Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone. Earlier this year, I did a bunch
Speaker 1: of interviews for the launch of my book, The Other
Speaker 1: Side of Change. One of them was with the actor
Speaker 1: and comedian Rain Wilson, best known as Dwight from The Office.
Speaker 1: Rain and I covered so much ground in this conversation.
Speaker 1: We talked about the science of language development, my experience
Speaker 1: creating a job in the Obama White House, Rain's personal
Speaker 1: reflections on faith and meditation, and what led me to
Speaker 1: select each of the stories that appear in my book.
Speaker 1: I really hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: Hey there, it's me Rain Wilson, and I want to
Speaker 2: dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations
Speaker 2: about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends,
Speaker 2: and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the
Speaker 2: soul Boom Podcast.
Speaker 1: Hi Maya, Hi Rain.
Speaker 2: It's so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1: It's so nice to meet you too. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: I've so enjoyed your new book.
Speaker 3: I'm really excited to talk.
Speaker 2: To you about it.
Speaker 1: Thank you. This means a lot.
Speaker 2: It's called The Other Side of Change.
Speaker 1: Yes, Okay, Who we become when life makes other plans.
Speaker 2: And you have become many things, a podcaster and a
Speaker 2: best selling author and a cognitive scientist on the other
Speaker 2: side of other.
Speaker 1: Plans, lots of other plans.
Speaker 2: In a weird way, this just evokes for me something
Speaker 2: that I've been undergoing over the last few years in
Speaker 2: my fifties, which is my whole life was acting as
Speaker 2: soon as I started. Why I started later. I started
Speaker 2: like sixteen seventeen, and then pursued it through college and
Speaker 2: went to to you know, repertory school and theater and
Speaker 2: off Broadway and tours and you know, just trying to
Speaker 2: build my career, get a little bit better agent, and
Speaker 2: get a little bit better job and make a little
Speaker 2: money and try and support myself and study, and then
Speaker 2: of course with Dwight here I am like having kind
Speaker 2: of hit this home run, Like here's a great memorable
Speaker 2: character that is in the cultural zeitgeist and consciousness. Apparently
Speaker 2: it's the most shared person or character on like the
Speaker 2: what do they call the emojis or don't know what
Speaker 2: are those called JITs?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it's the most shared, like Jiff, Yes, I'm
Speaker 3: one of the shares. You've shared a lot of white
Speaker 3: gifts So there's my big weird face being shared millions
Speaker 3: of times.
Speaker 1: And I mean it was. It's just one of the
Speaker 1: most superb characters that exists on TV.
Speaker 2: And it's in a weird way. My entire life led
Speaker 2: up to creating that character, because that's like I said,
Speaker 2: when I was in acting school, we learned how to
Speaker 2: create characters and play absurd circumstances with great seriousness, and
Speaker 2: create kind of clown and inhabit the body and do
Speaker 2: physical comedy that still felt, you know, grounded in the
Speaker 2: real world. Like I had a lot of training that
Speaker 2: led up to to Dwight and a lot of different
Speaker 2: roles that and since Dwight, I've played a ton of
Speaker 2: really cool roles that are very different than Dwight. Not
Speaker 2: a lot of people have seen those roles, but that's okay.
Speaker 2: There've been some great movies and other TV shows and
Speaker 2: theater and and whatnot. But I've had a couple of
Speaker 2: people say like, oh, so have you left acting now.
Speaker 2: It's like, well, no, I just had a movie come
Speaker 2: out and I'm doing another thing and just was you know,
Speaker 2: on Broadway. And they're like, oh, I thought you'd left
Speaker 2: acting to be a part and author and talk about
Speaker 2: spirituality and the human experience and they So the public
Speaker 2: perception in a lot of ways is shifting, like oh,
Speaker 2: is that guy still an actor or has he moved
Speaker 2: into another line of work. And it's been it's been
Speaker 2: an interesting shift internally for me, like how I've lived,
Speaker 2: you know, thirty years plus as an actor being my
Speaker 2: existential identity and now I'm also doing this other thing.
Speaker 2: I'm hoping to do both. I'm hoping to write books
Speaker 2: and have conversations like this and occasionally play a silly,
Speaker 2: weird character in a TV show or a film or
Speaker 2: something like that, and I think that's how it's going
Speaker 2: to work out. But it it has been. It has
Speaker 2: been a shift of like, oh, yeah, this is a
Speaker 2: new this is a new identity beyond Rainn Wilson slash actor.
Speaker 1: Yes. I so resonate with that because I feel like,
Speaker 1: for basically all of my childhood, I was a violinist
Speaker 1: before I was even maya. I mean, that was the
Speaker 1: primary label that I gave myself. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that I've learned since then, you know, now I
Speaker 1: study change and how we process change, is that so
Speaker 1: many of us anchor our identity, so firmly to what
Speaker 1: we do, to the roles we inhabit, to certain labels,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of value in doing that right.
Speaker 1: Being an actor gives you a sense of camaraderie with
Speaker 1: your fellow actors. Being an actor gives you meaning and
Speaker 1: drive every day and maybe helped stave off existential angst
Speaker 1: because you know what your goals are for the day,
Speaker 1: and you have a filming schedule and what have you.
Speaker 1: But the risk of tethering your self identity too closely
Speaker 1: to what you do is that life can effortlessly get
Speaker 1: in the way it deny you the ability to do
Speaker 1: that thing. And so one technique that I've learned only
Speaker 1: recently that has helped me whether change better in my
Speaker 1: own life is to define myself not simply by what
Speaker 1: I do, but by why I do it. So to
Speaker 1: ask myself, well, what is at the core of my
Speaker 1: passions for music or for the other things that I love?
Speaker 1: And when I asked that question about music specifically, I realized, oh, well,
Speaker 1: emotional connection is definitely the number one thing that drove
Speaker 1: me towards music. I also loved getting better at something.
Speaker 1: It's great to improve and see progress in that way.
Speaker 1: I love being creative if you can make that community
Speaker 1: that you found. So, if I could define my identity
Speaker 1: in that way, oh, I'm a person who loves emotional connection.
Speaker 1: I'm a person who loves having creative outlets. Then the
Speaker 1: exercise in the face of a big change is to
Speaker 1: figure out, well through what other outlets can I express
Speaker 1: this part of myself. And it turns out subconsciously, I
Speaker 1: have actually found pursuits in which I can forge those
Speaker 1: emotional connections. Right, as a cognitive scientist, I study the
Speaker 1: science of connection, as a writer, as a podcast host
Speaker 1: of a slight change of plans, the whole enterprise is
Speaker 1: about having these deep, emotional, rich conversations with other people, right,
Speaker 1: And so I would urge people who are listening to
Speaker 1: ask themselves, what is what is my why? What is
Speaker 1: the thing that makes me tick? Maybe it's giving to
Speaker 1: my community, maybe it's learning something new, maybe it's caring
Speaker 1: for others in times of need. Whatever that why is,
Speaker 1: it can serve as a soft landing when that anvil
Speaker 1: falls from the sky and you don't know who you
Speaker 1: are anymore, and it can be a north star that
Speaker 1: helps guide you towards your next thing because it will
Speaker 1: still be very much intact, you know, like, just because
Speaker 1: I love the violin didn't mean that I lost what
Speaker 1: led me to love it in the first place. So
Speaker 1: my dad's a theoretical physicist. He has no musical connections.
Speaker 1: But what he told me when I learned that I
Speaker 1: could not play the violin was, look, you've been wearing
Speaker 1: blinders for the last ten years, and so your understanding
Speaker 1: of the world is very very small. Your job, and
Speaker 1: I remember this was the summer before college, he said,
Speaker 1: your job is to expose yourself to as many domains
Speaker 1: as you possibly can. I want you to read books,
Speaker 1: I want you to watch documentaries. I want you to
Speaker 1: talk to people that you find fascinating, absorb everything like
Speaker 1: a sponge, but importantly, do it without an end goal
Speaker 1: in mind. So I don't want you to limit yourself
Speaker 1: too quickly because you think I have to figure out
Speaker 1: what my major is going to be in college. And
Speaker 1: good thing he gave me that guidance rang.
