactions with any of the people whose brains I'm scanning.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And then secondly, maybe I could be a general management consultant. Can I start that circuit? So I call my trusted friend and mentor, Laurie Santos, and I tell her, hey, so that thing I've been doing forever, and you were like a really generous, kind, charitable mentor to me, I don't want to do it anymore. Sorry, I'm going to try to interview for all the general management consultancies. And she's like, okay, before you do that, let's talk for a second before I lose my student, who I've invested so much energy and time into, let's talk.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  And she shared this incredible story that I did not know about how the federal government was using insights from my field, from the field of decision making, which is where I eventually landed in my postdoc, the Kahneman-Tversky work around judgments and decisions and biases, and was using insights from that field to help low-income kids get access to school lunch. So, long story short, government offers this program, the National School Lunch Program, offers it to millions of kids, but millions of kids were still going hungry every day at school, and it's because applications had not been submitted successfully for the program. And so when they did a behavioral audit, they realized that there were at least two barriers for parents enrolling their kids.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  The first was that the form was extremely burdensome to fill out. And so imagine, you know, you're asking a single mom who's making, who's working three shifts to make ends meet, to fill out this extremely complicated form that requires referencing multiple tax documents, and oh, by the way, if you get something wrong, you could face a huge penalty, and you have to go to the post office on this day, in the middle of the day, and get time off of work, and then you have to make sure you have postage stamps, like, it was not practical, given the feasibility constraints that face a lot of people's lives. And then the other, one of the other barriers was stigma. I mean, later on, I learned in talking with school principals and whatnot that a lot of parents felt, "Look, I work really hard for a living and I don't want my kid relying on the government." And so for that reason, they weren't signing their kids up for the program.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  So they ended up using a behavioral economics insight known as the power of the default. You're probably familiar with this. And all that happened is they changed the program from an opt-in program to an opt-out program. So they used administrative data they had collected on these kids to automatically enroll them in the school lunch program. And now, parents would only have to take an affirmative step if they wanted to actively un-enroll their kids from the program. So now, the onus has changed, right? And you've reduced, you've eliminated stigma, actually, because everyone's now just automatically enrolled in the program.

• 58:03Rich Roll?

  Right. These zero-cost changes that rely on behavioral insights that have tremendous real-world ramifications if they're just well-thought-through.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, in this case, 12.5 million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day.

• 58:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  It was unbelievable to me. And so, I had never, I had read about the theoretical potential of nudges and behavioral science, but to hear this story told to me was, it pulled on my emotional heartstrings, you know? And I thought, "Wow, I kind of want to be doing that stuff." And so, the barrier was that there was no job to apply for, and I had no connections into the political world. I mean, I'm just in academia forever. Like, no one political had ever even crossed my radar. But Lori had heard Cass Sunstein, the co-author of the book Nudge, it's kind of one of the fathers of this space, and had worked for Obama for four years, had heard him speak at a conference, and so she gave me his email address. And I just sent him a cold email.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And to our earlier point about insecurities, I wrote in my email, because I was just, I was so anxious about him even thinking that I thought that I could maybe ever even have a slight chance of having a job in the Obama White House.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Well, also, the recurring theme being you're not afraid to knock on doors.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yes, not afraid to knock on doors.

• 59:24Rich Roll?

  A cold email being a version of that.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I wrote to him and I said, you know, because I have no public policy experience. I don't feel I publish much of significance and I'm telling him in this email, I know you've worked with Obama and I wrote in parentheses, I know I'm not cool enough to work with the likes of Obama, but if there's a local or state government opportunity, please let me know. I couldn't even bear to ask about the federal version.

• 59:46Rich Roll?

  Negotiating against yourself right out of the gate.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. And thankfully for me, I mean, one, Cass is married to Samantha Power, so he's used to having strong, or he believes in strong women. And so he just ignored all that insecurity and wrote back to me within moments and said, here's the president's science advisor's email, here's his deputy's email, send them a note and let them know I sent you along. So every email, by the way, the subject line is changing from one important, one person who's more important than me to the next person who's more important to me. So the first email to Cass was, recommendation from Laurie Santos. And then the second email to the Obama people was, recommendation from Cass Sunstein. So I'm just using all their names to try to get, you know, generate some clout in a space

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  where I have zero. And I mean, I remember still, so I was, I was, I took up swimming, actually, when I was in my twenties. It was, it's a very meditative sport and it's, I mean, you were in a very competitive space. For me, it was always just recreational.

• 1:00:42Rich Roll?

  It's still meditative, though. Did you do it while you were at Stanford?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  I did, in their gorgeous Olympic-sized pool where the national team...

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  That was my home for...

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. What was your, I'm just curious to know what your, what was your stroke?

• 1:00:54Rich Roll?

  Butterfly.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Butterfly, okay, that's pretty baller. I can't do butterfly.

• 1:00:59Rich Roll?

  Keep going, though.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  So I...

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  There's plenty of things that you're, that you're very good at. Don't worry about it.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So I was, I think I was actually at the, I was at the local YMCA swimming because the outdoor pool is getting me, man. It's too cold. And so I was biking home and I stopped at a stoplight. And I looked at my phone, as one should not do, by the way, public service announcement, and I see this email response from him, and I nearly fell off my bike. I mean, I just couldn't believe that the White House people were getting back to me because I wrote, you know, Cassie email, then I sent the science advisor email, and then this guy writes back, Tom, who ends up being my future boss, and says, you know, "Just so happens, coincidentally, that I live in California and I actually commute to DC for three out of four weeks

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  of every month, and I happen to be here this week, and if you can come to my house, like, one and a half days from now, you can interview with me." And so, I'm pretty scared about this thing because I don't know what a White House interview's gonna look like. And so, I spend the next 24 hours calling everybody smart than I know in my entire life and mining them for wisdom and insights-

• 1:02:07Rich Roll?

  The good student.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  On what I could do.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  The good version of Tracy Flick is coming out.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  And so, I call everyone, and I'm like, "What ideas would you have?"

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  Thoning up on policy.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, for what you want to translate from behavioral science into policy. And I had to get, like, a business suit. Like, I just don't, I mean, as a postdoc who's riding a bike everywhere, I only have athleisure. And so, I go get, you know, a business suit. I have to borrow my friend's car. I don't even have a car to drive to this guy's house. And I show up, and it's not at all what I'm expecting. I'm expecting this, like, stiff government bureaucrat, and instead, I come in and there's, like, toy strewn everywhere, and he's got his shirt untucked, and it was, like, a very familiar cozy home. And, you know, his family was super nice and warm. So, anyway, I sit down with him, and don't forget, there's no role I'm interviewing for. So, my, the onus is on me to pitch him

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  on the idea of even creating a new role for a behavioral scientist, right?

• 1:03:05Rich Roll?

  Right. You have to present some kind of value proposition-

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  That would, you know, substantiate them hiring you for something they haven't even really thought of.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly, well said. That's exactly right. And so, I start talking about the different ideas I have. And at one point, I talk about how the first lady, Michelle Obama's, language for her Let's Move initiative could be improved using some insights from behavioral science. And his response to that is, "Oh, well, yeah, I mean, I know the first lady and her chief of staff, so we can make that happen."

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  Right, your head's exploding.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  What? Yeah, I mean, again, I was, I was in the, you know, ivory tower, so to speak, where in my, in my world, ideas went to die. And suddenly this guy's telling me, I've got a translation system for you in the form of you actually working in the federal government and actually getting to apply all these insights that are in your head or out in the field and out in research into measurable improvements in people's lives.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  And this is happening near the end of the first term.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yes, this is actually weeks before Obama's second term election. So I think it was like in, yeah, maybe early October or something. And so I remember at the end of the conversation, which was so much fun, by the way, like I went there so nervous and then all of a sudden it just felt like this extremely fun, you know, kid in a candy shop talking about all these fun ideas and...

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

  Did he give you the job, though? How did it?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was very confusing at the end. He said, well, I'd love to keep in touch. And I was like, okay, is that like a don't call me, I'll call you situation? Like, I enjoyed our chat, talked to you in three years, or I enjoyed our chat, want to give you a job. So I kind of asked for clarity. He was like, hey, so let's just unpack that for a second. What exactly does that mean?

• 1:04:46Rich Roll?

  In Hollywood, that means I'm never speaking to you again. You will never get a phone call from me.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I'd love to keep in touch. That's some very lukewarm feedback. And so he said, no, here's the deal. First of all, no plans can be made until we find out if Obama wins his reelection in a few weeks. And I was like, oh, totally fair. By the way, at the time, the biggest threat the Democrats faced was Mitt Romney. So ha ha, joke's on us, if you fast forward.

