A Conversation About A Slight Change of Plans

and my inspiration for A Slight Change of Plans. Our conversation gave me the chance to take a step back and reflect on how we make A Slight Change of Plans and the important role all of you listeners have played in making it into what it is today. So thanks and I hope you enjoy it. Hello, Welcome to the long Podcast. I'm Max Lynsky. I'm here with just one co host Evan Ratliffe. How are you, sir? I'm doing great, Max. Aaron will be back next week. We

always miss him. What he's gone. It's been so long since I introde with Aaron. I miss him desperately. Well, you'll see him again, You'll see him again. But for this week, who have we got for us? This week? I talked to Maya Shunker, and Maya is the host of a podcast. It's called A Slight Change of Plans.

It launched last year, and every episode Maya talks to someone, oftentimes very well known people, sometimes people you have not heard of before, but all of them have gone through a significant change, something transformative in their lives, and the show is about how you navigate those moments, how you come out on the other side. And Maya is like the perfect person to host it because she has had

a bunch of really distinct lives, particularly professionally. She was well, I don't want to spoil it because we talked about it at some length, but she has reached the pinnacle or almost the pinnacle, of multiple professions and that includes podcasting. She launched the show last year. It was named best of the Year by Apple, which you know, is for me at least like a little annoying. She just starts doing this and all of a sudden it's the best of the year, but deserved. This show is great and

it was really fun to talk to her. We talked about, you know, interviewing and moving into podcasting, and also about like whether or not she thinks of herself as a journalist or a scientist or an entertainer is a really compelling conversation. She is a one of a kind person, absolute one of one. I love it when you interview an interviewer, Max. I feel like I learned a lot from the Max interviews and interviewer type shows. You know

that I wanted to do that whole show. I wanted to do like a spinoff where I just interviewed interviewers, and then I realized, like, that doesn't need to be a spinoff. I could just do it on the show. Yeah, we'd be annoyed if you did that as a spinoff. You know who's not annoying the people at Vox who we make this show with. Thanks so much to them for their partnership. And now here is Max with Maya Schunker. Hi, Maya, Hey Max, it's great to be here. Oh, it's so

great to have you. Feel like we're overdue, I know. I mean, I'm such a fan of long form, so I'm I'm a fan girl in a bit mutual fanning out because I'm very very excited to have you, Maya. I believe that you are unique among our four hundred and eighty two guests and that I don't have the qualifications to be on the show. Is that what you mean. I'm not a journal I'm not a writer. In that I think this might have been a mistake. No, I think that you potentially have lived more lives than anyone

that we have had on the show. Is always not the life that would again qualify me to be on the show. It's not lost on the Max. But thank you to all the listeners who are sticking around. I promise it'll be a fun conversation. Yeah, we'll do our best. But when people ask me about you, which they do fairly often, my answer is that Maya has lived like multiple entire lives that the rest of us would be very comfortable, was just like any one of and yet

somehow you have had these totally totally disparate journeys. And I understand that this is a slightly challenging way to ask this, But is there a way that you could just do like the condensed Maya story for people who don't know about these multiple lives. Yes, I'll try to do the fast story. Yeah, give me the fast version. So as a kid, first of all of you'd ask me, will you be a cognitive scientist. One day, I'd be like, no, because I don't even know what that is. I was

a violinist first and foremost. So when I was six years old, my mom brought down my grandmother's violin from the attic that she had brought with her all the way from India when she immigrated to this country in the seventies. So my grandmother had played Indian classical music and my mom had just meant to show me the instrument, but I I took to it so quickly, like I looked at it and I was fascinated by it, and I asked my mom very quickly for a pint sized

version of my own. So she bought me a quarter size instrument. And I was a little kid with big dreams very quickly. And so I ended up auditioning for the Juilliard School of Music in New York when I

was nine and was very fortunately accepted. And when I was a teenager, it's like Pelman asked me to be his private violin student, and so that was a big deal for I. Mean, these days I feel like people are like, who's Pearlman, because you know, we all grew up with Brittany, But Pearlman is a big deal in classical music circles. I feel like the long form podcast audience is in the Perlman's a big deal camp. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think this is

the right audience for recognizing Perlman. Wait, just so people are understanding this, your mom showed you a violin when you were six years old. You intuitively and immediately became obsessed with the thing, willed your way into Juilliard, and then Perlman is like, you're going to be my person kind of. I mean, we literally willed our way into Juilliard,

like into the physical building. So it might be worth sharing the story, which is I was obsessed with the violin, and my mom notes that while she had to convince me to do lots of things, practicing the violin was just not one of them, which was always kind of stunning to her. And so at a certain point she realized that she was at the limits of her connections in the musical world. Namely, she had none. I mean, my dad's a physics professor or my mom was a

physics major. They're both scientists at heart. They don't have any connections into this space. And so she realized, you know, I'm not really sure how to connect my kid with the opportunities she needs in order to pursue her dreams. And so one day we were walking by Juilliard in New York and I had my violin with me, and she said, why don't we just walk into the building. It's like, what do you mean just walk in? She's like, what's the worst thing that can happen. I'm like, security guards,