Speaker 2: Because you could have jumped to I'm going to play
Speaker 2: the tuba now.
Speaker 1: Exactly, or something I was familiar with, right, I'd be
Speaker 1: like I liked history in high school. Maybe I'll be
Speaker 1: a history major. Good thing he gave me that advice
Speaker 1: because I literally didn't even know cognitive science was a discipline.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that it was an area of study.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what those words meant. And it was
Speaker 1: only when I stumbled upon a book by the Harvard
Speaker 1: psychologist Stephen Pinker, It's called The Language Instinct, that I
Speaker 1: was again onspired, very different experience, obviously than when I
Speaker 1: was listening to Beethoven in my bed, you know, as
Speaker 1: a ten or eleven year old. But I was reading
Speaker 1: this book and it was giving me insight into this
Speaker 1: miraculous organ that is our brain and what is going
Speaker 1: on behind the scenes that gives rise to our unbelievable
Speaker 1: capacity for language. I mean, we just take for granted,
Speaker 1: like right now, in this moment, you and I are
Speaker 1: having the super I think, it's a super fun conversation.
Speaker 1: This stuff that's happening in your brain in order to
Speaker 1: process what I'm producing, and the stuff that's happening in
Speaker 1: my brain to produce what I'm producing, is just truly
Speaker 1: extraordinary when you think about the cognitive machinery. And I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, oh my god, if this is what's
Speaker 1: going on behind the scenes for language. Then what's happening
Speaker 1: when not we I didn't inherit my dad's physics genes,
Speaker 1: but when my dad solves a complex mathematics equation, or
Speaker 1: we fall in love, or we extend forgiveness to someone,
Speaker 1: like it just lit up my imagination about all these fascinating.
Speaker 2: Topics talking about consciousness, yes, which is much bigger than
Speaker 2: necessarily just the brain or what goes on neurologically in
Speaker 2: the brain, because all of these different aspects. And let's
Speaker 2: go back to the language for a minute, because I always
Speaker 2: think about this like I think about the word mountain, Okay,
Speaker 2: Like if you see a bunch of scratches on a
Speaker 2: paper with a M and it says mountain, So that's
Speaker 2: another level of it. Like you're reading these symbols, these glyphs,
Speaker 2: and you know exactly what it means, but is it exact?
Speaker 2: What is that mean? When you see the word mountain,
Speaker 2: what do you think of? Do you think of like
Speaker 2: archetypal mountain? Do you think of like a kid drawing
Speaker 2: like a mountain? Do you think of a mountain from
Speaker 2: your childhood? You think about some kind of union arc
Speaker 2: type of mountain, or some kind of plato higher form
Speaker 2: of what a mountain is. And then when then we
Speaker 2: start using it metaphorically, then we're like, that's a this
Speaker 2: is a mountain too high for me to climb, or
Speaker 2: that was a tough mountain for me to get over,
Speaker 2: or there's you know, mountains ahead of me, or like
Speaker 2: the Hastiens say, you know mountains beyond mountains. It starts
Speaker 2: to have all these reverberations about what a mountain means.
Speaker 2: It's it's solidity, and it's insurmountable, but sometimes surmountable when
Speaker 2: you reach the peak of the mountain. So all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, these these glyphs go to an idea and
Speaker 2: the ideas in your brain that is connected to what
Speaker 2: an actual mountain is. We went over here and saw
Speaker 2: Mount Whitney's, but it reverberates on so many different levels.
Speaker 1: Thank you for sharing in my passion for linguistics. It
Speaker 1: was actually my concentration when I was a cognitive science maker.
Speaker 2: How about that?
Speaker 1: Because I am fascinated by all the things you just said,
Speaker 1: and I remember learning or just just just really just
Speaker 1: having a moment of recognition when we were learning about
Speaker 1: child language development. So a kid hears a bunch of
Speaker 1: incoming auditory streams all the time, and sometimes in multiple languages,
Speaker 1: depending on the household they grow up in. Right, no
Speaker 1: one is formally teaching them grammatical structures. No one's teaching
Speaker 1: them explicitly. Oh, this is where one word begins and
Speaker 1: the next word ends. We don't pause between words. Right now,
Speaker 1: your brain is parsing the words effortlessly because it knows
Speaker 1: semantically that each thing means a distinct thing.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is what's happening. This is what's happening in
Speaker 2: my brain. Toilet paper, head of broccoli, bananas, raw on almonds.
Speaker 2: I've got my Trader Joe's shot, and I should be
Speaker 2: listening to what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Multitasking is fine, Okay, yeah, totally, and keep going. Trader
Speaker 1: Joe's has actually my favorite almonds, So I think it's
Speaker 1: a good choice. All right, you chose well. And so
Speaker 1: I find it miraculous that these little beings and their brains, yeah,
Speaker 1: can take all of that in and within a short
Speaker 1: amount of time, are like, yep, I understand how to
Speaker 1: produce sentences, and I know exactly what you're saying to me,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that you know it's just a streamist
Speaker 1: of sounds it's crazy, it's crazy, it's so onspiring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but what do you think about that, that level
Speaker 2: of meaning of a word of like symbols, symbol of mountain,
Speaker 2: the shape of mountain, the archetype of mountain, the reality
Speaker 2: of mountain, the metaphor of mountain.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it has to do with
Speaker 1: the state, the emotional state we're primed to be in. Right,
Speaker 1: if you're at say a yoga retreat, and you're asked
Speaker 1: the thing about mountains, you might have a more abstract
Speaker 1: image that comes to mind. Right, But if you are
Speaker 1: driving exactly and you're you have a map in front
Speaker 1: of you and you're trying to just figure out which
Speaker 1: peak to go to in order to go skiing, yeah,
Speaker 1: you might have a slightly more literal image come to mind.
Speaker 1: So I think we're all capable of the continuum of
Speaker 1: you know, very concrete to very abstract. It just depends
Speaker 1: on the mental state we happen to be in.
Speaker 2: How do you end up in the Obama White House
Speaker 2: with a degree in cognitive science?
Speaker 3: How does that?
Speaker 2: How does that work? I've never heard of that before.
Speaker 2: I've never heard of a cognitive scientist working for some
Speaker 2: kind of political administration.
Speaker 1: That wasn't such a role, so that would make sense.
Speaker 1: So I got my PhD and then my postdoc in
Speaker 1: cognitive neuroscience, and I when I was doing my postdoc,
Speaker 1: I was studying decision making. So I was studying all
Speaker 1: the biases that drive the decisions we make, how we
Speaker 1: develop our attitudes and beliefs, how we think about risk
Speaker 1: when we're trying to make a decision, when we have regrets,
Speaker 1: how our emotional states differ depending on our risk tolerance. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just like a fascinating number of questions. And I
Speaker 1: was also realizing that, oh crap, I don't think academia
Speaker 1: is for me, which is one of those moments that
Speaker 1: you're hoping won't happen to you when you've spent ten
Speaker 1: years studying a field. So I remember calling my undergrad advisor.
Speaker 1: I remember it. I was in the basement of a
Speaker 1: Stanford MRI fMRI laboratory and I was scanning like the
Speaker 1: tenth person's brain for the day as part of the study.
Speaker 1: And there's no windows, and it's this dark room, and
Speaker 1: I thought that this is a terrible fit for me
Speaker 1: and my personality. I like working on teams, I like
Speaker 1: having a really you know, vibrant environment and seeing impact
Speaker 1: really quickly, and academia doesn't lend itself to a lot
Speaker 1: of those things, and so or often doesn't. And so
Speaker 1: I called my advisor and I was like, okay, jumping ship,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for your service, thank you for
Speaker 1: getting me to love this topic. But I'm not interested.
Speaker 1: And she said, no, no, no, wait, wait wait, I just
Speaker 1: went to a conference where I heard about how they're
Speaker 1: using insights from cognitive science from behavioral science to improve
Speaker 1: people's lives in the US. He said, Okay, tell me more.
