Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr. Maya Shankar: Find the Asset in your Defect

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Dr. Maya Shankar (cognitive scientist, Senior Advisor to Obama administration, host of Slight Change of Plans podcast) breaks down the role of language in cognition and why understanding human behavior makes a huge difference in informing government policy. She discusses her pivot from Juilliard violinist into neuroscience after suffering a permanent hand injury as a teenager, and how she created her own role in the White House. Mayim and Maya explain why "I" statements are the best way to communicate difficult emotions, the benefits of speaking to yourself in third person, and achieving positive lifestyle changes through a technique called "temptation bundling." Maya opens up about using her anxious thoughts to propel her to strive for positive change in the world, and the benefits of spending effective time in the past and future. Mayim addresses the notion of self-sabotage within a relationship in another installment of Ask Mayim Anything. Dr. Maya Shankar's Podcast: http://podcasts.pushkin.fm/slight-change-of-plans BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You studied with one of the most famous classical musicians. When Pearlman took me on and gave me that vote of confidence, that was the first time I felt like my parents thought, yeah, maybe she could do Juilliard for college. Maybe she does that have maybe. I would have been convinced when you were six. I would have been like, that's it. She's the best thing ever. This is my kid.

You're gonna go places. It's my and Bialics breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down. Hi, I'm I'm Bialik and welcome to my breakdown.

This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. I'm smiling. We got a lot to break down today. Before we get into talking about Dr. Maya Shunker, who's going to be joining us, I'd like to introduce my constant running monologue in my head, Jonathan Cohen. I've woven my way in there. You can't get me out. Something we'll be talking about.

She is the incomparable Dr. Maya Shunker. You don't know who she is? I'm going to tell you. Tell us. This bio is insane. I mean, it's like, she's a cognitive scientist, a cognitive scientist,

which I already love that. She's a cognitive scientist. She has a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans, which has been featured on all sorts of amazing platforms. She was a senior advisor in the Obama White House. She founded and served as chair of the White House behavioral science team. She literally created a position because she felt that her knowledge as a behavioral scientist,

as a cognitive scientist, especially around how we frame language and interactions, could benefit the government. And it has. And it has and it continues to. She also was the first behavioral science advisor to the UN. She was a core member of Buttigieg debate preparation team during his presidential run. But this is not about politics. It's like very, very not about politics.

She went to like all these fancy places for school. Her postdoc in cognitive neuroscience is from Stanford. She got her doctorate from Oxford on a road scholarship. She originally went to Yale. She's from Connecticut. She's been profiled by the New Yorker. I mean, she's been a featured guest on NPR's All Things Considered for economics and hidden brain. she also was a private violin student of Izhak Perlman

and performed alongside him at Carnegie Hall when she was a teenager. She was accepted to Juilliard like at night. Like she's unbelievable. And she's a lovely, funny person. I don't, there's nothing else I can say. Like, this is a very, very interesting conversation. I'm very, very excited and really honored to have Dr. Maya Shunker with us. Break it down.

Welcome, Dr. Maya Shunker, but you said we can call you Maya. Please call me Maya. And everyone's going to call me Dr. Bialik. I will refer to you both as doctor. It's an honor to get to talk to you. Your reputation precedes you in all of the best ways. You have so many things that I think we both are interested in about you, both your musical story and kind of your path as an artist,

and, you know, in particular a prodigy, you know, a precocious talent, as it were. and then a slight change of plans, as it were, in your life and your path has taken you many interesting places, in particular into the world of cognitive neuroscience. And also, you were an advisor in the Obama White House. Like, you've gone all the places. If we would ask Jonathan why to have you on, I think he'd be like, because it's a neuroscience face off. What do you picture? Exactly.

What do you picture with the two of us? Both just fighting each other with stats and studies. I will not beat her on stats. Believe me. There's no chance. You have a really, really special story. And I believe everybody's story is special, but yours is really, really special. Tell us a little bit about your childhood, where you grew up, kind of what your folks were like, you know, what was their life? Did you have siblings? Tell us a little bit about young Maya. Okay, I will take the time machine back. So I was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, which is a suburb outside of New Haven. My parents immigrated

from India in the 70s. My dad had come here to go to graduate school. He's a physicist. So he got his Ph.D. And then he was doing a postdoc. And then on winter break, he goes home, is introduced to a couple women. One of those women's my mom. And they knew each other 21 days before getting married. They knew each other for 20 days. I guess 21 of you tell the first. Yeah. So it's like they met on the first, married on the 21st. And so it's funny. She comes back with him to the U.S. and everyone's like, hey, man, what'd you do over break? Oh, I went snowboarding. And my dad's like, I got married. Actually, my mom at that point decided she wanted to have a big family because I think she felt very lonely, very isolated as an immigrant in this country. She ended up having four of us. And I'm the

youngest of four. And yeah, I would say, you know, it was a fairly academically minded home. You know, I already mentioned dad's a physicist and my mom was a physics major. They're both smarty pants. And the big thing for my My mom was that growing up in India, she had not been exposed to a lot of extracurricular activities. So her duties were to do well in school and then to help out in the kitchen. And so her big commitment, especially to her daughters, was to make sure that we got as much exposure as we possibly could to as many activities as we possibly could. So that meant, you know, we were enrolled in all the things. My mom was like, let me enroll my kids in all the things.

And then they can tell me slowly which things they liked, you know, soccer and and, and, and, running and arts and crafts and drama and theater, like all the things. And for me, the one that really stuck was the violin. And so I started playing, all my siblings played musical instruments, but I started playing the violin when I was six and just totally fell in love with it. My mom was so surprised because, you know, she had to ask us kids to do lots of things. But the one thing she felt she rarely had to ask me to do was to practice. Was that a primarily white, like were there other South Asian families there? Was it y'all? And I mean, was there a sense of kind of difference in that? I was very, very self-conscious about the color of my skin. It was a primarily Caucasian community.

And I was one of very few kids of color in my entire school. And you had my three older siblings, but there are only a couple others. And since then, the town has really diversified. But certainly growing up, I would not say that I was proud of being Indian. I would say that I was, I was so desperate to assimilate. Like I have, I very thick and textured curly hair. And I remember when I was a young kid, um, going to the sink and putting water on my hair and stretching it out and holding it and hoping that if I just held it long enough, it would become straight like all my, all my girlfriends at school. Turns out jeans are very powerful folks. Never happened. Um, but I was, Yeah, and I remember, it's like small little things.

You just remember going to the birthday party and they give you like the scrunchy because the headbands don't work on your head. You know, those sorts of things. So, yeah, I felt always like I wanted to be like the other kids at school. And my parents would tell me that when I would write stories for school, all the main character's names were Christine and Lindsay and Catherine. There was no Rameh and certainly no Maya or, you know, Lavigneur or any of the beautiful Indian names that exist out there. So I think that kind of says it all, the story, the storytelling. And I'm not sure where your parents are from, but are you Hindu? Like what was your?

Yeah, yeah. So raised, so culturally Hindu. And my parents are from Chennai or, you know, madrasas, it was formerly called before it was called Chennai. Well, you're the jeopardy woman. So you might know the history here. Everyone thinks you know every answer. I was like, I got a PhD in neuroscience. That's all I really know.

