Pushkin. Hey everyone. Earlier this year, I did a bunch of interviews for the launch of my book, The Other Side of Change. One of them was with the actor and comedian Rain Wilson, best known as Dwight from The Office. Rain and I covered so much ground in this conversation.
We talked about the science of language development, my experience creating a job in the Obama White House, Rain's personal reflections on faith and meditation, and what led me to select each of the stories that appear in my book. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.
Hey there, it's me Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the soul Boom Podcast.
Hi Maya, Hi Rain.
It's so nice to meet you.
It's so nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me.
I've so enjoyed your new book.
I'm really excited to talk.
To you about it.
Thank you. This means a lot.
It's called The Other Side of Change.
Yes, Okay, Who we become when life makes other plans.
And you have become many things, a podcaster and a best selling author and a cognitive scientist on the other side of other.
Plans, lots of other plans.
In a weird way, this just evokes for me something that I've been undergoing over the last few years in my fifties, which is my whole life was acting as
soon as I started. Why I started later. I started like sixteen seventeen, and then pursued it through college and went to to you know, repertory school and theater and off Broadway and tours and you know, just trying to build my career, get a little bit better agent, and get a little bit better job and make a little money and try and support myself and study, and then of course with Dwight here I am like having kind of hit this home run, Like here's a great memorable
character that is in the cultural zeitgeist and consciousness. Apparently it's the most shared person or character on like the what do they call the emojis or don't know what are those called JITs?
Yeah, Like it's the most shared, like Jiff, Yes, I'm one of the shares. You've shared a lot of white gifts So there's my big weird face being shared millions of times.
And I mean it was. It's just one of the most superb characters that exists on TV.
And it's in a weird way. My entire life led up to creating that character, because that's like I said, when I was in acting school, we learned how to create characters and play absurd circumstances with great seriousness, and create kind of clown and inhabit the body and do physical comedy that still felt, you know, grounded in the real world. Like I had a lot of training that led up to to Dwight and a lot of different roles that and since Dwight, I've played a ton of
really cool roles that are very different than Dwight. Not a lot of people have seen those roles, but that's okay. There've been some great movies and other TV shows and theater and and whatnot. But I've had a couple of people say like, oh, so have you left acting now. It's like, well, no, I just had a movie come out and I'm doing another thing and just was you know,
on Broadway. And they're like, oh, I thought you'd left acting to be a part and author and talk about spirituality and the human experience and they So the public perception in a lot of ways is shifting, like oh, is that guy still an actor or has he moved into another line of work. And it's been it's been an interesting shift internally for me, like how I've lived, you know, thirty years plus as an actor being my existential identity and now I'm also doing this other thing.
I'm hoping to do both. I'm hoping to write books and have conversations like this and occasionally play a silly, weird character in a TV show or a film or something like that, and I think that's how it's going to work out. But it it has been. It has been a shift of like, oh, yeah, this is a new this is a new identity beyond Rainn Wilson slash actor.
Yes. I so resonate with that because I feel like, for basically all of my childhood, I was a violinist before I was even maya. I mean, that was the primary label that I gave myself. And one of the things that I've learned since then, you know, now I study change and how we process change, is that so many of us anchor our identity, so firmly to what we do, to the roles we inhabit, to certain labels, and there's a lot of value in doing that right.
Being an actor gives you a sense of camaraderie with your fellow actors. Being an actor gives you meaning and drive every day and maybe helped stave off existential angst because you know what your goals are for the day, and you have a filming schedule and what have you. But the risk of tethering your self identity too closely to what you do is that life can effortlessly get in the way it deny you the ability to do
that thing. And so one technique that I've learned only recently that has helped me whether change better in my own life is to define myself not simply by what I do, but by why I do it. So to ask myself, well, what is at the core of my passions for music or for the other things that I love? And when I asked that question about music specifically, I realized, oh, well, emotional connection is definitely the number one thing that drove me towards music. I also loved getting better at something.
It's great to improve and see progress in that way. I love being creative if you can make that community that you found. So, if I could define my identity in that way, oh, I'm a person who loves emotional connection. I'm a person who loves having creative outlets. Then the exercise in the face of a big change is to figure out, well through what other outlets can I express this part of myself. And it turns out subconsciously, I have actually found pursuits in which I can forge those
emotional connections. Right, as a cognitive scientist, I study the science of connection, as a writer, as a podcast host of a slight change of plans, the whole enterprise is about having these deep, emotional, rich conversations with other people, right, And so I would urge people who are listening to ask themselves, what is what is my why? What is the thing that makes me tick? Maybe it's giving to my community, maybe it's learning something new, maybe it's caring
for others in times of need. Whatever that why is, it can serve as a soft landing when that anvil falls from the sky and you don't know who you are anymore, and it can be a north star that helps guide you towards your next thing because it will still be very much intact, you know, like, just because I love the violin didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. So my dad's a theoretical physicist. He has no musical connections.
But what he told me when I learned that I could not play the violin was, look, you've been wearing blinders for the last ten years, and so your understanding of the world is very very small. Your job, and I remember this was the summer before college, he said, your job is to expose yourself to as many domains as you possibly can. I want you to read books,
I want you to watch documentaries. I want you to talk to people that you find fascinating, absorb everything like a sponge, but importantly, do it without an end goal in mind. So I don't want you to limit yourself too quickly because you think I have to figure out what my major is going to be in college. And good thing he gave me that guidance rang.
Because you could have jumped to I'm going to play the tuba now.
Exactly, or something I was familiar with, right, I'd be like I liked history in high school. Maybe I'll be a history major. Good thing he gave me that advice because I literally didn't even know cognitive science was a discipline. I didn't know that it was an area of study.
