Live: Michael Lewis and Maya Shankar on "The Other Side of Change"

Summary

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Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion

Special Episode: Live – Michael Lewis and Maya Shankar on "The Other Side of Change"

January 27, 2026 • Pushkin Industries

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Overview

This live episode brings together celebrated author Michael Lewis and cognitive scientist/podcast host Maya Shankar for a candid, humorous, and deeply insightful conversation marking the launch of Maya’s new book, The Other Side of Change. Set before a lively San Francisco audience, the discussion delves into the psychology of personal change, resilience, identity, and the universal experiences underlying seismic life transitions. Blending personal memoir, cognitive science, and stories from Maya's book, the duo explore how we navigate unexpected redirects in life, the legacy of change, and why storytelling still matters in making sense of chaotic times.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: Maya’s Fascination with Change

Timestamp: 04:16 – 13:00

• Personal Loss as Catalyst

  • Maya recalls losing her dream of becoming a concert violinist at 15 due to a hand injury:
    “I felt like I was grieving. The loss of the instrument, sure. But more importantly, the loss of myself in this more fundamental way. … I was bullied in school and violin and that whole community was a refuge for me.” (06:03)
  • Her father’s advice led her to explore new interests without a strict goal, eventually discovering cognitive science.

• Life-Altering Fertility Struggles

  • At the start of 2020, Maya faced the loss of a pregnancy with her surrogate, igniting questions about identity and control:
    “The universe is totally indifferent towards the depth of my desire for this outcome. … I really struggled with this feeling of contending with the true limits of my control. That was very hard for me psychologically.” (12:13)

• Genesis of the Podcast “A Slight Change of Plans”

  • While brainstorming with friends (and after some initial false starts), Maya realized stories of dramatic personal change with high stakes felt more compelling than stories about career shifts.
  • Notable anecdote: Her first “test episode” interviewing her husband Jimmy was panned by a friend as “boring,” teaching Maya that stories need high stakes to truly resonate.
    “My friend Aggie… said, girl, I really love you and Jimmy, and this is so boring. This is a terrible podcast.” (14:08)

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2. From Podcast to Book: Finding the Universal in Personal Stories

Timestamp: 15:09 – 22:51

• Why Write a Book?

  • Maya was hesitant, echoing advice from behavioral economist Richard Thaler: “Don’t write a book!” Ultimately, she was inspired to explore patterns across diverse change stories for a broader synthesis only a book could allow.

• Core Finding:

  • The most resonant insights weren’t about what happened to people, but about shared psychological responses to change (loss, grief, loss of identity, sense of unfairness, etc.).
  • “People going through wildly different changes… have so much more in common when it comes to both the problem statement and the solution set.” (18:44)
  • The book aggregates these lessons across disparate lives—from cancer patients to those facing betrayal, loss, or illness—to offer universal strategies for navigating upheaval.

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3. Case Profiles: Lessons from Extreme Change

a. Olivia – Locked-In Syndrome

Timestamp: 23:17 – 29:25

• Olivia, a young woman in her 20s, suffers a catastrophic brainstem stroke, resulting in Locked-In Syndrome (total paralysis except eye movement).
• The real trauma was not the physical loss, but being “locked out” of managing her image for others—especially her boyfriend’s family.
  • “The gravity of my situation did not sink in until my boyfriend’s family came to visit ... that’s when I fully appreciated that I was locked in.” (26:41)
• Universal lesson: Even at the edge of physical catastrophe, old habits—like people-pleasing—linger, and true growth sometimes means learning internal acceptance, not just overcoming external hardship.

b. Ingrid – Amnesia and the Blank Slate

Timestamp: 29:27 – 35:37

• Ingrid, raised in Colombia, is taught to hide her Indigenous roots; after a biking accident, she loses her autobiographical memory (retrograde amnesia).
• Strikingly, she feels euphoric—unburdened by her past—and, as memories return out of order, falls in love with her family’s heritage anew.
  • “There’s something very curious about the way her memories come back... She is so enchanted by these stories.” (32:00)
• Her story illustrates the liberating potential of change to help us reconsider (and revise) core personal beliefs we might not even realize are optional.
  • “We should not hold our beliefs as these sacred, immutable truths... Change can wipe the slate down clean and give you a chance to ask yourself: Is this a belief that I should carry?” (34:10)

c. Skipped for Brevity—Dwayne

• (Mentioned, but discussion focused on Olivia and Ingrid.)

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4. Change as Identity Shift, Not Just Event

Timestamp: 22:52 – 23:13 / 36:32 – 37:29

• The “real stakes” in change aren’t always in the losses or gains, but in the threats to (and transformation of) identity.
  • “It occurred to me… (the) show is about change, but it’s actually a show about identity, because every story actually is about how people felt that their fundamental sense of self was threatened as a result of the change they went through.” (22:52)
• Maya notes people often mispredict how change will feel, because we ignore that our selves will change too (“end of history illusion”).

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5. Applying Social Science: From Story to Strategy

Timestamp: 36:28 – 37:29

• Maya’s background in cognitive science allowed her to not only collect stories but translate them into psychologically grounded, actionable insights.
  • Naming concepts (“affect labeling,” “identity foreclosure”) helps readers recognize their own experiences.
  • Prescribes strategies for “pressure testing” personal narratives and beliefs for their durability and flexibility.
  • “Giving names to concepts is very helpful for readers... and research on changing minds is where I was able to say, ‘here are strategies you can use to test your own convictions.’” (36:44)

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6. Audience Q&A—Change, Resilience, and Revising Core Beliefs

Notable Segments: 43:26 – end

• On Helping Young People Confront Change in the Age of AI (44:28):

  • Maya: “One thing that ... I have tended to do over the course of my life is to over-plan… [but] we are really bad affective forecasters ... and when big changes happen to us, they also lead to lasting change within us. ... Having humility about all of it ... is important.” (44:53)
  • Michael: “Enroll your kid in improv. ... Once you realize what that muscle [flexibility] is, you can apply it to lots of other things.” (47:36)

• On Letting Go of Immutable Beliefs (50:10):

  • Maya shares the story of a woman whose deep belief in a just world collapses after a tragic accident, forcing a reckoning with the limits and dangers of rigid values.
  • “Imagine that you were born in a different time period… different culture… How would your values be different? And that is just a reminder of the fragility of our belief systems.” (53:03)

• On Writing the Book’s Impact on Maya Herself (53:41):

  • Maya discusses personally grappling with childlessness after multiple miscarriages, and how gratitude and revisiting her sense of self-worth (beyond motherhood) have been transformative.
    • “I am child free and I am the happiest, calmest, most peaceful, joyful version of myself. And I never saw that coming.” (59:03)
    • “What losing, what the pregnancy losses revealed to me was I had placed so much of my self worth in becoming a mom. ... And yet here I am ... I am so grateful for the personal evolution ... so yeah, that was a wonderful belief to have challenged.” (59:35)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Facing Powerlessness:
  “The universe is totally indifferent towards the depth of my desire for this outcome. ... The true limits of my control. That was very hard for me psychologically.”
  — Maya Shankar (12:13)

• On Unexpected Universality: “The cancer patient had far more in common with a betrayed wife than with another sick person; it’s a shared psychology in the face of change.”
  — Maya Shankar (18:44)

• On Revising Identity: “Every story actually is about how people felt that their fundamental sense of self ... was threatened as a result of the change.”
  — Maya Shankar (22:52)

• On Growth Through Hard Times:
  “I am child free and I am the happiest, calmest, most peaceful, joyful version of myself. And I never saw that coming ... the gains have continued far beyond when I had to submit this for publication.”
  — Maya Shankar (59:03 - 59:35)

• On the Fragility of Values:
  “Imagine you were born into a different family, a different time… How would your values be different? ... It’s a reminder of the fragility of our belief systems.”
  — Maya Shankar (53:03)