Speaker 1: She said, well, there's a program called the National School
Speaker 1: Lunch Program. It gives lunches to free or reduced price
Speaker 1: lunches to low income kids, and unfortunately, millions of kids
Speaker 1: were going hungry every day, despite the fact that despite
Speaker 1: the fact the program was offered to so many and
Speaker 1: they ran a behavioral audit of the program and realized
Speaker 1: that there were at least two factors that were contributing
Speaker 1: to low enrollment rates. The first was stigma. A lot
Speaker 1: of these parents were like, I work really hard. I
Speaker 1: don't want my kids depending on the federal government for assistance.
Speaker 1: And then there was also just the barrier, the outsize
Speaker 1: barrier that these families faced of having to fill out
Speaker 1: very very complicated forms that require referencing multiple tax documents
Speaker 1: and oh, by the way, if you get some field wrong,
Speaker 1: you might face you know, also tells t is exactly
Speaker 1: fraud and think it. Put yourself in the shoes of
Speaker 1: a single mom who's working three shifts to make ends meet.
Speaker 1: It's non trivial for her to fill out this form
Speaker 1: and to figure out a way to get their boss
Speaker 1: to approve a lunch break in order to go mail
Speaker 1: it exactly at the time that you're suppos to mail
Speaker 1: it in order to get enrolled, right, And so we
Speaker 1: can sometimes underestimate those barriers when we forget about the
Speaker 1: time and resource constraints that families face in the country,
Speaker 1: and by we m at policymakers. And so what the
Speaker 1: government did was leverage a really elegant insight from my field,
Speaker 1: which is called the power of the default option. They
Speaker 1: simply change the program from an opt in program to
Speaker 1: an opt out program. So by virtue of being opt out,
Speaker 1: everyone's now automatically enrolled. Stigma's gone. Parents only have to
Speaker 1: take an active step if they want to unenroll. Their
Speaker 1: kid from the program, and as a result of this
Speaker 1: slight tweak in the way the Paul's he was designed,
Speaker 1: twelve and a half million more kids were now eating
Speaker 1: lunch at school every day.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I heard this example and I said to
Speaker 1: my undergrad advisor, that's the job that I want to do.
Speaker 1: And she said, well, the job doesn't exist, but let
Speaker 1: me connect you with this guy, Cass Sunstein, who was
Speaker 1: running an office at the White House, and maybe he
Speaker 1: can help. So I email him and I'm like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm Maya. I've published nothing of significance, i have no
Speaker 1: public policy experience, I'm not cool enough to work with
Speaker 1: the likes of Obama. But is there a state or
Speaker 1: local government job that I might be able to translate
Speaker 1: insights from my field into public policy improvements? And fortunately
Speaker 1: for me, Cass ignored all of my insecurities that were
Speaker 1: just seeping out of this email, and he wrote again,
Speaker 1: kindness of strangers. He wrote back to me and said,
Speaker 1: here's Obama's science advisor's email. Send him a note and
Speaker 1: let him know I passed you along. And two days
Speaker 1: later I was interviewing for a job that didn't exist,
Speaker 1: and I pitched them on the idea of not just
Speaker 1: creating a job that was dedicated to the translation of
Speaker 1: behavioral science into policy, but also like, could they maybe
Speaker 1: kind of hire me for that job as well, Right,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, it's just kind of wild to think
Speaker 1: back to this period, but it all worked out after
Speaker 1: you know, all the FBI clearances and whatnot and getting
Speaker 1: the role approved, and then a couple months later I
Speaker 1: started working in the White House and I worked there
Speaker 1: for the entirety of Obama's second term.
Speaker 2: Amazing, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: It was so cool.
Speaker 2: What policies then did you work on? You worked in
Speaker 2: Flint a good deal with the water crisis.
Speaker 1: Yes, So we worked with so many different government agencies,
Speaker 1: so we did a lot of light touch interventions given that,
Speaker 1: you know, there weren't a lot of funds to devote
Speaker 1: to radical program overhauls. So instead, what we tried to
Speaker 1: do was to take existing programs and make sure that
Speaker 1: the people they were designed to benefit were actually receiving them.
Speaker 1: And so a good example is the there are these
Speaker 1: very helpful veterans benefits that we give to people when
Speaker 1: they're transitioning from military life to civilian life, which can
Speaker 1: be really fraught with a lot of psychological challenges and
Speaker 1: educational and job challenges and not enough. That's we're signing up.
Speaker 1: And we were told, okay, there's one email that you
Speaker 1: can you know, change. That's all the money we have,
Speaker 1: and we'll run a very simple A B test And
Speaker 1: we ended up changing just one word in the email.
Speaker 1: Instead of telling veterans that they were eligible for the program,
Speaker 1: we simply reminded them that they had earned it through
Speaker 1: their years of service.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: And that one word change led to a nine percent
Speaker 1: increase in access to the venement.
Speaker 2: This goes back to linguistics, right.
Speaker 1: Linguistics. Absolutely, it's actually.
Speaker 2: Leveraging feeling of like, you know, you can opt in
Speaker 2: for this versus you've earned this right through your work,
Speaker 2: through your service to our country. There's a it triggers
Speaker 2: some pride.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. It's leveraging an insight known as the
Speaker 1: endowment effect, which says that we've value things more when
Speaker 1: we own them. So for example, if I owned which
Speaker 1: I hope I do. At the end of this is interview,
Speaker 1: this wonderful sorry, no mug when we own things.
Speaker 2: Or how good the rest of the interview goes.
Speaker 1: Or we feel we have earned something. So, like you said,
Speaker 1: now it's not something that they're going to gain, it's
Speaker 1: something they now have to lose because they've already gotten
Speaker 1: this benefit. So we did that sort of work, and
Speaker 1: we worked across the government, so helping student loan borrowers,
Speaker 1: helping caregivers of wounded vets, helping military service members, and
Speaker 1: rolling retirement savings plans. And then towards the end of them.
Speaker 2: You're talking about making government programs more effective and service
Speaker 2: oriented instead of cutting them to the bone and eliminating
Speaker 2: them and getting rid of them, making government more effective.
Speaker 1: That's it was a different time. Rain. It's a different time,
Speaker 1: my friend, makes me quite nostalgic to think back. But yes,
Speaker 1: we are starry eyed and bushy tailed, and we really
Speaker 1: believed that government could do great things for people, and
Speaker 1: it does do great things for people. We wanted to
Speaker 1: just improve the way that it serves people.
Speaker 2: Did you go to public school?
Speaker 1: I did go to public I didn't do as well.
Speaker 2: What an amazing service our government provided for us that
Speaker 2: we had public school and we were able to get
Speaker 2: great foundational education and move on and to be podcasters.
Speaker 1: I know look at what we did.
Speaker 2: But it reminds me too of I do some work.
Speaker 2: My wife and I started a nonprofit eleven years ago
Speaker 2: in Haiti in girls' education, and one of the things
Speaker 2: we learned early on in terms of doing education service
Speaker 2: projects in the developing world is you never offer free
Speaker 2: education because people will simply view it as not very good, yeah,
Speaker 2: not valuable. Yeah, but if you put a value, even
Speaker 2: if it's very small to say like, no, this is
Speaker 2: going to cause us to you acts and then fifty
Speaker 2: cents or whatever like, but you're going to have to
Speaker 2: like put in they feel like, oh, this is this
Speaker 2: is something worthwhile that have.
Speaker 1: Skin in the game, basically, yeah and so. And then,
Speaker 1: like you said, towards the end of the administration, we
Speaker 1: my teammates and I traveled to Flint, Michigan because of
Speaker 1: the lead and water crisis, which we very quickly learned
Speaker 1: was about so much more than lead and water.
Speaker 2: Okay, we initially were.
Speaker 1: Tasked, yeah, we were initially tasked with creating water safety
Speaker 1: fact sheets and making sure that they had, you know,
Speaker 1: actual information that was clear and totally in line with
Speaker 1: what the EPA was recommending. But then when you when
Speaker 1: you go on the ground, you realize, oh, wait a second,
Speaker 1: this is a symptom of a much, much bigger problem,
Speaker 1: which was decades of systemic racism and disenfranchisement and feelings
Speaker 1: of being totally lied to and betrayed by their local government.