I didn't know what those words meant. And it was only when I stumbled upon a book by the Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker, It's called The Language Instinct, that I was again onspired, very different experience, obviously than when I was listening to Beethoven in my bed, you know, as a ten or eleven year old. But I was reading this book and it was giving me insight into this miraculous organ that is our brain and what is going on behind the scenes that gives rise to our unbelievable
capacity for language. I mean, we just take for granted, like right now, in this moment, you and I are having the super I think, it's a super fun conversation. This stuff that's happening in your brain in order to process what I'm producing, and the stuff that's happening in my brain to produce what I'm producing, is just truly extraordinary when you think about the cognitive machinery. And I thought to myself, oh my god, if this is what's
going on behind the scenes for language. Then what's happening when not we I didn't inherit my dad's physics genes, but when my dad solves a complex mathematics equation, or we fall in love, or we extend forgiveness to someone, like it just lit up my imagination about all these fascinating.
Topics talking about consciousness, yes, which is much bigger than necessarily just the brain or what goes on neurologically in the brain, because all of these different aspects. And let's go back to the language for a minute, because I always think about this like I think about the word mountain, Okay, Like if you see a bunch of scratches on a paper with a M and it says mountain, So that's
another level of it. Like you're reading these symbols, these glyphs, and you know exactly what it means, but is it exact? What is that mean? When you see the word mountain, what do you think of? Do you think of like archetypal mountain? Do you think of like a kid drawing like a mountain? Do you think of a mountain from your childhood? You think about some kind of union arc type of mountain, or some kind of plato higher form
of what a mountain is. And then when then we start using it metaphorically, then we're like, that's a this is a mountain too high for me to climb, or that was a tough mountain for me to get over, or there's you know, mountains ahead of me, or like the Hastiens say, you know mountains beyond mountains. It starts to have all these reverberations about what a mountain means. It's it's solidity, and it's insurmountable, but sometimes surmountable when
you reach the peak of the mountain. So all of a sudden, these these glyphs go to an idea and the ideas in your brain that is connected to what an actual mountain is. We went over here and saw Mount Whitney's, but it reverberates on so many different levels.
Thank you for sharing in my passion for linguistics. It was actually my concentration when I was a cognitive science maker.
How about that?
Because I am fascinated by all the things you just said, and I remember learning or just just just really just having a moment of recognition when we were learning about child language development. So a kid hears a bunch of incoming auditory streams all the time, and sometimes in multiple languages, depending on the household they grow up in. Right, no one is formally teaching them grammatical structures. No one's teaching them explicitly. Oh, this is where one word begins and
the next word ends. We don't pause between words. Right now, your brain is parsing the words effortlessly because it knows semantically that each thing means a distinct thing.
Oh, this is what's happening. This is what's happening in my brain. Toilet paper, head of broccoli, bananas, raw on almonds. I've got my Trader Joe's shot, and I should be listening to what you're saying.
Multitasking is fine, Okay, yeah, totally, and keep going. Trader Joe's has actually my favorite almonds, So I think it's
a good choice. All right, you chose well. And so I find it miraculous that these little beings and their brains, yeah, can take all of that in and within a short amount of time, are like, yep, I understand how to produce sentences, and I know exactly what you're saying to me, despite the fact that you know it's just a streamist of sounds it's crazy, it's crazy, it's so onspiring.
Yeah, but what do you think about that, that level of meaning of a word of like symbols, symbol of mountain, the shape of mountain, the archetype of mountain, the reality of mountain, the metaphor of mountain.
I think a lot of it has to do with the state, the emotional state we're primed to be in. Right, if you're at say a yoga retreat, and you're asked the thing about mountains, you might have a more abstract image that comes to mind. Right, But if you are driving exactly and you're you have a map in front of you and you're trying to just figure out which peak to go to in order to go skiing, yeah, you might have a slightly more literal image come to mind.
So I think we're all capable of the continuum of you know, very concrete to very abstract. It just depends on the mental state we happen to be in.
How do you end up in the Obama White House with a degree in cognitive science?
How does that?
How does that work? I've never heard of that before. I've never heard of a cognitive scientist working for some kind of political administration.
That wasn't such a role, so that would make sense. So I got my PhD and then my postdoc in cognitive neuroscience, and I when I was doing my postdoc, I was studying decision making. So I was studying all the biases that drive the decisions we make, how we develop our attitudes and beliefs, how we think about risk when we're trying to make a decision, when we have regrets, how our emotional states differ depending on our risk tolerance. Right,
It's just like a fascinating number of questions. And I was also realizing that, oh crap, I don't think academia is for me, which is one of those moments that you're hoping won't happen to you when you've spent ten years studying a field. So I remember calling my undergrad advisor. I remember it. I was in the basement of a Stanford MRI fMRI laboratory and I was scanning like the tenth person's brain for the day as part of the study.
And there's no windows, and it's this dark room, and I thought that this is a terrible fit for me and my personality. I like working on teams, I like having a really you know, vibrant environment and seeing impact really quickly, and academia doesn't lend itself to a lot of those things, and so or often doesn't. And so I called my advisor and I was like, okay, jumping ship, thank you so much for your service, thank you for getting me to love this topic. But I'm not interested.
And she said, no, no, no, wait, wait wait, I just went to a conference where I heard about how they're using insights from cognitive science from behavioral science to improve people's lives in the US. He said, Okay, tell me more. She said, well, there's a program called the National School
Lunch Program. It gives lunches to free or reduced price lunches to low income kids, and unfortunately, millions of kids were going hungry every day, despite the fact that despite the fact the program was offered to so many and they ran a behavioral audit of the program and realized that there were at least two factors that were contributing to low enrollment rates. The first was stigma. A lot
of these parents were like, I work really hard. I don't want my kids depending on the federal government for assistance. And then there was also just the barrier, the outsize barrier that these families faced of having to fill out very very complicated forms that require referencing multiple tax documents and oh, by the way, if you get some field wrong, you might face you know, also tells t is exactly
fraud and think it. Put yourself in the shoes of a single mom who's working three shifts to make ends meet. It's non trivial for her to fill out this form and to figure out a way to get their boss to approve a lunch break in order to go mail it exactly at the time that you're suppos to mail it in order to get enrolled, right, And so we can sometimes underestimate those barriers when we forget about the time and resource constraints that families face in the country,
and by we m at policymakers. And so what the government did was leverage a really elegant insight from my field, which is called the power of the default option. They simply change the program from an opt in program to an opt out program. So by virtue of being opt out, everyone's now automatically enrolled. Stigma's gone. Parents only have to
take an active step if they want to unenroll. Their kid from the program, and as a result of this slight tweak in the way the Paul's he was designed, twelve and a half million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day.