• Michael Lewis’ Advice for Resilience:
  “Enroll your kid in an improv comedy class. Build that muscle and understand what that muscle feels like.”
  — Michael Lewis (47:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Description | Timestamp | |---|---|---| | Opening | Maya introduces event, her roots in exploring change | 01:57 – 04:16 | | Loss of Violinist Identity | Early trauma, grieving identity | 05:09 – 07:48 | | Fertility Struggles & Birth of Podcast | Navigating loss, need for new narratives | 13:02 – 15:09 | | Book Rationale & Patterns in Change | Why go beyond the podcast? | 16:16 – 22:03 | | Identity at Center of Change | The ‘real’ trauma of change | 22:52 – 23:13 | | Case Studies: Olivia | Locked-in syndrome & people-pleasing | 23:17 – 29:25 | | Case Studies: Ingrid | Amnesia, heritage, blank slate | 29:27 – 35:37 | | On Social Science & Story | How cognitive science shapes recommendations | 36:28 – 37:29 | | Audience Questions | On AI, parenting, flexibility | 43:26 – 48:41 | | Final Audience Qs | Revising beliefs, personal evolution post-book | 50:10 – 61:00 |

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Style, Humor, and Tone

• The rapport between Maya and Michael is playful and witty, each ribbing the other while still honoring the depth of the stories.
• Michael admits to minimal preparation and plays up his book-selling prowess; Maya self-deprecates about her anxiety, people-pleasing, and sales angst.
• Both share vulnerabilities—Maya about loss and growth; Michael about writing about brilliant subjects like Daniel Kahneman.
• They often move between light banter (e.g., “You could sell phone book excerpts, Michael!”) and intense, honest reflection.

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Takeaways

• Change is ever-present, and while the specifics differ, our psychological responses often rhyme—anchored in identity, unpredictability, and the universal human need for meaning.
• Openness to revising one’s beliefs, even those foundational to our self-concept, is not just okay, it’s a path to resilience and growth.
• Storytelling—in podcasts, books, or conversation—remains essential for collectively making sense of life’s shocks.
• The book’s main lesson: strategies rooted in both science and collective wisdom can help anyone build a “survival kit” for whatever change—expected or not—comes next.

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Transcript

[Maya Shankar]

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[Michael Lewis]

Pushkin.

[Maya Shankar]

Hey everyone, it's me, Maya. I recently had the pleasure of launching my new book, the Other side of Change with literary royalty Michael Lewis. Michael, it seems, knows only how to write bestsellers that also tend to get turned into big budget movies like Moneyball, the Big Short and the Blindside. He's a star through and through. Needless to say, I was honored that he wanted to host this conversation. I've known Michael for over a decade and so when we took our seats in front of a live audience in San Francisco, we immediately defaulted to our normal state when hanging out, ribbing one another, joking and also going deep. The conversation you're about to hear is one of my favorites from my book tour. We talked about my experience writing the Other side of Change starting this podcast, and how we think about navigating life's hardest moments. I hope you enjoy it.

[Michael Lewis]

So I Have here, to my right, Maya Shankar, who is a friend from when we go back. I was working on the Undoing project story of Danny Kahneman, and I met you at the Kennedy School.

[Maya Shankar]

I asked if you wanted to be my friend.

[Michael Lewis]

Yes, she did. That's exactly right.

[Maya Shankar]

Sent you an email.

[Michael Lewis]

I went to listen to a presentation that she was giving. She was working in the White House at that point. You were working, you were a behavioral, what was your title?

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, behavioral scientist.

[Michael Lewis]

Right.

[Maya Shankar]

All right.

[Michael Lewis]

So I've watched iterations of Maya. You know, I, I, that was my White House Maya, public policy Maya. And now then she became Google Maya, and then she became podcast Maya, and now she's author Maya. And she, you know, eventually you will be Nobel Prize winning Maya, Maya, we're going to talk. Maya and I are going to talk for 45 minutes and then we're going to open that up to questions. And the conversation is going, is we're going to talk about the book. But before we talk about the book, I want to talk about you. We're going to start with you. And I want you to, I want to start with. Because the book grows out of your podcast. Slight change of plans. And I was present at the birth of your podcast. We share a podcast company, Pushkin, and they're here, They're, I think they're recording it for the podcast. So I want to, let's just start by how you got interested in the subject of change in people's lives. And let's talk a little about the podcast, how you got into this in the first place.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, thank you, all of you, so much for coming. It's so much fun to do this in San Francisco because it does feel like a celebration with friends and family and some new faces. But I am very humbled that all of you took some time out of your evening to spend it with me. And like, mostly. Michael, stop it. So we know who pulled the weight on this invitation.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

Okay.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. So how did I get interested in the topic of change? So 2020, the beginning was a little tough for me personally, because after years of trying to start a family with my husband, Jimmy, we found out, I think it was early March, that our surrogate in Arkansas has had miscarried. And so this big dream that I had of becoming a mom was just, in a moment, shattered. And I had had a lot of formative experiences would change as a kid. You know, losing the violin and then.

[Michael Lewis]

Don't just gloss over that. Talk about that for a minute.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay, let's start there. So from the time I was a little kid, violin was the center of my life. And when I was nine, I started studying at Juilliard. When I was a teenager, Itzhak Perlman invited me to be his private violin student. That was sort of the vote of confidence I needed to think, hey, maybe I have what it could take to become a professional. And it was the first time I remember talking with my siblings and my parents like, oh, maybe conservatory is a real option versus, you know, the standard liberal arts college. And then everything was going according to plan until I had my slight change of plans. And a hand injury that I sustained while playing the violin ended my dreams kind of in a moment. You know, doctors told me that I could no longer play the violin.

[Michael Lewis]

How old were you?

[Maya Shankar]

15.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay, and what was your response to that? How'd you feel?

[Maya Shankar]

I was surprised by how hard I took it. But then I think about the fact that when you're 15 and you've played the violin since you were 6, that's a sizable fraction of your life. And so the loss feels pretty big. And it's hard to understate my devotion to the craft. My sister would say, who's in the front row? That when I was not home, she would actually hear phantom sounds of the violin playing. It was like her worst nightmare. It was so horrible. I'm so sorry, Mira. And also, my life was oriented around the violin. So every Saturday, I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning, catch a train to New York with my mom. I would spend 10 hours there taking classes, come home at 10:30 at night. And there were just a lot of sacrifices involved. And, you know, it was just a huge part of my identity. And so I think what was interesting to me when I lost it is that I felt like I was grieving. The loss of the instrument, sure. But more importantly, the loss of myself in this more fundamental way. I mean, it was the thing that made me feel like I was special and I was good at something and that I belonged. You know, I was bullied in school and violin and that whole community was a refuge for me. And, yeah, it just was really entangled with my self worth.

[Michael Lewis]

I mean, you flash forward many years and you're telling stories of other people's adaptive strategies. Did you have a strategy? Did you? What did you do?

[Maya Shankar]

I doubled down on watching mtv.

[Michael Lewis]

All right.

[Maya Shankar]

I was super mopey. I didn't have any good strategies or coping mechanisms. As a 15 year old, I was just like, this sucks. I was also very Very stubborn. So I kept playing through the pain. I had hand surgery. I took an absurd amount of anti inflammatories. Eventually doctors were like, kid, you got to. What's. You gotta stop. This is clearly not gonna resolve itself. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

At that moment, where did all that energy go?

[Maya Shankar]

So my dad gave me good advice. So it was the summer before college, and I was having serious imposter syndrome because I thought, well, violin's the only reason I even got into college in the first place. And I don't even have that thing. So now what do I do? And he said, you've effectively been wearing blinders for the last 10 years. Your job this summer is to basically be an explorer. I want you to read as much as you can possibly read. I want you to talk to as many people as you possibly can. I just want you to feed your curiosity and to do it in a way that doesn't have a goal attached to it. Because if you're. If you're exploring the world, hoping that you're going to figure out what your college major is going to be, it's going to be limiting in a way.

