Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Dr. Maya Shankar: The Mindset Shift You Need When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

At age 15, Dr. Maya Shankar suffered a devastating hand injury that abruptly ended her promising violin career and shattered her sense of identity. Forced to reimagine a future beyond music, she turned to cognitive and behavioral science to understand how humans navigate unexpected change. That path led her to President Obama’s White House, where she applied human behavior insights to influence policy and improve decision-making at scale. In this episode, Dr. Maya reveals the power of human psychology and how small mindset shifts can help us make better decisions when life doesn’t go as planned. In this episode, Hala and Dr. Maya will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:13) Dr. Maya’s Early Life and Violin Journey (11:04) What Is Behavioral and Cognitive Science? (21:23) The Sunk Cost Fallacy Explained (26:55) Her Impact at the White House  (37:24) Understanding the Power of Nudging (43:43) Why Changing Minds Is So Difficult (46:24) Practical Nudging Tactics for Everyday Decisions (50:12) Decision-Making Biases You Need to Know (54:32) A Slight Change of Plans Podcast Mission Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the creator, executive producer, and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. She currently serves as Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google and previously founded the White House Behavioral Science Team under President Obama, where she served as a Senior Advisor. Dr. Maya completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford, earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and holds a B.A. from Yale. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting  Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting.  Spectrum Business - Visit Spectrum.com/FreeForLife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful and production-ready websites. Go to Framer.com/profiting and get 30% off their Framer Pro annual plan. Intuit QuickBooks - Start the new year strong and take control of your cash flow at QuickBooks.com/money  Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting   Working Genius - Take the Working Genius assessment and discover your natural gifts and thrive at work. Go to workinggenius.com and get 20% off with code PROFITING Resources Mentioned: Dr. Maya's Podcast, A Slight Change of Plans: bit.ly/ASCOP-apple  Dr. Maya's Website: mayashankar.com Nudge by Cass Sunstein: bit.ly/-Nudge  Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals  Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Positivity, Human Nature, Critical Thinking, Robert Greene, Chris Voss, Robert Cialdini

Yap, gangs, our lives are shaped by thousands of decisions, from the big decisions to the small ones and even the ones that we don't realize we're making. But imagine being able to understand the hidden forces behind those choices that we make so we can navigate our paths with more confidence and clarity. In this Yap classic episode, we're revisiting my conversation with Dr. Maya Shankar, a renowned cognitive scientist and former behavior science advisor in the White House. Maya has spent her career studying how emotions, identity, and subtle nudges influence the past and decisions that we make. Together we unpack how to let go of outdated identities, overcome mental traps like the sunk cost fallacy, and design environments that support smarter, more intentional decision-making. Yeah, fam, I guarantee you're going to want to take notes on this one.

Here's my sit-down with Dr. Maya Shankar. Hey, Maya, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hey, Halet, so lovely to be here with you. Yeah, me too. I'm really excited for this conversation, human behavior and the science of decision making, the science of change. These are all things that I'm really passionate about. I love talking about them on my podcast. And so you're super impressive. You know, you worked at the White House. You worked at the United Nations. You work for Google now. And you lead their behavioral science teams there. So really interesting stuff. But we always like to start from the beginning. So let's talk about you growing up. And from my understanding, you are, you were super talented at the violin. And the violin was essentially your whole life. But when you were 15 years old, you had a very traumatic hand injury that kind of changed the way that you thought your life would be thereafter. And you had to kind of switch careers. So talk to us about what it was like for you as a child, a teenager, how you got into the violin and then maybe how you transitioned to

some of the stuff you're working on now. Absolutely. Yeah. So violin, as you mentioned, was my entire life as a kid. When I was six years old, my mom went up to our attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had brought with her all the way from India when she immigrated here in the 70s. And I think my mom had just meant to show me the instruments. I don't think she expected that I would be instantly captivated by it, but I was. And I really took to it. And my mom says that she never had to ask me to practice. It was just one of those genuine passions that I had as a child. And I can't say that for many of the other things I was asked to do in school. So she knew that it was very rare. And then when I was nine years old, things started to get a

little bit more serious. And I was starting to realize, hey, maybe this violin thing could be my life, right? Like maybe this could be a career. And so I ended up auditioning for the Juilliard School of Music in New York. And I was accepted into their pre-college program. And that began weekly trips every Saturday from Connecticut to New York in which my mom and I would get at that 4.30 in the morning, go to New York on the train, and I'd spend about 10 hours in the day studying the violin. And then, as you can imagine, like with the intensity of that spirit, things started to get even more serious. And then in high school, it's Ack Perlman, who's, you know, the greatest violinist of our time, invited me to be his private violin student.

And that was an incredible vote of confidence for me, because I think, like so many, We're in competitive environments. It can be very intimidating. You're not sure if you have what it takes to succeed. And him taking me on as a student, I think, really helped me appreciate, oh, wow, I think I could actually be a violinist in GoPro. So, unfortunately, what happened is that when I was 15, I was in summer music camp. I woke up early, probably didn't warm up as much as I should have, and I overstretched my finger on a single note and heard a pop. and it turns out I had torn tendons in my hand.

And I resisted Hala for so many months, the diagnosis that my doctors were giving me and the fact that they were telling me I could never play the violin again. But ultimately, I just had to surrender at a certain point and, you know, the pain became too intense. And yeah, I realized that, you know, my dreams were crushed and I could no longer pursue this path.