Wow, that's amazing.
Yeah. So I heard this example and I said to my undergrad advisor, that's the job that I want to do. And she said, well, the job doesn't exist, but let me connect you with this guy, Cass Sunstein, who was running an office at the White House, and maybe he can help. So I email him and I'm like, Hey, I'm Maya. I've published nothing of significance, i have no public policy experience, I'm not cool enough to work with
the likes of Obama. But is there a state or local government job that I might be able to translate insights from my field into public policy improvements? And fortunately for me, Cass ignored all of my insecurities that were just seeping out of this email, and he wrote again, kindness of strangers. He wrote back to me and said, here's Obama's science advisor's email. Send him a note and
let him know I passed you along. And two days later I was interviewing for a job that didn't exist, and I pitched them on the idea of not just creating a job that was dedicated to the translation of behavioral science into policy, but also like, could they maybe kind of hire me for that job as well, Right, and so yeah, it's just kind of wild to think back to this period, but it all worked out after you know, all the FBI clearances and whatnot and getting
the role approved, and then a couple months later I started working in the White House and I worked there for the entirety of Obama's second term.
Amazing, that's so cool.
It was so cool.
What policies then did you work on? You worked in Flint a good deal with the water crisis.
Yes, So we worked with so many different government agencies, so we did a lot of light touch interventions given that, you know, there weren't a lot of funds to devote to radical program overhauls. So instead, what we tried to do was to take existing programs and make sure that the people they were designed to benefit were actually receiving them.
And so a good example is the there are these very helpful veterans benefits that we give to people when they're transitioning from military life to civilian life, which can be really fraught with a lot of psychological challenges and educational and job challenges and not enough. That's we're signing up. And we were told, okay, there's one email that you can you know, change. That's all the money we have, and we'll run a very simple A B test And we ended up changing just one word in the email.
Instead of telling veterans that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service.
Wow, that's so cool.
And that one word change led to a nine percent increase in access to the venement.
This goes back to linguistics, right.
Linguistics. Absolutely, it's actually.
Leveraging feeling of like, you know, you can opt in for this versus you've earned this right through your work, through your service to our country. There's a it triggers some pride.
One hundred percent. It's leveraging an insight known as the endowment effect, which says that we've value things more when we own them. So for example, if I owned which I hope I do. At the end of this is interview, this wonderful sorry, no mug when we own things.
Or how good the rest of the interview goes.
Or we feel we have earned something. So, like you said, now it's not something that they're going to gain, it's something they now have to lose because they've already gotten this benefit. So we did that sort of work, and we worked across the government, so helping student loan borrowers, helping caregivers of wounded vets, helping military service members, and rolling retirement savings plans. And then towards the end of them.
You're talking about making government programs more effective and service oriented instead of cutting them to the bone and eliminating them and getting rid of them, making government more effective.
That's it was a different time. Rain. It's a different time, my friend, makes me quite nostalgic to think back. But yes, we are starry eyed and bushy tailed, and we really believed that government could do great things for people, and it does do great things for people. We wanted to just improve the way that it serves people.
Did you go to public school?
I did go to public I didn't do as well.
What an amazing service our government provided for us that we had public school and we were able to get great foundational education and move on and to be podcasters.
I know look at what we did.
But it reminds me too of I do some work. My wife and I started a nonprofit eleven years ago in Haiti in girls' education, and one of the things we learned early on in terms of doing education service projects in the developing world is you never offer free education because people will simply view it as not very good, yeah,
not valuable. Yeah, but if you put a value, even if it's very small to say like, no, this is going to cause us to you acts and then fifty cents or whatever like, but you're going to have to like put in they feel like, oh, this is this is something worthwhile that have.
Skin in the game, basically, yeah and so. And then, like you said, towards the end of the administration, we my teammates and I traveled to Flint, Michigan because of the lead and water crisis, which we very quickly learned was about so much more than lead and water.
Okay, we initially were.
Tasked, yeah, we were initially tasked with creating water safety fact sheets and making sure that they had, you know, actual information that was clear and totally in line with what the EPA was recommending. But then when you when you go on the ground, you realize, oh, wait a second, this is a symptom of a much, much bigger problem, which was decades of systemic racism and disenfranchisement and feelings of being totally lied to and betrayed by their local government.
And I do remember there was this critical decision and I felt like the response was so so smart. There was a question about who should deliver these water safety sheets to Flint residents, and I think instinct is, oh, well, it should be the Environmental Protection Agency, right, I mean, they're the ones that are the leading authorities when it comes to what's safe for us to put in our bodies and or what's safe for us when it comes to environmental issues. And then we had to think that.
Then the EPA had to think, well.
Wa should I think it should have been K pop bands? Can you imagine?
I mean, they would be very effective messengers. We know the power of the messenger. We know that sometimes who delivers a message is more important than the message itself. So I think you've hit on a really brilliant behavioral insight going. And so there's this question of do we have them come from members of the EPA. But then you have to think, well, wait a second. Flint residents
have every reason to not trust their local government. Surely there will be spillover effects of that distrust when it comes to the federal government. So maybe the EPA is not the best messenger of these fact sheets. So the EPA organized this local canvassing effort with heads of the Red Cross, members of the YMCA, church leaders, people that you would see if you are a Flint resident at the supermarket every week, people that you trust to babysit
your kids. They were the ones knocking on doors and they were saying, here's the fact sheet. Yes it's endorsed by the EPA. They're saying everything here is true, but I, as your friend and your community member, am also blessing its content. And I think that was such a powerful way of combating all of the misinformation that was floating around the community in this time of great stress and anxiety.
That's amazing.
Yeah, and then the twenty sixteen election happened, so things quickly got disbanded.