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  How quaint of a time.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I wanted to work for Obama, not Romney, just personal preference. And so we had to wait for that. And then he said, I have to pitch the entire office on creating this new role. So that's going to take me a little bit of time. You have to interview with the chief of staff and the deputy chief of staff. And then third, and this is where my West Wing visions kind of crumbled. He was like, we're going to just have to make sure we can find you a desk. And that's when I realized, actually, that the White House is quite resource constrained. And it really just comes down to how many chairs and desks are allowed in there with the fire safety codes.

• 1:05:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  So it might come down to something as simple as there not being space.

• 1:05:48Rich Roll?

  The woman who was hired for the general counsel's office in West Wing who ended up in the basement, you remember the boiler room?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Some of the most important people in the White House are working in the West Wing basement with no windows. That's how you know you really made it, when there's no, there's no windows in sight. And so, I mean, I'm already waiting for that election result, but I'm really freaking waiting for that election result in that year in 2012. And what was, again, I can't believe I did this, but I ended up breaking my lease in California and signing a one year lease in DC before I even had a written job offer.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  That's pretty ballsy.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  I sold everything but my bike, which I kept in my aunt's garage. And I was like, I might need this.

• 1:06:29Rich Roll?

  He must have given you a decent amount of-

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  He gave me a non-verbal hope and like, maybe a light email here and there. But 100%, I mean, you don't get to control the process, right? There's security clearances, like the FBI will randomly call your sister and be like, so tell me about Maya. And so you don't get to control all of it. But I really wanted this to happen.

• 1:06:50Rich Roll?

  Sorry, I keep stepping on your words. I don't mean to interrupt, but it is, it is an extrapolation of the theme of knocking on doors. You're like, I'm just gonna show up and I'm gonna, you know, if I've waited long enough, I'm gonna go knock on the door and manifest this, make this thing happen.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  I had that visual in my mind, which is like, I'm just gonna be on the White House doorsteps and I'm just gonna wait until it happens. And I'm just gonna show how much I want this job.

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  Be friends with the security guard outside the White House?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they won't let me just march in there with good reason.

• 1:07:23Rich Roll?

  I grew up in DC, so-

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Oh, did you? Okay, I lived in Dupont Circle. It was a lovely experience. And DC is so charming. So yeah, so I moved to DC. And I mean, that's when the real challenge begins. Like I, every time you pivot, there's the, there's the path of getting you the thing. And then there's coming to terms with the fact that you now have the thing.

• 1:07:46Rich Roll?

  Now you have it and you gotta, you gotta actually show up for it.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  You have to show up for it. And I again, had no public policy experience and I felt like a fish out of water. I mean, I had no idea how things worked. And I made it my goal. So I really benefited from, let me just say also, at this point in the conversation, mentors have been a game changer for me in my life.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  I don't know if I would have gotten to have the kinds of experiences that I've had in the absence of people who took me under their wing and mama bared me.

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, talk a little bit more about that. I mean, you have, you live in rarefied air with respect to mentors. I mean, Itzhak Perlman, Laurie Santos, like incredible human beings, but for the average person who is looking to level up and realizes or recognizes on some level that they could benefit from having a mentor, like, how do you think about that? I'm sure people, young people, reach out to you. They want you to be their mentor.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is the interesting thing about mentors, which is, I never entered a relationship hoping for a mentor on the other end. It was always a very organic process. I said with Laurie that when I met her, I was so inspired by her, I just wanted to, like, bring her close, you know? And I never, now, we talk a lot about having mentors. That's like a formal category, like a role that people play in your life. And I just never saw things through that lens. Like, I never thought of Perlman as like a mentor. It's like, Perlman's my teacher. But I think because I'm so curious about human beings, and I think because I always prioritize the interpersonal relationship above all else,

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  they naturally lent themselves to friendships. And that's actually how I had mentors. Like, I'm thinking about Tom, my boss, who taught me so much. He became a fast friend for me. And I don't think a lot of people approach that relationship in the same way. They were like, this is a boss-direct-report relationship. And granted, that's sometimes how things happen. Everyone has their own degree of comfort in blurring the distinctions between, you know, work and just real-life relationships. For me, it's always been a very blurry line. I'm friends with a lot of the people that I work with because it's just more enjoyable to live my life this way. But I think I'm effusive about my excitement about people.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  And so I think in turn, friendships form, you know?

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  And friendships are a two-way street. You're contributing to the relationship. I think a lot of people look at mentorship relationships as purely extractive. Like, I need to be with this person and I'm gonna pull out of them as much as I can, and not understanding the, you know, the social-psychological component of being in the shoes of the mentor. Like, what am I getting out of this?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  That's a great point. That's an excellent point. I had not thought about that before.

• 1:10:47Rich Roll?

  Even if you're young and don't have experience, you can still, you know, bring something to the equation that's gonna, you know, like, sort of nourish the mentor.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Rich Roll?

  And I think if you think of it in terms of like, more of a service-minded approach to it, you're in a better situation to actually, you know, be on the receiving end of whatever wisdom you're looking to get.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  That's a great insight. And I'm just thinking back to Laurie telling me that she found my energy and enthusiasm for cognitive science really infectious when I was an undergrad. And that sustained her through difficult days as a professor. You know, you invariably have a tough day with a paper rejection, or a tough student, or, you know, you're mentoring all these students that are at times struggling, even psychologically. And I think absolutely, that relationship was very mutually beneficial. And, you know, now thinking back to the Perlman relationship, I was telling you, like, I approach a lot of things with a hint of irreverence. And I'm sure Perlman was very used to sycophantic relationships. Just like, people, you know, bowing down to him everywhere he went.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  And maybe he found it refreshing that I didn't do that, you know? And I just saw him as a, as my teacher. And someone who I obviously respected to the sky and back, but that I could have fun with, too. And maybe there was a light, that lightness, which we talked about earlier, something that he appreciated. So, I really, um, yeah, I really appreciate that you said that. I think there has to be bidirectional benefit. And I still remember, we were organizing a team event in DC, and I invited my boss to come along. I was like, "Oh, Tom, you should come along." And he actually made a passing comment, like... Oh, it's actually rare that I get invited to these things because I think everyone's like, "Oh, he's the fancy guy at the top. We shouldn't invite him to these things." But he actually, you know, he was separated from his family, who were all living in California.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  So his social life in DC was not exactly hopping. And he loved the opportunity to spend time with all the fellow policy wonks, you know, in the neighborhood. So that was a good reminder, too, that we can bring things to the people who mentor us.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think to put a button on the mentorship discussion, it's also important to understand that mentorship doesn't have to come in the form of Itzhak Perlman or Laurie Santos.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Totally not, yeah.

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  We tend to think that the only mentors of value are the fancy people who have written bestselling books, or who are famous, or whatnot. And I think most people are surrounded by people that have some kind of wisdom that, like you said earlier, like, people want to help, right? And if you come to it with the right spirit, I think mentors abound more than people recognize.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, one of my greatest mentors in my daily life is the guy who does fitness training with me. His name's Matt. And I met him several years ago. And just to give you a quick backstory, I have a history of inflammation, and a lot of injury, and kind of chronic pain that I've had to work through over the years and try to unpack. And every time I tried to work with a personal trainer, it would end in some sort of disaster. Either I'd get terribly hurt, or something bad would happen, or they would go too strong, too fast, and not understand my body. And Matt is the first person I'd ever met in my life who showed an unbelievable amount of patience towards me.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  I'm not kidding when I say those first, like, few months, we were doing chest press with no weights in my hands. Okay, that's the level. This guy is like, you know, 6'2", like, very strong. But this is not the normal workout he's doing with his clients. Like, he's a HIIT instructor. And...

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  There was like a calm and wisdom and peace and compassion in his approach that blew me away and has gotten me to a point where, I mean, I've exceeded every dream goal I could ever have had for myself, where I have a consistent strength training workout that I do every other day, that I've been able to do for years now. And I had never before in my life been able to do that without getting injured or having some horrible debilitating pain that would last forever. And Matt took me under his wing and figured out my body alongside me, like he was like an expert, he was like a scientist trying to figure out like, okay, how do her biceps respond to this motion? You know, he's looking at

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  that level. And it made such a huge difference. And so I consider him one of my biggest mentors in life in terms of someone who's had a profound impact on my well being and my psychology and my sense of self. I'm still not strong enough to like lift my bag into the overhead compartment. So I'm working on that. Still need to ask for help. But I'm like, you know, orders of magnitude stronger than I ever was before. And that's an amazingly empowering feeling to have.

• 1:15:39Rich Roll?

  Shout out to Matt.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Love Matt Fuller.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  Matt Fuller.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Rich Roll?

  What's up, Matt?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  What's up, Matt?

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  Lots of love for you here today. All right. So you get the job at the White House. I'm envisioning you're walking through the West Wing doing a walk and talk with Josh Lyman. He's taking you down to the basement to show you your office where you discover-

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  I've got a briefcase in my hand.