Wow. That must have been so hard because that's what you were doing your whole life. So before we move on to like, your next phase of life, I do want to talk about how you got into Juilliard because it was a really scrappy, interesting story. So I'd love to hear about that. Absolutely. So, you know, my parents had no connections within the musical sphere. So my dad is a theoretical physics professor. My mom helps immigrants get green cards to study in this country. And they knew that I had these big dreams as a kid, but they weren't really sure how to connect the dots and how to make my

Juilliard dreams come true. So one day, my mom. mom and I were in New York. This was, yeah, this was when I was nine. And we just were, we had a mother-daughter trip and I happened to have my violin with me. And we walked by the Juilliard School's building and she said, hey, Maya, why don't we just go in? Like, what's the worst thing that could happen? I'm like, mom, get out of here. That's nuts. I don't want to go inside. Like, we haven't even been invited. But she said, let's just do it. Let's just see what happened. So we go in to the building, unannounced, uninvited. And my mom strikes up a conversation. with a student in the elevator and her mom.

And she very politely asked her, oh, you know, at the end of your lesson, would you mind just introducing my daughter to your violin teacher because it would just be so wonderful if they could have a chance to connect? And they were very gracious, very kind. They said yes.

I think a lesson I've learned over the years is just how generous people can be when you just ask them if they're willing to do you a favor. But they let us, you know, meet her teacher afterwards. And I actually auditioned for him on the spot he accepted me into his summer program, and it was only because of that intense boot camp training that summer that I think I had any chance at all of getting into Juilliard. And what that lesson taught me, Hala, is that a lot of times the door will not open for you on its own,

right? You won't get that silver platter, but sometimes if you just force it open, I mean, literally in this case, my mom just walked into the building, you can try and inspire new opportunities for yourself. So I'm so grateful for that learning lesson because it wasn't the first time when I had to create an opportunity for myself that didn't that didn't necessarily exist beforehand. But I, yeah, I'm grateful for my mom's fearlessness, I guess, because it really helped allow my violin career to, you know, to blossom. 100%. It's something that I always talk about at this podcast is like, shoot your shot. Ask, you know, show up. Show up. Half the battle is just showing up. And the fact that you just went there, you and your mom, you were so young, who knows, they would have, they could have laughed at you guys. But instead they embraced you. And it kind of set off a whole new path for your life and was a huge resume builder for you later on, even though you didn't end up becoming a violinist. I'm sure going to Juilliard really helped you in other areas in terms of your hard work and dedication. So what other lessons did you learn as this like pro violinist as such a young age? Did you carry anything on later on that that helps you?

Absolutely. I mean, I think just hard work, just relentlessly devoted to my craft because, you know, I'm really grateful that my mom opened the door for me that day. But it was important that I was able to perform on the spot, you know, and actually complete the audition. And so I think just that relentlessness, that drive, that spirit of commitment to my craft, I think was so important for me to cultivate as a young child. because, again, I think I've carried that also into other pursuits that do require that kind of relentlessness. You know, we'll get to this later, but certainly working at the White House, things are not easy. You face so many barriers. I feel like in many ways I carried that spirit with me forward when I was working there too. And, you know, not trying to see many obstacles, trying to feel like hard work could get me to the finish line. So I think that was certainly something. And, you know, I think actually looking back, the greatest lesson that I learned about myself from playing the violin is that

that what I really loved about music was not necessarily the beautiful sounds that it created. Of course, I loved the way the violin sounded. But actually, it was my ability to emotionally connect with my audience, to connect with listeners of my music. And I loved being able to forge that connection from an early age on stage, right? I mean, I'm going out to the stage. I'm in a room with a bunch of strangers. And suddenly, we feel connected in this really deep, powerful way.

And I think what that taught me is that, especially when I lost my ability to play the violin, that there was a feature of my musical life that I could maintain afterwards, which was finding other areas, other passions, where I could unlock that same human emotional connection, my same fascination with humans, which is what ultimately drove me to become a cognitive scientist and to study humans as my profession, right? Like what it is that unlocks our passions, how we make decisions, how we develop our attitudes and beliefs, and certainly has driven me to create my new podcast, a slight change of plans, which is all about how people navigate extraordinary changes in their lives. You know, people like Hillary Clinton and Tiffany Haddish and Casey Musgraves. And I feel like I'm able to emotionally connect with my guests.

And I feel that same joy that I felt as a child playing the violin. Oh my gosh, I love that. So then you ended up going to Yale, right? And then you went to University of Oxford. You got your Ph.D. And you had a road scholarship. So super, super impressive journey. I love to set context from my listeners. So some people might not be familiar with your field. So what is like behavioral and cognitive science? Like what is that? Absolutely. So it is the study of how our minds work, the science of how it is that we make decisions. how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world, how we develop motivational states. It's basically a comprehensive understanding of our minds. And I will tell you, I mean, when I was, you know, on the heels of trying to figure out, like, what is my new passion? Right? Now that I don't have the violin, what is it that I do?

What is it that I can do? I really struggled for a long time. I had no idea what it was that could captivate me in the same way. And I was really lucky, actually, Hullet, because I was the summer before college, I was helping my parents clean their basement as a dutiful daughter does. I was actually supposed to be in China that summer touring with my musician friends, but instead I was with my parents. But I was helping them clean their basement, and I stumbled upon a book on how the mine works. And it detailed the incredibly sophisticated machinery behind our ability to perceive and learn language. And I remember up until that point in my own life, I had taken for granted my ability to comprehend language and produce language.

And it was fascinating to have the curtain pulled back and to fully understand what was behind this skill that I had taken for granted. I mean, I think so many of us can be really hard on ourselves in daily life, very critical of ourselves. But when you learn about the mind, you will feel like you're crushing it all the time. You will be in total awe of what our minds are capable of. So I read this book on language, and I remember thinking, well, this is how sophisticated the machinery is behind language learning. What is behind our ability to do complex mathematics? I mean, I can't do complex math, but my physicist dad can. You know, what's behind our ability, like what's behind falling in love?