that's one thing. You know, this was back in the day when you could still slide in too large establishments. So we did. We go into the elevator and my mom strikes up a conversation with a student and her mom and says, hey, my daughter plays a violin. Would you mind introducing us to your teacher when your lessons over today? And you know, I'm so embarrassed, like I'm like in the corner of the elevator, trying to make

myself as small as possible. And they said yes. I mean, it's incredible how kind strangers are when you asked them for a favor. And so they introduced me to who would become my future teacher. I auditioned for him on the spot. He accepted me into a summer boot camp essentially the summer music program, and skilled me up to the point where I even had a shot at getting

into Juilliard. And I'm not being falsely humble like. We asked him later about this, and he confirmed to my mother that when he first met me, he thought I had no shot of getting into Juilliard, but he liked my personality and so he wanted to give me a chance chance. And then you know, I just worked really hard over the summer and then you know, was able

to pass the audition. And so that was a very valuable lesson to me from an early age that sometimes life doesn't give you the silver platter and you just kind of have to create opportunities where they don't exist. Yeah, I feel like that's a theme that's going to come up again in Like Life Too of Maya and Life three. It's all about cold emails. But tell me about what happened next. So Perlman takes you in and you are on a path to be a concert violinist. That's going

to be your life. Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean again, I definitely had all the imposter feelings for the longest time, because when you're in such elite competitive circles, you're just not sure you have what it takes. And then, as I was saying, when Perlman took me on, I felt, okay, let me, let me go for this. And I even convinced my Indian parents that a conservatory was maybe in the cards for me. They had always been more of the you know, hey, we loved liberal arts education, very stable,

maybe don't do this music thing full time. But even they were, you know, sold after the Pearlman vote. And so I just went full, you know, steam ahead. I was totally in. And then at a moment that changed my life forever, where I was practicing violin early in the morning at Pearlman summer camp, I overstretched my finger on a single note and I heard a popping sound and I had torn tendons in my hand and resisted reality for a very long time until doctors finally told

me I could never play the violin again. And so that was it was a total shock to the system. Yeah, that must have been just wild. It's like your whole plan gone in a moment and then sort of setting in a couple of moments later. Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting, Max, because when I look back at it, I realized that I expected to grieve the loss of the instrument, but I didn't expect to grieve the loss

of me. It was only in that moment when I lost the instrument that I realized how tethered my identity was to it. And so when it was gone and it was no longer a thing I could do, I really felt like I didn't know who I was anymore, because I defined myself as a violinist for so long, even before I was Maya, I feel like I was a violinist, and so when it's taken away from you, you're kind of like, what the hell? You know, like, what do I do? What is my purpose in meaning

and value in this world? You know? I was sad, but then I was also discouraged because I didn't know if I could find something again that filled me with the same kind of passion and love and I and I recognized that it was such a gift. I was given to love something so much as a kid, you know, I was given that gift, and then when I was taken away, I was just heartbroken. It is the easiest

way of putting it. I had never been through something like that, but I can imagine how devastating that moment is and how confusing it is in terms of identity and trying to figure out who you are. And I feel like there's all these stories out in the world of people having experiences like this, Like I think about like athletes blowing out their knee and their professional careers gone by the way. I like to think that I made violent and extreme sport, you know, of having this

career ending injury. So I just want a little bit of street credit the rare catastrophic violin injury. But the thing that seems different here is that you figured something else out and then ran as hard as fucking possible at that. So what is like the next life of Maya? Yeah.

So there's a psychological term that I've since been acquainted with that I didn't know at the time called identity foreclosure, and it refers to the idea that we can lock ourselves into a self identity early in adolescence, and sometimes that mentality can persist into adulthood. And I fell prey to identity foreclosure, and I think it really held me back.

I didn't see my identity as malleable, as dynamic, as something that could change, and at the time, if I had been cultivating that kind of spirit, I would have navigated the moment better. But long story short, I was in my parents' basement the summer before college started counterfactual World. I was supposed to be in China touring with my violin classmates, so equally cool summer situation, and I stumbled

upon my sister's course book. It was Stephen Pinker's book called The Language Instinct, and it basically articulated the marvelous ways in which our mind works and how sophisticated the machinery is behind the scenes that's giving rise to our ability to comprehend and produce language. And I'd literally never once before thought about my language abilities. Just something that kind of happened, right, And I remember feeling in awe

of this organ that we all possess. I was like, this is awesome and fascinating and so complicated, and I was nerding out. I was like, this is a really cool thing that I just never thought about before. And so I got my hands on like every book I could that summer on cognitive science, which is so foreign.

I mean, I was going in to college thinking, Okay, maybe I could pull off being a history major, like don't I don't have any specializations, but my brain really lit up when it came to studying COGSI, and so I still remember. So this is another like kind of Juilliard entrance moment. Basically, I knew that the cognitive science program was a competitive one, so as an admission's only program.