• 1:16:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, you do? Right. Like you're probably possibly overdressed. Josh hasn't slept in three days. You're bright eyed and ready to go, only to discover you have no budget. There's no plan. There's no roadmap for what you're supposed to do here. And here you are sitting at your desk and it's just you and you.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Rich Roll?

  And here you're like, okay, well, now what?

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Now what? Yeah. Okay. So, so first of all, on the overdressed piece, my nickname in the White House was sneakers. And that was- Because I always chose comfort in ergonomics over looking good. So I would wear, I would wear, you have to wear business on top. But I would always be wearing sneakers until I had some really important meeting in which I'd flip into. Actually, I did that with you here, too, right? I came in with sandals and then wore these nicer shoes.

• 1:16:56Rich Roll?

  Better for the walk and talk.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, totally, to have some comfort. Okay, so I get to the White House and I learned some very valuable pieces of wisdom from my boss, Tom, who had the, had a lot of institutional knowledge because he had spent eight years in the Clinton administration, had left during Bush and then came back for another eight years of Obama. So I was catching him four years into that stint. And what he told me is that he had spent so much time as an individual contributor, if you will, while he was in Clinton, Clinton's administration, and that when Bush came into power, it was as though he had built this elaborate sandcastle on the beach for eight years.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  And then one big wave came and just destroyed the entire apparatus.

• 1:17:47Rich Roll?

  Right, welcome to Washington.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Right. So his advice to me was, Maya, you can try to have as much impact on an individual level as you can. However, my advice to you would be, you want to leave a blueprint for this work in parts of government that aren't susceptible to leadership changes or political changes, that don't fall prey to this, you know, these political cycles.

• 1:18:14Rich Roll?

  Four-year cycle.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so he knew my dreams of being, you know, a practitioner of behavioral science. And then I quickly got it in my head after that conversation. I think I want to build a team of behavioral scientists that can operate in a bipartisan part of government. Their day-to-day job can be to translate behavioral science.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Into policy, as a matter of course. And importantly, again, it's not going to be in the White House. If we build it in the White House, then I know it's going to disappear as soon as I leave. Or as soon as this administration ends.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  You've got to find those really boring corners of the internet where the lifers are holed up, right? And are immune from the vicissitudes of the political cycle.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And that's what I did. So I, you know, coming in, though, I had no budget and I had no mandate. And the president wasn't exactly saying at the time, like, there shall be a nudge team. He didn't even know who I was, right? And so I had to approach building this team completely differently than one would if they did have that high level mandate, which was, I started on the ground. I talk about door knocking. I probably knocked on 300 doors in that first year. Every person that I could possibly meet with, I would sit down with and tell them about the skills that, the skill set that I had and what insights behavioral science could bring to bear on the problems they were already trying to solve.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  And I was just so eagerly trying to get any government agencies to collaborate with me and just get some early wins on the board.

• 1:19:48Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. Well, before we dig into that a little bit further, when you look at tech, for example, they're very comfortable with this landscape in which you are expert because these platforms are built upon behavioral insights. How do you remove all the friction to get the person to click on the thing you want them to click? All the way down to the color palette and, you know, the way that the button looks, like all of that kind of stuff. Like, there's so much money in science that goes into all of that. Like, startup culture, tech culture is completely about that. Government, not so much.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 1:20:27Rich Roll?

  And the incentives are not there because, you know, when you're talking about trying to pitch these people who are, you know, in a different part of government and have been there for a very long time, you being a bright-eyed, young person coming in saying, I'm going to do this new thing, like, what's in it for them? Like, they have their little way of doing things and it's a About not rocking the boat and

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll get slapped on the wrist if it doesn't go well.

• 1:20:49Rich Roll?

  You just become a pain in the ass to everybody.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. I was everyone's pain in the ass in that first year, for sure. And the only way I was going to succeed is if I inspired organic interest in my government colleagues. Because nobody had to say yes to me. In fact, most people wanted to say no to me. I got more no's that year than any human being, I think it's gotten. I mean, the number of people where maybe they showed not a kind of interest that it wouldn't go anywhere, or they showed no interest off the bat, like it was my ratio.

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  Because they have everything to lose. Like, there isn't a lot to gain for them.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And like, what if our A/B test reveals that their program isn't as effective as I thought? Then there's a liability involved. So they were taking a risk in partnering with me with very little upside. And I was aware of this. And so I had to get pretty clever about the tactics that I used to try and align incentives, to create an incentive structure where they had maybe at least not more to gain than to lose, but at least even, right? And so, and I also was faced with this question early on, which is, what is the right order of operations here, right? Because I don't have a budget and I don't have a mandate. So there's one world in which I wrote elegant policy proposals and drafted them up and tried to keep pitching them to senior leaders.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  And like, at some point, could someone just sign off and give me a few headcount? So that was one version of the world. The other version of the world was to reverse engineer that, where you do the opposite. You start by actually just getting some work done, showing proof of concept that this methodology works and can have a positive impact. And you just get your feet wet and you just get the job done. And I very quickly learned that the only way that this was going to succeed is if I did the latter. Nobody was waiting around with resources for my proposal to get, you know, land on their desk for them to sign.

• 1:22:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  That was never going to happen. And so, in that first year, I, you know, eventually was able to get a few government agencies to say yes. And one of them was the Department of Veterans Affairs. They were trying to get vets to sign up for a employment and educational benefit that they were entitled to upon leaving their time in the military. And we worked with them to try to convince them that our techniques could be helpful to them in boosting participation rates, similar to the school lunch program, not enough vets were signing up for this, even though that transition from military to civilian life is so fraught with so many challenges. And so it can be so helpful to them to have these resources. But they were very budget constrained and they only had one email to work with.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  And we changed one word in the email. We told, we simply reminded veterans that they had earned the benefit through their times in service, time in service, rather than

• 1:23:35Rich Roll?

  Eligibility versus they were eligible.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that, that one word change led to a 9% increase in access to the Veterans Program. And, and they threw a pizza party. It was the first time they'd ever run an AV test. You know, we, we were, most of the time that my colleague and I were spending, working with them on this, was spent just building the technological apparatus to run an email AV test, which didn't even exist. And so that was part of my mandate, was bringing experimental methods, not just behavioral science to the table. But it was really, really hard work. For every one of those wins, I swear, there were 50 things that were in the fire that never went anywhere.

• 1:24:11Rich Roll?

  Right. Because it seems so simple, right? Like, how hard can this be? Like, change this word and you'll get a better result.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  It's so not.

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  My broader point just being like, these, these tiny little tweaks that have zero cost, when you're, when you're, when you're, when you're implementing them at the highest levels of government with respect to giant programs.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:30Rich Roll?

  Can end up saving billions of dollars, benefiting millions of people. And, and so the results end up being like, really huge for these small things.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And as huge as the results are, is the effort that goes into actually convincing all of the relevant people, everyone, at every level of government to say yes.

• 1:24:48Rich Roll?

  Just change one word. Change one word. Not gonna do it.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  And then sometimes we had much bigger changes, right? Program design, the structure of defaults, things like that. And so it was really hard work. But in that first year, year and a half, we were able to just get a few points on the board, enough that, you know, caught the, the attention of the president's office. And we ended up having a briefing with President Obama in the Oval. This was in early 2015. And I was able to share with him work that we'd actually done. Like, you know, here's the before and here's the after. And, oh my gosh, it was such an exciting and energizing meeting for all kinds of reasons, including that he's just remarkably charming. But also because it was the first time that

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Someone was acknowledging the existence of this very makeshift team that I'd been pulling together through all these creative hiring codes and whatnot, and he called it the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, which is the name that I'd given it. And he called, he thought of us as an actual entity that existed, and it didn't exist anywhere other than in the impact we were having. We weren't in any clauses and any documents, like anywhere. It wasn't a thing. We were just a group that I was pulling together. And so, having him say in that moment, like, "You are a real team, and I value your team's work," was such a satisfying moment. And in that, in the fall of that year, I think because of this initial briefing, he ended up signing an executive order that made my team a permanent part of government. And that was just a huge win.

• 1:26:19Rich Roll?

  So that, that prevents the sandcastle from getting washed away.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And the team, they're called the Office of Evaluation Science. They still live in the General Service Administration. They're still running amazing trials and doing great work in a very bipartisan fashion across the government.

• 1:26:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, continued through the Trump administration, although it didn't find its way back into the White House.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  I disbanded the White House component on my way out the door. Yeah, whatever was still there, I was like, "Ah, no, I don't want any of this. It wouldn't even be used in any way." That's anything other than positive, so I just kind of didn't, didn't renew that charter.

• 1:26:52Rich Roll?

  Right. Talk to me about Obama a little bit, though.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:26:56Rich Roll?