Speaker 1: And I do remember there was this critical decision and
Speaker 1: I felt like the response was so so smart. There
Speaker 1: was a question about who should deliver these water safety
Speaker 1: sheets to Flint residents, and I think instinct is, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it should be the Environmental Protection Agency, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: they're the ones that are the leading authorities when it
Speaker 1: comes to what's safe for us to put in our
Speaker 1: bodies and or what's safe for us when it comes
Speaker 1: to environmental issues. And then we had to think that.
Speaker 1: Then the EPA had to think, well.
Speaker 2: Wa should I think it should have been K pop bands?
Speaker 2: Can you imagine?
Speaker 1: I mean, they would be very effective messengers. We know
Speaker 1: the power of the messenger. We know that sometimes who
Speaker 1: delivers a message is more important than the message itself.
Speaker 1: So I think you've hit on a really brilliant behavioral
Speaker 1: insight going. And so there's this question of do we
Speaker 1: have them come from members of the EPA. But then
Speaker 1: you have to think, well, wait a second. Flint residents
Speaker 1: have every reason to not trust their local government. Surely
Speaker 1: there will be spillover effects of that distrust when it
Speaker 1: comes to the federal government. So maybe the EPA is
Speaker 1: not the best messenger of these fact sheets. So the
Speaker 1: EPA organized this local canvassing effort with heads of the
Speaker 1: Red Cross, members of the YMCA, church leaders, people that
Speaker 1: you would see if you are a Flint resident at
Speaker 1: the supermarket every week, people that you trust to babysit
Speaker 1: your kids. They were the ones knocking on doors and
Speaker 1: they were saying, here's the fact sheet. Yes it's endorsed
Speaker 1: by the EPA. They're saying everything here is true, but I,
Speaker 1: as your friend and your community member, am also blessing
Speaker 1: its content. And I think that was such a powerful
Speaker 1: way of combating all of the misinformation that was floating
Speaker 1: around the community in this time of great stress and anxiety.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the twenty sixteen election happened, so things
Speaker 1: quickly got disbanded.
Speaker 2: I've read a lot of like positive psychology book that
Speaker 2: make a lot of good cases for you know, how
Speaker 2: to leverage positive psychology ideas in your daily life, and
Speaker 2: they'll have some like story examples, but your stories are
Speaker 2: so deep and so researched, and I'm so glad that
Speaker 2: they're as long as they I kind of wanted more
Speaker 2: that you go super in depth into what these people
Speaker 2: are going through, their ups, their downs, and where they
Speaker 2: come out on the other side. How did you find
Speaker 2: all of these incredible people in these amazing stories.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for recognizing that no one's ever
Speaker 1: commented on the book in the way that you have.
Speaker 1: And I cannot tell you how I'm going to start
Speaker 1: crying how rewarding it is to hear you say that,
Speaker 1: because the people that I had the honor of interviewing
Speaker 1: for this book have so profoundly changed my life and
Speaker 1: I care so deeply for and my only goal was
Speaker 1: to do justice to their stories because they open up
Speaker 1: our hearts and minds to me over years, and it
Speaker 1: was so important to me that it had the emotional
Speaker 1: impact that they did. So first of all, just thank
Speaker 1: you so much. As a first time author, it truly
Speaker 1: means the world to me and to the people that
Speaker 1: I interviewed that you had that response. So thank you.
Speaker 1: As I was conceiving of this book, I had been
Speaker 1: humbled as a scientist for many years, because I had
Speaker 1: taken such an empirical approach to my life up until
Speaker 1: this point, and I had assumed that kind of I
Speaker 1: could study my way out, I could research science my
Speaker 1: way out of challenges in my life. And then in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, I faced something that I couldn't hustle my
Speaker 1: way out of. So long story short, my husband and
Speaker 1: I had been trying to build a family for many,
Speaker 1: many years, and we had faced at this point so
Speaker 1: many barriers and heartbreaks and disappointments, And in early twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: we found out that our surrogate had miscarried, and it
Speaker 1: was just before the world shut down, before COVID, and
Speaker 1: I remember I had had these formative experiences with change,
Speaker 1: and yet I felt so wildly unprepared for this moment,
Speaker 1: for the grief that I felt in this loss. And
Speaker 1: I think that was multifold in terms of why. But
Speaker 1: I think a massive reason is that I am so
Speaker 1: used to working my way through challenges. I'm so used
Speaker 1: to figuring out a creative way to get from point
Speaker 1: A to point B, to overcome failure, to overcome setbacks.
Speaker 1: But there's no such thing as working harder in the
Speaker 1: context of starting a family, the universe does not care
Speaker 1: how much you want a child. It's indifferent towards that.
Speaker 1: And I think in everyday life we all fall prey
Speaker 1: to what psychologists call the illusion of control, where we
Speaker 1: wildly overestimate the degree to which we ourselves will dictate
Speaker 1: how our lives turn out. I definitely fall prey to
Speaker 1: the illusion of control. I like having my hands firmly
Speaker 1: on that steering wheel, a tight grip, right, trying to
Speaker 1: plan out okay, five years, ten years, fifteen years, and
Speaker 1: then when a negative change falls out of the clear
Speaker 1: blue sky, we are forced to contend with the limits
Speaker 1: of that control. We see it so clearly, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, we're taught the lesson the Buddhists have been
Speaker 1: trying to teach us for all of humanity.
Speaker 2: I want to go there, which is.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I'm not in control at all. And
Speaker 1: as I was trying to pick up the pieces of
Speaker 1: my life, and as I was grieving the future, and
Speaker 1: we talked about identity earlier, right as I was grieving
Speaker 1: this identity of mom that from the time I was
Speaker 1: a little kid, I had aspired to be.
Speaker 2: So you literally were at fifteen, being like, I'm going
Speaker 2: to be a violinist and a mom. Those are maybe
Speaker 2: the two most important things about who I am as
Speaker 2: a person.
Speaker 1: And actually it was only in writing this book that
Speaker 1: I realized the only identity that really predated violinist was mother.
Speaker 1: I think from the time I was three or four,
Speaker 1: my dad tells me he'd come downstairs, I'd be with
Speaker 1: my place at on, like my fictional plastic phone, having
Speaker 1: these conversations with my neighbors, like Claudia, Yes, little Bobby
Speaker 1: is being just so difficult today, you know. Like I
Speaker 1: just was so enamored by the idea of motherhood, and
Speaker 1: it was a fantasy land that I would travel to
Speaker 1: in my brain when things in my life were hard,
Speaker 1: or I didn't feel like I belonged, or things in
Speaker 1: the world were hard, I would just escape to this
Speaker 1: fictional place where I was a mom and I had
Speaker 1: my brood and things were happy and cozy and healthy, right,
Speaker 1: And so to have that identity stripped away from me,
Speaker 1: I felt, Yeah, I felt just like impossibly sad and
Speaker 1: just oriented again. And so that was when I realized
Speaker 1: this science was falling short, and I needed to connect
Speaker 1: with people, and I needed to connect with their narratives,
Speaker 1: and I needed to hear how other people were doing
Speaker 1: change better than I was doing change. So I search
Speaker 1: for the most fascinating stories I could, ones that were
Speaker 1: exceptional on the surface because they're just like, wow, I
Speaker 1: can't wait to turn the page, but they all carried
Speaker 1: a universal lesson within them. And then I realized something
Speaker 1: that was so interesting. I started to realize that there
Speaker 1: were fascinating connections that were emerging across people's stories that
Speaker 1: didn't look at all the same on their surface. The
Speaker 1: cancer patient and the woman who learns that her husband
Speaker 1: is having an affair both share the same feeling of betrayal.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the throes of a big change, irrespective of
Speaker 1: their circumstances, is contending with grief and bristling at the
Speaker 1: unfairness of the world and grieving the future that they
Speaker 1: hoped for and ruminating and regretting the past. We're all
Speaker 1: dealing with the same stuff, and so if we're dealing
Speaker 1: with the same problem statement, chances are that the solution
Speaker 1: set is going to be similar. And so to get
Speaker 1: to your question, what led to this book, Well, I
Speaker 1: went on a hunt to try to find the most
Speaker 1: riveting stories of change that I could find that all
Speaker 1: had an unexpected element to them, that had stories sitting
Speaker 1: beneath the stories, sitting beneath the stories sitting beneath the stories,
Speaker 1: because I'm so interested in people's interior lives. I'm not
Speaker 1: that interested in the external beats of their narrative. I
Speaker 1: want to know what's happening in here. I want to
Speaker 1: know the transformation that's happening inside. And every person I
Speaker 1: interviewed over years, on multiple occasions so surprised me with
Speaker 1: what was going on in their minds. I could never
Speaker 1: have predicted it just by learning, Oh, this person was
Speaker 1: locked in Oh this person became a poet when they
Speaker 1: were in prison, I would never have known what was
Speaker 1: happening to them within their brains. And then from each
Speaker 1: story I distilled a valuable lesson about the human experience,
Speaker 1: about our minds that I was hoping every reader could
Speaker 1: actually benefit from.