No, I know a couple other things. A little Bible. Okay, so do you remember just because I'm very curious about this? I mean, do you remember what it felt like to love violin when you're that young? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the only reasonable way to know what it felt like to love something was just to contrast it with other things that I liked less. I didn't know what it meant to love something in like absolute terms.

I mean, what does that ever mean to love something in absolute terms? But certainly as a kid, I found that I very natural. had huge dreams for myself when it came to the violin. And in my imagination didn't run wild for the other things I was doing. Like I loved arts and crafts and I loved theater, but I wasn't like, one day I hope to be on a Broadway stage or one day I hope to have my art in some gallery. But with the violin, I was, I immediately started thinking, wow, could this, could this ever be my career? Like, could this be what I grow up to be? And I started just asking my, peppering my mom with questions. And my mom was very, very entrepreneur.

like, you know, she had had no exposure to the Western classical music scene, especially having grown up in India, but she was, she was a total go-getter, you know, digging everywhere being like, can my daughter play on your random stage on Thursday, like trying to find me as many concerts as she could to kind of feed my appetite. And then finally when I was nine, I auditioned for the Juilliard School in New York. And that's when things really, really picked up. Yeah, auditioning for Juilliard will do that part. So you, it's amazing. My older son is a fiddler, as we call it fondly. You know, and there's,

there's something very special, you know, to also watching kind of the experience of a young person who doesn't have life experience yet to put into their music, but there's still this kind of sense of passion. And I remember, you know, I taught my older son, I taught both my kids to play piano. This is also one of my students right here, Jonathan. And, and, and, and, I'm, I'm on the first lesson. You're doing great. What her youngest was doing in 2015. No, but I was, even in teaching piano and even when I, you know, watch him or help him with violin,

like, there's this notion of, like, there's an emotion that often can be conveyed by children who are exceptional that seems that they are playing far beyond their life experience. And I think when people think about... That's how I play old McDonald's. What I'm saying is when you see people like, you know, like Maya who have that, it's as if they are playing with a level of kind of emotional knowledge that is far beyond the technical aspects. Is there anything? Was there anything? Is there anything kind of, I hope this doesn't sound crazy. There's a kind of mystical beauty when you see someone who is

putting that kind of experience into music, but they are a child. Do you remember feeling anything, you know, outside of the realms of things that we can quantify with numbers. No, it's an incredible observation. I mean, I've certainly felt this way watching actual prodigies play. I would not consider myself as having been in any way prodigious. But I will say that my musicality always outpaced my technical prowess. That was just reliably the case. I mean, as I mentioned, my mom had no exposure to the classical music world,

which meant that I had no structured training as a kid. I learned, and he was an amazingly kind human being, but I learned from this graduate student, I remember who had never taught anyone before. And so I didn't learn a proper technique. I never learned how to read music in the first place. I didn't even know how to play a scale until I had to prepare for my Juilliard audition.

And so I was just learning everything by ear, and I was trying to just replicate what I was hearing on recordings and make those pieces my own. And I think that the fact that I learned in this kind of scrappy, non-methodical way probably forced me into a more emotional space than I might otherwise have been, because there was nothing else to distract me. I didn't know any technical dimensions of the instrument. Like, I was not trained in music theory. I didn't understand chord progressions. Like, there was almost nothing more to capture my brain than basically just like hitting the notes, basically, and then also feeling things and hopefully getting other people to feel things from what

I was producing. Yeah, I mean, that's, to me, that's so fascinating because as a neuroscientist, that's literally the intersection of our experience as humans, right? There's a certain amount of technical knowledge we have about the things we do. Then there's the feeling it evokes. And then there's also what we want to communicate with what we're doing. I think that's so interesting. Like, it's like a three prong. You know, and some people might have. have more technical experience and no emotional, you know, intensity to their playing, right? Yeah. You know, your old McDonald could use a little bit of work.

I was on the fast train to wanting to become a concert violinist. My parents were not on that train. My parents were like, you should be well-rounded. We firmly believe in a liberal arts education. We're glad you have this like pet thing that you love. But like, come on, let's be reasonable. And so what that meant is that my mom in particular insisted that I do other things. So I was still running cross-country in high school.

I was still doing arts and crafts. I was still auditioning for the school play. She just insisted that I have more things to call upon. And I think that benefited me profoundly because it meant there was something else to call upon when I was making music. I had so many insecurities because I did lack that technical ability. So I'd ask these teachers, you know, either after the fact or during, like, why did you take me on? Or my mom would be like, what was the decision-making process like? And it seemed like the resounding answer was because we like her personality and we think she has something to say.

So it's, you know, I eventually started studying that it saw Perlman. And I asked his wife, point blank, why the hell did Pearlman take me on when I sucked on a technical level relative to my peers? And she said, because he felt you had something to say. So I think they could sense that there was at least some depth there of experience or at least emotions that I wanted to share that would maybe compensate for my lack of. a technical prowess. Most of this episode will be me comparing myself to the great doctor, Maya. But this is also very, very, very similar to a lot of immigrant families' experience. Like, I always, when people asked me, because I was on a television show from the time I was 14 to 19. Yeah, I kind of know about it. I kind of watched you.

Well, oh, but people asked me, why did you go to college? I said, because I was raised in a family where like, even if you become the president of the United States in high school. You have to go to college. Like, what do you mean? Where are you going to find a husband and try and get educated so you don't end up cleaning toilets the rest of your life? Which is like what, you know, I think we... Miami-Bi-Lx breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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No. Okay, sorry. I mean, it's an empirical question, but I think so. I think you're crowding, you're always crowding out something. There's always going to be a trade-off. And certainly in a young child's mind, when the focus is on technique and they are striving for excellence, they're going to try to be the best technically, right? I don't even think I had a North Star technically because I didn't even have the raw materials.

I didn't understand the foundational aspects of playing the violin. And so my only North Star was, well, I've heard these really beautiful stirring performances of the violin. Can I make that myself? That was my North Star. You have to have a natural propensity to feel things with classical music. Like I've been working at my husband for a long time, Jimmy, who, by the way, was on Jeopardy. We should talk about that later. And then was recently on the chase.

So he's kind of a trivia guy. He's also a sophomore engineer. He's also a wonderful loving husband, triple threat. So anyway, he also played the violin growing up. And he hated it. Right. To this day, I'm like, Jimmy, let's just listen to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, just turn off the lights.

It's amazing. I'm going to get so immersed. And he's like, this is so painful. And so when we got married and my dad was giving a wedding toast, he said to everyone, Jimmy also started playing the violin at the age of six. And just three years later, he was nine. Sounds about right. I know what you're thinking.

So what am I thinking? Here's what Jonathan is thinking. Jonathan's thinking, why doesn't she teach me the whole Primer A book in one sitting? I'm ready to take it in. I don't really need technical problems. I just want to blow through this so that I can play like I want to and entertain people at parties. I do believe in technical training. I do.