I've read a lot of like positive psychology book that make a lot of good cases for you know, how to leverage positive psychology ideas in your daily life, and they'll have some like story examples, but your stories are so deep and so researched, and I'm so glad that they're as long as they I kind of wanted more that you go super in depth into what these people are going through, their ups, their downs, and where they
come out on the other side. How did you find all of these incredible people in these amazing stories.
Thank you so much for recognizing that no one's ever commented on the book in the way that you have. And I cannot tell you how I'm going to start crying how rewarding it is to hear you say that, because the people that I had the honor of interviewing for this book have so profoundly changed my life and I care so deeply for and my only goal was to do justice to their stories because they open up our hearts and minds to me over years, and it was so important to me that it had the emotional
impact that they did. So first of all, just thank you so much. As a first time author, it truly means the world to me and to the people that I interviewed that you had that response. So thank you. As I was conceiving of this book, I had been humbled as a scientist for many years, because I had taken such an empirical approach to my life up until this point, and I had assumed that kind of I could study my way out, I could research science my
way out of challenges in my life. And then in twenty twenty, I faced something that I couldn't hustle my
way out of. So long story short, my husband and I had been trying to build a family for many, many years, and we had faced at this point so many barriers and heartbreaks and disappointments, And in early twenty twenty, we found out that our surrogate had miscarried, and it was just before the world shut down, before COVID, and I remember I had had these formative experiences with change, and yet I felt so wildly unprepared for this moment, for the grief that I felt in this loss. And
I think that was multifold in terms of why. But I think a massive reason is that I am so used to working my way through challenges. I'm so used to figuring out a creative way to get from point A to point B, to overcome failure, to overcome setbacks. But there's no such thing as working harder in the context of starting a family, the universe does not care how much you want a child. It's indifferent towards that.
And I think in everyday life we all fall prey to what psychologists call the illusion of control, where we wildly overestimate the degree to which we ourselves will dictate how our lives turn out. I definitely fall prey to the illusion of control. I like having my hands firmly on that steering wheel, a tight grip, right, trying to plan out okay, five years, ten years, fifteen years, and then when a negative change falls out of the clear blue sky, we are forced to contend with the limits
of that control. We see it so clearly, all of a sudden, we're taught the lesson the Buddhists have been trying to teach us for all of humanity.
I want to go there, which is.
Oh my god, I'm not in control at all. And as I was trying to pick up the pieces of my life, and as I was grieving the future, and we talked about identity earlier, right as I was grieving this identity of mom that from the time I was a little kid, I had aspired to be.
So you literally were at fifteen, being like, I'm going to be a violinist and a mom. Those are maybe the two most important things about who I am as a person.
And actually it was only in writing this book that I realized the only identity that really predated violinist was mother. I think from the time I was three or four, my dad tells me he'd come downstairs, I'd be with my place at on, like my fictional plastic phone, having these conversations with my neighbors, like Claudia, Yes, little Bobby
is being just so difficult today, you know. Like I just was so enamored by the idea of motherhood, and it was a fantasy land that I would travel to in my brain when things in my life were hard, or I didn't feel like I belonged, or things in the world were hard, I would just escape to this fictional place where I was a mom and I had my brood and things were happy and cozy and healthy, right, And so to have that identity stripped away from me, I felt, Yeah, I felt just like impossibly sad and
just oriented again. And so that was when I realized this science was falling short, and I needed to connect with people, and I needed to connect with their narratives, and I needed to hear how other people were doing change better than I was doing change. So I search for the most fascinating stories I could, ones that were exceptional on the surface because they're just like, wow, I can't wait to turn the page, but they all carried a universal lesson within them. And then I realized something
that was so interesting. I started to realize that there were fascinating connections that were emerging across people's stories that didn't look at all the same on their surface. The cancer patient and the woman who learns that her husband is having an affair both share the same feeling of betrayal. Everyone in the throes of a big change, irrespective of their circumstances, is contending with grief and bristling at the unfairness of the world and grieving the future that they
hoped for and ruminating and regretting the past. We're all dealing with the same stuff, and so if we're dealing with the same problem statement, chances are that the solution set is going to be similar. And so to get to your question, what led to this book, Well, I went on a hunt to try to find the most riveting stories of change that I could find that all had an unexpected element to them, that had stories sitting beneath the stories, sitting beneath the stories sitting beneath the stories,
because I'm so interested in people's interior lives. I'm not that interested in the external beats of their narrative. I want to know what's happening in here. I want to know the transformation that's happening inside. And every person I interviewed over years, on multiple occasions so surprised me with
what was going on in their minds. I could never have predicted it just by learning, Oh, this person was locked in Oh this person became a poet when they were in prison, I would never have known what was happening to them within their brains. And then from each story I distilled a valuable lesson about the human experience, about our minds that I was hoping every reader could actually benefit from.
The core of the story of Olivia was a young woman who is very healthy and has a stroke and then has that kind of diving bell in the butterfly experience where consciousness inside of her body but she can just blink a little bit at.
The Yeah, she has no voluntary control over any of the muscles in her body other than her eyes. So that's her only portal for communicating with the world is through her blinks.
And then gradually, through years and years of physical therapy, she can move her finger a little bit and makes some sounds, and gradually kind of more and more life comes back to her body. But the central part of her story that I found incredibly profound was that she, before her stroke lived for other people in every way, shape and form. She was trying to impress people, hope they weren't embarrassed by her, trying to fit in, people pleasing living her entire life let reflect did in whether
at school or family or her fiance's family. And then she has the stroke, and here she is. She has to have her diaper changed, she's drooling all the time, and she's just embarrassed and mortified that people have to see her in this state. And again, here she is with this most tragic, horrific thing happening to her, and all she's thinking about is how other people see her, how other people are thinking, and other people are feeling.
And she goes through this incredible transformation during this one stage of her rehab where she lets all of that go and she's like, I don't give a fuck. I'm just going to drool. I'm going to be myself. I'm going to take down all the pictures of myself as a young woman off the walls, and I've got it. I've got to be me. Can you tell us a little bit about that? In that sense? What great freedom she found while being encased in the greatest prison we
can possibly think of. But actually the real prison is being enslaved to what other people think and need from us, and people pleasing other people, and she actually gains her freedom even though her body doesn't work right.