Speaker 2: The core of the story of Olivia was a young
Speaker 2: woman who is very healthy and has a stroke and
Speaker 2: then has that kind of diving bell in the butterfly
Speaker 2: experience where consciousness inside of her body but she can
Speaker 2: just blink a little bit at.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, she has no voluntary control over any of
Speaker 1: the muscles in her body other than her eyes. So
Speaker 1: that's her only portal for communicating with the world is
Speaker 1: through her blinks.
Speaker 2: And then gradually, through years and years of physical therapy,
Speaker 2: she can move her finger a little bit and makes
Speaker 2: some sounds, and gradually kind of more and more life
Speaker 2: comes back to her body. But the central part of
Speaker 2: her story that I found incredibly profound was that she,
Speaker 2: before her stroke lived for other people in every way,
Speaker 2: shape and form. She was trying to impress people, hope
Speaker 2: they weren't embarrassed by her, trying to fit in, people
Speaker 2: pleasing living her entire life let reflect did in whether
Speaker 2: at school or family or her fiance's family. And then
Speaker 2: she has the stroke, and here she is. She has
Speaker 2: to have her diaper changed, she's drooling all the time,
Speaker 2: and she's just embarrassed and mortified that people have to
Speaker 2: see her in this state. And again, here she is
Speaker 2: with this most tragic, horrific thing happening to her, and
Speaker 2: all she's thinking about is how other people see her,
Speaker 2: how other people are thinking, and other people are feeling.
Speaker 2: And she goes through this incredible transformation during this one
Speaker 2: stage of her rehab where she lets all of that
Speaker 2: go and she's like, I don't give a fuck. I'm
Speaker 2: just going to drool. I'm going to be myself. I'm
Speaker 2: going to take down all the pictures of myself as
Speaker 2: a young woman off the walls, and I've got it.
Speaker 2: I've got to be me. Can you tell us a
Speaker 2: little bit about that? In that sense? What great freedom
Speaker 2: she found while being encased in the greatest prison we
Speaker 2: can possibly think of. But actually the real prison is
Speaker 2: being enslaved to what other people think and need from us,
Speaker 2: and people pleasing other people, and she actually gains her
Speaker 2: freedom even though her body doesn't work right.
Speaker 1: Okay, So first of all, I would like you to
Speaker 1: do my book tour for me. Yeah, because that was
Speaker 1: an unbelievably compelling, an accurate description of Olivia's story, So
Speaker 1: thank you for that. Second. Yes, So, one of the
Speaker 1: things I discovered from this book is that change can
Speaker 1: serve as revelation for us as humans. So when we
Speaker 1: go through a big negative change in our lives, you
Speaker 1: can feel like a personal apocalypse, like everything we knew
Speaker 1: about the world that we cherished and loved and felt
Speaker 1: stable for us is now gone. Going back to linguistics,
Speaker 1: The word apocalypse actually comes from the Greek word apocalypsis,
Speaker 1: which means revelation, and so the etymology is quite in
Speaker 1: destructive change can abend us that it can also reveal
Speaker 1: things to us. And what happened with Olivia is that
Speaker 1: she was living her life beholden to others. But she
Speaker 1: only became acutely aware of the degree to which she
Speaker 1: was beholden to others when she completely lost her ability
Speaker 1: to curate an image of herself and to present herself
Speaker 1: in a way that she felt others would find palatable.
Speaker 1: And that is the power of big change. It brings
Speaker 1: into the light the most unsavory parts of who we
Speaker 1: are because we can't resist seeing those things anymore. For example,
Speaker 1: in my own life, when we found out there was
Speaker 1: a second miscarriage and we lost identical twin girls, that
Speaker 1: was when I realized, fully, oh my god, my entire
Speaker 1: self worth is tied up in the identity of becoming
Speaker 1: a mom. I have grown up with cultural influences telling
Speaker 1: me that my worth as a woman comes from procreation, Like,
Speaker 1: maybe that's a problematic view that I need to revisit.
Speaker 1: And so similarly, Olivia has to contend with this realization
Speaker 1: that she cares so much what other people think about
Speaker 1: her when her boyfriend's family comes to the hospital and
Speaker 1: she can't be who she wants to be in front
Speaker 1: of them. She's got a ventilator hooked up to her face.
Speaker 1: She can't not along, she can't give them reassurance. She
Speaker 1: can't be the charmer that she wants to be. She
Speaker 1: has to be the rawest, purest form of herself and
Speaker 1: the only way that she it's almost actually by brute
Speaker 1: force that she gets to the other side, because with
Speaker 1: her team of therapists, she has no choice but to
Speaker 1: be herself, and over time she starts to realize, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a second, they seem to really like me, like
Speaker 1: they seem to like the unvarnished, unpolished, irreverent version of Olivia.
Speaker 1: They seem to not be so bothered when I break
Speaker 1: down and I have these moments of despair. Maybe I
Speaker 1: should like myself, Maybe I should actually love myself. And
Speaker 1: she gets to a point of self actualization and self
Speaker 1: love at the age of twenty seven that I think
Speaker 1: most people in their forties, fifties, sixty seventies would long for,
Speaker 1: They would lust after that kind of self acceptance. Olivia
Speaker 1: told me, yes, I don't feel glad the stroke happened.
Speaker 1: Most people never will a negative change to happen. But
Speaker 1: she said, I am so grateful that I've gotten to
Speaker 1: the place of self assuredness and self confidence that I've
Speaker 1: gotten to, because it might have taken me decades to
Speaker 1: get there, if I'd ever gotten there at all. And
Speaker 1: I think she's completely right, like change can be a
Speaker 1: teacher to us because when it reveals something about who
Speaker 1: we are that was previously hidden from view, then we
Speaker 1: can take active steps to actually shape that future journey
Speaker 1: and to become new people on the other side. By
Speaker 1: the way, that's why my book is called The Other
Speaker 1: Side of Change. It's because we are constantly transforming during
Speaker 1: the experience, and when a big change happens to us,
Speaker 1: it creates lasting within us, and so we can't forget
Speaker 1: that the person we're going to come out the other
Speaker 1: side as is going to be different from the person
Speaker 1: we are in this very moment.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful. In my faith tradition, Baha'u'llah, the prophet founder
Speaker 2: of the Bahai faith, says something to the effect, because
Speaker 2: I don't want to misquote it about you know, true
Speaker 2: freedom is freedom from the self, and that's a very
Speaker 2: old spiritual practice that when you think of self, you
Speaker 2: think of lust, seeking, status, greed, just kind of chronic
Speaker 2: self interest, power, narcissism around that. But when we are
Speaker 2: freed from the self, that that's true freedom. You can
Speaker 2: be in a prison cell and be freed from yourself
Speaker 2: and experience kind of a lightness that you had never
Speaker 2: thought possible.
Speaker 1: Thank you for sharing that, because I want to continue
Speaker 1: on that point. We talked about awe, right, and I
Speaker 1: think most people think about awe fairly narrowly. They think
Speaker 1: about things like nature and art and music, and.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful sunrise or just yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: My favorite form of awe that I think isn't talked
Speaker 1: about enough is something called moral beauty. That is the
Speaker 1: awe that other people inspire within us, and it is
Speaker 1: all around you if you're willing to look for it,
Speaker 1: and if you're willing to be a keen observer. So
Speaker 1: moral beauty can be or let me just talk about hold.