And you should. I'm not saying that my way is the right way. He just got excited by what you said because he's like, see, I don't need technical training. I'll take myself out of the equation. I just think that for a student like you, who obviously had a wide emotional landscape, that a focus on technical aspects of music would have limited, you know, your reliance on feeling the way you did.

You were forced into... You don't know that's true. Yeah, we don't know the counterfactual world for sure. I imagine there's some, maybe a little bit. Look, the prompt here, my aim was like, okay, you felt things and you expressed them, explain it. And so I'm just, you know, trying to figure out some possible explanations. But there are different aspects of our brain that we're using.

And maybe you validate that. Like the logical, I need to understand what I'm doing and I need to know the scales and I need to be able to, you know, break it down in that way versus I'm going to feel it and translate that. It's different parts of us. Is it not? You're using right, left brain. Okay.

Stop. You're going to stop right now. If you want me to leave that mic on, you need to stop right now. Here's what, here's sort of my take on it. And I think this is really my take for all things when I'm asked about these things from a more of a scientific perspective. There's tremendous variability. We can't know anything. It's not proof of anything. It's one example. What I was going to say is for some, for some brains, that love and create, can only come from a solid structure and foundation that is more rudimentary, that is more disciplined. My elder, for example, he needs to know where he can play and then he can play. Some people don't need to know where. They just know this is, I'm just going to put it out there.

So I think there's still a lot of variability. If there was one way to teach people how to become good, we would have figured it out tens of thousands of years ago. And also, can I just defend the technical camp for a moment because I feel like I'm stirring up some marital conflict and I'd like to dissipate a bit is there you become limited in your ability to express yourself emotionally when you don't have all the technical faculties. So I love that that that plagued me for a while where my brain could totally imagine the perfect arc, the perfect vibrato, the perfect cadence, whatever it was. And I couldn't translate it all the time because it didn't have what I needed. And you know what you just described? You just described emotional capacity as well.

Because if you don't have, let's say, a vocabulary, right, to have emotional interactions, you... Just because I need the last word, I'll all say, is that you develop that big emotional capacity by not having that, but at a certain point you would need it in order to expand. And also, you know, most, you know, novice piano players don't understand why they have to use their pinky. And that makes me insane, because when you're learning, yes, you want all... all the fingers to be stimulated in your somatosensory cortex. I want everything getting stimulated.

I want you to have that reach. Once you become accomplished enough, I don't really care about fingering, but there's a reason that Moonlight Sonata has the fingering it does. There's a reason it's moving your hand, and to me, it does create more structure. But I'm not even kidding. These are parallel conversations for relationships,

for emotional processing, all these things. Okay, let's get back to Isaac Perlman. So you studied with, I mean, one of the most famous classical musicians. And how long was that was that course of study? So he took me on as a student when I was a freshman in high school. So I think I was around like 13 or so. Okay. And then I think when I was 15 and a half, that's when I hurt my hand and my 300.

So, yeah, I would say about like two and a half years or so, but I'm just guessing the past crazy. Wow. So that's a huge chunk of your childhood and teen years were essentially directed towards, I mean, imagine sort of having a potential for your destiny and career, you know, so young. And by the way, that was a turning point for the family, the earlier point. When Pearlman took me on and gave me that vote of confidence, that was the first time I felt like my parents thought, yeah, maybe she could do Juilliard. for college. Maybe she does that have maybe. I would have been convinced when you were six. I would have been like, that's it. She's the best thing ever. This is my kid. She's going to go places. I mean, to be fair to my parents, they were kind of right because I hurt myself and then couldn't play the violin again, really. But yes, that was when I think that that vote of confidence made them think that their last child. I mean, look, also, the fourth screws up, whatever. They got three

other ones who are great. So stakes are low. But they're They were starting to get really excited, I think, when that started happening. So there's an actual moment. And, you know, I know that for people, you know, who may not know kind of this world of music, it kind of sounds insane. But this was the equivalent of being in the prime of your athletic career and, you know, snapping something that cannot essentially truly be repaired to its full glory. If you are a Golden State Warriors fan, you know, what the last three years have been like. Yeah. So you literally, like, you heard a sound that shouldn't come from your finger.

That's exactly right. Yes. There was a popping sound. I like to think that I have made violin an extreme sport, which kind of make me cool. Give me some street cred. People are like, wait, what, you injured yourself playing your instrument? I was like, yes, guys. It turns out the agility, the small things in the hand matter a lot when it comes to playing the violin. So I tore tendons slash tendons in my hand on a single note. I was playing a really, really hard Paganini piece. And it was testing the shit out of me. I mean, it was so hard. And it required a lot of stretching. And there are these things called fingered octaves where you have one finger on one string and another finger on another string that's stretching basically as far as you can.

And I was also the impatient teenager that didn't think about the violin as a sport that you should be warming up for. And you should be doing all sorts of physical therapy and stuff for. Like that whole space, that whole field, I think, at the time just wasn't. isn't as developed. I think now musicians know, oh, they really need to take care of their bodies. But certainly for me, that just wasn't a part of my day to day. It sounds like there's a range of emotion around this. And I am curious, you know, because I think of this specifically with athletes, you know, is there any remnant of like, oh my gosh, I should have or was this not supposed to happen? Or if I had done that, like, does that stay with you? Oh, yeah. I felt all the things for

sure. And the biggest thing I felt was an unwillingness to accept reality for a long time. So I kept playing through pain, taking lots of ibuprofen. I was working through passages I shouldn't be working through on my violin. I was, you know, it was so painful to cancel concerts. I remember that was just like a punch in the gut. You work so hard for these for these things. I remember one of them I had won the opportunity to solo with an orchestra through this very competitive process. And you get it and then you get to perform with them like a year later, whatever it is. And I was so excited about this performance. And now all of a sudden it's in jeopardy.

That sounds devastating. Yes. Especially as a young person. I mean, I'm just like feeling it. Like that sounds devastating. And I think, you know, I was resilient when I felt like I had not performed my best and needed to perform better. I could take that always. It's like, okay, I didn't perform my best.

I need to work harder. I need to play better next time. Or I should have been practicing. Instead, I was watching Brittany on MTV because I'm also a teenager. I should have worked harder. Whatever, whatever the thing was, if I can blame myself for the thing, that's fine. When it came to this injury, I don't think I really blame myself. Again, at the time, I didn't even know that I should have been doing things differently

or should have been stretching or any of that stuff. And so it did feel kind of just like a random act that happened. and instead I just felt, well, I need to overcome this. Like, I need to get through it. I need to find a way. And then when I couldn't find a way, I just felt very frustrated. I remember, oh, yeah, I'm just remembering something for the first time. So every year, Juilliard has a concerto competition where the Juilliard kids audition,

and then one of them gets chosen and they get to solo with the Juilliard Orchestra, the pre-college orchestra. And this is like the big deal competition. And I still remember it was like 11 p.m. this is after I'd hurt my hand. And I go onto the web page to figure out what concerto they've chosen. And they chose the barber violin concerto, which was my favorite violin concerto. That was my concerto. And I ran in my mom and dad's room. And I woke up my mom and I said, mom, they chose the barber because she would know what that meant to me. And just a piece of me knew, like, you can

hope that you're better by then, but you very well may not be. So I just felt all these stings constantly like I felt like I had so much ambition. I had so much motivation. As you said, I was at the peak of my career. I felt like I was on the up and up. And then suddenly it just comes crashing down. And no matter how much ice you use and how much you wrap it up and how much ibuprofen you take, the situation isn't something you can fix. What did your parents say? They sound like very supportive people, but I could be wrong. They are very supportive. What did they say? My mom was very close to the situation because like I said, said she was kind of my violin partner in crime. I mean, she was driving me to and from

Juilliard. She was sitting in on my violin lessons with me. She learned, I mean, she'd learn classical music along with me. It was incredible. And so because she was so close to it, she was heartbroken. And so we were actually both heartbroken together. My dad was the one who was constantly giving me perspective. You know, he just felt like, I know right now you think the violin is the center of the universe. I know you think Pearlman's the center of the universe. I know you think all these things are the center of the universe. universe. Let me just tell you the world is much bigger than that. And like, you will be fine. And he kept telling me that. It's so hard to hear as a teenager. So frustrated. It is. Yeah.