What's behind really high-level decision-making? I was enraptured. I mean, I could not wait to figure out all there was to understand about the mind. So when I went to undergrad, I ended up being coming. a cognitive science major, which was a relatively new major at the time. Your audience might appreciate because, again, it's an education podcast, but one thing that I loved about the cognitive science major is that it is interdisciplinary. So you study the mind from multiple perspectives. So I took classes in neurolinguistics. I took classes in psychology, anthropology, computer science, neurobiology.

Like, you're really trying to figure out some fundamental, you're asking fundamental questions about the mind. And then you are also answering those questions. Sorry, I took philosophy classes as well. You're answering those questions using this rich canvas of insights from so many different fields. And another feature, I think, of my undergraduate experience that really lit up my excitement for cognitive science is that I actually got to do lab research. So I worked in a non-human primate lab. My mentor was Laurie Santos. You might have heard of her. She has an incredible podcast. Yeah, she's going to come on our podcast soon. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Okay, so she's been my lifelong mentor. I'm so grateful to have had her in my life from day one, but she took me on as that lowly freshman into her monkey lab. And so I got to do research on non-human primates and also on humans and study things like how our visual systems work, how we code objects in the world. And yeah, I was just so excited by the idea of asking novel questions about the mind.

So your trajectory was to actually just be an academic, right? I think a lot of people who go into your field, they end up becoming professors or writing books and things along those lines. And I think you had a change of heart at some point. So talk to us about that and what you did next and maybe how you use some of your lessons that your mom taught you about getting into Juilliard for your next job position. Yeah, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

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So I was doing my postdoc in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. And I was scanning people's brains in the basement up in the FMRI laboratory. I was on my whatever. hour of doing this. I remember this guy came in and within minutes I'm peering into his brain. And I remember thinking, given my personality, I feel like the order of operations is wrong here. Like, I'm already peering into this guy's brain and I don't know whether he has kids, what his favorite food is, what his passions in life are. I feel like I should be doing something that feels slightly more social and team oriented where I get to know people first and then maybe, you know, do the behavioral science piece. But as you can imagine, and I imagine as many of

listeners can relate to when you put so many years into a pursuit, you feel a lot of anxiety about the idea of jumping ship, right? And I also didn't know what could come next. Like, what does a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience do other than become an academic? And so I remember thinking, you know, should I just keep at it just to, you know, avoid all this sunk cost. But I knew from my, you know, behavioral science research to avoid the subcost fallacy, which is to not give in to that. But also, I called up Lari. I called up Lari Santos and I said, Laurie, I know you're an academic, you're a professor,

you've been my role model all this time. It's one of the reasons I even went to grad school in the first place. Like, what do I do at this point? And I said, I think maybe I should become a general management consultant. Like I had no idea what to do. And she said, Maya, I recently heard about this incredible work that's happening in the Obama White House, where they are using insights from our field

to really change people's lives. In this particular case, they were using the power of defaults. The default setting in a program can wildly affect participation rates. And they changed the default setting in the national school lunch program to help enroll millions of kids into free or reduced price lunches. So prior to this change, people had to proactively enroll their kids into the program. And that was associated with the stigma. It was also accompanied by a very burdensome application.

process that was, you know, required referencing multiple tax forms. And think about like a single mom who's working three shifts to make ends meet. And now they're being asked to fill up this very burdensome form just to allow their kids to eat lunch at school every day. And so what the government did is they used existing data on these students and they automatically enrolled these kids in the program such that now the default was for kids to be enrolled. And if you wanted to unenroll your kid, you could, but that was the default setting. And as a result, of this change informed by behavioral economics, 12.5 million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day. And I just remember being blown away by this example. You know, I've been waxing

poetic about the promise of my field for years at this point, but to actually see it in practice was extraordinary for me. And there was just this light bulb moment of, oh, my gosh, this is what I want to be doing. You know, I want to be actually taking insights from decision science and putting them into practice in people's lives so that they can live better lives. But the challenge that existed, Hala, was that there was no job for a behavioral scientist in the White House. And so I ended up sending a cold email, so this is my mom's Juilliard method. I opened that door unannounced. And I sent an email to an academic luminary named Cass Sunstein. So he had written the book Nudge, which is all about the science of how we can, you know, positively impact people's

lives through these small tweaks and how we design programs and policies. He had also worked for Obama for four years as the head of their Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And I basically just sent him a note saying, hi, I'm Maya. I've published nothing of significance. And I have no public policy experience. And I even did this thing that I think a lot of women do in particular, which is I really downplayed myself. I said, I remember writing in parentheses, I know I'm not cool enough to work with the likes of Obama, but if there's a state or local government opportunity for me to apply these insights, I'd be totally game. And thankfully for me, Cass ignored all the insecurity that was seeping out of my email and wrote

back almost right away, again, generosity of spirit that I referenced earlier, and said, this is so wonderful, Maya, I'm going to introduce you to the president's science advisor. Now, I remember, like, nearly falling off my chair. I was like, what is happening in my life? I can't believe this connection's been made. And a week later, I was interviewing with top white health officials, pitching them on the idea of creating a new position for a behavioral scientist like me. And there was this particularly powerful moment, Hollett, I remember in the interview, where I was proposing all these ideas based in behavioral science, like the growth mindset, which is the idea that if we treat our minds like muscles, they can grow with time and effort. We can actually see a lot more potential in people.

I was talking about social norms and how that can inform the first lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative, which was all around health and wellness and exercise. And I remember this White House official telling me, well, that's great. I mean, I know Michelle Obama and her team. We can absolutely propose this change. And it was in that moment I realized, wow, okay, this is a real thing that can happen. And I was so taken by that interview and the promise that I saw in this position that even before I had a formal job offer. I moved to D.C., packed up all my bags. I signed a one-year leave.