Speaker 2: On, I want to jump in.
Speaker 1: Y, yeah exactly, let me okay, let me go in,
Speaker 1: let me go in. So there's a phenomenon known as
Speaker 1: moral elevation. Moral elevation is that warm, fuzzy feeling we
Speaker 1: get in our chest when we witness someone else's outstanding acts.
Speaker 1: So it could be their kindness, or their courage, or
Speaker 1: their resilience, or their ability to forgive someone you name it.
Speaker 1: Anything that impresses us about humans can fall into the
Speaker 1: moral beauty bucket and therefore give rise to moral elevation.
Speaker 1: And what's amazing about moral elevation Rain is that it
Speaker 1: doesn't just make us feel good. It doesn't just restore
Speaker 1: our faith in humanity day to day, which a lot
Speaker 1: of us need right now. It actually changes our brains
Speaker 1: because in witnessing someone defy our understanding of what humans
Speaker 1: are capable of, it cracks open our own imagination about
Speaker 1: what we are capable of. So one of the people
Speaker 1: that I interviewed for this book who we just talked about, Dwayne.
Speaker 1: He was sentenced to nine years in an adult prison
Speaker 1: when he was sixteen years old for carjacking. And you
Speaker 1: feel bad for the kid because he had dreams of
Speaker 1: going to Georgia Tech. He was class treasurer, He was
Speaker 1: a sweetie pie to his mom, and yet in an
Speaker 1: effort to impress the boys in his neighborhood. He made
Speaker 1: a really, really terrible He made a terrible decision and.
Speaker 2: Which we all do, which we all do at.
Speaker 1: Sixteen, and his led to nine years in adult prison.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine that Dwayne is feeling despair at
Speaker 1: this point. He said that he wasn't just grieving all
Speaker 1: of the futures that he lost, he was fearing who
Speaker 1: he might become within the walls of prison. And there's
Speaker 1: a concept in psychology called possible selts. So we conjure
Speaker 1: up possible selves all the time in daily life. So
Speaker 1: we have hoped for selves. This is the version of
Speaker 1: us that we want to see come true. So for you,
Speaker 1: it would be I want to be an actor and
Speaker 1: a podcaster and a writer. That's my hope for self.
Speaker 1: Then there's feared sels that might be like, oh I
Speaker 1: become greedy, or I become really self interested, or my
Speaker 1: conditions change and I no longer have the ability to
Speaker 1: be kind, right, That might be the feared self. And
Speaker 1: then there's the expected selves. So as much as I
Speaker 1: would want to be the next Taylor Swift, it ain't happening.
Speaker 1: I'm probably gonna be a cognitive scientist in five years.
Speaker 1: And so that's just the version of us that's most
Speaker 1: likely to happen. And for Dwayne, all of the hope
Speaker 1: for selves disappeared instantly when he got that nine year sentence,
Speaker 1: and the feared cells expanded effortlessly in his brain. Right now,
Speaker 1: he's wondering, am I going to become an addict? Am
Speaker 1: I going to be someone who steals? Am I going
Speaker 1: to become violent? He's just worried about all these versions
Speaker 1: of himself that he might now embody until about a
Speaker 1: year in two his prison sentence, when he has a
Speaker 1: spectacular moment of moral elevation. He encounters a fellow inmate
Speaker 1: named Bellaal who defies all of the stereotypes Dwayne has
Speaker 1: in his mind about what it means to be a prisoner.
Speaker 1: So this guy cares for all the younger inmates. He
Speaker 1: teaches the young boys how to box to protect themselves
Speaker 1: from the threat of violence. He carries himself in such
Speaker 1: a dignified way. Dwayne says, it's like he carries himself
Speaker 1: like a man in uniform. He gets up an hour
Speaker 1: before the guards even come by his cell door and
Speaker 1: does two hundred and fifty push uts. So Dwayne was
Speaker 1: saying that's the kind of guy who was like, no,
Speaker 1: this is my identity. Now, I'm choosing to be a
Speaker 1: certain way. Just because I'm a prisoner doesn't mean I
Speaker 1: can't be like this. And that moment of moral elevation
Speaker 1: cracks open Dwayne's imagination about who he can become. And
Speaker 1: so a few weeks later, when he encounters a book
Speaker 1: of poetry in which one of the writers is speaking
Speaker 1: to the experience of young boys of color in prison,
Speaker 1: Dwayne thinks, oh, well, I could do that. I can't
Speaker 1: do the ballall version. I'm not strong. I can't teach
Speaker 1: anyone how to box. But I can absolutely record and
Speaker 1: dignify the experiences of the people that I'm meeting in
Speaker 1: prison and my own experience. And fast forward a few decades.
Speaker 1: Dwayne is a Yenge Law School graduate. He's a MacArthur
Speaker 1: Genius Prize winner, and he publishes some of the most
Speaker 1: stirring poetry I've ever read about what the experience of
Speaker 1: being a black man in prison is like. And it
Speaker 1: came from that afec did moment of moral beauty within prison.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible story in the book, and you tell
Speaker 2: it so well this believe it or not. I'm not
Speaker 2: trying to be Dax Shepherd an armchair expert right now, folks.
Speaker 2: But this is actually something I know a little bit
Speaker 2: about because my uncle, doctor Rhett Deisner. This is his
Speaker 2: area of study. Way, it's moral beauty. He studies beauty
Speaker 2: in the psychology of beauty. He just spoke at the
Speaker 2: Max Planck Institute.
Speaker 1: And which one I went to, the one in Leipsiging
Speaker 1: when I was in college.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's that one.
Speaker 1: Okay, great. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He has worked with Jonathan Height and Arthur Brooks, and
Speaker 2: a lot of his studies are published. But he has
Speaker 2: numerous studies about moral beauty and moral elevation, as coined
Speaker 2: by Jonathan Height, how much it impacts all the choices
Speaker 2: that we make. You can witness someone you know, giving
Speaker 2: money to homeless or holding open a door, or doing
Speaker 2: an act of kindness, helping an old lady across the street,
Speaker 2: and then your next action will be morally and in fact,
Speaker 2: when you even when you see someone helping an old
Speaker 2: lady across the street, and then you're shown pictures of
Speaker 2: like flowers, you can experience awe much more readily having
Speaker 2: witnessed moral beauty and moral elevation and other people. So
Speaker 2: it has this kind of like snowball effect of actually
Speaker 2: making the world a better place. So when we take
Speaker 2: actions of moral beauty in our lives, they have reverberations
Speaker 2: far past what we would normally think of.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's exactly right, and I love that moral beauty
Speaker 1: transcends domains. So one of the instances I reflect on
Speaker 1: in the book that I experienced in which I experienced
Speaker 1: moral beauty was after the horrific shooting in Mother Emmanuel
Speaker 1: Church in South Carolina. I remember watching on TV the
Speaker 1: daughter of one of the victims publicly extending forgiveness to
Speaker 1: the racist killer, and I was so stunned by this reign,
Speaker 1: Like she in that moment demonstrated a depth of forgiveness
Speaker 1: that I did not think humans were capable of. And
Speaker 1: what's so amazing about the impact of moral beauty and
Speaker 1: elevation is that it's not like I was looking to
Speaker 1: forgive anyone in my life at that moment in time.
Speaker 1: It's not like it was a perfect translation of she forgave,
Speaker 1: now I can forgive. What it does do is it
Speaker 1: makes you think across the board, could I be kinder?
Speaker 1: Could I be more empathetic. Could I be more generous?
Speaker 2: Who do I need to forgive? You know, you might
Speaker 2: not forgive your cousin who didn't come to your wedding
Speaker 2: when they said you would, And like, wait, she can
Speaker 2: forgive this guy, and I can't forgive my cousin.
