Meet Maya Shankar: A Conversation with Michael Lewis

peek of what's to come this season. I am recording, and Michael, before we started talking about the podcast, I did want to share. I went on memory lane a little bit around our friendship because we've been friends for like, I don't know, five six years. So I went back into the Gmail chambers and I found something very fun from twenty fifteen. This is after my husband Jimmy and I hung out with you at Dick Taylor's birthday party. Okay, so we spent like a few days together. So I

sent you the following email. Dearest Michael, Jimmy, Lee and I would like to sign up to be your friend. I'll work with your agent to complete the relevant paperwork. Best May and Jimmy. So, first of all, clearly I don't know how to play hard to get. But thankfully you didn't really enjoy the chase, because you wrote back right away, Dear Maya, your application has been reviewed by our committee. All boxes seem to be checked. We are

pleased to inform you of your acceptance. Michael, Yeah, so that probably again, I have a feeling we share these character traits. I have a feeling we both assume that other people would want to be friends with us, and so we don't actually aren't very shy about it. When I met you there, you had no media ambition. You were an advisor to Obama. How did you even get interested in being a podcaster? So during quarantine, I was feeling really overwhelmed by all the changes that were happening

around me. I think everybody was feeling really overwhelmed by the change happening around them. And I think I realized because I'm a cognitive scientist, so I was thinking about this from the perspective of psychology, right, which is like, how do we interact with this change thing that just happens in our lives whether we like it or not. And you know, maybe the specifics of what twenty twenty through our way is unprecedented but our human ability to

navigate change is not. And so maybe if we heard stories from people who have experienced extraordinary changes in their lives, we could learn something interesting. Right, there's no manual out there on how to navigate big life changes. We don't know what that process is supposed to look like. There's no science textbook on this. And so I was like, let's dig up the most fascinating change stories, changes of all kinds, right, and then let's see what we can learn.

Let's let's see we can change our own minds about change. So you started with the subject rather than the ambition. You didn't think, Oh, I want to be a podcaster unless what should I do it about? Definitely not. That's just not the directionality that works for my brain. I need to have a really fascinating thing to say that feels interesting to me. It can't be the reverse. Like, I really I love podcasts, so I love the audio medium. It's super immersive for me, way more immersive than TV.

So I'm a huge fan of podcasts, but I just never imagine myself having a show of my own. What were your favorite podcasts? Well, I'm a big Bachelor fan, as you know. Ye, So I absolutely subscribe to all the main Bachelor fan podcasts YEP. I like interview shows. I listen of course to like Laurie's Santos Is Happiness Lab. Actually, let me just pull up my podcast feed right now and tell you what's on there. Yeah, I mean, I've got the classic ones, so like The Daily Got against

the Rules, but that seems shameless right now. Revisionist history still processing Hidden Brain. How Oh I love How I

Built This. I actually part of me when I was thinking about this podcast was like, oh, How I built this talks about these elaborate journeys of humans who have built incredible things, and I was like, I kind of want a version of like How I built this life, And so that was part of the inspiration, which was people are going through all these changes, and how do they maneuver and how do they find creative solutions along the way, and how do they navigate? Have you always

been interested in change? This is kind of come up? You know? I study change, right, So I study how and why people change. I study how and why people make decisions, how they developed their attitudes and beliefs about the world. But I never elevated change to an important concept.