And, I mean, he had obviously expressed some degree of interest such that I would take this risk. But I basically was like, I'm moving to C. I'm moving to D.C. I'm going to be here whether you like it or not. We are going to make this job happen. And sure enough, a few months later, I would be able to join the Obama White House and continued that work for four years. Wow. That is a really powerful story. She basically created her own dream career out of nothing, but, you know, the willingness to ask and having the passion and the skills and the experience. And the other lesson that I find here is that a lot of the times people think, and I want to circle back to something that you mentioned, the sunk cost fallacy, they think that, you know, you go to school and if you switch gears or even evolve, because you didn't

totally switched gears. You just applied what you learned in a whole new way and probably learned new things to succeed in that avenue, right? You just layered skills on top of what you already had, but that actually was a huge differentiator for you to actually create this dream job. And so it wasn't a waste at all. And same thing with me. I was in corporate. I worked at HP Disney for many years. I was in marketing. I launched a podcast on the side. Then I launched a marketing agency that blew up. And everybody told me, you're crazy. You're an executive at Disney. Everybody would kill for this job. And I was like, well, yeah, I did, you know, rise up the ranks, but that doesn't mean I have to do this for the rest of my life. I could easily take these skills and transfer it somewhere else,

right, and continue on that way. So talk to us about the sunk cost fallacy. I'd love to hear about that from you. Yeah. I mean, I think it speaks to the fact that we feel so attached to the things that we've invested in or the things that we own. And we can make irrational decisions in the face of that emotional pull towards those things. You know, there's this interesting insight in behavioral science called identity foreclosure. And it refers to the fact that, especially adolescents, though this can follow people into adulthood, can get very closed off very quickly regarding what their identity is in this world. They can attach themselves to an early identity that they claim, and they can hold onto that with a firm grip in ways that make them close-minded in the

face of other opportunities or other identities that they might occupy. And I think the fact that at 15, I was forced to challenge my fundamental identity. I mean, as I mentioned to you, Hala, I was first and foremost, a violinist. That was my defining trait. But when that was taken away from me, I was forced to see my identity as far more malleable than I otherwise would have. And I think opening myself up to multiple identities at that point in my life and learning this valuable lesson of, you know, maybe I shouldn't attach my identity to things, to pursuits, but instead to traits of pursuits, I was mentioning earlier that one of the appeals of the violin was the fact that I could forge this emotional connection and that I was so fascinated by the human mind and its

response to music. And so maybe I can find that trait in another area of life, right? Maybe I can, maybe I can translate that into other pursuits. And so I think seeing my identity as more malleable is something that has served me well. It's very painful at the time, but I would certainly encourage listeners to try and avoid identity foreclosure and to instead keep an open mind about all of the identities that we can occupy, you know, over the course of our lifetime. Yeah, that's super powerful. I love that what you said about, you know, choosing to really not tie yourself to a thing, but rather than a trait, something that can involve and apply to many different things. I think that's a really great piece of advice for everybody listening, especially young listeners who may not

have gone through failure. You know, I can really relate and I have so many stories, but I want to focus this on you. Well, I would love to share one of your stories if you're willing to share. Well, I used to work at Hot 97 and I actually dropped out of school for this radio internship at Hot 97. And I was the girl from Hot 97. I was the coolest girl, you know, with all the celebrities. That was my life. You know, all my branding on social was Hot 97's hollas. you know, and I was an intern working for free for three years and trying to get that my dream job on air. And then they fired me out of nowhere, you know, they fired me for no reason because they didn't want to pay me minimum wage, even though I had sacrificed everything to work at the station.

And again, like you, I felt like my identity was ripped from me. And I was like, wow, I've invested all this time. I have absolutely nothing. I'm not allowed to use their brand anymore. Similar to you, like you weren't able to use your hand anymore. It wasn't possible, right? Exactly. And then I had to pivot quickly and I owe a lot of my grit and being able to understand when it's

time to move on and also, you know, to your point, be more aligned to things you own as well as your mission rather than other brands or things. It's really important for people to understand. And I think if you don't get that early failure or rejection or tragedy, you might not know that and you might hang on to a dream that's worth letting go. I think that's completely right. And I'm, first of all, I'm so grateful. that you share stories like that because I think in the same way that when you see someone's

Instagram feed, you're seeing the highlights real. When you read someone's bio, you're not looking at all of the moments in which they failed and they were challenged. And I almost want all of our bios to say, you know, and then I tried this and it didn't go anywhere. And then I tried this and I failed or I was rejected because I think one, it humanizes people and it allows people to see the path is never linear. It's going to have so many twists and turns. And it's having, you know, perseverance and trying to build self-confidence at those critical junctures that ultimately can lead you to thrive. Yeah, 100%.

As you did, clearly. Thank you. Thank you. And so did you. So let's go back to your time in the White House. So you're working for the Obama administration. And, you know, you basically were like a little startup because you invented this job. I think you started with no team in a very male dominated, I guess, not industry.

but male-dominated culture, right? So how did you thrive there? What are some of the things that you did? What are your best memories from that work experience? Yeah, so interesting. I mean, I thought, oh, the challenge has ended when I convinced them to give me this job. But actually, that wasn't the case at all.

So on day one, I decided, based on the advice of my boss, that instead of just focusing on the impact that I as one person could have while in government, it might be far more worth it to actually build up an institution that would persist beyond my unique tenure in the White House and actually be able to keep doing this work well beyond my departure. And that can take a lot of effort in time because instead of just trying to get discrete projects done, you're trying to convince the federal government and Obama leadership that they should actually build out a new function in government, right, a behavioral science team.