[Michael Lewis]

And he knows. He knew his daughter. You were so goal oriented.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

Yes.

[Maya Shankar]

And I really like clarity and I really like certainty. So I was going to latch onto anything. It was like, okay, can I pull off being a history major? Okay, I'll go with that. And I'm really glad that I didn't do this with a concrete goal in mind, because I didn't even know that cognitive science was a thing. And it just so happens that I read Steven Pinker's book the Language Instinct. It was in the basement of my parents. My sister had read it in college.

[Michael Lewis]

Which you wouldn't have read if your father didn't.

[Maya Shankar]

Absolutely not. Yeah. I would probably have just skimmed the course catalog and been like, which is the one where I feel like I could actually do okay in it. That would probably have been my strategy. And it was. The book was all about our brain's extraordinary capacity for language. And I had always taken my language abilities for granted. I just didn't really think about them. And this book detailed the sophisticated cognitive machinery that's operating behind the scenes that gives rise to language. And I was totally enraptured. I was like, whoa, this is totally crazy. And it would share things like think about how a little kid learns language, right? They just hear a continuous stream of sound. There's no parsing between words. Kids just figure out when one word stops and the next word begins. And it's like, whoa, that's crazy. Like, you never really teach them grammar, and they, like, somehow learn grammar and grammar. Anyone who has learned English as a second language knows English is not an easy language. It doesn't make any sense grammatically. Like, what is going on? And so I just remember having this moment of awe. Like, wow. I feel genuinely interested in this topic. I'm very curious about it. I want to know more than just language. And then I looked in the course catalog, and I was like, oh, there's a cognitive science major. It combines philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, biology, neurobiology. And you ask a question about the brain from multiple perspectives.

[Michael Lewis]

So this trauma in your life that comes from.

[Maya Shankar]

I mean, little. Little t. Trauma.

[Michael Lewis]

No, no, no.

[Maya Shankar]

Concert violinist, hurts herself. Can't study at Juilliard anymore. Like, kind of. I think that's slightly perfect.

[Michael Lewis]

You motored through it pretty well. You motored through pretty well.

[Maya Shankar]

I just want to pay respect to true trauma.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, all right. Because we're going to get to that. We're going to get. There's an awful lot of it in this book. Let's come closer to the present. You are. Your surrogate has lost the child.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

How does that lead to a podcast?

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. So one thing that was surprising to me is, despite having gone through this violin shift and learning whatever I subconsciously learned from it, I wasn't consciously being like, what lessons should I draw from this experience? And I. Sorry, I was just waving to Jimmy, who came in, my husband. Hello. And sorry to embarrass you. Okay.

[Michael Lewis]

Going to get to you, Jimmy.

[Maya Shankar]

I. So anyway, I. I had had these formative experiences, and I wasn't, you know, consciously drawing lessons, but I felt like, okay, I built some thicker skin. And I found myself reeling after the miscarriage.

[Michael Lewis]

I remember.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. And I. As someone who's quite social, I also felt like it was very, very hard for me to communicate with people. I remember I texted my family and was like, this happened. I can't talk to anyone. Please don't call me. I don't want to talk to anyone for, like, many days. And I finally mustered up the courage, and I called my brother AJ because it just felt like I had to reach out to someone. And he was wonderful, but I was just really struggling. I think the biggest reason I was struggling with that was I love being in control, and I'm very used to hustling my way to solutions. So if I face an obstacle, there's a barrier in my life. I will just work harder. I'll just figure Out a way. I'm very creative and very resourceful when it comes to finding a way to the finish line.

[Michael Lewis]

And relentless.

[Maya Shankar]

And relentless, right? Pretty much to my mom's chagrin. And so for that reason, I felt this sense of powerlessness that was so discomforting for me because I was like, oh, wow. In the world of fertility and whether pregnancies work or not work, there's no such thing as hustling or hard work. The universe is totally indifferent towards the depth of my desire for this outcome. Doesn't really care how hard I'm working at the fertility, at the egg retrievals. None of that matters. And I really struggled with this feeling of contending with the true limits of my control. That was very hard for me psychologically. And that's what introduced me to this whole world of change. All right, and then I was at a party of a person. Who's here, Adele. And I was talking with my friend Christine. We were talking about the idea of a podcast. Oh, you're sitting right next to each other. Thank you, guys.

[Michael Lewis]

Is there anybody in this room you don't know?

[Maya Shankar]

It makes me look bad. My goal, if it's all just my friends and family, I would say 30%. I know.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay, all right.

[Maya Shankar]

70% are true strangers. And we're just so captivated by the title of the book.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah.

[Maya Shankar]

Um, so I was brainstorming my friend Christine, and then we came up with this idea of, oh, wouldn't it be amazing if there was a podcast about change? And I wasn't quite sure what that looked like yet. In fact, at first I thought maybe it'd be career change. And my friend Max, who's in the podcasting business, he told me, maya, don't wait until there's a proper proposal. Right. Just record something. And I was like, okay. He's like, just get into the deep end. So I got on my Android phone, I hit record, and I interviewed Jimmy, my husband, about his career shifts, and I sent it to one of my best friends, Aggie, who's sitting in the back of the room, and she said, girl, I really love you and Jimmy, and this is so boring. This is a terrible podcast. And you had a competitive edge with me because I actually like you guys.

[Michael Lewis]

So Jimmy's very entertaining. What was the problem?

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, I guess I brought it down.

[Michael Lewis]

No, I can guess what the problem was.

[Maya Shankar]

What do you think it was?

[Michael Lewis]

The stakes were so low.

[Maya Shankar]

I mean, the stakes are too low.

[Michael Lewis]

I was just like, who cares about people's career changes?

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, yes, yes, yes. The stakes aren't high enough for exactly the reasons you described. Yeah. Then it just became a podcast about people's unbelievable changes in their personal lives. And the first person that I interviewed was Daryl Davis, this black jazz musician who convinced dozens of people to leave the Ku Klux Klan because of his incredible persuasive powers and his ability to understand what it means to empathize with people who even have vile views. Right. And how to actually get them to change their minds. And I remember I put him as one of my dream guests on my podcast proposal, and then I was able to get him, and that was just the best day. Turns out there's three Daryl Davises in the world, and one of them also agreed to be on the podcast. He's actually a speaking coach, which is not ideal.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, so now we're going to move to the book.

[Maya Shankar]

Can we move into the book a little bit? Yes, please, please.

[Michael Lewis]

So there are what, six, seven different profiles? You're one of them.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. Unexpectedly, I didn't think that the last chapter would be narrative.

[Michael Lewis]

I picked three that I want to talk about.

[Maya Shankar]

Sure.

[Michael Lewis]

We're going to do case studies, and we're going to figure out what you tell these stories, and you're going to explain to us what we can learn from each of these stories. Is that all right?

[Maya Shankar]

Okay.

[Michael Lewis]

I mean, that's what you've kind of done here.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, yeah, no, sorry. That's fair. That's fair. I want to push back a little bit, and I'm so glad that we coordinated in advance what we're going to talk about.

[Michael Lewis]

But no, no one even told me.

[Maya Shankar]

What time to come here. Michael, on the way in, was like, I did extremely little prep for this conversation. I just want you guys to know. And I was like, perfect. That sounds great. That's actually the best version of Michael. So this is great. Here's what I want to push back on. I want to give our readers the joy of the story unfolding in the long form version of this. So I don't want to give away endings so I can talk generally about some of the stories or some of the lessons learned, But I want people to really enjoy it. Their words are always going to beat my words.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, so we'll back away for just one sec before we get into that.

[Maya Shankar]

Like, whatever. Write a book.

[Michael Lewis]

No, no, no.

[Maya Shankar]

Well, all right, we'll talk about that. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Why'd you write a book?

[Maya Shankar]

Okay.

[Michael Lewis]

There are plenty of books out there. Who needs another?

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. And in fact, I ask myself that.