  You know, what is the, you know, you hear these stories, he's so charismatic, he's the person who makes you feel like a million bucks, and he's completely attuned to you when you're in his presence and all of that. Like, what is that magic?

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  I, I was taken aback by it. So yeah, it's, it's real. I remember the night before, so I had an interesting experience with this briefing in the Oval, because I was both leading the meeting as the lead of the team, but I was also helping to organize the meeting behind the scenes by writing the president's talking points for the meeting. So, you know, I had my-

• 1:27:29Rich Roll?

  Weird meta.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was very meta. I was like, "And here's what you should say to the team about this result with the Department of Defense, and here's the work that we did." So it's so funny, right, to be both a participant and then also part of the team that's helping POTUS, you know, enter the meeting. So, I was pulling together all the briefing docs of all the wins that we had had and, and, and our historical work and, and giving him some general talking points. And then- They asked for bios of all the members of the team. So I was curating the bios and it was alphabetical order. So I made sure it was in alphabetical order. And so I was somewhere farther towards the end. And I remember pulling the bio together and thinking, you know, there's that line at the end about how I used to be a violinist and I studied with Perlman.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Like, that doesn't really seem relevant to my current role as a policy person. I should probably take that out for this very formal briefing doc. And then I thought, you know what? He's not going to have time to read this anyway. Who cares? So I just kept it in. He opens the door the next day to the Oval. And the first thing that comes out of his mouth is, oh, my gosh, Maya, you studied with my buddy Itzak. He played at my inauguration along with Yo-Yo Ma. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, talk about making one of your random staffers feel like a million and a half bucks in that moment. He either took the time to read the briefing doc, which I actually believe he did. And he was just that studious that he did do all of his homework all the time.

• 1:28:55Rich Roll?

  I'm sure he did.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  And or someone told him about this. And either way, I don't care what system was in play behind the scenes. The thoughtfulness, you know, we worked so hard in that administration. Every single one of us just was like hauling every minute of every day for those four or eight years. In the case of my colleagues who worked for the two terms and to feel valued for our full story in life. You know, it was wonderful. And so I instantly, I was just like, the meeting could end right now and I'm good. You know? And so and then also just, he's just such like a, we just had a jokey rapport, you know?

• 1:29:35Rich Roll?

  Is it the kind of thing where you would see him in the hallways then from time to time? Like in my like mind or trying to envision like the real life experience of like working in the in the West Wing?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not that many people are seeing the president day to day. I'm sorry to say, but we were grateful whenever we had the opportunity to. I'll say that. But of course, I mean, his actual, like, the really legitimate senior advisors were like regularly in the mix with the president, but I certainly wasn't. So and the other thing that was so wonderful about this meeting is that he was so engaged with the material. Like you learn later, all the things that were on the president's plate that day, including national, you know, concerns around national security and whatnot. And the fact that he was able to be laser focused on our team for the entirety of that meeting was astonishing.

• 1:30:26Rich Roll?

  That's the gift and the job.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. I remember at one point, he said to me, kind of cheekily, he's like, "Maya, can we get your team on Congress? Like, can you guys just like fix what's going on over there?" And I, and I remember saying, you know, "With all due respect, Mr. President, we try and take on projects that are difficult, not impossible." And so, yeah, he was just, he was so engaged and he, he made it very clear by the end, you know, if you run into any obstacles, I, I feel like he knew that up until this point, I'd been like the lonely person. I mean, obviously I had my teammates, but I was still at the top of the hill being like, "Hello, listen to me, everybody. Can you please think behavioral science is important?" And he knew that if he could lend some of that gravitas that he has towards my cause,

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  it could be very effective. And so, helping, you know, at the end, he, you know, he was joking, like, "You got my number, right? Any problems anyone gives you, you just let me know. You call me directly." So he's a huge supporter of the, of the initiative. And then signed the executive order, which is amazing.

• 1:31:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, how did that come into being, the executive order?

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  So, it's, it's, it's equivalent to a Juilliard moment. There's no executive order, and then you just kind of create a draft one day, and you start circulating it, and there's a lot of resistance, and you just keep plugging and plugging and plugging. And one day, the top of the document gets changed to say, "Executive order." And, um, yeah, for the longest time, actually, uh, I think there was a feeling that like behavioral science isn't sexy enough to get executive order treatment. Um, but my point was, well, that's exactly the point, is that it should, as you were saying, that some of this stuff just feels so obvious. This is just good government practice. And oftentimes, it is very low cost, uh, light touch interventions that can be make or break for families everywhere.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  And so I think that's what helps solidify the argument, which is, this is, this is what it means to just engage in best practices as we run this massive entity, which is the federal government.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  A while back, you let slip with this phrase behavioral economics. But I'm not sure I understand exactly what that is.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a lot of umbrella terms that are used in this space. So I think maybe the broadest one is just behavioral science, which is essentially the study of the human condition. Behavioral economics, technically, I guess, on a definitional level, is just blending insights from psychology with insights from economics to have a more robust understanding of how humans operate in different settings.

• 1:32:52Rich Roll?

  I see. The idea being that we're not logical actors that were prone to these emotional states and these defaults that lead us to make decisions that on paper it looks like we wouldn't otherwise.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, there are some philosophical disagreements about what is logical. I mean, it is actually logical sometimes for a human to act on their emotional states. And so there's questions about that, but I think that's exactly right. It's that there's a lot of hidden surprising factors that influence our decisions and our judgments outside of our conscious awareness. I think one of the most illustrative examples of this is in the context of voting. We like to think that we will just vote for the candidate we'd most like to see elected into office. That feels pretty straightforward.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  But there's research from Texas showing that the order in which the candidates' names appear on the ballot has an outsized influence on voter behavior. So if your candidate's name is listed first, that candidate will receive a 10 percentage point boost in vote share relative to if they're listed last. And obviously, this is in low-information environments. Of course, if you're dealing with a national election, probably those ordering effects are going to be a lot less relevant or important. But I feel like when we know that, when we know that we as humans have this first-in-line bias, it can lead us to design more equitable solutions, right? To design policy accordingly.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  What's happened is now that now we randomized the order in which candidates' names appear in a lot of places and a lot of election contexts, and that helps make things fair overall. So the reason I'm so fascinated by this field is that when we learn about it, when we uncover insights, in turn, we can become smarter in correcting for those biases and solving for them in the DNA of how we design policies and programs.

• 1:34:38Rich Roll?

  What are some of the initiatives you would have liked to have seen happen when you were at the White House that didn't happen or got no's, but you feel like were good ideas?

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  That's a great question. So one of the projects I was most passionate about just came to an abrupt end. My team and I started working on the ground in Flint, Michigan, and with our colleagues there during the lead-in water crisis. And initially, we were working in collaboration with White House offices and also with the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure that safe water information was getting into the hands of Flint residents. But then when we visited the ground, and we actually went there, and we talked to heads of churches and heads of local YMCA's and just people who were leading the troops, we learned that the challenges went so far back, and that in many ways, the lead-in water

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  crisis was a symptom of a much bigger crisis, which was decades of disenfranchisement and systemic racism, and people of color in the community feeling like they had no voice, and rightly feeling like they were betrayed by their government and consistently lied to. And so when you recognize that, you realize that the problem you're solving for is in part water in the short term, of course. You need to make sure you don't poison an entire generation, which is what was happening. But it was trust. And that introduced a whole set of interesting questions in the psychological domain, which is, how does a community rebuild

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  trust when they don't have good reason to trust their government?

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  You can imagine how erosive that is, right? And this would play out even the decisions we made around the way that we are getting this water safety information in the hands of Flint residents, I remember. So, we think a lot about who the messenger is in this field, right? So, what we've learned from research is that sometimes it's as important to consider what the message is as who it is who's delivering the message as what the message itself is. And I think naturally, our instinct is to go to the Environmental Protection Agency, right? Like, they are the leading authority figures when it comes to environmental safety. And so, they should be the ones delivering this message to people on the ground. But then, Rich, you think about the backdrop here, right?

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Which is that Flint residents have been lied to for years by their local government.

• 1:37:11Rich Roll?

  If the EPA had been doing its job, they wouldn't be in that situation to begin with.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Or if their local government had let them down, and you could absolutely imagine that that would translate to the federal government. Like, your feelings about government aren't boxed into, "Oh, I don't trust my whatever, my mayor, or my whatever." No, you just have a general feeling sometimes towards whether the government is an entity you can trust or not. And there was no reason that they should trust the government. So, what ended up happening is that the, I mean, the local EPA, which was a fantastic group of people to work with, I'm not sure that they were the ones who were behind all the deception, but the ones at least I came into contact with were fantastic. They organized a canvassing effort on the ground in which they recruited trusted members

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  of the community to deliver these information packets to people. And so, we're talking heads of churches, heads of the Red Cross, members of the YMCA, people that you're running into as part of your day-to-day life. "Oh, my kid goes to, you know..." Baseball practice with your kid. I see you every week. I have reason to trust you.