Until I was thinking about this podcast. It felt in twenty twenty like a really big deal to think about, and I think against the backdrop of such a broken political society, it felt especially important to figure out how and why we change in potentially good ways because we are seeing so many fractures. But yeah, your your observation that this is a moment to investigate the phenomenon because of COVID is a really good one, and it's to me,

it's interesting because you can see what's happen. You can see now as as we start to come out of it by fits and starts. But that a lot of people they had to change, and it's hard for them all over again because they have to change that they've got. They've adapted to some new kind of way of going through the world, and they feel a kind of hesitancy about going back to the old ways. So people have

very different attitudes towards it. It's not just one thing for everybody that's exactly right, and it's not one thing for everyone over the course of their lives, right right. I think that's one thing we're finding out is, you know, huge childhood trauma with change doesn't necessarily mean that you have an aversion to it later on, right, And we see some of that unfold in some of the stories. Right. So give me an example of that. Give me an

example of someone whose attitude towards change has changed. Yeah. So one person I interviewed was Tiffany Hattish. She is an incredible comedian. She just won Best Comedy Album at the Grammys this year, making her the first black woman to win this award since the early eighties when Whoopie Goldberg won it. And she had a deeply traumatic childhood. When she was eight, her mom had a really terrible car accident that left her with severe brain damage and

made her extremely violent and very verbally abusive. And Tiffany's having to navigate this new world where this person that she loved most in the world is now actively tormenting her. And so it's a profound change in her life. And so what's fascinating about Tiffany's story is that she recognized early on as a kid that she had this talent

and that was to make people laugh. But rather than treating it as this recreational hobby, right, the thing that she just did, you know, with her friends and whatnot, she repurposed it into a survival tool, and so she uses this over the course of her life. When she's a kid, she tries to make her mom laugh, even just for a moment, to distract her from getting hit. Does it work and it's working. Yes. She goes to school,

doesn't know how to read. She charms her classmates into letting her copy their homework by making them laugh and being the class clown. And so she's so traumatized by change early in her life, but then slowly realizes that she's identified that she has this superpower along the way, and so now there's an element of her that embraces change because she realizes that she's got this amazing weapon that she can use at every turn. It's actually it's just a great way to get at people's lives, I

mean getting in your life. You. So you start your podcast right by telling you everybody that you once were going to be a musician and that didn't work out because you had this horrible injury. But back then, you weren't were you thinking about You weren't thinking about change at that age as an as a cons as an abstract concept. You just had to go to about your life and do something different. Yeah. I don't think any

kid is like, oh, and now I'm confronting change. I mean maybe the philosophers among us were doing that, but I certainly wasn't. I was like, this sucks. That's what I was thinking. If I met the musician you way back when, when you're a kid, now I was, I was interviewing you, would you be recognizable to me? You were you basically the same character, but just with a violin in your hands. I think I was really the same. So when we look back at like childhood videos, a

little bit unnerving how similar I was back then. I think some of the traits I preserved, or like getting incredibly excited about things, very passionate about things. I was telling my production team that I have had to do months of voice therapy over the past few years because my doctor diagnosed me is getting so excited when I talk, I forget to breathe. This is apparently a medical diagnosis, but I've now had to retrain myself to remember to breathe.

So I think that like exuberance was certainly there when I was a kid, but I think I was maybe the one thing that I had in childhood that I have not retained. Is just an absolute, singular focus on a goal. I mean I was so dedicated. Like when I think back to being nine, ten eleven, going into a room and practicing for five hours, I just can't. My brain can't comprehend today having that kind of discipline. I don't. I lost it. I stopped cultivating that skill.

If you could go back and learning what you've learned so far, or you know, just taking what you've learned as a grown up, including all your behavioral science stuff, if you had to go back and consult the young you after you get you're told that you're never going to play the violin again. Yeah, is there anything you would have told the young you? Yeah? I would have said, stop making long term plans. Hmm. I was an absolute I still am. I'm a type A or whatever that means, right.