And on day one, I started off with zero budget. no team, and I'm a 27-year-old at the time with no public policy experience trying to make this happen. Now, I will say there was one advantage to lacking that experience at the time, which is that I came in so optimistic about what it was that I could accomplish. I didn't see barriers because I didn't know where they existed. And I think had I been a seasoned government official, I would have been like, okay, I've done this rodeo six times and I failed, you know, four to six times. And so I'd be somewhat disenchanted and a bit jaded. But actually, I think my, you know, light naivete served me well, which is that I came in and I was just absolutely resolute in my commitment to building this team.

But I had to get very creative. So I recognized early on that the only way that I would succeed at this mission is if I could inspire organic interest in my government colleagues to translate insight from behavioral science into public policy improvements because I could not point to a high-level mandate. I could not point to at the time President Obama saying, you guys all need to do this. Instead, I had to convince people because they saw genuine value, inherent value in what it was that I was proposing and that it would help them achieve their existing program or policy goals. So I knocked on every single door I could in government. I engaged at all levels of government.

And essentially, the tactic I used was to align my recommendations with existing goals they already had. So if the Department of Veterans Affairs was already trying to get veterans enrolled in a program, I would knock on their door and say, hey, I have some science-based insights that we can use to try to get you from point A to point B. Or if the Department of Education was trying to help student loan borrowers better understand their choices among repayment plans, I would say, oh, yeah, here's some research on the most effective way that we can structure these choices. I kind of recognize in those early days that if I were

to introduce a new goal or a new idea, it would just be too much for folks to swallow on day one. So that was one. I lined these incentives. Really smart. I decided I need to get some quick wins on the board. So I think one trap folks can fall into is that they spend so much time writing beautiful pros about what this team could be in the future, what these insights could translate into in the future, rather than actually just getting your feet wet and getting some wins on the board. Because I realized, like, yes, I can draft these 15-page elaborate policy proposals with the hope that one day someone important might sign the dotted line, but that's not going to be the way that you actually ignite people's imagination and creativity and

excitement for the work. So I ended up organizing a meeting fairly on and early on in my tenure at the White House where I created an admissions ticket to the meeting. So I invited all these luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, who are Nobel Prize winners in the field of economics, and also government luminaries. And I said, you can only come to the meeting if you submit a one or two page proposal on how you plan to integrate a behavioral insight into one of your existing programs over the next three to six months. And it was incredible to see the motivation levels that emerge from this ticket to the meeting. In fact, I probably got maybe 35, maybe 50 proposals in the door because people were so excited to meet their intellectual heroes, right, like Danny

and Richard and have them evaluate their proposals, but also just creating a deadline of any kind was very motivating for folks. And those wins ultimately generated the kind of argument that I needed to get buy-in from government agencies to actually give me headcount, to help give me a budget, ultimately build the argument for President Obama to sign an executive order that made my team a formal, persistent part of government. Hello, young improfitors. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you.

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This new year with Shopify by your side. I love how you use creative solutions to kind of get. get your way. And I love the fact that you mentioned that your naivity really helped you because you approached the situation extremely optimistic. And I know from my experience that when it comes to growing a team or influencing others, just being optimistic, positive, confident, creative can get you a really long way. So I could see why everybody kind of adored you once you got on the door and gave you those opportunities. I mean, it was definitely, it was so much hard work. And I will say that the failure rate was extremely high, you know, for every hundred conversations I had, maybe we

get one project over the finish line. But in looking back, I will say that there were so many times that I wish Hala that like, Obama would just step in and be like, y'all need to do this because my life would be so much easier. But in hindsight, I realized that the fact that I had to inspire organic interest from the outset at all levels of government meant that folks were doing this work because they saw inherent value in it. And you can't, you can't dictate someone to care about something, right? Like no mandate in government can force a person to be excited about stuff. And I do feel like this more startupy approach led to a lot more cultural change in the government and a lot more sustained change in the government. I'll share

one story with you, which is that I remember there was a career civil servant I'd worked with. Her name was Rosemary Williams. She'd worked at the Department of Defense for decades. And I met her just when she was on the cusp of retirement. She was like, oh, I've worked. in the government for so long. I'm planning to retire. I'm done. And after working with us for a month or two, she came back and said, I no longer plan to retire. Like working with your team has energized me so much, has allowed me to see that the government can in fact be very innovative that I've decided to stick it out and I'm going to stay here longer than I did before. And it was stories like that that really touched me in a deep way because it allowed me to see,

one, the power of these scrappy start-of-the-environments where everyone feels like they're building this thing together. And two, how you can really change minds, not just the minds of Americans who you're serving through these public policies, but even the minds of government officials who have done incredible service to this country that could do even more if they just find the right opportunity. I love this conversation. It's been so great so far. I want to dive deep into how you actually changed the minds of American citizens. So from my understanding, I think that they called your team the nudge unit. Is that correct?

Yeah. So we're informally known that way. Yeah, the nudge unit. So talk to us about nudging. What nudging is. What's different from the way traditionally the government would try to convince people to take action? Yeah. I think what behavioral science teaches us is that there are a lot of surprising factors that can influence our decisions that we might not even be consciously aware of.