Speaker 1: So it not only inspires you to forgive, it inspires
Speaker 1: you to be better in any domain where you're looking
Speaker 1: to improve. Okay, So that's the key thing is that
Speaker 1: I felt like I was elevating. I was elevated as
Speaker 1: a human overall. Oh you think that's the maximum kindness
Speaker 1: you can show someone else, No it's not. Oh you
Speaker 1: think that's the maximum amount of self sacrifice you can
Speaker 1: engage in, No it's not. And so it pushes you
Speaker 1: to new internal heights when you witness someone else showing
Speaker 1: spectacular levels of a trait in another domain.
Speaker 2: My uncle Rhet also talks about in speaking of two
Speaker 2: different domains, is moral beauty and physical beauty and visual
Speaker 2: beauty in that connection or musical artistic beauty. So you
Speaker 2: can experience moral beauty and it will increase your experience
Speaker 2: of artistic or natural beauty. You can experience natural beauty
Speaker 2: and that will influence and uplift your own acts of
Speaker 2: moral elevation that you undertake in your life. So beauty,
Speaker 2: the beauty trait you know, runs from action into esthetic.
Speaker 1: Isn't that so uplifting? Because I mean, if you also
Speaker 1: think about what's happening on a neuroscientific level, what is
Speaker 1: happening in our brains and bodies when we experience awe, Well,
Speaker 1: the parts of our brain that are other dedicated to
Speaker 1: self immersion decrease in activity. So the default mode the
Speaker 1: default mode network, for example. And so what happens when
Speaker 1: we experience awe is that we are able to more
Speaker 1: easily step outside of our own wants and needs and
Speaker 1: anxieties and to remember that we are part of a collective,
Speaker 1: that we are a small being on this planet, and
Speaker 1: we have so much more context, We so much more
Speaker 1: perspective on the significance of our own lives in a
Speaker 1: way that I think gives us the clarity we need
Speaker 1: around the kinds of choices we want to make while
Speaker 1: we're here and the way that we want to be
Speaker 1: around others while we're here. When I have those moments
Speaker 1: of perspective giving, I think, oh my god, all that
Speaker 1: matters is how I treat other people. All that matters
Speaker 1: is how other people feel when they're around me. That's it.
Speaker 1: That's the meaning of all of this.
Speaker 2: But we also see the opposite because since COVID and
Speaker 2: since this kind of toxic partisanship that has really been
Speaker 2: rocking our world over the last eight oris ten years,
Speaker 2: we've seen a degradation and how people are treating each other.
Speaker 2: Just think about airports and think about going on airplanes
Speaker 2: and fights on airplanes and people attacking you know.
Speaker 1: Flight flight attendants, and.
Speaker 2: If we long for moral elevation or moral beauty and
Speaker 2: seeing acts of kindness and forgiveness like that, so that
Speaker 2: it inspires our own acts are altruistic actions and beautiful actions.
Speaker 2: Abdulla Baha says, strive therefore, day by day that your
Speaker 2: actions may be beautiful prayers. So this idea and the
Speaker 2: Bahigh faith that a prayer is not just something you
Speaker 2: kind of say, it's a way of a being in
Speaker 2: the world. But we've seen a degradation of that. So
Speaker 2: we are seeing our society and everyone picks up on it.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum
Speaker 2: you're on. Everyone sees, you know, this deterioration of these
Speaker 2: small acts of being kind and patient with a flight
Speaker 2: attendant is making our world a much worse place, even
Speaker 2: though they might feel like small little actions, and again
Speaker 2: has a snowball Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: The same way in which those negative actions can have
Speaker 1: a snowball effect. Just like you said earlier, pauseitive, because
Speaker 1: everyone's always wondering what can I do? What can I do?
Speaker 1: I feel helpless, I feel hopeless, like you said, and
Speaker 1: I thought you said it so beautifully a small So don't.
Speaker 2: Even try and repeat it. Let's just replay what I
Speaker 2: said before. It was perfect. Go ahead.
Speaker 1: The small act that you initiate to be kind to
Speaker 1: a stranger, it has these beautiful spillover effects. So I
Speaker 1: was in an airport a couple of weeks ago, and
Speaker 1: I had way too much stuff that I was trying
Speaker 1: to carry. Okay, So I had like a crappy suitcase
Speaker 1: that was top heavy, so it kept falling over. Then
Speaker 1: I had my open purse, and then I had a
Speaker 1: garment bag okay, and as I'm getting to the top
Speaker 1: of the escalator, it like does something on one of
Speaker 1: the edges and everything topples down the escalator.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: That is like my worst night verb because I've now
Speaker 1: inconvenience everyone again in the app behind me, so mortified.
Speaker 2: I would have been so pissed at you, of course, right, and.
Speaker 1: I was pissed at me. I was so embarrassed. And
Speaker 1: there are two people behind me. Immediately behind me, there
Speaker 1: were tons of people you know down yes, later they
Speaker 1: launched into save this woman from her self mode instantly,
Speaker 1: so one of that operation. Yeah, one of them does
Speaker 1: this crazy jiu jitsu move where he takes the purse
Speaker 1: which is now facing downwards, all the stuff is open faced,
Speaker 1: and he goes like this as quickly as possible, thus
Speaker 1: sparing ninety percent of the contents and only three things
Speaker 1: in there. It was a total magic move. The other
Speaker 1: one's like, I got the garment bag. We're good, and
Speaker 1: they get to the top of the escalator. They passed
Speaker 1: me the stuff and one of them says to me,
Speaker 1: don't worry, it happens to all of us. And then
Speaker 1: the other one sees me just trying to arrange myself
Speaker 1: as stuff in another corner and comes over and says,
Speaker 1: do you need anything else? Is there anything anything I
Speaker 1: can help you with? Mess?
Speaker 2: Beautiful?
Speaker 1: And it was such a beautiful moment of humanity. And
Speaker 1: I really believe that. I'm just reflecting on this now
Speaker 1: because of the observations you share it about your uncle's research,
Speaker 1: I was a kinder person for the rest of that day.
Speaker 1: That stayed with me. Yeah, I thought, because there's a
Speaker 1: mini version of pay it forward when someone is so
Speaker 1: kind to you without any good reason, like wait a second,
Speaker 1: I should aspire to be so upstanding, you know, and so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and instead it's like give it forward, Serve it forward, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, beauty it forward.
Speaker 1: Beauty it forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you can actually make an impact just because people
Speaker 1: are observing you, and there's a lot of power in that.
Speaker 2: So you referenced earlier lessons that Buddhism had been teaching
Speaker 2: that align so much with this theory of change and
Speaker 2: coming out of change, and I think this is your sequel.
Speaker 2: Is there are so many spiritual teachings from the world's traditions,
Speaker 2: from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions especially, that have to
Speaker 2: do with basically all of the concepts that you bring
Speaker 2: up in your book. And I'm wondering how much of
Speaker 2: your grandmother's spiritual tradition kind of trickled into the ground
Speaker 2: water here because when you talk about awe, that's the
Speaker 2: same thing a spiritual person or a religious person feels
Speaker 2: for the divine or for the sacred. When you talk
Speaker 2: about the illusion of control, we know that the essential
Speaker 2: Buddhist teaching is that we have no control, and that
Speaker 2: change and hardship are a part of living and that
Speaker 2: is undeniable. You talk about the psychic distance and overview effect,
Speaker 2: about how helpful it is to kind of detach from
Speaker 2: yourself and your problems, like yourself with the purse and
Speaker 2: the garment bag at the top of the escalator, and
Speaker 2: to kind of like witness yourself with compassion. But meditation
Speaker 2: is literally a daily action that one can take that
Speaker 2: creates the psychic distance and the overview effect and strengthens
Speaker 2: the muscles of compar They've done studies where meditation, even
Speaker 2: though it's simply being in the present and stilling the mind,
Speaker 2: actually increases compassion, which doesn't seem like there'd be a
Speaker 2: correlation totally, because I think that meditation allows you more
Speaker 2: compassion for yourself and then allows you more compassion for
Speaker 2: other people by creating that kind of psychic distance, like
Speaker 2: rising above yourself. About having a metacognition that was the
Speaker 2: word that I was looking for. The soul Boom way
Speaker 2: into so many of these ideas that are central to
Speaker 2: your book. We have in a little plug from the
Speaker 2: soul Boom Workbook where these create, you know, a surrendering
Speaker 2: of control, increasing awe, drawing what's sacred, writing about what
Speaker 2: gives you the tingles, you know, creating an increased compassion,
Speaker 2: and metacognition and psychic distance helping helping you with rumination
Speaker 2: and thought loops that can bring us down that there
Speaker 2: are also spiritual tools as well as positive psychology tools
Speaker 2: and neurological tools to help us navigate this mind field
Speaker 2: of being a human being.