• 1:38:19Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  So those folks would go door to door knocking and saying, hi, I, trusted member of your community can vouch for the information that's in this flyer. And that's very important when misinformation and disinformation is on the run, right? And you actually have trusted people who can deliver these messages. So I was really sad. I remember.

• 1:38:40Rich Roll?

  So that program was discontinued?

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an effort. I mean, gosh, this is so painful. So I'd gone to Flint, and then the election, the 2016 election happened. And I actually went back to Flint shortly after. And you could see, you could see how traumatized people were by this leadership change. Like, they already felt that they were not getting the support they needed. And now it was like, is it, are we going to get anything? Are we going to get negative support? Are we, like, what is, what does the future hold? That was so, that was so sad, to be there knowing that there wasn't a future where we could help them.

• 1:39:25Rich Roll?

  It's so crazy.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Through that route. It was really hard.

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  This problem persists in Flint.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, no, and it's going to be a problem for a long time. So I just, I remember knowing in that last trip right after the election, like, oh, this is kind of our goodbye trip. And we got to know a lot of these folks on a personal level and developed beautiful friendships with them, you know, and heard about their grandkids and, you know, their role as the head of a church or whatnot. And so it was pretty heartbreaking to see that come to an end.

• 1:39:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, extrapolating on that idea of leveraging cognitive science to engender trust where that trust is broken, scaling that up to the broader kind of national declining trust in institutions, like, what does behavioral science say about how we might address that? Do you have thoughts on that? Like, it's sort of this epidemic right now that we're dealing with, where people just don't trust institutions in general, or that trust is at... I don't know if it's at an all time low, but it's at a low that is feels unprecedented, at least in my lifetime.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of my favorite insights from behavioral science in the area of trust building is around what's called operational transparency. And it refers to the idea that when we pull the curtain back and we just let people in on what's happening behind the scenes, whether in terms of what constitutes our decision making process, why we chose X over Y, the messiness behind the scenes. I think my instinct as a leader of my team is to protect people from all the mess. It's like, oh, my job is to protect you, but actually it's kind of counterintuitive to learn that that can be an antagonist.

• 1:41:07Rich Roll?

  Let me tell you about the mess.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, towards building trust, to shelter people too much from that process. And so there was a really interesting study run by some Harvard psychologists with the city of Boston in which people were complaining about various challenges around the city. So broken stoplights, broken stop signs, potholes in the ground. And they're like, when is this stuff going to get fixed? Like, we gotta keep living our lives here in Boston. And what the city did is they created a virtual map in which they simply ID'd that all these problems were happening and they showed where those problems were. And then they had these little progress meters, right? Where you could actually see that like, oh, this road sign, you know, could maybe get fixed on Thursday, or at least it's next in line.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  And even though the speed with which the problems were going to be fixed was unlikely to change, the mere transparency into the process was extremely assistive in building trust. And in this case, the study showed, I believe, that it led people to be more civically minded. They were more interested in participating in their government as a result. And I mean, I saw this as a, as a regular of Domino's. I don't know if you're aware of the pizza tracker. You're probably not because you're Mr. Health Nut, so anyway.

• 1:42:20Rich Roll?

  But I do know.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Us Amharians occasionally eat.

• 1:42:22Rich Roll?

  You're talking about some kind of social media campaign where they were like transparent about their failure?

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It's actually just a pizza tracker where when you place your order, you can see where it is along the way.

• 1:42:32Rich Roll?

  Sort of like Uber or something like that.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, oh, Sarah, just put your pizza in the oven and like the pizza's going to come out now. And now the toppings, now they're doing a quality check on it. I wish I could say that I'm reporting this on behalf of a friend.

• 1:42:44Rich Roll?

  You're so emotionally engaged with it. It's coming out of the oven.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  And so when I'm frustrated, like, where's my damn pizza? It's been so, I feel like it's been so long. What I, and then your imagination is thinking, they're not doing anything, are they? And then they are, and then you're like, oh, I should actually be a lot nicer in this situation because the pizza's on its way and you should be patient. And even though, again, the timeframe, which I was gonna get my pizza, has not changed, I feel more trust that things are happening behind the scenes.

• 1:43:11Rich Roll?

  Because you can see it happening in real time.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  It is common sense, but transparency, yeah, transparency requires a level of comfort with vulnerability and it feels like a political liability.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Rich Roll?

  When in truth, it engenders trust and people respond positively to it. You know Brené Brown, you've been on her podcast, she talks about this all day long.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Rich Roll?

  But it feels like the curve is steep in terms of getting people to really understand and start practicing that. But, you know, when you were telling the Domino's story, I was thinking of the many examples of companies on Twitter when they screw up and they just, they, they're just, here's what happened, here's exactly, or they send an email to their thing and they're like, here's what's going on and here's what we're trying to do to fix it. That, that breeds loyalty. And then people feel connected to that because they weren't lied to.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Rich Roll?

  And I think, you know, as we become more digitally savvy, our radar for bullshit becomes more finely attuned and we can see the bullshit coming further and further away. And I think that means that whether it's corporations or government entities have to shoulder that, that responsibility for transparency in a way that maybe they haven't had to historically. I mean, young people won't tolerate it. They demand a level of transparency that, you know, people my age probably don't think about that much.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  There, there was an interesting study run where, um, in the beginning of a brainstorming session, one group was asked to share something they were proud of and another group was asked to share, uh, something, an embarrassing story. So like, you know, 100% vulnerability, you're sharing something you are actively embarrassed by. And when they measured the productivity of the brainstorming sessions after the fact, the embarrassing session, the embarrassing story group outperformed, uh, the proud of group.

• 1:44:58Rich Roll?

  Cause they get all that out of the way and then they feel liberated to share other dumb ideas.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it creates a more open space. I think it was that not only were the, was the magnitude of the, magnitude of ideas increased, but also the diversity of ideas, like the range that they covered. And so. It's not even that it feels good sometimes to share. It can affect productivity and outputs in pretty powerful ways.

• 1:45:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so if you were the czar of behavioral insights for America, or whatever, or corporate America, or government, I feel like that's mission number one, right? Like getting people comfortable with transparency.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think just reminding people that when you do admit to weakness, when you admit to struggling, it can build a lot of credibility. And you can help people. I mean, that's the thing that I've seen in my approach to leadership, especially in the last two years when there's been so much loss worldwide. And we've all navigated our own losses, you know, over the last two years and are grieving, in some cases, just lives we used to have that we don't have anymore. Whatever it is, everyone has been changed in some way by COVID, right?

• 1:46:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  And in many ways, I saw that bring out the best in people when it came to their willingness to share. So on a personal level, I remember in the beginning of quarantine, my husband and I, we have to work with a surrogate in order to have a baby. And we had a successful pregnancy and then a pregnancy loss. So we lost our surrogate miscarried, and we were devastated. And I didn't share it publicly with the team. So this was in like February of 2020 that this happened. And then fast forward a year and a bit, a year and a few months, and our surrogate's now pregnant for the second time. And I'm feeling super optimistic. And she's actually pregnant with identical twin girls.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Jimmy and I are like, wow, can't believe this finally happened after years of fertility stuff and trying to find a surrogate. And we found a beloved surrogate who lives in Arkansas. We love her, her name's Haley. And we thought the stars are finally aligning and this is going to happen. And then she miscarries again on exactly the same day as the time before.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  We just got unlucky. Haley's healthy. Our embryos were tested and normal. And it turns out she just had an autoimmune response to our embryos. Her body was treating our embryos as kind of foreign material. And I was beyond devastated. I was so torn up by the second loss. And I didn't know how to process it and how to navigate my own emotions about all of it. And we are all at home and not having the social supports we're used to. I'm sure there was at some point, probably it was Delta at that time that was up. There's always one. And I remember, I think it was that night,

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  I wrote a note to my entire team at work saying, "I'm suffering and I'm in pain and this happened to my husband and me and our surrogate. And I'm going to be offline for a while, but I wanted you all to know what happened because I want you to feel less alone if something tragic happens in your life." And I heard from so many people, you know, who shared with me that that helped them feel more comfortable sharing when they had something bad happen, you know, that was modeling, that kind of behavior. And we haven't talked about the podcast yet, but I turned to my own show in that moment of grief, which was so surprising for me.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I can be an open book about certain things, but this felt so deeply personal. And I never expected to share it with anyone outside of my immediate family and close friends. Like, it was just not a thing that felt comfortable for me. And yet, when I was in the throes of this change and felt so overwhelmed by it, I realized that, okay, I have this show called A Slight Change of Plans, in which I'm inviting all these people to come on and talk with such vulnerability about how they navigated their slight change of plans. And while I'm in the throes of production, the host of A Slight Change of Plans has her own shitstorm thrown her way and doesn't know how to manage it. I felt like I needed the show in that moment. And so, I actually turned the mics and had my producer interview me

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  about my experience with loss. And it was so therapeutic to do. And, you know, the episode's called Maya's Slight Change of Plans. You know, it was never expected that that would ever be an episode.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  I think one thing that we know that's positive that can emerge from loss and grief is meaning-making and purpose-making. And I can't count the number of emails that I've gotten from people all over the world who have navigated losses in this domain or losses in any other domain, who felt emotionally connected to me because I was willing to share my story with them.