And if we can better understand human behavior, we can in turn design. public policies and programs in ways that reflect those surprising features. So a good example of this is when people go into a voting booth, I think they like to think, oh, of course, I'm just going to vote for the person that I'd most like to see elected into office, right? That's just common sense. But it turns out that the order in which the candidate's names appear on the ballot can have a profound impact on who gets boat share from different voters. In Texas, they found that if a candidate's name appeared first on the ballot, that candidate received a 10 percentage point boost in voter share relative to those, you know, listed below. And so this is, again, a very

surprising feature, right? We might not think that the order in which the candidate's names appear has this outsized impact. But once we understand that, we can then design ballots in ways that actually randomize the order of candidate's names across ballots in order to help solve this problem. In government, there were so many instances where we had designed a really impressive programmer policy, but it just wasn't reaching Americans in the way that we had hoped for. So a good example of this is I worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs. They were really eager to have veterans sign up for an educational and employment benefit that they could use after they had served our country overseas. And this was a very valuable benefit, because as you

can imagine the transition from military to civilian light could be quite jarring, full of lots of obstacles and hurdles psychologically and physically. And we wanted to do everything we could to smooth that transition and open up as many doors as we possibly could for veterans. Now, the challenge is that vets weren't signing up for this, in part because we hadn't made a compelling enough case probably for the program or we weren't getting the word out, and because we were budget constraint, right? We didn't have a ton of dollars to throw at marketing this program. So the VA came to us and said, look, Maya and team, we have one email that we're sending out about this program, do it what you want, but that's all you've got. And so we set up an AB test in which, you know,

the, you know, one version of the email was the original email. And then we modified the email, and we actually just changed one word in email. Instead of telling vests that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it. through their years of service. And this one-word change led to a 9% increase in access to the program. It's a spin off of an insight in behavioral science called the endowment effect, which basically says we value things more when we own them, or in this case, have earned them.

And so when veterans feel, oh, I've already got this benefit in my hands and now I have something to lose if I don't take advantage of it, it was a very compelling way to drive interest in the program. And so that's one example of a project that we worked on, In other cases, we are working on issues that had, wow, really deep and systemic underlying issues. So in my final year in the White House in 2016, I was working in collaboration with Flint, Michigan residents and officials in the face of the lead-in-water crisis.

So, as you might know, when there's lead-in-water, it can poison the brains, young children and adults and communities. And tragically, members of Flint, Michigan were on the receiving end of this. terrible change in water quality. And so I was working with my teammates at the time to make sure that information about safe water practices was written very clearly and was disseminated within the community. And we did everything from, you know, trying to dispel myths because there's, you know, disinformation was on the ride around water quality. And so we had to make sure that we were, you know, conveying truthful information, but also making sure that the messenger was the right

messenger. I think, you know, prior to this instance, we would have seen the Environmental Protection Agency as having been, like, the beacon of truth and the best messenger harness for this mission. But think about the fact that in Flint, Michigan, residents don't trust their government. They just been betrayed and lied to by their local government. And so naturally, you might expect there would be spillover effects, and they wouldn't trust the federal government. They wouldn't trust the EPA. So instead, the local EPA organized a canvassing effort where members of their communities, members of the local Red Cross, the heads of YMCA's, the heads of churches would go door-to-door distributing these water safety flyers around the community.

Anyway, so we're working on this water safety piece, and I ended up flying to Flint, Michigan a few times to make sure that they're responsive to residents' needs. And then I realized it's like hit me like a freight train that the problem is so much deeper, and it is the result of decades of disenfranchisional. among communities of color, decades of lying from the government towards communities of color, and that at the end of the day, the breach of trust between the government and its residence was at the heart of this challenge. You know, the water quality was a symptom, but the underlying issues were ferocious and

deep and deeply problematic in the result of a lot of decades of systemic racism. And so we were using behavioral science at the tail end of the administration. Obviously, a lot of these efforts got truncated after the 2016 election. But to try to figure out strategies we could use to try and rebuild trust between residents and their government, but only justified trust. You know, if the government was sucking, then they shouldn't trust the government. But to try to restore some semblance of trust because the government would actually take better action moving forward.

That's really interesting stuff. Thank you so much for sharing all those different stories. So I want to talk about why it's so hard for people to change. your mind. So like basically your job at the White House was to try to get people to make better positive decisions for themselves. You can't, can't force them to do it, right? So you were trying to use these little tweaks, these nudges to try to get people to make the right decisions for themselves. So I've heard you say in the past that it is incredibly hard for people to change their minds. Talk to us about why that's true and what's that play there. In general, I think

getting people to change their behaviors in ways that align with their long-term goals is achievable. In fact, in many ways, my work in government was trying to do exactly that, which was, you know, you find a service member who wants to sign up for a retirement savings plan, but, you know, finds the options confusing or just hasn't gotten around to it because they're procrastinating, and then you can use these nudges to try to get them over the finish line. Changing people's minds is an entirely different beast. it's extremely hard for us to change our minds because we often attach our identities to our values and our opinions and our beliefs. And we feel a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to challenging these deeply entrenched views that we have about the world.

In many ways, when we challenge our own minds, we're challenging our sense of selves. And importantly, this is research by Dan Cahan and others at Yale Law School, we're challenging our group. membership. We're challenging our tribal memberships and the communities that we associate with. I think one thing I've learned from all of the research and behavioral science is that people don't make up their minds just based on the facts, just based on evidence. They make up their minds based on what their communities believe and value. And, you know, this played out in COVID, for example, right? A lot of those who are believers of COVID and believers of wearing masks are thinking, it's just a piece of damn cloth. Like, just wear the mask. It'll keep you healthy.

Like, why is this such a big thing? But actually, if you appreciate the fact that sometimes people aren't wearing masks, not just because, you know, it's inconvenient, but because wearing a mask would threaten their group membership. It would signal something really important to them about where it is they belonged in society. And so if they see their entire community not wearing masks and it's a cultural statement, then it carries a lot more significance than we might give it credit for. And so what's important to appreciate in this space is that when you're asking people to change their minds about a topic, you need to understand what gave rise to that belief in the first place. And just throwing more evidence at them is not going to change the game. Super, super interesting.