[Michael Lewis]

Question every time before I write a book. Like, does the world need another yes. And often the answer is no.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. Richard Thaler had told me so many times, like, don't write a book, don't write a book, don't write a book. And I started to take it personally. I was like, okay, dude, you haven't seen my writing yet. Like, why do you feel. Why do you feel so strongly about this? But what he was trying to say is so many authors get into the business for the wrong reasons. And kind of like the Bachelor, right? You got to be here for the right reasons for it to work. But the reason that I wrote it is because, one, I love learning new skills. So at the time, I was lucky enough that I had talent representation, and my agents at CAA had been asking me for a really long time, will you write a book?

[Audience Member / Moderator]

Will you write a book?

[Maya Shankar]

And by the way, initially, I mean, I said no for about a year and a half because I was like, it was never on my bucket list to write a book. I was happy to go to my grave not being a published author. I also only want to take on endeavors if I think I can make something exceptional. Which really sets a high bar for you now that you're about to read this book. No, but I want to feel it's great. So I really don't like phoning things in. I didn't want to write a mediocre book that was going to be very unsatisfying for me. And so I kept saying no. And so one was, oh, I would love to build a new skill in adulthood. How much fun would that be? And then the second thing was I had to ask myself, will a book give me something that the podcast can't give me? That would be the only reason to do it. I love the podcast. I love audio. So people listen to podcasts more than they read books, as evidenced by how hard it's been to sell this damn book, despite so much hustling. Oh, my God, you guys, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being supported.

[Michael Lewis]

Doing this for two days.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. Yes, it's your first.

[Michael Lewis]

You're already complaining the sales aren't what you hoped.

[Maya Shankar]

You could literally do an excerpt from the phone book and it would be a number one New York Times bestseller. So you really don't have a lot of credibility here. So annoying how easily you sell books. It's so annoying. Yeah. People were like, hey, when I was asking for advice, I was like, dude, these pre order numbers are paltry. Like, what's going on? And then they were like, well, you know authors, like, why don't you talk to Michael Lewis about his experience selling books? And I was like, yes, I will learn zero lessons that are applicable to my life as an author. Thank you very much. Anyway, I digress. I realized that as I was recording all these podcast episodes about people's incredible lives. So it was like stories of illness, stories of a dream loss, stories of a job loss stories, and stories of just unexpected, wild, anvil drop from the sky style changes. I noticed there are some really interesting connections. In fact, sorry, I should also mention your daughter, who I interviewed Quinn, for the podcast. She was a guest of mine. I noticed that there were really interesting connections across stories. So we are often told when something crappy happens to us going through a divorce, it's like, oh my God, my friend's going through a divorce. You should talk to them. Oh, I lost a loved one. Oh, go to the bereaved section of the bookstore. Oh, I'm going through a job thing. Oh, yeah, there's a community support group for people losing jobs, and I think that's misguided. What matters is a shared psychology in the face of change. So what I've noticed is that people going through wildly different changes, on their surface, have so much more in common when it comes to both the problem statement and the solution set. So to make this concrete, I interviewed a cancer patient and I interviewed a woman who had been betrayed by her husband. She found out he had had a decades long affair. They were both grappling with a deep feeling of betrayal. So they were both struggling with this thing. And they had much more in common than the person with cancer did with someone else who had an illness or disease. And for me, there was just this light bulb moment of, okay, there are these universal things, like this stuff of change that's worth sharing with people, right? We're bristling at the world's unfairness. We are anxious about all the uncertainty that lies ahead. We're grieving an identity that we've lost or a past that was so recent. Like we can feel it. We can feel yesterday. It's so intoxicating to go, I'm quoting the Beatles by accident, counterfactual. We can feel two days ago does that. No, that still counts as plagiarism. Okay. Yesterday, you just want it. It's elusive, but it's like, if I could just get my life back, that would be so amazing. Or we're catastrophizing the future playing out every worst case scenario. Right? That is the Stuff of change. And so my view was, okay, if there's a bunch of common problems, then any story will resonate with anyone who's going through any kind of change. And then the solution set, the set of recommendations that I make, either based in cognitive science or just in people's wisdom, will also resonate if.

[Michael Lewis]

But if they're all the same, why do you need seven different ones then?

[Maya Shankar]

No, sorry. Different lessons emerge from different people's stories. Okay, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

All right.

[Maya Shankar]

Good thing you weren't my editor. Not exactly motivational. He's like, couldn't this have been an Atlantic article?

[Michael Lewis]

Well, that's a good question to ask oneself before one sits down to write a book.

[Maya Shankar]

And that's also a good thing a moderator should ask one's author before one sits down and one's authority.

[Michael Lewis]

But your point wasn't that all these people have the same thing in common? Your point is that sometimes the cancer patient has something in common with the person whose husband cheated on her.

[Maya Shankar]

The bet I'm making is that when people read this book, which I hope they do, they will find resonance in an unexpected story because of the lesson that emerges from it.

[Michael Lewis]

Before we. Again, before we get into the specific story, since you're not going to tell them all the way through, we have a little more time.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

Is in your mind. When you started the podcast, were you thinking, change is always bad change? Is it always loss that you do? How about gain?

[Maya Shankar]

So it's a great question. Yeah, I was thinking about bad change because who wants to hear no one's interested in reading about good change? Hey, I'm here to brag about how wonderful my latest promotion was. It's true that there's a flip side to good change, because of course, we're bad at affecting forecasting, and we get things wrong. And it turns out lottery winners are missing, miserable. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine, that's all true. But I don't really think that's the population that needs to be served right now.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay.

[Maya Shankar]

So I want to help the people who are, like, literally struggling.

[Michael Lewis]

It's loss. You're really?

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, absolutely. And to that point, there was a moment about a year into making a slight change of plans that I was on a walk, and it occurred to me, I thought, this show is about change, but it's actually a show about identity, because every story actually is about how people felt that their fundamental sense of self, their identity, was threatened as a result of the change they went through.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, this is an excellent segue to the first Story.

[Maya Shankar]

Great.

[Michael Lewis]

Why don't we take them in this order? The three people I want to talk about are Olivia, Duane, and Ingrid.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

So let's start with Olivia.

[Maya Shankar]

Olivia was incredible. And I want you to know, by the way, the reason this book took me three and a half years to write is one, because I have a full time job, but two, because it was extremely hard for me to find people that I wanted to feature in this book. Great stories are so, so, so hard to find.

[Michael Lewis]

None of these people were in your podcast, Correct?

[Maya Shankar]

All the people profiled are not in the podcast. And I was very interested, not just in the external beats of a person's story, but from my vantage point, their interior life. Right. So what was shifting within them as they went through their change? That was the novel lens I was going to bring to the table, which is, I want to understand, maybe the thing that they find the hardest isn't the thing that I found would find the hardest. It's so easy for us to impose our mental frames on other people when they're going through change. But my greatest delight as an interviewer is when my subjects would prove me wrong and they'd be like, no, that wasn't the. That wasn't what I was struggling with at all. And I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. Tell me more about that. I want to know because I read one article about you and I never would have gotten that insight. So Olivia, actually, she came to me via Instagram. She sent me a DM and she said she slid into my DMs and she said, hey, I've listened to your podcast. A slight change of plans. I have my own story. I had a severe brain stem stroke when I was in my early 20s and it left me with Locked in syndrome. Now, for those of you who don't know Locked In Syndrome, Diving Bell and the Butterfly, if it rings any bells, it basically means that. So all of your cognition is preserved, but importantly, you cannot voluntarily control any of the muscles in your body except for the muscles that move your eyes. So your only portal for communicating with the outside world is with. Through your blinks. So caregivers will have the letters of an Alphabet on a board and they will slide their finger across those letters, and then a person with locked in will have to blink when they get to the correct letter. And that's how they painstakingly spell out words. And so Olivia tells me that she's going through this when she's 21 years old or 22 years old.

[Michael Lewis]

Who is she before this happens to.