And my imposter syndrome, by the way, at this point is through the roof, because I'm thinking, the only reason I got into Yale in the first place is because I had these violent credentials, and I don't have them anymore,

so I don't even know why I'm here. And I heard during a pre orientation program that this professor, Laurie Santos was running a monkey lab, a non human primate cognition lab, and it was like the coolest thing because if you joined this lab, you got to run novel experiments and ask all these interesting search questions and study cognition through this lens and hang out with monkeys all day and hang out with monkeys, which, by the way,

later proved terrifying. So I'm not really sure what I was thinking, but I show up to the class on day one. It's the day where we just learn about it, and then there's the admissions process after that, and the room is overflowing Max. There's like fifty people for whatever five spots, and it's overflowing with upperclassman. I'm the lowly freshman. I'm thinking, oh crap, like there's no shot I have

at this. But thankfully for me, there is an application form, and I'm like, I'm going to crush this application form. Laurie Santos is never going to see a better application form than this. And by the way, no one's taking the application for seriously except for seventeen year old Baya, viewing it like an elevator at Julie. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, Laurie, I will take the six thirty am Saturday morning shifts in New Haven. I was selling

my soul on this application. I was like, you can have any unborn children, like you can have all the things that I ever succeed at, like all everything. And she took me in. I was the only freshman that she took into the class that year, and I thought it was my bulliance. She later told me that I was the only one who was willing to take the Saturday morning shifts, So you know, too bad. It wasn't

actually what I wrote in the application process. But that course really changed my life because not only did I have did I get to enter this life experience of what it could be like to be a scientist. I now had an inbuilt mentor in Laurie Santos who was able to kind of coach me through undergrad and get me jazzed about studying the mind and getting to ask just fascinating research questions, which is something I never thought i'd be able to do. So you find another passion.

You get like seventeen different PhDs, it's actually eighteen. Matt travel all around the world. Don't understand eighteen right eighteen, You're going to be a professor of cognitive science. You're set up, it's all there for you. Yes, and yet that's not what happens. Again. Yes, I had my other slight change of plans, So I got my one PhD for the record, and I was doing my postock at Stanford.

I was doing my post stock in a neuroscience lab, and I had this moment that maybe many people can relate to, where you've put a lot of years into something and you're kind of fighting reality, which is it's not actually good fit for you. So this happened to me. I was in the basement of this fMRI laboratory and it was my like sixth hour scanning brains in a windowless lab, and this guy comes in and within moments I'm peering at his amygdala. And I didn't know anything

about the dude. I didn't know what his favorite books were, or if you at kids, or what his favorite ice cream flavor was. And I just felt like, given my personality, the order of operations was just totally off, and I just wanted a personal connection before I before I did brain scans, basically. And so I'm having this realization and it's definitely an oh shit moment, because again I've just spent whatever seven years or something plus undergrad studying cognitive science.

And so I leave the lad that day and I call Laurie and I'm like, hey, girl, you know that thing you've been helping me do for a long time and you invested a ton of resources into I don't want to do that anymore. I'm really sorry, but thanks so much for everything. I think I want to become a general management consultant and Laurie is just like, oh my god, I put too much into your kid for

you to leave. And at this point, you know, let's just like a deep breath, let's have a quick conversation about what your options are before you go on the general management consulting interview circuit, which is very much in the cards. And then it was just fortuitous Max, because she'd just been to a conference where she heard about how the federal government at the time, so this was

the Obama administration. She tells me about how they were using insights from my field, from behaviorali from cognitive science to get low income kids access to school lunch. And I was just blown away by this example. It's a really simple story. And the government offers of free or reduced price lunch program for low income kids, and despite the fact they offered it to millions of kids, millions of kids were still going hungry every day because they

weren't enrolled in the program. And when they did a behavioral audit of the program, they realized that there were some barriers to entry. The first was that it was

an extremely complicated application form. Think about a single mom who's working three shifts to make ends meet, and we're asking her to fill out like a fifty page application form that requires referencing a bunch of tax documents and oh, by the way, if you make a mistake, there's going to be a financial penalty, and oh, you have to get to the post office on this specific day and make sure you have stamps and all. Like, it's just

it's too much to ask. It's one of those things that feels like totally insane that that's how it works, and also impossible to ever change. Yeah, no, exactly. And then there's a second barrier which was deeper than that, which was that there was a stigma associated with signing your kid up for a benefits program. And ultimately what they did is they used an insight from behavioral economics, which is the power of the default, and they changed the program from an opt in program to an opt

out program. So they used administrative data they already had collected on these kids and automatically enrolled all eligible kids into the program. And so now parents only had to take an affirmative step that they wanted to actively unenroll their kids from the program. And Laurie was telling me that as a result of this program change, twelve and a half million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day, and I was like, holy crap, that

is unreal. And by the way, compare that to the extreme lack of impact I was having as opposed to talk publishing nothing of significance or importance. And so I remember thinking, that's the thing I want to be doing. That's incredible, And I didn't even realize it was a thing that you could be a practitioner of this field. And the challenge max was that there was no job