But I also, I don't know, love my dad. So I was kind of like, you're probably right. He had actually fed me a similar message when I was in my prime, which I thought was actually very validating and credibility building. Because he was also like, don't get in too deep either. That's dangerous too. Because like, at some point this could go away. Who is this woman and who are her parents? No attachment. It says so healthy. Anything. Anything. will be what it will be. Why she's so healthy. Like that's exactly what you would want your parent to do and they did it. Well, because my dad would see me getting really wrapped up in the competitive culture, feeling very envious of my peers who were so much better than me or feeling really

sad after a bad lesson. And he just would tell me, you know, again, these people are your center of your universe right now, just give it 10 years. Chances are they won't be anymore. He's a physicist. He's like, I see the really big picture. I'm a physicist. I bet you he sleeps like a Maybe. Does he sleep well your father? He does sleep very well. He even takes naps during the day. Of course he does. He's a grounded guy. He's very relaxed. I bet you has a resting heart rate of 55. He had also, you know, he had changed career paths. So basically what had happened is he had been back in the day in India. He had been an electrical engineer that was kind of like the path you take. You know, he was obviously very, very smart and that was the degree being offered. And then a few years in a college, he started listening to Feynman's lectures. That's Richard Feynman, she's talking about. He was fascinated by these lectures. So he would go on these long walks, listen to Feynman, learn about physics. And then one of his dorm mates, new physics. And so what my dad would do is, it's kind of a romantic physics story. He would work through this textbook and he would work through all the problems. He'd write down his answers,

show his work, slip the problems set under his friend's door. His friend would correct it overnight and then pass it back. So what ended up happening is he had to go to his very conservative parents at that moment and say, I know I've been doing this electrical engineering degree. I really want to change course and I want to become a physicist, even though my college doesn't even offer that as a degree program. And they were like, what are you doing, dude? Like, electrical engineering is where it's at in terms of career stability, lots of jobs everywhere. You want to be a physics professor, like a theoretical physics professor. And so he paved his own path and, you know, came to Berkeley and took the entrance exam and got in and got his PhD here. And he's loved being a physicist ever ever since. And so I think he saw

that he at least had one experience of pivoting in life and feeling like he landed in a good place. Now, granted, that was on his own volition, but still. At least he didn't want to be a poet. I was going to say, it's like usually the story is like, like my dad, they wanted him to be an accountant. Like that's what you do if you don't have money to be a doctor or a lawyer. And he was an artist. And it was like, you know, that was devastating. from electrical engineering to physicists is not so bad. You want a higher degree that pays better and is more respected? Stay as an engineer.

You'll always need something to fix. Yeah, I realize the absurdity of the story. It's like the proverbial Indian child being like, no, mom, I want to be a lawyer, not a doctor. They're like, wait, no, both of those work in our culture. I mean, I want you kind of to walk us through your pivot, you know, and how you sort of, I know you sort of found the world of neuroscience and in particular the cognitive, you know, of branch, as it were. But tell us sort of, yeah, what happened from that injury and how did you sort of get to study what you did? I was totally despondent and I was I was ticked off because I was

supposed to be in China that summer touring with my music classmates and instead I was at home for the summer. And I was in the basement and I stumbled upon one of my sister's course books from college. She was in college at the time and it was a book by Stephen Pinker called The Language Instinct. and never really thought about language before. It wasn't a thing that I was thinking about. I opened the book and I started reading about it. And it explained how incredibly complex the cognitive machinery is that drives our ability to produce and comprehend language.

And I felt I was in awe of this capability because it was something I totally taken for granted, you know, didn't really think twice about. And then all of a sudden I'm learning that when you pull back the curtain, there's really sophisticated, complex stuff going on. And so it just lit up my imagination. I was like, wow, if that's what's involved with language, what's involved in all these other higher level decisions that we make or in the kinds of visualizations that we have. I just became totally intrigued by this incredible organ, the human brain. You stuck kind of in the cognitive world.

Do you talk about your thesis? Like, what was your particular interest in field of study? Yeah, so I joined a monkey lab pretty quickly into my time in undergrad. So there's a non-human primate lab. And we also would go in the summers and sometimes over Thanksgiving break to this place called Kaya Santiago where the monkey to human ratio is 500 to one. And it's actually terrifying because they all have like herpes bee and you're walking around with all these experimental, like attractive experimental stimuli like pieces of coconut and apple to like lure the monkeys into participating in your experiment. But then if they bite you or like pee on you or whatever, it's horrible. So I feel like I aged 20 years on that island, but I did successfully complete my senior thesis. I was studying the role of language in cognition. I was looking at how dependent some of our cognitive abilities are on language. Do they rely on language? And one way to see that is whether non-human primates have these abilities.

Then you can kind of tease out the role, the role of language. And which monkeys were these? A rhesus macaques. Oh, and capuchin monkeys. Oh, wow. Wow. That's very special.

And then I decided I just wanted to study humans because it was a much easier lab setting. So I ended up studying visual perception in my senior year of college. And actually what was interesting from working in two distinct labs and asking very different questions is you realize that it's insufficient to study the senses in isolation. So, you know, there tends to be the vision science lab and the auditory lab and the tactile sensation lab or whatever it is. But research was just coming out showing how multisensory our perception is. What we see can affect what we taste, what we taste can affect what we touch. And so it didn't make sense to study them in isolation. And so I ended up getting my PhD in multisensory perception. I was looking at how the senses have this incredible interplay in the mind.

This is amazing. You did a postdoc. What was your postdoc? So that was where I started studying decision-making. So it was a cognitive neuroscience lab, and I was studying, you know, the work of Kahneman Tversky, the fathers of behavioral economics, who studied how it is that we make decisions, what our biases are, how we build risk tolerance for things, what our risk preferences are. I mean, the whole gamut of like what it means to live as a human and navigate this very complicated world. I'm going to ask a dumb question. Is that this postdoc and the kind of, you know, the science, let's say, of decision making, is that how you get to the world of politics?