[Maya Shankar]

Well, I'll get to that. Michael. I'm trying to do a, you know, story with tension denouement, you know, so.

[Michael Lewis]

Would you like I could just walk on over there?

[Maya Shankar]

You told me I had to tell the story. Yeah, go ahead. So first I want to say that she texted me and she's like, I just want to share this story with you. And I was in the throes of writing this book and I texted her. I was like, you know, she was hoping maybe to hear back from me at some point. I was like, hey, are you free in like one minute to talk on the phone? And I get on the phone with her and I was like, so instead of doing a one time podcast episode, would you instead like to spend the next three and a half years with me talking deeply about your story? I probably freaked her out, but she was like, okay, yeah, I guess. And so she was. She was one of those people that made this book the book. It gave me the confidence that I did not, in fact, need to return my advance.

[Michael Lewis]

You've already told us something.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

That the person who you. She's got this syndrome where she can only communicate by blinking her eyes. And she's on the phone with you.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay.

[Maya Shankar]

So she was sending me a text on the phone. Michael. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I just. You didn't have to make that so explicit.

[Michael Lewis]

No, no. One day I will improve to the point where you're satisfied with my interviewing skills.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

But I.

[Michael Lewis]

But, but, but, but. Let's talk about your interview.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. Okay.

[Michael Lewis]

I'm trying to figure out. So this person gets in touch who wants to tell her story.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. And so I started interviewing her. And here's who Olivia was before the stroke. She was a fairly happy but very insecure high school student slash college student. So that's most people. Right. And so she has this catastrophic brain stem stroke. She ends up in the hospital. What's so fascinating? This is what I mean by that twist. The angle that I didn't see coming because when I first saw her message on Instagram, I thought, okay, this is going to be a story about adversity in the face of hardship and a laborious recovery and physical therapy and beating the odds. That's what I thought it was going to be. And then Olivia's like, the gravity of my situation did not sink in until my boyfriend's family came to visit about 12 days later. And I had never been able to gain these people's approval. And when I realized in the moment they came into the hospital room, that I could not curate an image of myself, that I could not be the person that I knew they needed me to be in order to like me back. That is when I fully appreciated that I was locked in. And I thought, how incredible. For two reasons. One, I think we naively believe that when we get such catastrophic news, like we're locked in, all of our old preferences and values and ways of thinking about the world are immediately right sized and we don't care about that stuff anymore. And we are immediately enlightened and we have perspective. And it's like, who cares what other people think? I'm just concerned about being able to talk again. Right. Obviously, that's not true. So, actually, one of the people that I interviewed for the podcast, Scott, who had cancer, he was like, on any given day, I'm more worried about losing my six pack than I am about dying. That's the reality of human psychology. We still have. We are still the same person. We were actually two minutes ago with this new information that we're actively processing. So I found that fascinating that, like, she would still care so much, but her chapter is actually about what it means to reckon with the fact that you can no longer, almost by brute force, you must relinquish your people pleasing tendencies. And I'm a people pleaser. You wouldn't know that by the way I'm engaging with Michael tonight. I've lost one friend, but I am a people pleaser with most people. And I so loved that there was this theme. Like my goal with the book was exceptional story, very relatable, universal lesson. And so I just love that this magnificent story of Locked In Syndrome was actually about a young woman's desire to be liked and loved by people and how she had to become comfortable with the rawest, most vulnerable version of herself.

[Michael Lewis]

So let's talk. Tell me about Ingrid.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. Ingrid is someone who, from the time she's very little, growing up in Colombia, is told that she should never tell people about her family's indigenous background. So her mom cautions her from a young age. She says, all these family stories about your grandpa's magical abilities and our spiritual traditions, they're gonna be harshly judged by others and you might face violence or discrimination. Don't talk about these with anyone.

[Sponsor Voice]

Can you.

[Michael Lewis]

Can I stick your stuff? Can you pause just a little bit there and tell them? Can you tell them one of the kind of stories that she was told as a kid? They're great stories.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. That her grandfather could move clouds and Help farmers with their crops. And so little Ingrid would hear these stories with such delight. But she quickly learned, like, oh, wow, no, these are shameful stories. Right. I shouldn't talk about them with anyone else. And then when she. So she continues this. When she moves to Chicago eventually and has a bustling community around her, her friends notice she's very guarded about her upbringing and her cultural heritage and just her life in Colombia in general. And, you know, her boyfriend even would tell her, like, ingrid, you never open up to me about your life back in your homeland. Why not? And so he said being inscrutable was kind of her defining quality. And then one day, she gets into a biking accident, and she develops amnesia, retrograde amnesia. So what that means is you lose a lot of memories from the past, but you can still form new memories.

[Michael Lewis]

But she didn't develop it. She comes out of this crash, and she doesn't remember who she is.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes. So in a moment, it's like.

[Michael Lewis]

Like no idea who she is.

[Maya Shankar]

Correct.

[Michael Lewis]

And has to kind of uncover who she is. Like, it becomes a detective.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah. So she. So she. She does nothing about herself.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

Just an amazing thing.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Waking up and knowing nothing about who you are.

[Maya Shankar]

She gets up from the bike, and she knows. She knows how to use the bike. So it's interesting because with retrograde amnesia, all your skills are still intact. So you can still read and you can still write and you can still pick up a phone and call someone, but you don't have an understanding of who you are. And so she stares at her reflection at one point and thinks she's observing someone else until she finally puts it together and is like, oh, my God, that's me. And there's something very curious about the way that her memories come back to her. So. So, so sorry. One thing that I should note is unlike most people who would be totally freaked out of their mind if this were to happen, Ingrid experiences unbridled joy and euphoria.

[Michael Lewis]

She knows she doesn't know who she.

[Maya Shankar]

Is, and she's thrilled about it.

[Michael Lewis]

And she's to the point where she doesn't even want to look in the mirror.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. She doesn't want to remember anything.

[Michael Lewis]

She doesn't want to remember anything.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

That is especially weird.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Audience Member]

Because.

[Michael Lewis]

Because don't you think if you felt that way, you would ask yourself, why do I feel this way? And maybe, like, what I was. Maybe I was a serial killer or something?

[Maya Shankar]

Absolutely. It was Ingrid. And I could not have more different cognitions. That was one of the other delights I'm like, I don't relate to this person at all. Right.

[Audience Member]

Yes.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

You'd be scrambling to get back to Maya as fast as possible. Right.

[Maya Shankar]

I'd be like, what is her Amazon ranking? What is this person? I don't know if she's written a book, but I need to know her Amazon ranking. And so Ingrid has this euphoria, and she describes it as a feeling of lightness. She feels unburdened in some way, but she can't understand quite why. And as Michael said, as she's going through these next few weeks trying to halt her recovery, she covers up every mirror in her house with blankets because she doesn't want to be reminded. She doesn't read any of the journals on her bookshelf. She wants to preserve this feeling of lightness. And what happens is, as her memories slowly come back, they come back a little bit out of order, and in a way, that actually changes her relationship with her family's history. So the first set of things that come back are her family's stories. It just comes back to her in a rush. Oh, my God. My grandpa could move clouds. My mom would bless water. Both of them were curandera. I can't roll my R's. I'm not gonna try. They were spiritual healers. And she is so enchanted by these stories. She thinks they're so beautiful. And she starts sharing them liberally with everyone. Tells her boyfriend that night, oh, my God, have I told you I have this incredible past? Tells her friends at dinner parties. So she just. She's like a ball of energy for two weeks, just delighted to tell everyone she can meet about these stories.

[Michael Lewis]

There's no idea that what she's doing is transgressing exactly nothing.