that existed that I could apply for. So I talked to Laurie's like, I want to do that thing, but I know that thing doesn't exist yet, so like, what how do we make this work? And she said, well, let me give you the email address of the guy whose presentation I saw at this conference. His name is Cass Sunstein, author of the book Nudge, which was a seminal piece of work that really defined, you know, the

application of behavioral science to public policy. And you know, I sent him an email and I used Laurie's name in the subject line. I was like, recommendation from Laurie Santos, because like, I just needed some name recognition. And I looked back at the email, and it is seeping withinsecurity. I mean it's actually hilarious, not quite in these words,

but it was essentially like, Hi, I'm Maya. I have no public policy experience, and I've published nothing of significance, but I would really love to work at the intersection of behavioral science and policy. And I said in parentheses, I know I'm not cool enough to work with the likes of Obama, but if there is an opportunity in state or local government, I would love to take advantage

of that. And fortunately for me, probably in part because cass Unstein is married to Samantha Power and understands that like women can really thrive in this world, ignored all of my insecurities and wrote back an email and said, here's contact information for the president's science advisor and his deputy. Let them know I passed you along the story. By the time, I feel like you've told this story enough

times that it doesn't seem amazing to you. But this story is so incredible, all right, just keep going, No, thank you, It's funny to go down memory lane with you. I was swimming at the y MCA when this email came in, and as I was getting on my bike, to go home. I opened my phone and saw that Cassette responded to me, and I'm like, I nearly fell off my bike. I just could not believe again the kindness of a stranger. It's like he doesn't know who

I am. He's responding to my cold email within a matter of minutes and is telling me he's happy to facilitate a connection to an entire political sphere that I've had no interactions with my entire life. And when I email the Obama advisors hilariously this time, I put cass in the subject line recommendation from cass Sunstein ladder up.

I love it, Ladder it up. So I email the Deputy Science Advisor and he tells me, again fortuitous, that it just so happens he's in California this week because he lives in California, and he loved to have me interview with him two days later. And I need to get a business suit, and I also have to prepare Max for an interview with a White House official, and

I have no idea what I'm doing. So my solution to that problem was to call everybody smart that I know in this world and mine their brains for wisdom. I was like, so, hypothetically speaking, if you had an interview in two days with a White House official, what policy interventions would you want to do at the intersection of behavioral science. And so I just start curating all

these ideas. And also, I mean, it was a really fun exercise because I feel like I'd been waxing poetic about the virtues of behavioral science for a bit at this point, but I never thought any of those dreams could come true, and so it was a really fun

thought experiment. And so I show up at Tom Khalil's house, that's his name, and I don't know what to expect of this government bureaucrat either, and so I'm like very very nervous coming in the door and I enter, and I just remember like it was not what I was expecting. He was super nice and not at all intimidating, and

what perceeds is just this wonderful, rich conversation. It felt really like a conversation versus an interview about what it could be like if the government created this new position that I was proposing to them of a behavioral scientist. And so my job was just to pitch him. It was like, I want you guys to create this position, and I want you to hire me into the position

once you created it. And I remember that there was this there was this moment that was really special for me where I was talking about the first Ladies Let's Move initiative and I was saying how some of the language on the website could be improved because it wasn't reflecting the best science from behavioral science. And Tom's response was, oh, well, I know you know Michelle, Michelle and her chief of staff,

and we can make that happen. That was incredible, that moment where I realized, Wow, all this stuff that's in my brain and in all the books can now be translated in real life to improve people's lives. And so we conclude the conversation, and I remember at the end it was like an awkward first date. He was like, so, I'd love to keep in touch, and I was like, let's unpack that. What kind of keep in touch are we talking about? Here? Yeah? What are we talking about?

We talking about like a don't call me, I'll call you situation or is it like i'd love to hire you? So I literally, I think in the moment I did push him and I was like what does what does that mean exactly? Are you blowing me off here exactly? And he says, well, there's a couple of things that

need to happen. One, Obama needs to win his reelection in a few weeks, so this was like fall of twenty twelve, and he said, I also have to like convince all the leaders ship at the White House to create this new position, right, and I also need to

make sure that there's a desk available for you. And this is where all my West Wing dreams just kind of like start dictating, because I realized that, like the White House is actually look a very resource constrained environment in which practical considerations like is there a desk available? It's like a real thing. And so all those things

ended up happening. But I did do a very bold thing, which is I terminated my lease in California and I signed a one year lease in DC and sold everything other than my bike before having a formal job offer from the White House. That is a bold move. I was kind of like, I'm showing up, We're going to make this happen. Just showed up, knocked on the door of the White House. Yeah, and I was like, let me in, But I think that really did show a commitment to everyone that it was really great if we

could just get this over the finish line, and it happened. Yeah, and we can fast forward a little bit. I mean, you created a Department of Behavioral Science, worked in the White House for four years, did all kinds of incredible work, and to me, I mean, there's so many parallels between that and the experience that you had with the violin and then Maya. And this is where the story goes

from incredible for me slightly annoying. You decide to start a fucking podcast and then it's Apple's best podcast of the year, Like, how do you do that? I think it's important to pull the curtain back a little bit. Which is the number of times that I've been told

no and rejected in my career is countless. I mean, I was trying to build this team in government, and I was knocking on every conceivable door that I could, begging my government agency colleagues to work with me because I wasn't given a mandate and I had no budget to build this team. And I think that a key part of my story is you know, you see the numerator, you see the successes, but you don't see the denominator.