• 1:50:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  And that overwhelms me to this day. Like, I get a little emotional thinking about the impact that it's had on so many people. And I feel like that's maybe, I never really thought about this before, I feel like that's probably been the greatest area of growth for me on a personal level, is a willingness to show when I'm suffering and to process things out loud. Maybe the podcast has helped me get there, but I think it's also just growing up and maturing and realizing, what's the point of keeping it all up here?

• 1:50:39Rich Roll?

  No, it doesn't do well when it's kept up there.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  Doesn't do well when it leaves there.

• 1:50:42Rich Roll?

  You know, grief is best shared, and it does engender a level of emotional connection and trust. And for you being the host of this podcast, where the very theme of it is how we navigate hardships and what we do in the face of life throwing curveballs at us, had you not shared that, it would ring unauthentic to who you are. So I think it was really important, as well as courageous to do that, but I'm not surprised at the response. You know, I'm somebody who's been in recovery for a very long time and has the gift of being exposed to communities on the daily who share their pain and their vulnerability

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  and their, you know, the terrible things that they've done, with such a level of courage and comfort at the same time. And there's something very unique and special about that that makes you feel connected to those people and trusting of them, and also empowered to do the same yourself, right? Like, had I not borne witness to thousands and thousands of people, you know, standing up in front of groups, big and small, to share their deepest shame and their most embarrassing moments without...

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  Any more shame attached to it is incredibly powerful in terms of like how you think about the things that you're ashamed of, that you're hiding from the world, that you're afraid to share. And I think the more that we get comfortable doing it, like you said, you get all these emails from people, like that was a self to them, and makes them feel like they can have a different relationship with their own pain. And together, we grow. And I think there's something really beautiful about that. And I think, you know, being a member of that community has made me a more, has made me a better podcast host, because I am more empathetic to the people that I'm sitting across from, because I've been exposed to so many, you know, versions of individual pain and mishap

• 1:52:41Rich Roll?

  in life, that it's impossible for me to judge someone's lived experience.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think that's, I mean, that's really powerfully said. And I think one thing that has surprised me and heartened me when it comes to making a slight change of plans is how universal our change stories are, and how the psychological strategies we use to navigate change, and the coping mechanisms we use, and the insights we generate, they seem to transcend circumstances. And so I think before making this podcast, I would have thought, oh, you know, I'm having someone who's in the throes of a stage four cancer diagnosis. The people that this story's going to resonate the most with are people who are going through a cancer diagnosis. But instead, I'm seeing fascinating crossover effects that seem to align people along psychology rather than

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  circumstance. So a recent divorcee shares how the betrayal that one of my guests shared in getting a stage four cancer diagnosis, even though he had spent his whole life trying to be, to optimize for his future and be a health nut, is a similar kind of betrayal that she felt in her marriage.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Inner marriage ending and I shared with you that I shared my own story of loss. And I heard from a woman who lost her 21 year old son to an overdose. And she said, it was in hearing your story that I finally found healing, that I saw a new way of thinking about my son's death. And that has helped me so much, you know, and those circumstances are wildly different. She lost a 21 year old son and yet, something about how I shared, something about the way in which I psychologically responded to this and the realizations I had or the

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  reflections I had, touched something in her and helped her. And so I love that, that we can learn from stories that don't look like our own. It means that we have this infinite resource of wisdom that we can tap into when we're navigating change.

• 1:54:49Rich Roll?

  Of course, and although someone's life experience is so different, as they say in recovery, like the facts of the experience, you know, don't pay attention to the facts of the experience, look for like what you can identify with. And, you know, humans come in a variety of archetypes and there are only so many stories, right? The facts are infinite, but the themes are less so, right? So there's something about storytelling, stories told authentically and with honesty and vulnerability, that resonates so deeply with the human psyche that a nonfiction book can't. Like you can write out all the facts, here's what, here's how humans work and here's how they undergo this and here's what you need to do to work your way out of whatever it is you're dealing with.

• 1:55:33Rich Roll?

  And it's in one ear and out the other, like you can intellectualize this stuff, but short of making an emotional connection with a version of your story, you're hard pressed to, you know, find that sense of peace and, and, and hope, I think, that only can come through storytelling. And podcasting is such a powerful medium for that. And You know, I applaud you for, you know, being very focused on this subject of change and finding these amazing humans through which you can, you know, share these stories of transformation that, you know, for your behavioral scientist mind, I'm sure create this like map of meaning, like how are you mapping psychology, like what are the, what

• 1:56:16Rich Roll?

  are the, you know, similarities between these stories from which you can extrapolate certain truths that can tell us more about what it means to be human?

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And a large part of my motivation for starting A Slight Change of Plans is that the science invariably will fall short at some point. You know, it's not like in the throes of grief, you can open up some book to page 78, oh, there's my answer. Instead, in those moments, we sometimes do just have to rely on the collective wisdom from other people's stories. You know, it's like the wisdom is in people's actual lived experiences.

• 1:56:54Rich Roll?

  And we can derive strength from another's strength. Like I'm thinking about the episode you did with your friend who was this health nut and, you know, suffered this cancer diagnosis and shares very openly and honestly about what it has been like for him.

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what's been, oh my gosh, this has been such an uplifting thing too, which is seeing how listeners from all over the world have like fallen in love with the cast of characters that we've had on the show. So I had Scott, the guy you're talking about on the show last year, I think it was last summer. And he talks, you know, he's an early 30 something who is probably like you in terms of your fitness and health nutrition stuff.

• 1:57:34Rich Roll?

  Right, he's like vegan, fitness break.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so vegan, intermittent fasting, high intensity interval training, definitely is not ordering Domino's, as you are not as well. And I was sufficiently shamed earlier when I brought up that example, but.

• 1:57:47Rich Roll?

  Domino's, how dare you. And you're talking about your inflammation. It's like, I, we need to talk.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I should probably stop with the cheese. Anyway, but also cheese like makes my heart so happy. So there's a trade off there.

• 1:58:01Rich Roll?

  I have a solution for that, too.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  You have a solution? Okay. Oh, wow. This is so great. Okay, I'll need to get all your pro tips on this. So Scott has done everything he possibly can to try to optimize for the future. And then he gets this, in the middle of quarantine, stage four bone cancer diagnosis. And within weeks, he has his right leg amputated below the knee. He eventually has to get a vertebra removed from his spine. He has to get surgery on his other leg. Part of his femur was removed and he has 18 administrations of chemotherapy in Texas. So he's uprooted his whole life, okay? And there's a huge loss of identity. He says that on any given day, he was more worried about losing his six pack than he was about dying.

• 1:58:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I appreciate that honesty.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Rich Roll?

  Like just fessing up to his own vanity.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. And being like, it's not like when you get a cancer diagnosis, you suddenly stop caring about all the things you used to care about. I'm still Scott. I still have some values in my life, my value system. And you don't, it doesn't all evaporate in the face of some higher goal or purpose, right? And so he's talking about these identity shifts and is starting to learn slowly over time that maybe his identity is more negotiable than he thought. That's the phrasing he used, which really touched me. And when I first interviewed him, he was about two thirds of the way through his treatment. And I just kept hearing from listeners, how's Scott doing? How's Scott doing? Everyone wants to know, how's Scott?

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  And so I was able to invite him back on the show just recently. His episode aired, what a guy. His scans show no evidence of cancer today, which is amazing. So thrilled. And it's not even an and, it's a but. But what's so fascinating about Scott's story is that his change didn't end with the completion of cancer treatment. It's a whole new set of challenges and questions that are arising in his life, some of which he's finding more challenging than the awfulness that he endured during treatment. So he talks about how, you know, he, before he was just following doctors' orders and it was very clear what was expected of him, what was required of him.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  People were defining his life. So even though some agency was taken away from him, he knew what it meant for any given day to be successful. And now that was taken away from him because now it's up to him to figure out what it means to live a full life.

• 2:00:25Rich Roll?