I was obsessed with plan making. I wanted to know what my life is going to be in two years, in four years, in ten years. That persisted through college and grad school, and at every point I'm like, I just I just need to know what comes next so that that traits survive that trauma. It's amazing, it's amazing, Like, well, I lost this one but like, surely I can control everything else. You know, you don't always. You don't learn the valuable lesson that your controls and illusion until I

think you had a few more experiences with change. You know. The next season my podcast is about experts, and we're still figuring it out, but there's a fair chance that there'll be a show about experts whose expertise is no longer of use or valued in anyway. That they go from being you know, prized or at least used to being completely pointless. What do we tell them? Now you're a budding expert on how to endure these sort of changes,

what do you do? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean when you first brought up expertise, I was like, Wow, that's super relevant in my life because I had this expertise I had been building for over ten years, and then overnight it became useless. Didn't matter at all that I had this dexterity and I could play all these pieces. I suddenly couldn't play the violin anymore. I mean, one thing I'm learning, Actually, I had this really interesting interview

with a young guy around my age. He's a cancer researcher. His name is Scott. He's a cancer research but he's also total health nuts. So we're like, the last ten years he's been a vegan and he's been obsessively trying to optimize his life span. Okay, intermittent fasting, high intensity, interval training, you name it, he's done it. Okay, pours turmeric on his food. Okay, turmics should not be poured on food. And I'm Indian, so turmeric is like one

of my spices. That's not how you engage with turmeric. But anyway, he said that his worst nightmare was eventually becoming deeply ill, and last year, in the middle of coronavirus, he gets a stage four cancer diagnosis that overnight leads him to have to amputate his right leg. He's had three or four surgery since then, including removing vertebrae, having to do six rounds of chemotherapy, moving to MD Anderson

for treatments. I mean, it's a gut wrenching story, and it's it's particularly gut wrenching that's against the backdrop of

someone who spent his entire life trying to avoid this outcome. Right, this guy's worst fear comes true and what he was marveling about is the fact that today, the day that I was doing the Inner You, he more or less felt as happy as he had before the diagnosis, really, which was stunning to me, because the happiness research does show that we are massively resilient in the face of adversity and set back, and then when really good things happen, we don't stay super happy for a long time at all.

We immediately go back down to our original set points. So I was familiar with this research, but I always called bullshit on it. I was like, and I told Scott this, I was like, I'm so familiar with this research, but I was always like, Okay, I get all of you will respond in that way, but I assure you that if I went there's experience, no way in hell I'm rebounding. But to hear someone who could say to me, Maya, I was in your shoes, I'm exactly the same way

was really heartening. And he said, if I had known the way that I would psycholologically respond to this event, I wouldn't have spent so much time being so fearful of it in the first place. And I think there is a lesson there for for that episode you're about to do, which is like, there are always unexpected almost I would call like side effects that happen with change, right, things that we can't predict. So, having decided to do the podcast on the subject, yeah, are you finding the

subject exhausting itself? Or do you think that it's kind of endless? How long can this go on for? Do you think how many permutations on this theme are there? Yeah? I was definitely worried when I was conceiving the idea, like is this just a season? You know? And my guests have proven me wrong, which I think is the best way to discover that there's more potential in something. It's not from doing your own research, it's not for

having thoughts in the middle the night. It's from your interview subjects teaching you that there are all these facets of change that you wouldn't even predict. So my favorite kind of interview is when I go in thinking I know what a person's change story is, what moment really changed them and the reaction they had, and they completely proved me wrong and show me that there was this

other element of the change that was actually superformative. So this happened actually just on Friday, So I was interviewing Tommy Caldwell, who you might know he is. He's an extremely skilled climber. He's considered one of the greatest big wall climbers in the world. And he scaled the down Wall, which was deemed impossible by just about everyone, and he did it with nine freaking fingers because he cut off one of his fingers during a wood shopping accident in

his garage. Okay, so the change story I was most interested in and had actually well proceeded losing the finger. It happened when he was climbing in Kyrgyzstan, and he was held hostage by these captors and for six days was under their watch and was basically in a state of severe starvation, extremely cold temperatures. They thought they were going to die of hypothermia. And they can't converse with their captors, right they speak too totally different lang and

they're trying to plot an escape route. And in the end Tommy ends up pushing one of his captors off of a cliff and he I think you surprised himself because like he's a very kind of like soft timid type and he doesn't believe that one should kill and so he has to reckon with this event for so many years, And so I was probing into that part of the story, right, which is like, it seemed like you proved yourself, you know, where your actual limits were, right,