Okay, So first of all, I would like you to do my book tour for me. Yeah, because that was an unbelievably compelling, an accurate description of Olivia's story, So thank you for that. Second. Yes, So, one of the things I discovered from this book is that change can serve as revelation for us as humans. So when we go through a big negative change in our lives, you can feel like a personal apocalypse, like everything we knew about the world that we cherished and loved and felt
stable for us is now gone. Going back to linguistics, The word apocalypse actually comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which means revelation, and so the etymology is quite in destructive change can abend us that it can also reveal things to us. And what happened with Olivia is that
she was living her life beholden to others. But she only became acutely aware of the degree to which she was beholden to others when she completely lost her ability to curate an image of herself and to present herself in a way that she felt others would find palatable. And that is the power of big change. It brings into the light the most unsavory parts of who we
are because we can't resist seeing those things anymore. For example, in my own life, when we found out there was a second miscarriage and we lost identical twin girls, that was when I realized, fully, oh my god, my entire self worth is tied up in the identity of becoming a mom. I have grown up with cultural influences telling me that my worth as a woman comes from procreation, Like, maybe that's a problematic view that I need to revisit.
And so similarly, Olivia has to contend with this realization that she cares so much what other people think about her when her boyfriend's family comes to the hospital and she can't be who she wants to be in front of them. She's got a ventilator hooked up to her face. She can't not along, she can't give them reassurance. She
can't be the charmer that she wants to be. She has to be the rawest, purest form of herself and the only way that she it's almost actually by brute force that she gets to the other side, because with her team of therapists, she has no choice but to be herself, and over time she starts to realize, hey, wait a second, they seem to really like me, like they seem to like the unvarnished, unpolished, irreverent version of Olivia. They seem to not be so bothered when I break
down and I have these moments of despair. Maybe I should like myself, Maybe I should actually love myself. And she gets to a point of self actualization and self love at the age of twenty seven that I think most people in their forties, fifties, sixty seventies would long for, They would lust after that kind of self acceptance. Olivia told me, yes, I don't feel glad the stroke happened.
Most people never will a negative change to happen. But she said, I am so grateful that I've gotten to the place of self assuredness and self confidence that I've gotten to, because it might have taken me decades to get there, if I'd ever gotten there at all. And I think she's completely right, like change can be a teacher to us because when it reveals something about who we are that was previously hidden from view, then we can take active steps to actually shape that future journey
and to become new people on the other side. By the way, that's why my book is called The Other Side of Change. It's because we are constantly transforming during the experience, and when a big change happens to us, it creates lasting within us, and so we can't forget that the person we're going to come out the other side as is going to be different from the person we are in this very moment.
That's beautiful. In my faith tradition, Baha'u'llah, the prophet founder of the Bahai faith, says something to the effect, because I don't want to misquote it about you know, true freedom is freedom from the self, and that's a very old spiritual practice that when you think of self, you think of lust, seeking, status, greed, just kind of chronic self interest, power, narcissism around that. But when we are
freed from the self, that that's true freedom. You can be in a prison cell and be freed from yourself and experience kind of a lightness that you had never thought possible.
Thank you for sharing that, because I want to continue on that point. We talked about awe, right, and I think most people think about awe fairly narrowly. They think about things like nature and art and music, and.
That's beautiful sunrise or just yeah exactly.
My favorite form of awe that I think isn't talked about enough is something called moral beauty. That is the awe that other people inspire within us, and it is all around you if you're willing to look for it, and if you're willing to be a keen observer. So moral beauty can be or let me just talk about hold.
On, I want to jump in.
Y, yeah exactly, let me okay, let me go in, let me go in. So there's a phenomenon known as moral elevation. Moral elevation is that warm, fuzzy feeling we get in our chest when we witness someone else's outstanding acts. So it could be their kindness, or their courage, or their resilience, or their ability to forgive someone you name it. Anything that impresses us about humans can fall into the moral beauty bucket and therefore give rise to moral elevation.
And what's amazing about moral elevation Rain is that it doesn't just make us feel good. It doesn't just restore our faith in humanity day to day, which a lot of us need right now. It actually changes our brains because in witnessing someone defy our understanding of what humans are capable of, it cracks open our own imagination about what we are capable of. So one of the people that I interviewed for this book who we just talked about, Dwayne. He was sentenced to nine years in an adult prison
when he was sixteen years old for carjacking. And you feel bad for the kid because he had dreams of going to Georgia Tech. He was class treasurer, He was a sweetie pie to his mom, and yet in an effort to impress the boys in his neighborhood. He made a really, really terrible He made a terrible decision and.
Which we all do, which we all do at.
Sixteen, and his led to nine years in adult prison. So you can imagine that Dwayne is feeling despair at this point. He said that he wasn't just grieving all of the futures that he lost, he was fearing who he might become within the walls of prison. And there's a concept in psychology called possible selts. So we conjure up possible selves all the time in daily life. So we have hoped for selves. This is the version of
us that we want to see come true. So for you, it would be I want to be an actor and a podcaster and a writer. That's my hope for self. Then there's feared sels that might be like, oh I become greedy, or I become really self interested, or my conditions change and I no longer have the ability to be kind, right, That might be the feared self. And then there's the expected selves. So as much as I would want to be the next Taylor Swift, it ain't happening.