You don't see all the times that I was totally despondent because I was told I would never be able to make it team, or all the times I felt hopeless and like there was no chance ahead. So I think I just want to start by saying that you have to try enough times at something to make things happen. And that's kind of always been my philosophy. And do you have endurance for that? Like, are you okay hearing no? Yeah?

So I think I'm comfortable being told no or getting those rejections because from the time I was a little kid playing the violin, I received so much critical feedback. You're not going to survive in that world if you don't develop somewhat thick skin, because it's a perfectionist sport, right, I mean, you're playing a passage that to any lay person would be like, that's great, and then it's being picked apart, not just by your teachers and everyone, but

by yourself. I mean I was always my harshest critic, and so I think maybe some of the resilience came from those early formative years where I was just used to being extremely criticized and extremely critical of myself, and I don't know where the right balance, but that was just my life. And so that's that's what I've kind of used to and I've used it to kind of grow and be better. So how does that translate to

starting a podcast? How do you go from the White House and that level of impact to being like, I'm gonna talk to people with some microphones. Well, one way that that kind of thing can happen is when you don't control the result of the twenty sixteen election and so the woman you were hoping to work for for eight years doesn't get elected. That's one possible way that you shift gears in life. But when it came to

the podcast, I mean, I love people. That's actually been the through line through all of these seemingly disparate career choices, which is at their heart, it's always been about human connection and forging human connection. Certainly through music, you can make people feel things they've never felt before, and that's intoxicating. And then in my role as a cognitive scientist, I studied the human condition. I study how it is that

we even connect with one another. And at the White House, you know when you're on the ground in Flint, Michigan. The wonky policy stuff feels super far away, and it's really just about connecting with human beings who are in states of distress. And so I do feel like I've always been motivated by a love and curiosity and empathy for humans. That's kind of like the thing that makes me tick, and so the podcast in many ways, I

never dreamt of being a podcaster. But when twenty hit and I was feeling overwhelmed by, first of all, just what was happening in the world. I mean, I think that kind of took us all by storm, and no one knew how to respond in this collective moment of grief and loss and shock. And then I was going through loss in my personal life. So one of the challenges that I faced is my husband and I have to work with a surrogate in order to have a baby. And after years of trying to find our surrogate, we

found her. We found Haley in Arkansas, and she's amazing, and I'd gone through all their fertility treatments and she was pregnant with our baby girl, and we were so over the moon and so thrilled that this was finally happening for us. You know, it's one process in life where you just don't have control. You know, no amount of like maya hustle translates in this space. It's just it's not like other spaces that I've been in. And

so we were so thrilled. And then Haley had a miscarriage and we lost our baby, and we were devastated. I was devastated. I was so intimidated by this moment. As someone who had endured so much change, this change felt different to me, and I felt like I didn't have the tools in my toolbox to figure it out. And we were also all quarantined. I wasn't even able to spend physical time with the very few people in

my life who knew about this at the time. And so I guess I did the thing that I tend to do in these moments, which is I kind of like got to action, you know, which is I think something that's kind of chacteristic of my personality, which is I am a very proactive person, you know, don't I don't like kind of marinating in the negativity. I'm always trying to find a way out. It's probably just a

survival mechanism. But I thought to myself, Okay, you're feeling really scared by all the change, but you know that change is not new to humans, Like you know that we've done this rodeo, this change rodeo, many times before, and that while the current moment feels daunting, our human ability to navigate change is not unprecedented. It's not new, and maybe if you can find people who have navigated extraordinary change and come out the other side, you can

learn from them. So it was actually motivated by a very personal desire to crack the nut on change, because even though I studied it, I felt like the science was falling short, and I felt like I needed to connect with other human beings and to hear their stories. And so that's that's what gave rise to what became a slight change of plans. I'm so sorry, May thank you. Yeah, it's been it's been tough. There's an episode of the show in which you talk about this at length, and

I do want to talk about that. But in terms of getting started, like you're embarking on this totally due medium, totally different than anything you've done before from a practical sense, Like how did you approach that shift, because I think there's probably a fair number of people who are listening who are thinking about those kinds of transitions in their own professional lives, and actually I think specifically around podcasting, and there's a lot of people who are thinking about

how they could do that or if they could do that, And I wonder how you approached actually doing the work. Yeah, I mean I called again, similar to that White House interview, I called smart people. I had a friend named Max Lynsky. Now you're just like blowing up my spot. I just ask you that question, like I didn't know the answer, but I do kind of a little bit. I mean answer, did you leave the witness a little bit and your subconscious didn't know it? Max? No, but it was an

important conversation. And I'm not you know, I don't mean to make you uncomfortable by saying that you help this podcast happen. But you did help this podcast happen, which is I called you up and I said I had this idea for a podcast, and I need you to keep it real with me about whether this idea has legs and whether you think there's something there, and also can you just give me some confidence that I can be a podcast host. I needed to hear all those things.