Yeah, it was actually losing interest in being in that setting that led me into the world of politics. So technically the-acadamia turns a lot of people off. But was that, you know, I mean, just for all of us listening, that kind of knowledge. 100%. And also I'm going to, your personality, right, the same passion that you had at six is, that's you. Like, that's who Maya is. So you're going to bring that to whatever you do.

So when you combine your kind of academic knowledge and your training with your curiosity and your passion and your personality, that's like an amazing dynamic combination of things. Then then you're in the White House. Yeah. So what, I mean, I didn't know that government was a place. that I could work. Like, it just didn't even occur to me. So I'm doing a postdoc and cognitive neuroscience. Neither do most politicians. And it felt like I had two options. I could become an academic, become a professor like my dad, or I could become a general management consultant. I didn't know any other paths exist. So I'm slowly realizing that, um, the academic lifestyle is not for me. I mean,

I love the notion of the sabbatical and the traveling to beautiful places for conferences, but the day to day grind of research is wearing on me and I don't feel like I'm getting the social stimulation that really lights me up and motivates me. I like working on teams. I like fast-paced impact. I don't like waiting eight months for one of my journal articles to be rejected, not accepted. And so the whole process was just very hard for me. And I don't feel like I had the grit that I needed to be a good academic. And so I'm trying to figure out like where my dad was joking because he was really eager for me to leave academia. He's like, we don't have the same personality. You need to. to go do something else. And he was like, Maya, you're going nowhere fast. Okay. My dad engages a lot of

real talk. And so I don't know what to do. And then I call my old advisor and she says, okay, before you do all the circuit of general management consulting jobs interviews, I need to tell you about the fact they're applying this science of decision making to public policy right now in the Obama way, in the Obama government administration, Obama administration. And so I said, I heard about the story. It was about how they were using insights from my field to help enroll low-income kids into the national school lunch program. And it was such an emotionally resonant story because I had been learning about all these insights and all of our biases, but then to see it applied in the real world to real life problems that could be make or break for a young child who's trying to thrive in school.

That was incredible for me. But there was no job to apply for. So I kind of had to go out on a limb. I sent a bunch of cold emails to Obama officials. begging them to consider me. You know, like you do. And amazingly enough, Cass Sunstein, who is a co-author of the book, Nudge, Hussein of Samantha Power, and who had worked for Obama for the first administration, I came for the first term, sorry, I came in for the second term, wrote back to me and said, this sounds great, this job idea that you have for a behavioral science advisor role.

I will forward you on to the president's science advisor. I was done for a couple reasons. One, I couldn't believe this dude wrote back to my email because he doesn't know who I am. So it's just an insanely generous thing to do. And to also have, again, give you this vote of confidence that despite having zero public policy experience, he felt that I could bring something valuable to the public policy scene. But two, I also freaked the F out because I was like, how will I pass this interview? Like, what did they ask me about how, you know, the government budget is set? I have no, I can't answer any facts about the government. So I just, just spent the next 72 hours or whatever, 48 hours in like crazy prep mode. I called everybody

that I knew. I start writing up my doc of all these ideas that I have for ways we can apply behavioral science to policy. And I go to this official's home and I interview with him. And at the end of the interview, he says, great, like, let's keep in touch. And I'm like, what does that mean? exactly. We just like dig into that a little bit. Like let's keep in touch. Like, don't call me. I'll call you. I enjoy the conversation. It's a one time thing. I hope you work for me. Like what were the things? What does that mean? And he said, well, many things need to happen. Obama needs to win his reelection next week. I was like, oh, right, right. And we also have to make sure that like there's support for you in this new role across the administration.

And then, yeah, as luck would have it. It ended up all working out. I packed up my bags. I moved to D.C. before I even had a formal offer letter in place, by the way, I was going to, like, force my way into the White House and ended up working for four years for the president. I mean, it's like, I don't even, I don't know what to say. I have either no questions or all the questions. I'm like, what do you do for four years? Right. Like, you live in D.C. then, you're young. How old are you at this point? It was 27. So you go move to D.C. and you just, you like, you hang out in the White House. And they've never had one of her working for that capacity before. Which is great. I love that.

My boss, the one who brings me on board, had a lot of experience working in the White House. He worked for Clinton for eight years, left for Bush, and then had come back for Obama. And he gave me a crucial piece of advice on my way in the door. He said, when I left the Clinton administration and Bush's team came in, came in. It was as though I had built this elaborate. separate sandcastle on the beach for eight years. And one wave came in and crashed the whole, I mean, just destroyed the entire thing. That sandcastle was our country. Sorry. He had no perspective at the time because we didn't know that Donald Trump was in our future. So we were just like,

this is the worst thing. Right. So anyway, so he tells me build things to last because you cannot rely, like you can't just do a lot of stuff and then leave because it'll all leave with you. You need to build things in parts of government that are sturdy and can survive in the face of administration changes. So what that taught me is, oh, I need to create an actual institution committed to translating behavioral science into public policy improvements. And so I end up, I have no budget. I have no mandate. No Obama does not know who I am at this time. Same. And I am just relentlessly trying to get support for this team that I have in my mind. I'm like knocking on every single door. I was trying

to convince them to invest in my team, to invest in the promise of behavioral science. And I got told no like 5,000 times. But for every 5,000 times I was told no, I was told yes once. And I still remember the Department of Veterans Affairs was one of the first agencies to agree to want to partner with me. And we ran it in tech companies and modern day companies, like this experiment would have been super easy. It took the government eight months to get up and running. It was a simple A-B test. We were trying to get veterans to sign up for a public benefits program that would help them when they returned from their time serving overseas to help assist with employment and educational challenges. And we changed one word in the email.

Instead of telling vets they were eligible for the program, we simply remind us, them that they had earned it through their years of service. And that one word change led to a 9% increase in access to the benefit. And it was based on a behavioral principle called the endowment effect, which basically says we value things more when we own them or in this case have earned them. And so I just kept trying to get some of these quick wins on the board to show the value, right, to show that this was something worth investing in. And over time, slowly the government starts responding. All of a sudden, we get to brief President Obama in the Oval. I get to finally tell him that the social and behavioral sciences team is a thing. And he validates it. He tells me back that it's a

thing. And I mean, that was just one of the most exciting days of my life. Again, it was a validation of all of this hard work that I put in before to try to make this team a reality. And then after the Oval briefing, he stays engaged. You know, we write him memos with updates and he ends up signing an executive order that made our team a permanent, a more permanent part of government moving forward. And importantly, I baked the team not into the White House, which is the part of the government that's very susceptible to leadership changes, but instead in this agency called the General Services Administration. And that's a very bipartisan part of government that basically just engages in good government work. And I always felt like this is just about making government more effective

and more efficient. It should just be a part of business as usual practice. That's a non- partisan issue as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. I mean, Paul Ryan had a very bipartisan, I think it was like a bill, evidence-based policy. It's just using what we know works to make sure that the single mom gets access to the benefit that she deserves, that, you know, the loan can kid, like we talked about earlier, gets access to school lunch, making sure that families are protected in the face of natural disasters. Like, you know, all of these programs are really well-meaning, and they serve, they have the potential to serve so many people. But if we miss the human behavioral piece, sometimes, you know, it's all for not.