[Maya Shankar]

Until one night, she has a flash in her mind of her mom staring at her sternly, and she rushes to the bathroom, and that's when she remembers. Oh, my God. I'm ashamed of these stories. These are a source of shame for me. I'm not supposed to even talk about them, but it's too late. She has already arrived at a renewed relationship with her beautiful family heritage. And the reason I love this story, why I called the chapter the Blank Slate, is that it is a reminder to all of us that we should not hold our beliefs as these sacred, immutable truths that are not worthy of revision. And change can serve as a beautiful moment of revelation where it reveals to us, oh, my gosh. I've been laboring under this view. It might be problematic. Is it outdated for Ingrid she realized she overinterpreted her mom's message. So her mom only cautioned her to not share this because she was worried about Ingrid's safety. She was deep. Her mom was deeply proud of these stories. But we so often have this happen, right? 90% of our beliefs. I just made that number up. But let's just assume I'm just. I'm just your classic social scientist. No, I'm just kidding. And 90% of you believed me just now. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Many of our beliefs. I don't know what the numbers are. Are actually sitting on very flimsy ground. We learned those ways of thinking and seeing the world based on subconscious messaging when we were kids, from parents, from teachers, from popular culture, from TV shows we watched, from culture and our upbringing, whatever it was. And yet it's not like every day we wake up thinking, what belief should I interrogate for its credibility today? Right? And so what change can do, like it did for Ingrid, is wipe the slate down clean and give you a chance to ask yourself, is, is this a belief that I should carry? And do.

[Michael Lewis]

Do we need trauma for that?

[Maya Shankar]

No. So one of the things. So I don't want anyone to have to go through a change to benefit from this book. So the thing that I was very intent on is this book is for anyone who is not just in the throes of change, but someone who's looking to change their relationship with a past experience that they have a very troubled relationship with, or someone who simply wants to get ahead of a big change that's forthcoming and it's going to come for all of us. Spoiler alert. Like I was telling you, behind the scenes, like, the last month of my life was horrible, and I dealt with lots of unexpected change, and I was like, damn it, I wrote the book. I thought it was done. I thought I'd wipe my hands clean of change. And now I'm going through, and it's awful. But I wanted to give people strategies to almost build armor around themselves so that when they get thrown that next change, they think, okay, I've got a little bit of a survival kit here. I know what to do about it.

[Michael Lewis]

Was your social science background at all useful to you in doing the book?

[Maya Shankar]

I know, oh, 100%.

[Michael Lewis]

Why, how and why? Because these are stories, and you can, you know, sort of draw conclusions from the stories, but explain how your social science background sort of finds its way into the book.

[Maya Shankar]

So I think, first of all, giving names to concepts is very Helpful for readers. Right. They want to know that there's a thing like identity foreclosure or affect labeling, whatever the concept is. But also because when it came to prescribing recommendations, that's where the social science is very helpful. So we can identify from Ingrid's story that she had these faulty beliefs that were problematic in X or Y ways. But how do each of us tap into our own mental flexibility and challenge our own self beliefs? This is where all the research on changing minds and canvassing and whatnot is very, very helpful. And where I was able to say, okay, here are eight or nine strategies you can use to test your own convictions, to pressure test them and make sure that they would hold up to scrutiny.

[Michael Lewis]

So we only got a couple of minutes before I let them start asking you questions. There are a couple. We'll skip, Dwayne, because I want to ask you a couple of other things. Did anybody you approached try to write about, not want to be written about?

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, of course.

[Michael Lewis]

So you got turned down.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Who turned you down?

[Maya Shankar]

Let me tell you one example. So there was a woman. I want to protect her privacy because she didn't want to be written about. I mean, yeah, it's all disguiser. I wrote about. I was interviewing a woman whose story I found absolutely fascinating. And at the end, she said, at the end of our interviews, which only lasted a couple weeks, she said, I feel like I'm kind of writing my own eulogy when we have these interviews. And I was like, whoa, that's really intense. I don't want you to feel like that. And it's because they were facing an illness that would be terminal. And it was very, very hard for her to. And also I think for her to. To surrender that kind of power over to me if she was going to talk about her odds or likelihood of surviving or not, she wanted to be the author of that narrative. And I totally understood. And I was like, yes, that should be. Yeah, that's her material.

[Michael Lewis]

So how are the subjects of the book responded to this?

[Maya Shankar]

So really, really well.

[Michael Lewis]

Nobody's angry.

[Maya Shankar]

Nobody's angry. I know that. So unlike you, I mentioned I was a people pleaser. So Michael has. Michael has pissed off so many of.

[Michael Lewis]

Pissed off a lot of subjects.

[Maya Shankar]

Oh my God.

[Michael Lewis]

Yeah, well, that's right. There's a rule. They get to. They get to read the book when you get to read the book.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. First of all, so you have the thickest skin. I mean, not collagen wise. I'm just saying you have the thickest Skin of anyone that I know. Because you just let criticism. Like, I don't even know if it hits your skin. It's like you have a chemical repellent that doesn't even let it touch you. He's like, Daniel Kahneman. Yeah. He was really pissed off about the way that I wrote about the whatever project. I'm like, nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. He's like, yeah, he'll get over it. You know, it's just like, you're so chill about everything. How are you so chill?

[Michael Lewis]

Well, so in the case of Danny, it's different. A little different. Danny was the most terrifying subject I ever had. Cause his mind could just run circles around mine.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

Mostly my subject is sort of the C student. And, you know, they're athletes and Wall street traders, and they're not that smart. And so I'm not that worried about what they might say or that they might think something that my brain hasn't already thought.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

But Danny, you just know he's going to think of 18 different things. But he had a very specific problem, and it was that he didn't. He looked. It was about this love affair with Amos Tversky. Basically, this platonic love affair, this collaboration. He didn't like the way he was positioned in a way in rel, which was the way everybody saw him. He didn't see himself.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay.

[Sponsor Voice]

So that.

[Michael Lewis]

And he just said, you didn't do me any favors there. Yeah, but he wasn't that angry. I mean, we would go out and whenever we were here together, we'd go out to Chez Panisse, and he'd say, you can make it up to me by buying me the tart for dessert.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

So it was not.

[Maya Shankar]

You know, I really, really deeply hate upsetting people.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay, Well, I don't.

[Maya Shankar]

And.

[Michael Lewis]

So I. Trying to upset them.

[Maya Shankar]

No, no.

[Michael Lewis]

That's not the point. Pain is not to upset them.

[Maya Shankar]

The point is to sort of deliver.

[Michael Lewis]

What you think is true on the page.

[Maya Shankar]

Absolutely.

[Michael Lewis]

And let the chips fall where they are.

[Maya Shankar]

So my policy for the book was I would not allow any editorial input on anything that I've written. I did allow for a fact check, but I did not let anyone interfere with the writing.

[Michael Lewis]

And nobody came back and said, you got me slightly wrong. I think.

[Maya Shankar]

I don't know if everyone has read their chapter yet.

[Michael Lewis]

All right. Okay.

[Maya Shankar]

Duane read his chapter and set. It was really healing for him.

[Michael Lewis]

So, I mean, by the way, you should say who Ingrid is. I mean, suddenly these people are not.

[Maya Shankar]

Ingrid's based in San Francisco. She wrote the man who Could Do Clouds. Yeah. She's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

This all turned into this. Turned into that. Actually, this is a story of gain. Yeah, that's the one story gain. Yes.

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

So the last thing I'm just kind of curious about.

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, in Ingrid, for example, she. She did say she loves that her story was interpreted through a very fresh lens because it was one she had not explored in the book that she wrote. So it was really fun for her. Yeah.

[Michael Lewis]

She left a lot of material on the floor. I mean, I just couldn't believe. That was amazing. It was. When I saw who she was, I thought, why didn't she write this?

[Maya Shankar]

Yeah, totally. Don't tell her that.

[Michael Lewis]

So did you enjoy doing this?

[Maya Shankar]

I actually loved it.

[Michael Lewis]

Did you like it more than the podcast?