I'm probably gonna be a cognitive scientist in five years. And so that's just the version of us that's most likely to happen. And for Dwayne, all of the hope for selves disappeared instantly when he got that nine year sentence, and the feared cells expanded effortlessly in his brain. Right now, he's wondering, am I going to become an addict? Am I going to be someone who steals? Am I going
to become violent? He's just worried about all these versions of himself that he might now embody until about a year in two his prison sentence, when he has a spectacular moment of moral elevation. He encounters a fellow inmate named Bellaal who defies all of the stereotypes Dwayne has in his mind about what it means to be a prisoner. So this guy cares for all the younger inmates. He teaches the young boys how to box to protect themselves from the threat of violence. He carries himself in such
a dignified way. Dwayne says, it's like he carries himself like a man in uniform. He gets up an hour before the guards even come by his cell door and does two hundred and fifty push uts. So Dwayne was saying that's the kind of guy who was like, no, this is my identity. Now, I'm choosing to be a certain way. Just because I'm a prisoner doesn't mean I can't be like this. And that moment of moral elevation
cracks open Dwayne's imagination about who he can become. And so a few weeks later, when he encounters a book of poetry in which one of the writers is speaking to the experience of young boys of color in prison, Dwayne thinks, oh, well, I could do that. I can't do the ballall version. I'm not strong. I can't teach anyone how to box. But I can absolutely record and dignify the experiences of the people that I'm meeting in prison and my own experience. And fast forward a few decades.
Dwayne is a Yenge Law School graduate. He's a MacArthur Genius Prize winner, and he publishes some of the most stirring poetry I've ever read about what the experience of being a black man in prison is like. And it came from that afec did moment of moral beauty within prison.
It's an incredible story in the book, and you tell it so well this believe it or not. I'm not trying to be Dax Shepherd an armchair expert right now, folks. But this is actually something I know a little bit about because my uncle, doctor Rhett Deisner. This is his area of study. Way, it's moral beauty. He studies beauty in the psychology of beauty. He just spoke at the Max Planck Institute.
And which one I went to, the one in Leipsiging when I was in college.
Yeah, I think it's that one.
Okay, great. Yeah.
He has worked with Jonathan Height and Arthur Brooks, and a lot of his studies are published. But he has numerous studies about moral beauty and moral elevation, as coined by Jonathan Height, how much it impacts all the choices
that we make. You can witness someone you know, giving money to homeless or holding open a door, or doing an act of kindness, helping an old lady across the street, and then your next action will be morally and in fact, when you even when you see someone helping an old lady across the street, and then you're shown pictures of like flowers, you can experience awe much more readily having
witnessed moral beauty and moral elevation and other people. So it has this kind of like snowball effect of actually making the world a better place. So when we take actions of moral beauty in our lives, they have reverberations far past what we would normally think of.
Yes, that's exactly right, and I love that moral beauty transcends domains. So one of the instances I reflect on in the book that I experienced in which I experienced moral beauty was after the horrific shooting in Mother Emmanuel Church in South Carolina. I remember watching on TV the daughter of one of the victims publicly extending forgiveness to the racist killer, and I was so stunned by this reign, Like she in that moment demonstrated a depth of forgiveness
that I did not think humans were capable of. And what's so amazing about the impact of moral beauty and elevation is that it's not like I was looking to forgive anyone in my life at that moment in time. It's not like it was a perfect translation of she forgave, now I can forgive. What it does do is it makes you think across the board, could I be kinder? Could I be more empathetic. Could I be more generous?
Who do I need to forgive? You know, you might not forgive your cousin who didn't come to your wedding when they said you would, And like, wait, she can forgive this guy, and I can't forgive my cousin.
So it not only inspires you to forgive, it inspires you to be better in any domain where you're looking to improve. Okay, So that's the key thing is that I felt like I was elevating. I was elevated as a human overall. Oh you think that's the maximum kindness you can show someone else, No it's not. Oh you think that's the maximum amount of self sacrifice you can
engage in, No it's not. And so it pushes you to new internal heights when you witness someone else showing spectacular levels of a trait in another domain.
My uncle Rhet also talks about in speaking of two different domains, is moral beauty and physical beauty and visual beauty in that connection or musical artistic beauty. So you can experience moral beauty and it will increase your experience of artistic or natural beauty. You can experience natural beauty and that will influence and uplift your own acts of moral elevation that you undertake in your life. So beauty, the beauty trait you know, runs from action into esthetic.
Isn't that so uplifting? Because I mean, if you also think about what's happening on a neuroscientific level, what is happening in our brains and bodies when we experience awe, Well, the parts of our brain that are other dedicated to self immersion decrease in activity. So the default mode the
default mode network, for example. And so what happens when we experience awe is that we are able to more easily step outside of our own wants and needs and anxieties and to remember that we are part of a collective, that we are a small being on this planet, and we have so much more context, We so much more perspective on the significance of our own lives in a way that I think gives us the clarity we need around the kinds of choices we want to make while we're here and the way that we want to be
around others while we're here. When I have those moments of perspective giving, I think, oh my god, all that matters is how I treat other people. All that matters is how other people feel when they're around me. That's it. That's the meaning of all of this.
But we also see the opposite because since COVID and since this kind of toxic partisanship that has really been rocking our world over the last eight oris ten years, we've seen a degradation and how people are treating each other. Just think about airports and think about going on airplanes and fights on airplanes and people attacking you know.
Flight flight attendants, and.
If we long for moral elevation or moral beauty and seeing acts of kindness and forgiveness like that, so that it inspires our own acts are altruistic actions and beautiful actions. Abdulla Baha says, strive therefore, day by day that your actions may be beautiful prayers. So this idea and the Bahigh faith that a prayer is not just something you kind of say, it's a way of a being in the world. But we've seen a degradation of that. So we are seeing our society and everyone picks up on it.
And it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're on. Everyone sees, you know, this deterioration of these small acts of being kind and patient with a flight attendant is making our world a much worse place, even though they might feel like small little actions, and again has a snowball Yeah, but.
The same way in which those negative actions can have a snowball effect. Just like you said earlier, pauseitive, because everyone's always wondering what can I do? What can I do? I feel helpless, I feel hopeless, like you said, and I thought you said it so beautifully a small So don't.
Even try and repeat it. Let's just replay what I said before. It was perfect. Go ahead.
The small act that you initiate to be kind to a stranger, it has these beautiful spillover effects. So I was in an airport a couple of weeks ago, and I had way too much stuff that I was trying to carry. Okay, So I had like a crappy suitcase that was top heavy, so it kept falling over. Then I had my open purse, and then I had a garment bag okay, and as I'm getting to the top of the escalator, it like does something on one of the edges and everything topples down the escalator.