It's not like when you build confidence in one area of life, it just naturally translates over into another. It's all of them. Michael Jordan's basketball to baseball switch. You never know what's going to happen, folks. And so I didn't know if I could do podcasting. You know, I didn't have interview experience, and I just didn't know what this whole enterprise was like. And so I remember what you told me is just get started. Just do an interview.

That was so interesting to me because that felt again like the order of operations is off. I was like, wait, no, no, I thought, I have to like convince the company to want to work with me and everything. So I just do an interview. And I remember I interviewed my husband Jimmy about his career changes, about his slight change of plans, and it was a shitty interview. Max. I am glad I don't have that recording anymore. I sent it to my best friend, who loves both my husband and me,

and she's like, girl, this sucks. I was really bored, that's what she said. And so the end outcome was maybe not amazing, but it gave me an understanding of what this show could kind of be. And I'm so grateful for that advice. And I think it's actually important to share because sometimes it's really helpful to just get your feet wet. So I did that, and then I also called up my tried and tested advisor, Laurie Santos. She works with Pushkin Industry, so Malcolm Gladwell's production company

on a show called The Happiness Lab. She's made that transition too, Yeah, yeah, from academia to podcasting. And so I started writing up this pitch, which I ran by you and got a lot of good feedback on, and she just ended up sending it to the head of Pushkin. I did a piloting process and and Pushkin ended up green lighting it. And that's when I got to really start and how have you approached interviewing? Like, how have these various experiences that you've had impacted the way that

you ask people questions? Do you think of yourself as a journalist? No, Oh my god. Do you know how any journalists I'd offend if I said I considered myself a journalist? Max, I am interested in how you think about it. Is it yeah? Is it journalism? Is it entertainment? Is it science? It's a great question when I've never

been asked before. When I think about it, actually I feel like, Okay, there's a there's a parallel here, which is when I entered the government, because I had such a lack of experience, there was an advantage to that, which is I didn't see rules and red tape and obstacles where a lot of people who were more seasoned in the government would have seen them. I was really just making things up as I went along, and in some ways that was an asset because I didn't feel

encumbered by some of the structure that existed there. And I think the same is true for podcasting and interviewing, which is I'm not a student of anything, like I've never taken like an interview class. I've never i had no experience interviewing people, but I love podcasts, so I've consumed lots of interviews, and I think this show for me was an expression of genuine curiosity, like I would

show up to interviews fascinated by a person's story. So the first person I interview on the show is a black jazz musician named Daryl Davis who ends up convincing people to leave the Ku Klux Klan. Okay, So that's like an unbelievable story. And the way I prepared for that interview was to consume everything he had ever done, every interview'd ever given, everything he'd ever written in his

whole life. I spent probably like fifty plus hours preparing for every single interview I do on the lower end sometimes and I go in being like, I'm a listener of the show. That's how I think about it. It's like, if I'm a listener of this show of a slight change of plans, what do I want to know about Darryl? I think I'm a cognitive scientist because I was already so fascinated by humans, So it might be wrong to say that because I'm a cognitive scientist, my questions are

informed by that. I think I'm actually just like so naturally interested in human beings that I put that lens on everything that I do, that cognitive science lens. There's an element, I guess you can say, of science because that's my training, and so I'm fascinated by every facet of human psychology, and I think something that makes this show different from simply reporting on a change, is that I'm always interested in the psychological shifts that are happening

underneath the surface. So I'm hearing about the external events that this person went through, but I'm always probing to understand how their psychology was changing along the way. And that's maybe where the cognitive science piece comes in. How is your psychology you've been changing along the way doing

the show. I think that's been the most surprising part of this whole show for me, in the most nourishing part of this whole show, which is I'm in the inner right and I'm preparing for the interview, and the interviews will often run for I don't know, an hour and a half or something, and we end up condensing it to about thirty minutes. And then I'm an executive producer on the show. I help edit the show, I write narration for the show. I'm listening to each episode

before it reaches completion, probably like a dozen times. And yet despite all of that exposure, I will find myself months later making a PV sandwich peanut butter sandwich, thinking about something that my guest told me months ago. That thought will come into my mind and it will enrich my own psychology and make me think totally differently about the current moment that I'm in. And so I feel like every conversation I've had has somehow stuck with me

and stayed with me in this really powerful way. And it's affecting the way that I think about my philosophy on life, It's affecting the way that I think about change, it's affecting the way that I think about my self identity. And that's amazing because I didn't expect for there to be this continuous cycle where you know, you put stuff out into the world, and you get stuff back, and then you also have all these ideas marinating. I mean,