The idea that eligible to earn made such a difference. And I think people hear human behavior, human factor, putting the human-centered. These are all great catchphrases to people who have studied it, and it means something. But to the average listener, like, it really comes alive in those small examples. Can you give us other examples where, you know, either just slight understanding of human behavior or perception makes such a big difference? Yeah, I mean, I just shared, you know, using affirmative language, like making a proactive addition or change, right?

I want to give an example of sometimes when it's important to remove things. And one of the populations that we work to help serve was the reentry population. So people had been formally incarcerated who were reacclimating to civilian life. And we were designing these reentering. guides for them, you know, making sure you want to get your social security card, you want to get your driver's license, here are the steps. Here are the things you can apply for while you're still in prison in those final weeks or months so that you can make sure you're set up for success upon release. You can make sure you do have access to health care so that you, you know, we can help

reduce recidivism rates or whatnot. What we noticed about the guide is that there was some harmful labels being used, ex-convict, ex-prisoner. We know from behavioral science that the labels we use to either self-identify or to identify others can have profound impacts on our behavior. We tend to act in ways that align with our social identities. And so it was really important for us in this moment to use forward-looking language, like job seekers or community members, because those are the kinds of labels that align with the actions that folks are hoping to engage in, right, to have a prosperous future ahead of them. And so it was a matter of of actually scrubbing the guide of the harmful labels and making sure that we are using

positive, positive labels that aligned with their long-term best interest. And I know the flip side of that is that you can use positive labels for good. So we know from research that if you remind people of their status as voters, that that is a feature of their character, right, to be civically minded. So it's not just that they engage in the action of voting. It's that they are a voter. There's a study that they did with the Red Cross where when you remind people of their former status as donors, right, as charitable people, they're not only, and you remind them, hey, you gave this amount on this day or whatever, they not only are more likely to give repeat donations, they actually increase the magnitude of those donations.

I was just going to say, I started seeing that's, I, I am a very charity friendly person. So I get a lot of, I started seeing this sentence. I wonder if I should blame you. I didn't do it, to be fair. And the first sentence was like, you. gave this much last year, we hope you will match it or exceed it. But I remember, I didn't used to get that language. It's like a newer thing. And it does, it does, it makes you feel different. Can I ask something along these lines? Because what, what you're talking about, you know, is, it's the

intersection of, of language and interpretation. Can you relate this or can you kind of help us understand, let's say the impact of that in interpersonal relationships, meaning there are certain rules, You know, like when you have a disagreement with a partner, for example, you know, we're told you don't use the word never. Don't use the word always, right? Don't bring up the past and remind them, you know, of old. Wait. Don't tell them they're just like their parents. Don't tell them they're just like their parents. But I'm, but it's true. There are these things that are, you know, a part of often therapeutic situations. And it's just so interesting. And this is why neuroscience is the best science. I'm. sure you agree, because this really is, like, this is a science that can touch anything and everything with all other kind of disciplines. So this is also something that's been applied to, for example, couples therapy, right? How you speak to each other, how you label each other. I mean, oh, in work environments too. We're also parents, right? How you speak, you're not supposed to label. You're not supposed to say you're lazy. You can say you're being lazy, but you can't say you are

lazy. But can you talk a little bit about, you know, was that ever an arena that you've operated in? Or are you more of kind of like a policy person or, yeah, just any insight about how what you do can also relate to relationships? Yeah. I think, I mean, I haven't studied them in the context of relationships, right? Because I only worked at like a population level. But, you know, if you see that trait expressing itself in humans in one context, it's completely not unreasonable to think that it will operate in other contexts. And, you know, I find this question of identity so fascinating. In many ways, my podcast, a slight change of plans is all about identity and how our identities change in the face of these big changes that we confront because I think in many ways, the reason why we're so scared

and fearful of change is because it can threaten our sense of self-identity. And when we feel comfortable in our identity, sometimes we embrace change, right? When we don't like our current identities, we can embrace change because it's like, oh, maybe there's something better on the other side. But when we're comfortable in our identities, and then all of a sudden, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from underneath us, we feel super destabilized. And in part, I think it's because we don't know who we are in that moment. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we feel more stable as human beings when we can label ourselves. It's a simplistic model of the world. I am a X. I am a Y. Right? That's easy. But the reality is that those things

are always in flux or they should be. And it's not just any one thing that defines us, right? We are, we are, we have so many components. And it can be a little frustrating, a little daunting to realize that because it means that your identity is a constant works in progress, that you, you basically have to audit all the time and also actively try and construct at other times. Well, and I think also even something as small as, you know, when I was taught, I mean, the habit taught, I mean, when I learned, that using eye statements is a much better way to communicate, especially difficult feelings, right? Like, that small thing really changed the way I communicated entirely.

And I can't say I always do it perfectly. But that's, you know, that's such a great example, again, of how these small things that we do when we interact with language as humans, right, those things can change the complete tone of a conversation or interaction. And I know this might be a lame reference. I just, you know, difficult conversations was a profound book for me when I read it. You know, it's simple things of like all the different levels that actually go on in a conversation have a lot more to do with what we think about ourself and how we label ourselves. And like the impact of other people's perceptions and words

on us, we don't need to always share with them. It's for us to deal with, right? But just those subtle thing, again, neuroscience is the best science. Okay. So I was talking with Ethan Cross about mental chatter, which is basically the internal monologue that we have, this running dialogue that's this running monologue that's going on. And there's a lot of advantages, right? It means that we can, you know, reflect on our mistakes, we can improve, we can, you know, think about the future and we can think about the past and reflect on those things. But it can also drive us crazy, right? When it, when it kind of runs away from us. And he was saying that one really effective tactic that we can use in these moments where we're trying to problem solve and feeling overwhelmed by the internal chatter

is to refer to ourselves in the third person. What? That gives us psychological distance between us and our stories and our experiences and our emotions. And it can allow us to better diagnose the problem. It can allow us to, again, disentangle our response from our emotional states. And you find that you can actually do a better job. So it's like, hey, Maya, like you got this. Or like, you know, Maya, what would you do?

You don't feel like maybe you're going crazy? Well, he does clarify that obviously there are cases where, you know, that's not appropriate. But it's really interesting, right? Because when you give advice to a friend, you're able to have some of that distance. And that's sometimes why you always feel like, I'm able to give great advice to my friend, but I'm not able to give great advice to myself. Or I can't follow the advice I give myself. And by taking the third person perspective, the fly on the wall perspective,

you're essentially giving the kind of advice you'd give to a friend. A friend who's stupid, fat, and ugly. Sorry. That's what the voice sometimes. No, but there are studies that have proven that we would not talk to anyone else the way that sometimes we speak to ourselves. You would be arrested if you spoke to me the way I speak to me. And the studies have shown that when you print out a transcript from an audio file and then get someone to edit it, that it gives them the similar psychological distance of going in the third person. And so, you know, I mean, we've we've spent a lot of time looking at this and exploring it, which I won't get into now.