  Right, that's scary.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  It's scary and. Oh my gosh, that second conversation just blew me away. I mean, I, I still think, I find myself, even though I'm in the interviews, and the interviews will run long sometimes, you know, like you're, you actually air the full thing, right? So we do edited, produced episodes. Sometimes the conversations run an hour and a half. So I'm in the interviews, and we're editing it down to about 30 or 40 minutes. And so I'm hearing this tape, like, so many times in the production process, probably like 14 or 15 times in full by the time we get to the end. And that's not even including all the mini sections I'm hearing. And yet, five months after an interview, I'll just be making a peanut butter sandwich,

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  and some guest's profound line enters my head. And it hits me in this new way because of the very specific thing that I happen to be going through in my life. I hear their words in my mind differently. I interpret their words differently than I did the first 15 times around. And so, so much of what Scott shared with me about his changing identity and how he views old Scott versus new Scott, I mean, it's just, it's a fascinating conversation that takes so many philosophical turns, that it's one of those episodes that I, even though I put it out in the world, I continue to listen to, like, I feel like I need a few times to digest all of it. And so, yeah, anyway, my guests are just amazing. I just feel like I can go on and talk about them forever.

• 2:01:49Rich Roll?

  No, you've had tons of cool people. And we should point out that Apple named it the best podcast of 2021.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  That was amazing. I felt like, when I got that call, I was just like, first of all, I felt like Taylor Swift at the Grammys. But when they said it was the best show of the year, I just couldn't believe it, honestly, because, but maybe that's part of it. It's like, this whole thing just was so organically generated. I never had dreams of being a podcaster. I never thought that I would ever have a podcast. And it was really just passion from day in and day out. And I think that's in part what people see in the show, which is, it is a host who's kind of on a personal expedition to try to understand herself and the world better.

• 2:02:33Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  And it just, it's all come from...

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  From just a very personal place, you know, starting with my

• 2:02:41Rich Roll?

  Beautiful.

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  life as a violinist and the changes I endured during that time. So it's kind of led to this point, but I've fallen in love with podcasting. I mean, you've been at this for a lot longer than I have. I, I don't think there's anything I've ever enjoyed so much.

• 2:02:58Rich Roll?

  It's a pretty great gig.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  I mean, really.

• 2:03:00Rich Roll?

  You get to meet all these cool people.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Rich Roll?

  Look at you, I'm holding you hostage today, getting you to ask all these questions for hours and hours.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  It's really incredible. And it's incredible to me how when you're willing to share yourself in a conversation, people are very willing to open themselves up and share things you've never heard. I love it when I go, this happened in three conversations. I had an interview with Tiffany Haddish, Amanda Knox, and Hillary Clinton. Oh, and Tommy Caldwell, the professional rock climber, who lost a finger and yet is still one of the greatest big wall climbers in the world, OMG. He would have figured out how to play the violin with like four fingers. So.

• 2:03:35Rich Roll?

  A few things that I can't do.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I remember for all of those interviews, because these are relatively public figures, I had done so much research on them, read every word they'd ever written, listened to every single interview they'd ever done, just like mined the archives on the internet, watched all the documentaries around them. So I went into those interviews thinking I had a relatively good command of their lives and their big inflection moments. And each of those guests proved me wrong. The moment they revealed to me as actually being the turning point for them was not the moment that I would have thought based on what I'd heard from the news and what I'd read in articles about them. And that's really fun and fascinating when your guest shows up and is like, nope, everyone's got it wrong.

• 2:04:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  That's actually not, that's not the moment.

• 2:04:20Rich Roll?

  It's great.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  For me, yeah.

• 2:04:21Rich Roll?

  What I loved about the Tommy one is this idea that we were talking about earlier between, you know, the loss of the violin and realizing that it wasn't the violin for you, but it was the ability to connect with people and discovering through your conversation with Tommy that, that climbing is merely the vehicle for him to access these flow states.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  Flow states, yes.

• 2:04:45Rich Roll?

  And it's really about like, how can I experience flow states in my life? And climbing is, is just the device for that.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, when I, when I heard about Tommy's story, for those listeners who don't know, he was held hostage in Kyrgyzstan, nearly died of hypothermia and starvation, ended up pushing his captor off of a cliff right at the very end. And.

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  I would have thought for sure that that moment was the defining moment for him. And it turns out what he, the thing that really stayed with him through that whole experience was unlocking a state of mind that was novel for him, that he experienced profound mental acuity when he was on the brink of death, basically. And he said he's been chasing those flow states ever since through his climbing and has very occasionally achieved that kind of acuity. And those are the kinds of things that unless you dig really deep, you're not going to get those insights, right? And so I felt we were such a perfect host/guest duo because me, the cognitive scientist coming in, having studied flow, and then Tommy being like, "Flow's my jam." It just, yeah, it felt like there was a lot of magic in that conversation.

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  He's also just like the nicest human being. I also love it when I meet people who I really admire and they just turn out to be incredibly kind. Talk about humility. I mean, you can't get Tommy to say one positive word about himself. It's pathological almost, but he is, oh, he's so kind and so open and generous and yeah, he's a friend now, which is wonderful.

• 2:06:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool. Climbers are salt of the earth as a general rule. I want to kind of close things out and finish this up with some more general thoughts on change and perhaps what you've learned about change, not just as a cognitive scientist, but as a podcast host and the work that you're doing. You know, I know you're in the private sector now through the experiences that you've had over the course of your career. And in thinking about that, because, you know, as I said at the outset of this, transformation, personal change is really at the core of this show. And in my own life, I've had these many pivots, you know, swimmer to alcoholic, lawyer to athlete, and athlete to author, podcaster, and you know, who knows what's next?

• 2:06:58Rich Roll?

  Navigating, you know, setbacks and obstacles along the way and confusion.

• 2:07:04Rich Roll?

  About, you know, who the person is that I want to become and trying to align my behavior with my values. It's all very ephemeral and confusing when you're in the midst of it, right?

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:07:14Rich Roll?

  It feels like elementary when we map it out and talk about it. And I think that can, if not handled the right way, can land on people like a burden because it feels like, well, if I just did these things, then I would figure out what these people have figured out. And life doesn't really work like that. So I wanted to leave people with maybe some takeaways or actionable tools, or just a means by which to think about change in their own lives that can have like a practical, positive impact.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, I was just listening to you and Scott talk, and you talk about how we're really bad cognitive forecasters. And I think that absolutely applies to how we internalize change, current day change, future change. One fallacy that I've seen humans fall prey to through just making the show, I didn't have this insight before I started interviewing guests, is that we tend to believe that when there's a change that's introduced to our life, either wanted or unwanted, that it happens in a vacuum, it happens in this isolated way, where I am Maya, the exact same person, almost walking through a magic mirror, but with that one little change, that one tweak made in my

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  life. And that's just not how human beings work. We're these really rich, complex ecosystems, where change in one part of our lives naturally has lots of spillover effects into other parts of our lives. And I think the lesson I've learned from that is we need to be, we need to approach change with a profound amount of humility, because we simply can't anticipate all of the ways in which the change will affect us. So we've got Scott, on the one hand, whose worst nightmare has happened, and then he actually finds a lot of positive growth that happens as a result.

• 2:09:02Rich Roll?

  He basically said his happiness is at a level that it was before his diagnosis.

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  He says he achieved happiness, he said, he said the

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  thermostat has prevailed. The happiness thermostat. Yeah. And so he said he basically achieved the same levels that the the bad moments were of course worse and bad, but the good moments were just as good, which is surprising. And he also felt like he had built more empathy and he was developing into a slightly more flexible human being and that being as rigid as he was before, maybe he wasn't the best version of Scott, right? So he felt he had, he saw considerable growth in himself. And then I talked to people who willed to change, who thought they were going to have an unequivocally positive thing happen to them. There's this one woman I interviewed, Elna, who went on a mission to lose weight and she lost weight very unhealthily, but she lost, I think, over 100 pounds in a very

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  short amount of time. And for a while she thought she was living her dream life until she realized that that weight loss was having all kinds of negative impacts on her personality. Interestingly, she, she became more self-conscious as a result. She kind of was buying into this part of society that had been unsavory to her before, but it was now seducing her into it. And she felt she became a worse person and that she worked less hard for things. And she suddenly realized that there was this complication that, and she literally, you know, I talked about the metaphorical mirror. She had the, the physical mirror. She, she was motivated initially to lose this weight when she was at an amusement park

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  with her family and she sees herself in one of those illusion mirrors. And so she imagined herself stepping through it and being thin Elna and did not appreciate all the other ways in which her life would change as a result. And so as a result of hearing these kinds of stories across the board where change didn't unfold in exactly the way that people expected, or there was a complication around the change. So another one of my favorite episodes is with a guy named Morgan. When he was in his twenties, he ended up having gender reassignment surgery to align his body with his true gender identity, which was, which was male.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  And initially he's intoxicated by feelings of liberation from his female body. You know, he's enjoying the, the bass in his voice and enjoying the growing muscles and finally feels comfortable in his body and is, is feeling so liberated. And then a few months later is confronted with

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  The realities of living as a black man in society when he gets pulled over by the cops in his grandmother's affluent neighborhood. And so it's just always more complicated because we, we, maybe we will, maybe the wisest among us in humanity will uncode exactly how we ourselves will respond to a change. But to have a grasp on how the world will change its response to us, how the world will interact with us differently, that's untenable, right? It's unattainable to have that level of insight.