it's amazing. I feel like we've been talking this whole time about your identity and how it has changed and shifted. I'm interested in for you personally, what has shifted from doing this work. And maybe this is the time to talk about this episode you did that was about you, because when I heard it, it's devastating, But I was also so impressed that you had decided to do that publicly, because it didn't seem totally in character to me. No, that's totally true. The decision to do that felt like

evidence of a shift. Yeah, I think that's completely right. I mean I always thought, you know, I'm the interviewer, and I bring guests on and they share their stories. That was always my mental model going into the show. And you're in control of how much you're going to

put out there of yourself, and you're just helping people along. Absolutely, And I tend to be open about certain things but also deeply private about other things, and certainly this whole fertility, surrogacy miscarriage space was was not something I was going

on the road talking about. But here's what happened. So I already mentioned that we had a pregnancy loss with our surrogate in February of twenty twenty and then I'm making the show in twenty twenty one, and in late summer, we go through another embryo transfer with our surrogate, Hailey, and this time she's pregnant with identical twin girls, so

our embryo split. It was so exciting, And I'm in the middle of production for season two of a slight change of plans, and all of a sudden, Haley miscarries again on exactly the same day of development for the baby and I mean this time, it's just like I'm still speechless because I just remember what that moment felt like. Where's like, wait, really again the same exact thing. How is this happening? We just saw the healthy babies on

an ultrasound and there's a miscarriage again. We later learned that Haley likely had an autoimmune response to our embryos. So it's just it was just a bad fit. We were a perfect human fit and just not a good biological fit, which is something that is such a bizarre thing to happen. I remember thinking in that moment, I feel like I need to make something good come of this, because it otherwise just only feels bad. And I feel like I also need some outlet to process what's going

on in my mind. And so I called my producer the day after this happened, and I said, I think I want to share this on the show, like would you be willing to interview me? Which is so foreign

to me. Max, I never ever thought that I would want to do this, But I also kind of realized and I was pushing myself, thinking, you know, this is something you ask of your guests all the time, like extreme vulnerability and honesty and transparency, and a willingness to kind of quote, go there, and you haven't been willing to do this about the stuff you're going through in your own life. And I already was starting to feel

so connected to my listeners at this point. I mean, in many ways, it's an ode to my listeners that I had the confidence to do this, because they had already started creating the supportive bubble around me, where you know, I get emails from listeners every single day from all over the world talking about the show and loving the show and loving hearing what I had to say, which was also amazing to hear because I was always focusing on the guests and I just thought of myself as

kind of like you know, fly on the wall who occasionally asked questions. But I was noticing that listeners were really responding to that, and so they gave me the confidence that my story was worth sharing. And so I remember telling my producer, we have to record this tomorrow

morning otherwise as I'm going to change my mind. And I also don't want too much time to pass because I don't want to have created a narrative around this is what the human instinct we all have in our psychology is to create narratives around what happens to us. And I was like, I don't want there to have been too much processing. I really want to process what I'm going through out loud. You did not have it

figured out. I really didn't, and I still don't for what it's worth, but I maybe I have it more figured out than I did then. So it was the rawest I've ever been and we put it out into the world. The episodes called maya slight change of plans, which is so again unexpected. And it's funny that I say we put it out into the world because I think that again was my mental model. You put things into the world. What I didn't anticipate is what I

would receive in response. And I feel completely overwhelmed by what listeners of this show gave me in return. It makes me emotional. Podcasting becomes a conversation between you and your listeners, and I didn't expect that going into all of this, but it is absolutely the most beautiful thing that's happened to me as a result of this show. And has that opened you up in other aspects of

your life? Does it translate to your personal life? Yeah, I'm more hopeful and positive about human beings because I see the love and generosity of spirit from people who are consuming the show all the time, and I also hear about their lives, and it makes me feel connected to people in a time when it's especially hard to connect with people. And does that make you better at your job? Probably? I think the more empathy we build as people and the more curiosity we cultivate about others,

the better will be as interviewers. I had to like learn about like interview structure. When I first started this, I didn't know. I don't know these things right. So I've learned so much from my producers on the show and my editor Jen Guerra has like taught me about structure. But mostly, like what I've driven by is just my own curiosity, and so I think probably it's translated what about your ambition? How driven are you by ambition and

what you want for yourself? Whether it's playing with Pearlman in Carnegie Hall, which happened, or working with Barack Obama, which happened, or being named Apple's Podcast of the Year, which happened, How driven are you by those end goal results? Look? I am I am a driven, ambitious person at my core. They're never able to take that out of me. I do find, certainly with this podcast that I have been not that interested in external achievements because I find the

thing itself so enjoyable and rewarding. And by the way, the Apple thing just came out of nowhere, like I in a sea of millions of podcasts. The reason I laughed ambition of the kind that you're describing in the podcasting spaces that I just felt like, what's even the point. There's no point in having a vision in this space. It's so saturated. I'll just be happy if I get people to listen to this show. That's where my expectations were, truly.