Like you were able to endure this really intense experience. But the part that was so interesting to me that I didn't even think for a second about until I got to the interview, is that the true motivation for him, the reason why he's been able to engage in incredible feats since Kyrgyzstan, is actually because he's been chasing a mental state that he had only experienced once when he was in Kyrgyzstan. So it was about four days into his captivity where his body I think totally turned went

from starving an apathetic to survival mode. And he said that he felt profound mental clarity and focus in that moment. He was in the ultimate flow state. Everything in the world was sharp and clear, and he knew exactly what he needed to do and how to do it. And he said it was so intoxicating that since that day he's been chasing that high and has only reached it once. He even tried to starve himself once, like on a

climb to see if he could get back there. Okay, he reached it when he was scaling the down wall. And I remember telling him, Tommy, if an alien descended on this planet and knew that you would had this deeply harrowing experience, and that you were then trying to recreate those circumstances in normal life because it was a change that you had actually desired, like was something you were striving for it. They would think you were insane.

But that's been the secret sauce to his experience. And again, I just love it when a guest teaches me, you know, about their story and makes me think about change in a totally different way. You know, It's funny because you're naturally a performer, right, you were going to be a performer. You're going to play the violin, You're gonna be on a stage. You've got you've now built a stage, and

you're on it again, and you're very naturally there. I remember when I first met you, when you were giving that talk to those people at the Harvard Business School. You were so obviously a performer, you were so obviously just made to be in front of people talking. And so now you're now you're doing it. How is being a podcaster changing you? So? I think it is making me a much better listener. And I actually don't see

myself as the performer. I try to approach every interview as though I'm giving the guests the stage, right, because that's the person whose story I'm trying to shine the light on, right, And so my only role is to figure out the right questions to ask such that they reveal really fascinating things about themselves. I think it's actually just wonderful to be on this end of the mic. Right. I've done tons of interviews, I've given tons of talks, perform so many times as a violinist, right, And in

many ways, I'm now an audience member. But I'm like an audience member who's almost like a music critic a little bit, because like she's trying to probe deep and try to figure out where some of the cracks are and like and dig in there. Right, So you're telling me that five years now, when you come over to my house for dinner, you're going to be kind of quiet, recessive, shy. Yeah, you won't even be able to get a word out of me. Yeah, you'll just be there, you're very painful dinner,

I'll be that. You'll leave these You'll leave awkward silences that I have to fill. Yeah, that's so, that's where you're going, I'm gonna cut the show off. Yeah, no, no, no, I mean, I think the other thing it's teaching me is like, I don't I don't tend to get like any sort of stage fright or anxiety going into an

interview or a conversation. I think maybe the reason for that is that when you're a little kid and you're forced to go on stage and play these deeply technical passages, when you're then told later in life you simply have to talk like speak words, You're like, oh wow, I'll sign up for that. That seems a hell of a

lot easier. And I'm hoping that the fact that I'm not approaching the conversations with anxiety is putting my guests at peace too, right, letting them feel open and like we're really just having a conversation, which is what I'm hoping will be the vibe of the show. It's really meant to be not superformal. I can be quite a reverend at times. That is my actual personality. As you know, right, and so I'm hoping at least part of that comes through. All right, all right, I'm gonna let you go. Great

to see you, and let's have dinner again soon. Yeah sounds great, Okay. Bye. A Slight Change of Plans is created an executive produce by me Maya Shunker. Big thanks to everyone at Pushkin Industries, including our producer Mola Board, associate producers David Jaw and Julia Goodman, executive producers Mia Lavelle and Justine Lange, senior editor Jan Guera, and sound

design and mixed engineers Ben Taliday and Jason Gambrel. Thanks also to Luis Gara who wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith who helped arrange the vocals, incidental music from Epidemic Sound, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shanker