Okay.
That is like my worst night verb because I've now inconvenience everyone again in the app behind me, so mortified.
I would have been so pissed at you, of course, right, and.
I was pissed at me. I was so embarrassed. And there are two people behind me. Immediately behind me, there were tons of people you know down yes, later they launched into save this woman from her self mode instantly, so one of that operation. Yeah, one of them does this crazy jiu jitsu move where he takes the purse which is now facing downwards, all the stuff is open faced, and he goes like this as quickly as possible, thus sparing ninety percent of the contents and only three things
in there. It was a total magic move. The other one's like, I got the garment bag. We're good, and they get to the top of the escalator. They passed me the stuff and one of them says to me, don't worry, it happens to all of us. And then the other one sees me just trying to arrange myself as stuff in another corner and comes over and says, do you need anything else? Is there anything anything I can help you with? Mess?
Beautiful?
And it was such a beautiful moment of humanity. And I really believe that. I'm just reflecting on this now because of the observations you share it about your uncle's research, I was a kinder person for the rest of that day. That stayed with me. Yeah, I thought, because there's a mini version of pay it forward when someone is so kind to you without any good reason, like wait a second, I should aspire to be so upstanding, you know, and so.
Yeah, and instead it's like give it forward, Serve it forward, yeah, you know, beauty it forward.
Beauty it forward.
Yeah.
So you can actually make an impact just because people are observing you, and there's a lot of power in that.
So you referenced earlier lessons that Buddhism had been teaching that align so much with this theory of change and coming out of change, and I think this is your sequel. Is there are so many spiritual teachings from the world's traditions, from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions especially, that have to do with basically all of the concepts that you bring
up in your book. And I'm wondering how much of your grandmother's spiritual tradition kind of trickled into the ground water here because when you talk about awe, that's the same thing a spiritual person or a religious person feels for the divine or for the sacred. When you talk about the illusion of control, we know that the essential Buddhist teaching is that we have no control, and that change and hardship are a part of living and that
is undeniable. You talk about the psychic distance and overview effect, about how helpful it is to kind of detach from yourself and your problems, like yourself with the purse and the garment bag at the top of the escalator, and
to kind of like witness yourself with compassion. But meditation is literally a daily action that one can take that creates the psychic distance and the overview effect and strengthens the muscles of compar They've done studies where meditation, even though it's simply being in the present and stilling the mind, actually increases compassion, which doesn't seem like there'd be a correlation totally, because I think that meditation allows you more
compassion for yourself and then allows you more compassion for other people by creating that kind of psychic distance, like rising above yourself. About having a metacognition that was the word that I was looking for. The soul Boom way into so many of these ideas that are central to
your book. We have in a little plug from the soul Boom Workbook where these create, you know, a surrendering of control, increasing awe, drawing what's sacred, writing about what gives you the tingles, you know, creating an increased compassion, and metacognition and psychic distance helping helping you with rumination and thought loops that can bring us down that there are also spiritual tools as well as positive psychology tools and neurological tools to help us navigate this mind field
of being a human being.
I completely agree. And actually part of my training, which I think is such a valuable vantage point on all of this, was in philosophy. The cognitive science major is multidisciplinary, and so it includes neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, sometimes anthropology, and so the idea is that you're trying to take a multifaceted view of a problem or a
question about the mind. Right. And I think so many of the techniques that I talk about intersect with philosophy right, and intersect with a number of these kinds of spiritual practices. So I'm thinking about how I have a whole chapter devoted to how in the throes of a big change we do descend into these horrible, maddening mental spirals in which we just keep or fixated on the same questions
over and over and over again. Either we're rehashing something in the past or we're catastrophizing the future, but either way we're engaging in an unproductive loop. And so there's a lot of tools from psychology around how to forge psychological distance, but they intersect beautifully with philosophy of the mind what is the self?
And they intersect beautifully with spiritual traditions that have been talking about this for ten thousand years.
Absolutely because this my grandmother did this stuff before and before I even learned about it.
And the Vedas and Upanashads talk so much about consciousness itself and being consciousness and bliss that is very much.
And radical acceptance is another thing suffering as a way of life.
Before we finish, I want to talk about your your your thoughts about rumination and thought loops and the kind of that OCD thinking is. It's something that I've been working with a lot in my life because I noticed that I do it a lot.
I do too. I have like a PhD in rumination.
Dude, it's dude, yeah, I have like a master I'm a lowly master's degree.
But it's not being such an underachiever rate. I know.
The uh it's like I describe it as like putting a shoe in the dryer, you know, it's just like
the thought just goes cook kicking. And one of the things that I was literally working on where you quote the psychologist who talks about like naming the feelings that are coming up is so helpful and I've I've I was literally practicing that and this is such a great you know, spiritual tool for modern living, which is you know, I I go into like doubt and it's like, oh, I'm feeling doubt, and then I have like some remorse like oh now I'm feeling remorse and confusion like did
I do the right thing? Like oh now I'm feeling confusion. Now fear of the future. Oh now I'm feeling some fear. I'm feeling fear and a little remorse. Oh I'm it's not ninety percent confusion and ten percent doubt and just literally naming the feelings that I'm going through can be incredibly helpful to dissipate them and to just make them okay. It's like rain, You're all right. You're just having a series of feelings. Sometimes they're contradictory.