But it has a huge, it has a huge impact. So it's awesome to hear. Yeah. And I think, you know, Malala apparently talks about having done this. So when she was trying to imagine how she would confront a member of the Taliban, had she, you know, had that, if that happened, obviously it did. She was playing around with different reactions. And she, she changed course when she started talking to herself in the third person. And she said, no, no, no, if you, if you meet them with violence, that's actually stooping down to their level. And like, Malala wouldn't do that, you know, that sort of thing. And so when she asked herself, what would Malala do, you know, is a helpful prompt for her to have some distance. So I think that's- Well, I'm always going to ask myself, what would Maya do? In one of the articles I read that you were, where you were interviewed, you acknowledge something that I think we all understand, which is that humans are very bad at making decisions for themselves.

that help them in the future versus their immediate gain. And so just taking this back to your expertise at the population level, how do we get people to take care of themselves, to do those things that are slightly harder in the now that will set them up for whether it's eating better or exercising better or going to sleep on time? Like we seem to be in a, especially as we just have gone through a pandemic. Like we're still in it, bro.

The messaging wasn't. like, oh, we should all be healthier. Yeah, yeah. Or take care of ourselves. We still seem to be... It was shop more. It's... Or bake more bread.

Bake more bread. But it's, it seems like we haven't gotten better at that. And I'm curious, sort of, if you've looked at that in your behavioral science and population health. One of my favorite techniques that I use in my life, it may not work for everyone, but it's been very effective for me. It comes from a friend of mine who actually interviewed for my podcast. Her name's Katie Milkman.

She's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. and she studies change. And she's come up with this idea of what she calls temptation bundling. And the idea is that you take a very undesirable activity, let's say working out in this case, that you know is in your long term best interest. And you couple it with something that gives you immediate rewards and immediate joy. And you only allow yourself to do the really joyful thing when it is deeply entangled with the undesirable thing. So in my case, what this means is I save my favorite Taylor Swift songs for when I'm working out, and I can only listen to them when I'm working out on the elliptical or whatnot. For other people, it might be, oh,

you know, I want to listen to my favorite podcasts with Maim and Maya Shunker. Wow, what a, what a fiery duo those two are, you know, can't get enough of this. And you only listen to them when you're doing laundry. You can find these little things to pair in your life, and it may seem small, but it's really had a transformative effect on my existence. I mean, if I couldn't listen to Taylor Swift all the time, that would be bad for my mental health, but I also get it. I'd be like, I will work out three times a day whenever I need to hear Swifty. I'm a Taylor Swift. It's amazing because you end up looking forward to a little bit or like, you know, find your favorite Netflix show. And it's like, I'm only allowed, you know, in the studies, they did an extreme version where they

like locked people's iPads or whatever in lockers and only gave them access to them when they working out. So it's a lot of enforcement. But I felt that when I just have these like light rules in my home, it gives me that small little boost that I need. It's like, oh, she just released red and it's got all these old songs that she never released before. I'm going to save them for when I'm doing my intensity workouts. You're speaking my name's language. Totally. Yeah. We're coming to the end of our time together. But I do, I just have a couple questions for you. Do you get depressed? I get anxious. Okay. Yeah. What? does that look like for you? She puts on Taylor Swift. I mean, I get anxious and I have found ways to,

you know, manage that better. And I've actually started to see, I think the biggest shift for me, my name, is that I've started to see anxiety as not an enemy, just leave in terms of how I label it in my mind, but is something that has also been a huge asset for me. So my anxiety has propelled me with a lot of impatience to get a lot of things done and to move really fast and to try to have a lot of impact in this world. And so what I want to do away with my anxiety altogether, no, it's actually can be very, very helpful. And I think when we have a slightly more compassionate, more well-rounded view of the things

that bother us about ourselves, we become more functional in the process. I don't know if either of you have had this experience. I don't know if you suffer from everything. We suffer from everything all the time. And have you found that like changing your relationship with the thing? Like have you experienced depression? Have you experienced anxiety? And have you ever been able to change your relationship with those things?

You go ahead and answer that for me. I mean, we're opening up a little bit of a big topic. For me, a lot of a lot of it has been in reframing my inner narrative and the path. my understanding of the path that has brought me to the point that I'm struggling with, trying to manage and understand what I can control, what I can't, and changing my understanding of what do I need to do. Sometimes I'll wake up and I'll have racing thoughts and I'll be like, I cannot figure out whatever it is that I'm struggling with right now.

So more thinking isn't going to help this. And I've literally said that to myself. And sometimes it works and sometimes I have to distract myself. but I know that when I'm turning something over and over and over, it's a matter of I have not processed something or I have not put it in its right context or place. And so it's disturbing me. And I do feel that my mental health, anxiety, depression is a result of lifestyle and, you know, overall emotional management that I have not spent enough time doing. And if I move too fast and I'm doing too many things and I don't have that wind down or process time to sort of empty that

mental inbox or emotional inbox, it spills over and affects other parts of my life. So I do see it as a gauge or a barometer of things that I need to address. I think also what Maya is talking about is that notion of kind of finding the asset in your defect. You know, the 12-step concept is that every defect you have is an asset that's gone out of control, right? So for example, you know, I'm a person who can be hypersensitive, quote, overly sensitive. But for me, I think this is kind of the lens that you're looking at it in, I wouldn't want to lose the fact that I am very, very in touch with who I am and what other people need, right? I'm a compassionate person. I really want to be helpful to other people. I want to be in touch with myself. If that gets kind of,

if that goes awry, it can look like, I can't function with anything because I'm constantly overstimulated, constantly flooded. So I think that's also some of that. So in that light, I have an amazing ability to find the problem with everything. I joke that's true. It's a superpower. Well, it's super risk averse. And it's also helped me in many ways as a writer understand what is the audience going to understand about what I'm communicating and where is the communication going to break down. So it's been very helpful in many ways because it helps preempt miscommunications and other things.

But when it's out of control, I see everything is a big problem. Those are hard days. It's also helped me and propelled me to find solutions and build a company that is trying to address major problems in the world. And without seeing those problems, we wouldn't be able to come up with creative solutions. So I do see it as a massive benefit. But it can get out of control. And I definitely can have to pull myself back and be like, is this really a problem? Or am I just trying to bind my energy or anxiety or that skill set to something that maybe doesn't need to be.

seen as a problem? I will say that, I mean, first of all, who hasn't had anxiety over the last few years? Oh, my gosh. And one thing, I don't know if this is helpful for your listeners, but one thing that's really helped me is introducing a very small ritual into my day that feels non-negotiable, no matter what is going on, no matter what I'm going through. So for me, that is a cup of very traditional Indian-style tea. So freshly chopped ginger, cardamom, boiled like the whole shebang, and I cherish the warm cup in my hands in the morning. And during that time, like, no one can bother me. You know, I have to be on my own by myself consuming it and enjoying it and savoring whatever present-mindedness I can achieve. I think this whole present-mindedness thing

is getting too much hype. And I just want to say that I think there's actually a lot of benefit to spending some of our mental time in the past and in the future. Because right now, the zeitgeist is be in the present all the time. That's not super healthy. First of all, we know biologically it kind of goes against our natural human biology to even reach for that goal because we spend, I think it's something like a third of our time in the present. And I believe it's two thirds of our time in the past or the future, I think.