So I want to go back to nudging a bit because I really want my listeners to understand how they could maybe use some nudging tactics in business in the workplace in their professional lives. Like, do you have any tips and tricks or just little ideas you could throw out there that we can use? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one, I would definitely, if listeners are interested, I would have them listen to the conversations that I had with Adam Grant and Katie Milkman on my podcast, the slight change of plans. Because we dive deep into exactly some of these questions, and they can get the longer version if they listen to those. I mean, Adam Grant's an organizational psychologist, so he's all about workplace reform. And Katie Milkman is an expert on the science of change. So she gives us lots of tactics we can use.

I would say a few nudges that I've used in my own life when it comes to trying to inspire change within myself is, one is a concept called temptation bundling, and that comes from Katie Milton's research. And it's the idea that if you pair up an undesirable activity, like working out or doing your laundry or cleaning the home or doing your math homework with a desirable reward, it can be much more likely that you actually commit to those activities in the longer, terms. So I have my favorite songs. I only allow myself to listen to them when I'm on the treadmill or working out. And it actually increases my motivation to do those things. I deny myself that pleasure in the rest of my life. Another insight I'd share with listeners as it pertains to the workplace has to do with the power of social norms. So we are heavily influenced by how those

around us act and behave. And if we understand this, we can actually leverage it for good in a lot of situation. So, for example, when they were trying to get homeowners to use less energy, this one company tried all sorts of tactics, right? Financial incentives, canvassing, door hankers, you name it. None of them worked. The one that did work was telling people when their neighbors were using less energy than they were. And that positive norm was so helpful at motivating people to use less energy because they're like, I don't want to be the highest energy user on my block. This would be terrible. And so I think in a worst place, setting when you see, you know, pro-social behaviors, when you see desirable behaviors, if you can

collect statistics around just how many people are engaging in those behaviors and just share the facts with people, it can have a really positive impact. Wow, that's super interesting. It's so fun. I have an example to bring up in which I've figured this out, but didn't know that there was like some science backing to this. So I do live interviews on Clubhouse. It's this social audio app.

And one of the things that I do is I say, DM me if you guys want to hear the replay. you know, send me a direct message if you want to hear the replay. And I noticed that when I say, oh, I've got hundreds of messages. Everybody's asking me for the replay. If you want the replay, DM me replay. And then I get 100 messages because I said that. It's so funny that people just like, it's kind of like, you know, I hate to say it, but that phrase of how kind of people are like sheep, they kind of follow the path. It is true. Like we want to be accepted, I guess. And so we're more likely to make decisions based on what everybody else is doing. Is that true? And well, importantly, I think we're really influenced by those people or populations in particular

that we socially identify with. So if you're a teacher, for example, and you find that a bunch of other teachers are doing something, there's an implicit cue in there being teachers that you share some of the same value system and that you might enjoy the same types of things. So I think, Hala, in your case, when a lot of people are asking for the replay and they know they're already fans of you, they're thinking, I'm a fan of her too. So chances are I might enjoy this replay as well. So I think we do find that social norms are even more effective when they're coming from people within a community or people who share a similar trait as you. Very cool. So we're all about actionable insights. And I just want to pick your brain even more about decision making. Like,

what are some other things that we need to know as young professionals, young entrepreneurs, in terms of how weaken ourselves kind of make sure we're not using biases or, like, how can we make more realistic decisions for ourselves and make sure that our emotions are not getting in the way and that all these other things that you're talking about are not getting the way? Like, how can we make clear good decisions for ourselves? I actually think the best way for your listeners to make more sound decisions is to just acquaint yourself with what those biases are. You know, for example, we're loss of earth. So we find it super painful to lose things, and we weight those losses much more than we weight gains.

Another example is the way that we construct our memories is you wouldn't necessarily intuitively understand that we code our memories in the way that we do. So let me say a little bit more about that. So I think at least I, when I was thinking about my memories, think, okay, well, you have an experience and every single moment of that experience carries some weight. And at the end, your brain kind of averages all those hedonic experiences and decides how enjoyable or not enjoyable the experience was. Actually, our minds don't work like that. We assign disproportionate weight to the most emotionally intense moment of the experience and the end of the experience.

This is called the peak end rule. And what this means is that when we think back to experiences, that end moment and that peak moment are really important in terms of whether we want to do that experience again. and how we think about it after the fact, this is really relevant in the context of health exams. Like, for example, colonoscopies are very painful exams. What they find is that when they elongate the exam, but they actually make the last few minutes slightly less painful, people are much more likely to return for follow-up visits, which is kind of astonishing because the overall amount of time that you are in some level

of discomfort is actually longer, but the intensity of that pain is less at the end. that can weigh in in a pretty significant way in terms of how you construct that memory. And I think this is so important for all of us because when we think back on experiences, we might not be coding them super accurately, right? And if we're aware of this bias, then we can think back differently on, you know, end of that, like, setting for that test, those last five minutes were so brutal. But actually, there were moments of joy there. I remember learning something new.

I remember feeling like my curiosity was ignited. And so kind of reminding ourselves to take that full experience. into account, or making sure that when we do want a repeat behavior, we end the experience on a high, on a positive note. It's a little bit of folklore, but Danny Cahneman, who's a Nobel Prize winner in behavioral economics and is a friend of mine, he has said that there are times where he would end a vacation short when he was having the time of his life, just because he knew that the memory, the memory would be more positive in his mind.