[Maya Shankar]

It was very different. Writing is solitary, though. My husband Jimmy, spent so much time helping me on this book, and I was so grateful for his partnership. We just kind of, like, coop him in the living room and just like, go. Go at it. Yeah. It's a very different experience. What I loved about writing the book, which, by the way, I'm saying I love it, but it was also absolutely the hardest intellectual thing I've ever done. It's also the thing I'm proudest of, which is wonderful, because as the daughter of two Indian immigrants, pride is not something I feel often, given the criticism received in my upbringing.

[Michael Lewis]

Was that knowing laughter from the front row? I think it was knowing laughter from the front row. Well, let's kick it to the audience.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. Let me. Oh, by the way, we are allowed to go, like, 10 minutes. Are people open to going, like, 10 minutes over? So we. Don't you just finish this?

[Michael Lewis]

Okay. We've already run late.

[Maya Shankar]

We're already running late. Okay.

[Michael Lewis]

No, go ahead, finish.

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, sorry. I was going to say, with the book, what was so nice is you have the luxury of time and space to breathe because you're doing dozens of hours of interviews with people over many, many years. And so I could explore kind of every nook and cranny, and there were. The stakes were low, and it didn't go anywhere. It didn't go anywhere. But with Inkgrid, it was like there were moments in this book turning points where if I hadn't gone down that little small alley, like, I would never have discovered these incredible things. So that was.

[Michael Lewis]

You never would have found it in a podcast.

[Maya Shankar]

Never. Never. So that was the part that was most joyful for me.

[Michael Lewis]

Right. You're able to make connections that you wouldn't otherwise.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

Right.

[Maya Shankar]

Yes.

[Michael Lewis]

All right, so let's open it up. Is there a mic or are people just going to stand up and shout? There we go.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

Hi, I'm Sonika, single. I'm a huge fan of your podcast. The question for both of you, which.

[Maya Shankar]

Podcast do you say.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

Michael Lewis has written so much.

[Maya Shankar]

I'm just in awe.

[Michael Lewis]

I have a podcast too, but I don't think.

[Audience Member / Moderator]

The question for both of you. You can decide who want to answer first or better answer. I have a college going daughter, she's doing cognitive science. And I'm just curious. Our kids are going to go through the massive change and they are going through the massive change right now as we speak in the AI era and where so much of what you're talking about I think is just happening to us without even the face of big change. The change is happening so slowly, but it's happening a lot. What is your advice for parents and kids and the students? How can they build that muscle in a way that it's progressive and they're growing and taking us to the next place?

[Maya Shankar]

Michael, you should answer.

[Michael Lewis]

Or the change person.

[Maya Shankar]

I don't do AI person.

[Michael Lewis]

I never change.

[Maya Shankar]

What about Sam Bankman? Fried? You're in tech.

[Michael Lewis]

No, no, no, it is, I mean this is a different. This is an interesting. There's a distinction here between external change, like rapid technological change that changes the environment.

[Maya Shankar]

All right, fine. Just to get used to stop. I'll just answer it.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay, go ahead.

[Maya Shankar]

So I'll start by saying I don't know the answer to your question. And one thing that I have tended to do over the course of my life is to over plan. I've been making five and ten year plans from the time I was five years old. Okay, super fun hang. Really, really cool kid. And for that reason, sorry, for that reason, I have really. I've really struggled with change because I would over prescribe the future. And we know from decades of research, legitimate social science research, that we are really bad affective forecasters. We're very bad at predicting how we will feel and think about the big changes that happen in our lives. And one lesson that I learned from writing the other side of change was that we often forget at the outset of a big change that it's not just the world around us that's gonna change. We are gonna be changing. We are not static entities. We fall prey to what psychologists call the end of history illusion. We think we're done changing. So we fully acknowledge we've changed in the past. But if you were to ask me how much I expect to change in the future, I'll be like, nope, what you see is what you get. Finished product. And so, actually, Dan Gilbert and his colleagues, they call this illusion a watershed moment in which we falsely believe we become the person we'll be forever. And so what's really important about this is that when big changes happen to us, they also lead to lasting change within us. We develop new perspectives and abilities and vantage points. And that's the same thing as perspectives and values and beliefs and ideas about the world and ways of just seeing us and everything. And I say that because I think having humility about all of it, not trying to get ahead of how your kid. When your kid's anxious about it or you're anxious about it, you don't want to get too far ahead because you truly don't know how. You. First of all, you don't know how you'll respond, because we just know that we're bad at that prediction. And then we definitely don't know how we're going to respond because we will be different people at that moment in time in ways that are really hard to predict. And so I think something that can calm the nervous system is to try not to excessively anticipate just how catastrophic it will feel or just how, you know what. Psychologically, whatever it'll feel. Because at the end of the day. And like my. My brother AJ Always says this to me. He's like, you know, humans are just incredibly psychologically resilient and adaptive, and it's just true. Everyone will figure it out to some degree. Right? They're just going to have to. Yeah, those are my thoughts. Any other. Then Michael has a real answer.

[Michael Lewis]

A weird little piece of advice.

[Maya Shankar]

Just.

[Michael Lewis]

Tiny little thing. It's a tiny little thing. It isn't a lecture. It's a. It's a. No, that's a. That's a speech. You gave a speech. You have a speech in you on this subject? I don't. This is not my subject. Yeah, but, but, but have your son enroll in an improv comedy class. Build. Build that muscle like that muscle and understand what that muscle feels.

[Maya Shankar]

Talking to an Indian person, you think they're going to enroll their kid. They're in Kuman Math.

[Michael Lewis]

If they think. If they think it's going to get ahead, absolutely. So. But there's a. In fact, if you want to give them a great present. Second City daughter. Sorry, Second City in Chicago. Has you read the book? Well, they also. You can send your daughter there for four days and just drop her in an immersion class. And I did it. I brought a child with me to do it, and it was an amazing experience, and she'll never forget it. And that muscle, once you realize what that muscle is, you can apply it to lots of other things.

[Maya Shankar]

That's a great answer. Genuinely. Genuinely. That's a great answer. It beat my answer.

[Michael Lewis]

If you're lucky, I'm as secure a person as I am, because I would just be out of here. I'd been out of here half an hour ago. All right, so we have any. We're gonna. We got a little bit more time. We got time for one or two more.

[Maya Shankar]

No one. Everyone else is here. You seem to be the one who's in a big rush. Where do you have to go? She's going to dinner with me, so it's me. Either way, I got my money, so be here with me rather than there with me.

[Michael Lewis]

Run this in and run this in and out in an hour.

[Maya Shankar]

You're fine. You're fine. Okay. Any other questions? Yeah. Okay. Hi. Hi.

[Audience Member]

Thank you so much for sharing your stories and about the book and all of that. I'm Brian. We had a little bit of a back and forth on Instagram. Actually, speaking of DMs, anyways, something.

[Michael Lewis]

Were you a subject?

[Audience Member]

Oh, no. Something you said sort of got me thinking about it being okay to change your beliefs. And you don't have to have say the same answer to what feels like your core beliefs. And sort of what I think a lot of us are taught is that to be a good person, you have guiding principles that are, like, immutable and that guides everything you do. And that's unshakable foundation of what you think. And then something like this happens and you start to doubt those things. And sort of how I'm interpreting that part of the conversation tonight is that that's okay. So I'm hoping that you can dive into that.

[Maya Shankar]

Oh, my gosh. I absolutely love that question, Brian. And thanks for reaching out to me over Instagram. The penultimate chapter of the book is actually about a woman who really believes the world is just. That's a big part of her upbringing. So her parents kind of tell her, look, if you do good, good things will happen to you. My trainer, Matt, and I talk about this all the time. Right. He believes in, like, karma and, like, good things happen to good people. And I'm always like, matt, my heart rate's already up. Don't get me started. I can't have this conversation Today, okay? With all your spiritual woo woo nonsense. Okay. Anyway, so she really believes that if she does good, good things will happen. And that is actually like her trajectory for most of her life. Right? She works hard in school, she gets good grades, she was nice to people. People are nice to her back. Right? Input, output, model, clean. And then when she is in her 20s, she. It gets really dark really quickly, guys. She's just driving on the road and a little boy who's 8 years old runs out onto the street because he didn't look in both directions, and she hits him and she kills him. And because Marianne's view in a just world is so robust, she ends up engaging in all these mental gymnastics to help to justify what has happened. She could have just said in that moment, wow, the world is like the universe is callous. It's indifferent, it's indiscriminately cruel.