This is called affect labeling, and when you give emotions specific names, rather than just feeling like, oh I feel horrible, right, they're like this is really negative. What you're doing is you're shifting your focus away from being the emotion to having the emotion. So that's one way of fostering that kind of psychological distance that we often need between us and the feelings that we're having, because then we can
see them with more clarity, more objectively. Another tool for engaging in this kind of psychological distance is to imagine that you are a fly on the wall observing your situation from afar, or that you're coaching a friend. So one thing that I'm sure you can resonate with is after something negative happens, we tend to look inwards and blame ourselves, right. We tend to think, oh, my god, if I had just done X or Y or Z, this wouldn't have happened. Why did I do that? Why
did I say that that was so awkward? Why I say this? You know, just over and over and over again. But when we were if we were to coach a friend, we would extend so much more compassion to them than we often reserve for ourselves. And we know from research by the psychologist Kristin Neff and others that self compassion isn't just like fantastic fantastic. Since christ is a friend, she's amazing. Our work is incredible because it shows that like self compassion isn't just like a nice to have,
feel good thing. It actually leads to way better outcomes for people. It actually gets them to problem solve what's happening with far more clarity than they would otherwise have, and to perform better. And so pretending that you're advising a friend, that you're coaching a friend out of their problems can also be another way of forging that distance. And then, interestingly enough, just changing whether you talk about yourself in the first versus the second or third person
can be really helpful. So rather than saying, oh my god, I need to get a grip, you say, maya, you need to get a grip. And it sounds really gimmicky, but it's shown to be super effective in a broad range of context. It just makes that simple change.
Yeah, that's so cool.
Yeah.
I was just talking to a friend this morning and he said, like, you know, we beat ourselves up so much and blame ourselves. We talk so negatively to ourselves. Can you imagine if you were out in front of a seven eleven and you saw an adult talking to a nine year old in that same way, if you saw an adult like you, fucking idiot, Why do you do that? God, you always do that, you make that same mistake. I'm just I'm disgusted with you now. That
person will never like you. Like if you heard that dialogue, you'd be like, hey, wait a second, buddy. But yeah, we do that to ourselves every day.
Yeah, absolutely, we use vile language to talk to ourselves. One of the people I profile in the book had panic attacks and it threatened his career as a journalist, and he became convinced that he was completely worthless. He lost all of his self esteem, and he believed that he was a faulty human that like, you know, his genes were screwed up. And it was only when he talked to an evolutionary psychologist who explain that panic is actually our ability to panic as humans is the reason
we survived as long as we have a species. That he started to see, Oh so it's not that I'm broken. Maybe I need to recalibrate my panic, but panic is actually a really important superpower. But before then, he said, I had a drill sergeant in my mind that was just telling me every day that I wasn't.
Worthy a lot of times. Let's say we did something and we screwed up some interaction and we have this kind of like OCD guilt running over you know what we did wrong? That the thought loop starts when we're avoiding the feelings. Yes, so if you have a feeling of of remorse or sadness, like we don't want to feel remorse and sadness, so we immediately go to a thought loop to try and get us out of feeling it.
But that the actual action is this immersion therapy of like becoming ever closer to the feeling that is so uncomfortable for us to feel. I need to just like take deep breaths and just feel bad about myself for
a little bit. It doesn't mean shame, not beating myself up but just just deep remorse and like I wish it, and to allow yourself to like deeply experience that feeling and then by and large, maybe thirty seconds later, maybe two minutes later, that feeling lifts and becomes much more manageable. Can you talk a little bit about these kind of ruminative thought loops and how interacting with our feelings, embracing our feelings can can help us move forward.
Yeah. I think we crave what researchers call cognitive closure. So we want and white answers. We want clarity, We want to definitively understand why things turned out the way they did. And I believe that it is that desire for clarity that gives rise to these sorts of mental spirals. And oftentimes when we climb out of the rubble of a change or a negative event of some kind, all we see around us is gray. There's no black and white.
Everything is uncertain. And I actually think that in the longer term, yes, we can use all of these techniques in the short term, right, but over the longer term we have to train our psyche to become far more comfortable with uncertainty. Our brains are not wired to like uncertainty.
One of my favorite studies shows that we're more stressed when we're told we have a fifty percent chance of getting an electric shock than when we're told we have a one hundred percent chance of getting an electric shock. So we would rather be certain that a negative thing is going to happen than have to grapple with any ambiguity or any uncertainty. But I think that's more of a lifelong mission. Right, is to become comfortable with grace
space and to not have all the answers. I think the devilish side of rumination is that we fool ourselves into believing that if we can just stumble upon an answer, it'll solve the problem. It'll give us a resolution we need. Like if I can just figure out why my partner left me, no one will ever leave me again. If I can just figure out all the things that could threaten my family's safety, I'll be able to keep them safe.
If I could just figure out why I lost my job, then I can make sure I always have job security.
These this is just fool's gold right that we're playing with in those moments, But it is so it's so attractive to our minds to just want to get that clarity right, that we will do anything to try to find it, and then to your point, to try to avoid the negative emotions that accompany that discomfort, right, and the more that we can now, I want to caveat one thing, which is it is important to acknowledge negative emotions and not to suppress them, but it is also okay.
The research shows to distract yourself temporarily to engage in healthy activities and behaviors that give you a reprieve from the negative emotions. So researchers used to say, or at least there's popular narratives online that if you don't persistently confront your negative emotions, they're going to rear their ugly head heads and decades from now and you're going to be in therapy for the rest of your life. That's been shown not to be true and doesn't account for
individual differences. So a lot of people actually find distraction to be a healthy, productive coping mechanism, and it shows to be very advantageous in the long run. That said, you don't want to suppress the negative emotions because to your point, when you're suppressing the negative emotions, that's what can give rise to these very unproductive thought loops.
Well, Maya The Other Side of Change, who we become when life makes other plans is brilliant and check out her wonderful podcast, A Slight Change of Plans And this was so much fun. I hope you'll come back on the show.
Sometimes I would love to come back. We barely scratch the surface.
I know there's so much more to dig into, but I got so much out of reading your book and having this conversation. Thanks for coming on soul Boom.
This was my favorite favorite conversation you've ever had in my whole life.
Even with your husband.
This is my favorite conversation that I've had about the book. Thank you.
Thanks man the soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, you might enjoy listening to the first chapter of the Other Side of Change, which we featured in this feed. It's called a sneak preview of Maya's new book, And if you've already read the book, I'd be so grateful if you could share your experience on Goodreads with either a quick rating or review. It really helps new readers find the book. The link to that page and the excerpt I just mentioned are both in our show notes.
We'll be back in a week with another episode of a slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then