He said this a while back, and I think he now neither confirms nor denies it. But I thought it was such a charming anecdote because it is a sign of just how powerful some of these biases can be. Yeah. And it's that one I really like it. That one's called peak and what is that one called? The peak end rule. Peak end rule. I love that because I can also see that being really useful in like a job interview.

So on both sides, like making sure that you are really strong in the beginning and end in some sort of positive way at the end because you know that they're going to remember the beginning and the end. most, but then also as a person interviewing. Oh, sorry, just to clarify, so it's not just the beginning. It's the most intense, emotionally intense moment of the whole experience. So it's the peak. It's the peak of the experience and then the end, hence the peak end rule. Yep. Okay. That's really interesting. And then I think you also talk about something called the IKEA effect. Could you tell us about that? Yeah, the IKEA effect refers to the fact that when we have contributed to something, when we have built something, we attach a lot more value to it. So even if you build the IKEA furniture and it's a piece of crap and the four legs aren't

perfectly on the ground, you will assign more affection and it will feel like a more valuable item to you because it involved your input. Very, very interesting. So let's talk about your podcast. You briefly mentioned it before, a slight change of plans. I'd love to hear more about that because it sounds really, really interesting. What gave you the idea to start this podcast and what are some of the things that you talk about on your podcast?

My inspiration for a slight change of plans, I think, was twofold. One is my own personal experience navigating change early in my life, right, losing the ability to play the violin and not knowing who I was and asking all these deep existential questions about identity and whatnot. And the second came from 2020. And when I was feeling extremely overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change around me, I think so many people were feeling overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change around them. And it was just really daunting. and intimidating to feel like we are totally out of control of our world and of our environment. And then I put on my behavioral scientist hat and thought, okay, maybe the specifics of what 2020 through our way are unprecedented. But our human mind's ability to navigate change is absolutely not. In many ways, our minds are built for change. There's no manual out there. There's actually no scientific textbook out there on how to navigate change. You can't just look up the answers and be like, oh, I'm in the throes of this, you know, horrible health diagnosis. What do I do?

And so I thought, what if we can mind people's stories, people who have navigated extraordinary change in their lives, like Hillary Clinton and Tiffany Haddish and Casey Musgraves and Tommy Caldwell and folks who have just lived through extraordinary change in general? What if you can mind their stories and glean insights from them about how it is they've navigated change in ways that can teach us valuable lessons? It can help us think differently about change. in our own life. And what are some of the key lessons that you've learned so far being on this show?

Like, have you learned something new from your, you know, college days? Absolutely. I mean, it's been so humbling to make this podcast because, as you know, part of what I do is I study change, but my interview guests have taught me so much about change in ways that I could never have predicted. So I'll give you a couple examples. One is I spoke with a young woman named Elna Baker about her. her deep desire to become thin, to lose weight. She felt that if she could just become thin,

she could achieve all of her dreams and goals in her life. And she did it. She lost close to 100 pounds in five and a half months. For a while, Elna thought she was actually living her dream life until she realized that she was starting to lose parts of herself in the process. She realized that she was becoming a more superficial person. She wasn't as kind to people. She was valuing the wrong things. She was losing her boldness and her authenticity. And what she learned from that experience and what it taught me about change is that change doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not like you can change one part of yourself and assume all the other parts of yourself will stay fixed through that change because you can't control the spillover effects, right? And you can't control

the way people will respond to you. And so I think it's taught her that she should approach change with a lot of humility and openness because you might not appreciate all the ways in which it might change you in unexpected ways. And the flip side of that is I spoke with a young man named Scott. He's a cancer researcher and a total health nut. I mean, if it's in a book somewhere, he's done it, intermittent fasting, high intensity interval training, he's vegan, he adds turmeric to all of his food, he eats chia seeds. And when he was 32, he received a stage four bone cancer diagnosis that led him to have to amputate one of his legs, do 18 administrations of chemotherapy, moved to MD Anderson in Texas for inpatient treatment. And in his mind,

this is his worst nightmare come true, right? He had spent so much of his adult life trying to avoid this outcome. He was the A plus student when it came to managing his health. And yet surprisingly, much to his surprise, he said, if I had known that I would respond psychologically in this way to my worst nightmare. I might never have been as fearful of it in the first place. And that was so powerful for me because it showed me like sometimes the change that we will that we encourage in our lives doesn't actually have the positive impact we think it will. And so again, we need to have humility there and be mindful and observant and audit our experiences to make sure it's having the intended impact. And then sometimes the changes that we dread

that are unexpected and undesired can have silver-lover. lining that make us better people in our lives. And so I feel now that I would give the same advice that I would give the same advice to someone whether or not they were going through a willed or an unwilled change, whether or not they were going through what they believe was a desirable or an undesirable change. And that would be approach change with a profound amount of humility and open-mindedness. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Everybody, make sure you go tune into her podcast, a slight change of plan. She's obviously super well-spoken, very, very interesting and bright. Thank you so much for your time. The last question that we ask all of our guests

is, what is your secret to profiting in life? I think building a really strong community of supporters around me. I've been the beneficiary of so many incredible mentors in my life, and I try to pay it forward by mentoring others, especially young women of color. And I've feel like in tough moments or when we're feeling insecure or feeling like we can't accomplish that next goal, tapping into that community for strength and support and wisdom and warmth and insight can really help buoy you and help you get to that next phase. Don't do it yourself or don't believe you have to do it all on your own.

100%. And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? They can go to my website, mayasunker.com. M-A-S-H-A-N-K-A-R. But, you know, my current passion project, and where all of my heart is out right now is with my podcast, the slight change of plans. They could check it out anywhere that they subscribe to podcasts.

Apple, Spotify, I-HartRadio. And if they like the show, definitely, please subscribe, great, and share. Thanks so much. Amazing. Thank you so much, Maya.