And so, but we spend a lot of time now. naturally thinking about the past and the future. And I think it gets a bad rep. And I think that can make people feel anxious. Why am I not in the present? But I think, again, what's wrong with, I mean, obviously, if it's causing mental health issues, you should reconsider your relationship with the past or the future. But I also think it's okay for us to spend time in those two places. And I think there's this like meta anxiety that's emerging in our society around the fact that people don't feel like they're in the present when they should be. And I just want to eliminate the meta anxiety. I spend a lot of time thinking about the past and thinking about the future.

And I think it's okay. I think I'm a better person because of it. I'm able to reflect on mistakes, move on from them, be better for them. I'm able to dream about the future, which can motivate me in the present day. That's also very valuable. I 100% agree. The idea that you have to be able to look over your mistakes or look over conversations and dynamics and pull it back to the present.

And how can that be bad when it is rumination, obsession, resentment, regret, and shame? Well, this is the very fine line is when you're going back and saying, how did I get here? Could I have done something? And it's not like, oh, I should have done something. But wait a second, let me learn from that dynamic. And then what about the future? The future I find extremely helpful. And I also find that it's a very fine line because it can turn into also rumination.

Anticipatory anxiety. Anticipatory anxiety. But also. Fear and paralysis. I had a session this morning for an hour where I was talking something out. And I kept using the word paths and options. I was like, if this happens, if A happens, then B might happen and then G might happen. But what if A and then C happens and then F might happen?

And spending that hour, which is really future tripping, but exploring those options, allowed me to come back and be more present in the rest of my day having spent that time doing that exploration. And again, I totally agree. I mean, there could be, there are absolutely mental health costs to, ruminating in this negative way of the past and the future. What I'm trying to eliminate in this moment is any meta anxiety that you might have about the fact that you're spending a lot of time thinking about the past or the future. Objectively, that is not a bad thing. By the way, I looked up the stats, so now I can tell you. So we spend a third to a half of our time thinking

about the past or the future. Kind of naturally. That's what study shows. And so you can try to shift a little bit more of it to the present if you want. But I guess I just don't know, I don't know. I just want to question how virtuous it is to spend more time in the present. Also, sometimes the present sucks for people. And so I want to give them a refuge. Like when the present sucks for you, spend as much damn time as you want in the future. Just don't go to the metaverse. Just don't go to the metaverse. That's a whole other problem. No, but I also think of that in terms of, and this is something we've talked about here other places, that also that notion of sort of whatever the zeitgeist is, you know, like you should be, I mean, the fixation,

especially if you live in Los Angeles or New York or really any large city of like, you have to be working out every day, for example. Like that's, meaning like that's the- Rest days, perfect. But I'm saying that anything like that, right, where I start comparing like, oh, I'm not doing, and then it brings up anxiety about what I'm not doing

instead of saying what's right for me, what fits into my life, what fits into my schedule, right? You could say that about yoga. You could say that about all the things that I wish I had to do. Just wrapping up the process. up the present and future stuff. What I hear us saying is, if you're spending time in either of those places, do it effectively.

Do it with purpose and then come back. Don't just say you shouldn't be going to those places. Yeah, or like even if you're not doing it on purpose and it's unintentional and you're just drifting off into those places, like that is also the time where creative ideas come into existence and your imagination runs free. I don't want us humans to rob ourselves of this incredible gift to time travel because of the present mindedness movement because it is a singular human quality that we can navigate throughout time in our minds. And it can give rise to incredible things in a lot of innovation and a lot of

reflectiveness and a lot of self-improvement. And so I just want to make it, I want to create a safe space for the past and the future. I'm a lobbyist for the past and the future. I'm into it. Thank you so much. It's been really, really awesome talking to you. We appreciate you going through all the regions that we took you. This was really, really fun. It's great to meet both of you. Thank you so much for having me on. When I picture who I am in my head, it's her. She seems super chat. Like, she just seems like... It's her dad's perspective. Well, her parents sound awesome. We should have them on. idea. We had a great idea to the people we like best. We want to talk to your parents.

We want to know what we can do that you did to make our children like your children who we like. We had the whole thing. We're going to talk to the people and their moms. They were going to bring their mom on. I want to talk to all her siblings. I'm like, what are the rest of you like? Super boring. She's fascinating. What were the five questions that you didn't ask her? What was Obama like?

Fair? Does everyone who worked with you have to be Democrats? No, she was bipartisan. She talked about that organization that she built, or she put it in the General Services Administration. That's bipartisan, I think. How do you keep just like recreating yourself, like creating so many new paths,

like just everything she does seems like it works? That's what I would ask. Are there things that you do that don't work? That's a good question. I don't mean like everything you do is, amazing. Because her slight change of plan was when she got injured, but what are the other slight change of plans in her life?

Also, does she want to hear my slight change of plan? I would have liked to know other things about her faith. You know, I'd be curious if there were things from her Hindu upbringing that might have stayed with her. Also, she said she was culturally Hindu, which I thought was really interesting, and that's kind of a structure that people in India know about, that often we don't. So I was curious about that. I want to know, okay, she likes Taylor Swift.

I was curious like... When did she get into Taylor? No. Who was first? I am also curious with people like that. Because I knew a lot of people in college and grad school like that. Like amazing. Brains and like just like...

Just brilliant minds. Just like brilliant and like efficient and like if something bad happens, get back up. I'm like blah, blah. I'm curious what kind of the rest of her social life is like. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm assuming she's not like wasn't a huge partier in college. But yeah, I'm curious like what TV shows she likes. If only we could interview her.

Well, we used a lot of her time with her talking about amazing things. She's a fascinating person. Like, her life should be a movie. Her life should be a movie. I play her. Maya, if you're still listening, I would like to play you in the movie about your life.

My hair is frizzy too. That's the only criteria you need. Ask Maya anything. Yeah. Bridget asks, Why do I feel the tendency to self-sabotage and feel some insecure even though the relationship is wonderful and healthy.

Because you're a human. Thanks for listening. Great question. I mean, the kind of short answer is because the relationship's not just about how the relationship is. It's about how you are and how your partner is. That means that there's likely work for you to still do to make you feel, you know, fill in the word, deserving, worthy, competent in the relationship. So I think that's also something really important.

A lot of people think, like, well, once I'm in a great relationship, all my problems will go away. And I'm here to tell you, folks, it doesn't work like that. It can work like that for a bit. The first three months are usually spectacular. And you're like, I'm my best self with this person. I found the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. But life continues to happen to you. And even in a healthy relationship, things like self-sabotage, those are often indicators that there's some maybe, I don't want to say cracks in the foundation, but maybe you need to revisit and see if the foundation that you've laid for yourself, independent of the relationship, feel stable and healthy.

Thank you, Bridget, for your question. And yeah, make sure to follow us on Instagram at Biolic Breakdown. We're releasing different types of content, little exclusive clips. You can find a lot of surprises. Follow us on Instagram. Make sure to follow us on Instagram. Sometimes we do lives just for kicks from that account. And that's it.

For more information, go to biolicbreakdown.com. B-I-A.R-A-L-K. Breakdown.com. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's my Bialik's Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or two. One fiction.

And now she's going to break.