I could never have anticipated that the show would become what it was. And then when Apple gave us the Best Show of the Year award, I mean, I just like, I mean, I think I might have laughed out loud. I was like, how did this happen? This is insane? This is totally completely wild and nuts. So that was like cherry on the freaking top. And don't get me wrong, I was over the moon about it. So it's not

like I'm rejecting. I'm not one of those people who you know, I've read about these Nobel Prize winners who are like, no, I refuse to accept the award. It's like, no, no, no no, I'm not one of those people. I will always accept the award. But I don't feel driven by the external stuff when it comes to this podcast, because there's just like so much humanity underneath it all in a way that like it's nourishing me at a deeper

level than I could ever have expected. I don't know if that resonates with you, but it just feels like it's a different, a different part of my being is being nourished by this podcast. That makes me not pay attention to that stuff as much. That makes sense to me in the context of the show. I think the thing I was prying at is whether there is connective tissue between these three totally different paths who have been

on and ambition. I think when I take something on and I feel a lot of ownership over it, which I did with a Violin because it was my creative pursuit, and then with the White House team I was building it from scratch, and then with a podcast and making the show, I just try and excel as much as I can, just try to always make it the best thing that I can imagine. That might be the thing

that stayed constant. I think the thing that's been surprising to me about podcasting is that you might have that goal of being like making the thing great, but then translating that into hard work is a totally different thing. Right, and with a violin, there was a lot of hours spent not having a ton of fun in my practice room trying to get a passage right, and also time I spent listening to Britney Spears on MTV TRL hashtag Carson daily instead of practicing because it's just like, not

all that's fun. And I think the thing that surprised me about podcasting is how rewarding I'm finding the day to day aspects of it, the actual making, which is so important because you need to really enjoy the making of the thing in order to sustain your interest in it and desire to keep doing it and to feel like even if it's doesn't become a great thing, it was still worth it. Do you have any sense of what the next version of your life is going to be?

I don't. Do you think about that? So this has probably been the greatest shift that's happened for me in my life. And maybe this hits on your your question about ambition. I am like a type a person through and through. I love having the five year plan and the ten year plan and mapping it all out by nature.

That's what I'm like. And I think the series of pivots that my life has naturally taken or I've had to take in my life has kind of soured me on that whole way of thinking and has forced me to kind of think more about now than what's coming, which is a really hard thing for my brain to orient around itself because my brain loves living in the future. And I'm not trying to like be on that whole present mindedness movement. I don't met it. I don't do

any of that stuff that I should be doing. But what I mean is, you know, I thought it was going to be a violinist, lost the violin I thought it was going to be an academic, decided not going

to be an academic. Finally land in a place that I love working in, which is the White House and in the federal government, and I'm like mapping out my you know, just on four years in Obama map and out my eight year plan with Hillary that doesn't happen, And so I have kind of learned to stop having so many plans, like so many long term goals, and so I can honestly say at this moment that I don't actually have quote ambitions for the future, which is such a weird thing to say, because my you know,

when you look at me as a kid, I had so many ambitions for the future. I want to play with every orchestra in the world. I want to win every competition that ever existed. I want to be a pro all this stuff. Like I was just brimming with tangible representations of you know, accomplishment and success right in this space I was in. And I guess again, I don't know if this is just a self protective mechanism,

but I just don't have those same goals anymore. And maybe it's also that I'm a more grateful person than I used to be, Like I feel more gratitude, and so part of my orientation now is well, how lucky am I that I even stumbled upon something like there was a moment Max, I'm just remembering like two years ago, maybe three years ago, where I was walking with my husband. I was like, I don't have hobbies like I need. I need to fill my free time with something that

is like really fun and meaningful. And literally Jimmy was like, maybe you can start up playing bridge, like maybe we can get you into video games, and I was like, all these things sound horrible to me. And so I knew that I was trying to fill some void, and so part of me is also just feeling gratitude, like I can't believe I stumbled upon something in podcasting that feels that void through and through and has just enriched

my life so much. But I just don't have a I don't have a five year plan that seems really healthy. I don't know. Sometimes it's a little destabilizing, like oh no, what's going to come next? I don't know. I think a little destabilization is healthy. That's probably true. And I will say, and this feels so wonderful to say, it's I think sometimes we spend a lot of time in our future because we're not satisfied with the present, right, and so it's kind of like where we go to dream.

I'm actually legitimately living my dream through a slight change of plans, and I didn't expect that, so I don't want to move into the future. I would love to stay in this current moment for as long as it'll let me. That's incredible and I can't wait to see what you do next. Oh gosh, Max put it so much fresher on me. I'm just teasing Maya. Thank you for doing this. Oh thanks for having me. Max, always a pleasure to chat with you. Thanks for listening to

Long for Him. I'm Maxinsky. My co host Sir Aaron Lamer and Evan Ratliffe. Our editor this week was Gabriella Saldivia. Thanks to her, thanks to Noel Mateer, who did the show notes, thanks to Vox, with whom we make this show, and thanks so much to Maya. Her show is called A Slight Change of Plans. You can listen to it wherever you're listening to this show, which we'll be back next week.