[Michael Lewis]

Or it's just unpredictable.

[Maya Shankar]

Or it's unpredictable. But so much of her sense of security and meaning and value in the world came from the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. That was a foundational view that she carried, such that she could not allow this accident to threaten that view. So what did she do instead? She wrote a narrative in her mind that she was bad, that she was dangerous, that she carried a dangerous essence, and that her mandate was to actually spend her life hiding from other people, to protect them from her wrath, basically. Right? Like, if she came to, she wouldn't allow herself to be near children anymore. She wouldn't allow herself to drive on freeways, she wouldn't leave knives when her cleaners came to clean the kitchen, she would put them away because she was so afraid of causing another accident and it ruined her life to think this. And I won't share how the story ends, but needless to say, Marianne has to revisit her relationship with a just world. And that was one of those things that she grew up with. And it was really hardened and it took a lot to kind of help her loosen her grip on that way of thinking. So that is to say, I think even views that are very, very cemented and that we think make us good, I think that view is kind of agnostic. I don't think it makes you a good person or a bad person person to view life in that way. But one of my favorite thought experiments that I read about in Think Again, which is an Adam Grant book, was imagine that you were born in a different time period. Imagine you were born into a different Family. Imagine you were born into a different culture or religious environment. How would your values be different? And that is just a reminder of the fragility of our belief systems.

[Michael Lewis]

Let's do one more.

[Maya Shankar]

All right. On the topic of change, just any belief systems that were changed from writing this book.

[Michael Lewis]

There we go. That's the one we got.

[Maya Shankar]

There we go.

[Michael Lewis]

Maya, how have you changed?

[Maya Shankar]

Is it okay if I give a lecture?

[Michael Lewis]

Yes, give a lecture.

[Maya Shankar]

Okay. I started off saying that as I was writing this book, my husband Jimmy and I were going through a tough period with heartbreaks and obstacles and disappointments when it came to starting a family. And when I. The genesis for the podcast was an emptiness and a void that I felt in my life that I wanted to fill with something after the first miscarriage. And then about a year and a half later, we found out that our surrogate was pregnant with identical twins. Identical twin girls. And we were just over the moon and so delighted. And then our surrogate miscarried again. And I just want to share two things about that in terms of lessons and values that I've learned. So the first thing is that on the night of the second miscarriage, it was particularly challenging because we had just seen healthy, beating hearts a couple hours earlier. So it was just a total roller coaster of a day where we were like, oh, my God, this is amazing news, and it's finally happening for us. And then, oh, my gosh. No, it's not. And I was just in. I was laying in bed, and my husband Jimmy comes over, and he's like, hey, Mayi. May is his pet name for me. He's like, mayi, let's just say a few things that we're grateful for. And I was like, bro, hell nah. Okay? You take your Instagram bs, You go over to that corner with your toxic positivity, you do the gratitude exercise. You have a beer with Mitch McConnell. I'm not doing that, okay? It's so jarring, and I feel like crap, and so I'm just gonna stare under the covers. But he was very cute and earnest about it, and I was like, okay, fine. I'll just get him off my back if I do this. And so I started. My list started to flow out of me. I said, I'm really grateful to be an aunt to my six nieces and nephews. I'm so grateful for my Zoom workouts with my trainer Matt, who I have philosophical discussions with, and we talk about the Bachelor. I am so grateful that I've worked with the same people for, like, 15 years. How lucky am I that I get to work with my best friends? I'm grateful for the California rays, how strong the sun is when you wake up in the morning. Like there were many. So, so much to be grateful for in my life. And I remember saying, also, I'm so grateful for a slight change of plans. I literally get to go into my apartment closet and connect with someone from around the world about this incredible story of change and what happened in engaging in this exercise, which is called the self affirmation exercise. My husband's a software engineer. He did this unknowingly. But basically what you do is you identify all the things that bring your life meaning and purpose that are not threatened by the change you're going through. So if you're in a tough spot in your relationship, you might focus on your spiritual life, or if you are having a tough spot in your relationship, you focus on how much value you get from work. And what that did for me in that moment is it made me realize that I had been so laser focused on my dream of becoming a mom, that I had developed tunnel vision. I had completely lost sight of how otherwise rich and dimensional and full of meaning and joy my life was. And it was so valuable for me to take that camera lens that was so zoomed in, it was blurry. At this point you couldn't see anything and just like zoom out a lot and say, oh my God, your whole identity has not been threatened by this loss. You are still very much Maya with so much joy to live for. And did I go to bed like happy that night? Of course not. But I went to bed feeling a bit more whole. And I think that was a very valuable lesson about identity. And then the final, the second thing I wanted to say in the two part lecture series is that one thing I discovered. So I talk about change as revelation in this book. So when a really negative thing happens to us, it can feel like an apocalypse. And there's something interesting about the meaning of the word apocalypse, which is that it comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which actually means revelation. And so that etymology is instructive. Change can upend us, yes, but it can also reveal things to us. And what losing, what the pregnancy losses revealed to me was I had placed so much of my self worth in becoming a mom. And I think cultural forces played a really big role. But it really felt like if I did not achieve this goal that society told me was identity defining, I could never live a fulfilling, happy, meaningful life. There's this Sheila Heady quote that's like, if you don't have children, people wonder what your meaning is and wonder if you have any meaning at all. And there's a particular stigma reserved for child free women. I'm a child free cat free woman. J.D. vance. Okay. And, and so I just remember that if you had asked me in the moment when I'm under the covers when Jimmy's asking me this incredibly annoying question about being grateful, if you'd asked me in that moment, like, maya, will anything good ever come from this? I would have been like, no. Will you ever feel truly fulfilled in life if you don't have children? I would have said no. And yet here I am, like three or so years later, I am child free and I am the happiest, calmest, most peaceful, joyful version of myself. And I never saw that coming. It was a transformation that was occurring kind of subconsciously. And I, and I credit the people that I interviewed for the book for giving me the kind of wisdom that I needed to get there, to first of all recognize that I had this unhealthy identity, attachment to motherhood, and to challenge to understand where did it come from? Why do I believe this? Why is it problematic? But then also to learn so many other valuable lessons about what it means to live a rich life even when life doesn't go according to plan. And so I am so grateful for the personal evolution that I experienced. It was such an unexpected part of the journey. I do write about it in the final chapter, but the gains have continued far beyond when I had to submit this for publication. Like, I continue to derive so much meaning and value from those stories. And so, yeah, that was a, it was a wonderful belief to have challenged Maya Shucker. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, Michael. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this special live episode of A Slight Change of Plans. You can find my book the Other side of Change in the episode notes [e-mail] book and exciting news. We recently learned that the Other side of Change is an instant New York Times bestseller. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome. We are so happy you're here. If you want to get caught up, check out the special link in our show notes for what I'm calling the Slight Change of Plan starter pack. It's a list of some of my favorite episodes that we've aired and features a great mix of incredible stories and practical, cutting edge science that I think you're gonna love. We'll be back in a week with another episode of A Slight Change of Plans See you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family in includes our showrunner Alexandra Garriton, our lead producer Megan Lubin, our associate producer Sonja Gerwitt, and our sound engineer, Erica Huang. Luis Guerra wrote our delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. Special thanks to Daphne Chen for her editorial support of this episode. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone, everyone there. And of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.

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[Michael Lewis]

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[Maya Shankar]

Five on one and I was the one.

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[Maya Shankar]

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[Michael Lewis]

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[Maya Shankar]

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[Audience Member / Moderator]

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[Maya Shankar]

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