• 2:12:13Rich Roll?

  Well, it's also something we have no control over.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we have no control.

• 2:12:17Rich Roll?

  In the context of change, like thinking about the very few things that you can control and being at peace with the fact that there are externalities that are well beyond your control, I feel like the healthier your appreciation for that lack of control or the more acceptance you have around that, the happier ultimately you're going to be. And perhaps the more engaged with the change that you're trying to create in your life.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And you've hit on another big theme in the podcast, which is we do love falling prey to this illusion of control. And it comes up time and time again in different interviews that I have with folks who wanted to believe that they were in control. And when this, when their slight change of plans happens, it's a sobering reminder that control is an illusion and they have to grapple with that as much as the change itself.

• 2:13:07Rich Roll?

  God's got other plans. What's the adage, like, you know, tell God your, if you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly.

• 2:13:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's, you know, again, that goes back to like a recovery thing, this idea of surrender and surrender not being like a giving up, but just developing an appreciation for the fact that your like instinct to try to hold on tightly to outcomes is, is really an engine for suffering.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:13:38Rich Roll?

  And I think there's also a distinction between, like, a lot of the stories on your show are about how people use the word change, but I think of it's more appropriately thought of as like adaptation, like when something happens outside of your control, like how do you adapt to that versus I'm going to change my life and I'm going to take these steps and move in this direction. Like those are two, I'm sure those live in two different parts of the brain.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Rich Roll?

  How do you think about that difference? Is that?

• 2:14:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, I don't know if it's living in two different parts of the brain, but I think they are competing forces and just a continual tension that just seems to define existence, right? And there's no right answer to where you should fall, right? But, and I think that that dynamic changes over time and depending on the specific change circumstances that you're in. But yeah, it's a challenge.

• 2:14:33Rich Roll?

  One thing I wanted to touch on before we close out is, is something we were talking about briefly before the podcast started. This idea of the present minded, present minded movement, like being present minded, being a movement right now and the kind of irony of that in that, you know, the reality of most people is that we're living in the past or we're living in the future. We're obsessing on things that that actually aren't real while we're talking about being present.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So spending too much time in the past or the future can be very unproductive when it kind of races away from you and you enter a state of like anxious rumination. So I absolutely am pro redirecting attention to the present when you're in those moments. But I don't want people to fail to appreciate this incredibly remarkable singular human ability we have to spend time in the past and the future. Not all species have this ability and it is actually remarkable that you can be sitting here at this table, right? And your mind can be somewhere completely different. It can be imagining things about the future, it can be coming up with new ideas, it can

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  be marveling at an experience in the past, it can be dissecting an experience in the past that gives you insight into how you might have been better, how you could be better. It gives you important signals into ways to improve and.

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  I just feel like there's so much emphasis on the present right now that we're starting to maybe move too far in that direction. And I just want a little bit more balance because there's a lot of utility we can derive from spending time in the past or the future. A very clear example is some people's present sucks. And I want to give them a respite from that.

• 2:16:26Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Yeah, I haven't thought of it in that way.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  If your present sucks, right? If you're Scott in the throes of cancer treatment and you want to spend all your damn time in the past or the future, have at it. Please, let's minimize human suffering. And that's not even considering, again, the virtues of spending time in those two spaces because they can be enlightening. Thinking about the future can help you figure out what it is you want in life, how you want to spend your time. Like, it allows your imagination to run wild, right? And thinking, reflecting on the past can make you a more thoughtful, introspective person, right? Who's actually engaging in self-improvement.

• 2:17:02Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  And so...

• 2:17:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, to be sure, you know, recalling episodes from the past that can make you make better decisions or be a better human being in the present moment. Like, there's certainly benefits to that. I think, to be fair, the thrust of it is aimed at the fact that we actually spend almost no time in the present moment. And even if we give lip service to it, very few of us are actually present in any given moment. And the fact that we're constantly obsessing over things in the past or what might happen in the future, that casting of attention generally is on negative things for a lot of people. And that obsession on negative past occurrences

• 2:17:47Rich Roll?

  or, you know, the disastrous thing that's about to happen, you know, are going to create a negative reality for you or force you to make a bad decision. Or, you know, so just awareness around that. I feel like that's a much bigger problem than the fact that, like... We're telling people to, you know, like, we're shaming people about, about being present.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  So here, here's my thought on that, which is, first of all, we're 100% on the same page. So my, my initial caveat was that the minute it turns, you know, ruminative, obsessive, negative in that way, then of course, we want to reach, direct our attention to the present. What I'm trying to help alleviate is a meta-anxiety when people find themselves thinking about the past or the future.

• 2:18:28Rich Roll?

  I got it.

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  Because it's not always a bad thing. Even if it, even if you're not deriving utility from it, and your mind's just wandering to some episode in the past, that is a feature of the human experience that is rich and textured and interesting. And so like, if you do find yourself thinking about the past, and it's a neutral experience, it's not good or bad, it's just neutral. Lean into it a little bit and marvel at your brain's ability to do that thing. So that's all I'm doing, trying to remove this meta-layer of like, damn it, why can I spend, I'm not able to spend, why would I keep doing it, right?

• 2:19:01Rich Roll?

  Beating yourself up for not being able to be present.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, beating yourself up for not buying in, I'm not like, you know, I mean, clearly I sound like I'm a lobbyist for the past and the future, but I just feel like there, we should maybe not be so hard on ourselves.

• 2:19:13Rich Roll?

  You're goddamn right, I'm not present, I'm thinking about this other thing, what do you have to say about it?

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, here I am just envisioning my future meal, I'm just saying that the escapism can sometimes be really assistive for people. And also, I think, just an incredible thing that our minds can do. And I don't want it to get too bad a rap, because I think it's actually a gift we've been given by virtue of being human, that we can spend time in these different temporal places.

• 2:19:40Rich Roll?

  Fair enough, fair enough. Well, let's end it there, I could go on, like I said, I have this outline that goes on forever, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  This was really fun.

• 2:19:50Rich Roll?

  That was really fun.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Rich Roll?

  How do you feel?

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  So flowy.

• 2:19:52Rich Roll?

  You feel okay?

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean...

• 2:19:54Rich Roll?

  We did pretty good, didn't we?

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Definitely a marathon, your interviews, but I loved, I loved it.

• 2:19:58Rich Roll?

  They go as long as I feel like they should go.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  I know, that's great.

• 2:20:02Rich Roll?

  And I feel like this one went the appropriate time for what I wanted to talk to you about.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  This was really fun.

• 2:20:07Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you indulging me.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Thank you for being so thoughtful in your questioning and clearly doing so much research into...

• 2:20:12Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that.

• 2:20:13Speaker 01

  My life and my show.

• 2:20:14Rich Roll?

  If you, if people want to learn more about everything that you're up to,

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm finally on social media. That's the thing that only happens as a result of the podcast.

• 2:20:22Rich Roll?

  You follow no people and you have like very few posts. So I was like, oh, you, you were smart and were not on social media.

• 2:20:29Speaker 01

  I was never, I got rid of all that.

• 2:20:30Rich Roll?

  Now you have a podcast.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:31Rich Roll?

  I'm sure a bunch of people told you, you have to be on now.

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think I'm in this like, um, I'm in this wonderful space where like fans of the show just get so excited and we get to communicate through this platform. And I love hearing what listeners have to say.

• 2:20:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  Questions they have.

• 2:20:48Rich Roll?

  You're in the halo period of social.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm in the halo period. Exactly. I'm like, wow, social media is so nice. Exactly. So I'm hoping to exit before that, that, that, that shift happens, if at all. But I'm at Dr. Maya Shankar. So, um, it's D R M A Y A S H A N K A R.

• 2:21:04Rich Roll?

  On Instagram.

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  On Instagram. And, um, the show is a slight change of plans. It's available for free anywhere you get your, your podcasts.

• 2:21:11Rich Roll?

  All the places.

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  All the places. And it's just, um, a total love project of mine. I think you can see it in my face that I just love the show and I could talk about it forever, but I really hope people love the show because, um, I, I've fallen in love with the whole process of podcasting.

• 2:21:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the show's great. You're, you're, you have a natural talent for doing it. So everybody check out the podcast. I love it. You won that crazy award for good reason. And, uh, come back and talk to me again sometime.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  Yes, I would love to. Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:21:41Rich Roll?

  Cool. Peace. Let's.

• 2:21:47Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

• 2:22:18Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering

• 2:23:00Rich Roll?

  by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.