Speaker 1: I completely agree. And actually part of my training, which
Speaker 1: I think is such a valuable vantage point on all
Speaker 1: of this, was in philosophy. The cognitive science major is multidisciplinary,
Speaker 1: and so it includes neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science,
Speaker 1: sometimes anthropology, and so the idea is that you're trying
Speaker 1: to take a multifaceted view of a problem or a
Speaker 1: question about the mind. Right. And I think so many
Speaker 1: of the techniques that I talk about intersect with philosophy right,
Speaker 1: and intersect with a number of these kinds of spiritual practices.
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking about how I have a whole chapter
Speaker 1: devoted to how in the throes of a big change
Speaker 1: we do descend into these horrible, maddening mental spirals in
Speaker 1: which we just keep or fixated on the same questions
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. Either we're rehashing something
Speaker 1: in the past or we're catastrophizing the future, but either
Speaker 1: way we're engaging in an unproductive loop. And so there's
Speaker 1: a lot of tools from psychology around how to forge
Speaker 1: psychological distance, but they intersect beautifully with philosophy of the
Speaker 1: mind what is the self?
Speaker 2: And they intersect beautifully with spiritual traditions that have been
Speaker 2: talking about this for ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: Absolutely because this my grandmother did this stuff before and
Speaker 1: before I even learned about it.
Speaker 2: And the Vedas and Upanashads talk so much about consciousness
Speaker 2: itself and being consciousness and bliss that is very much.
Speaker 1: And radical acceptance is another thing suffering as a way
Speaker 1: of life.
Speaker 2: Before we finish, I want to talk about your your
Speaker 2: your thoughts about rumination and thought loops and the kind
Speaker 2: of that OCD thinking is. It's something that I've been
Speaker 2: working with a lot in my life because I noticed
Speaker 2: that I do it a lot.
Speaker 1: I do too. I have like a PhD in rumination.
Speaker 2: Dude, it's dude, yeah, I have like a master I'm
Speaker 2: a lowly master's degree.
Speaker 1: But it's not being such an underachiever rate. I know.
Speaker 2: The uh it's like I describe it as like putting
Speaker 2: a shoe in the dryer, you know, it's just like
Speaker 2: the thought just goes cook kicking. And one of the
Speaker 2: things that I was literally working on where you quote
Speaker 2: the psychologist who talks about like naming the feelings that
Speaker 2: are coming up is so helpful and I've I've I
Speaker 2: was literally practicing that and this is such a great
Speaker 2: you know, spiritual tool for modern living, which is you know,
Speaker 2: I I go into like doubt and it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm feeling doubt, and then I have like some remorse
Speaker 2: like oh now I'm feeling remorse and confusion like did
Speaker 2: I do the right thing? Like oh now I'm feeling confusion.
Speaker 2: Now fear of the future. Oh now I'm feeling some fear.
Speaker 2: I'm feeling fear and a little remorse. Oh I'm it's
Speaker 2: not ninety percent confusion and ten percent doubt and just
Speaker 2: literally naming the feelings that I'm going through can be
Speaker 2: incredibly helpful to dissipate them and to just make them okay.
Speaker 2: It's like rain, You're all right. You're just having a
Speaker 2: series of feelings. Sometimes they're contradictory.
Speaker 1: This is called affect labeling, and when you give emotions
Speaker 1: specific names, rather than just feeling like, oh I feel horrible, right,
Speaker 1: they're like this is really negative. What you're doing is
Speaker 1: you're shifting your focus away from being the emotion to
Speaker 1: having the emotion. So that's one way of fostering that
Speaker 1: kind of psychological distance that we often need between us
Speaker 1: and the feelings that we're having, because then we can
Speaker 1: see them with more clarity, more objectively. Another tool for
Speaker 1: engaging in this kind of psychological distance is to imagine
Speaker 1: that you are a fly on the wall observing your
Speaker 1: situation from afar, or that you're coaching a friend. So
Speaker 1: one thing that I'm sure you can resonate with is
Speaker 1: after something negative happens, we tend to look inwards and
Speaker 1: blame ourselves, right. We tend to think, oh, my god,
Speaker 1: if I had just done X or Y or Z,
Speaker 1: this wouldn't have happened. Why did I do that? Why
Speaker 1: did I say that that was so awkward? Why I
Speaker 1: say this? You know, just over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: But when we were if we were to coach a friend,
Speaker 1: we would extend so much more compassion to them than
Speaker 1: we often reserve for ourselves. And we know from research
Speaker 1: by the psychologist Kristin Neff and others that self compassion
Speaker 1: isn't just like fantastic fantastic. Since christ is a friend,
Speaker 1: she's amazing. Our work is incredible because it shows that
Speaker 1: like self compassion isn't just like a nice to have,
Speaker 1: feel good thing. It actually leads to way better outcomes
Speaker 1: for people. It actually gets them to problem solve what's
Speaker 1: happening with far more clarity than they would otherwise have,
Speaker 1: and to perform better. And so pretending that you're advising
Speaker 1: a friend, that you're coaching a friend out of their
Speaker 1: problems can also be another way of forging that distance.
Speaker 1: And then, interestingly enough, just changing whether you talk about
Speaker 1: yourself in the first versus the second or third person
Speaker 1: can be really helpful. So rather than saying, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I need to get a grip, you say, maya, you
Speaker 1: need to get a grip. And it sounds really gimmicky,
Speaker 1: but it's shown to be super effective in a broad
Speaker 1: range of context. It just makes that simple change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was just talking to a friend this morning and
Speaker 2: he said, like, you know, we beat ourselves up so
Speaker 2: much and blame ourselves. We talk so negatively to ourselves.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine if you were out in front of
Speaker 2: a seven eleven and you saw an adult talking to
Speaker 2: a nine year old in that same way, if you
Speaker 2: saw an adult like you, fucking idiot, Why do you
Speaker 2: do that? God, you always do that, you make that
Speaker 2: same mistake. I'm just I'm disgusted with you now. That
Speaker 2: person will never like you. Like if you heard that dialogue,
Speaker 2: you'd be like, hey, wait a second, buddy. But yeah,
Speaker 2: we do that to ourselves every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, we use vile language to talk to ourselves.
Speaker 1: One of the people I profile in the book had
Speaker 1: panic attacks and it threatened his career as a journalist,
Speaker 1: and he became convinced that he was completely worthless. He
Speaker 1: lost all of his self esteem, and he believed that
Speaker 1: he was a faulty human that like, you know, his
Speaker 1: genes were screwed up. And it was only when he
Speaker 1: talked to an evolutionary psychologist who explain that panic is
Speaker 1: actually our ability to panic as humans is the reason
Speaker 1: we survived as long as we have a species. That
Speaker 1: he started to see, Oh so it's not that I'm broken.
Speaker 1: Maybe I need to recalibrate my panic, but panic is
Speaker 1: actually a really important superpower. But before then, he said,
Speaker 1: I had a drill sergeant in my mind that was
Speaker 1: just telling me every day that I wasn't.
Speaker 2: Worthy a lot of times. Let's say we did something
Speaker 2: and we screwed up some interaction and we have this
Speaker 2: kind of like OCD guilt running over you know what
Speaker 2: we did wrong? That the thought loop starts when we're
Speaker 2: avoiding the feelings. Yes, so if you have a feeling
Speaker 2: of of remorse or sadness, like we don't want to
Speaker 2: feel remorse and sadness, so we immediately go to a
Speaker 2: thought loop to try and get us out of feeling it.
Speaker 2: But that the actual action is this immersion therapy of
Speaker 2: like becoming ever closer to the feeling that is so
Speaker 2: uncomfortable for us to feel. I need to just like
Speaker 2: take deep breaths and just feel bad about myself for
Speaker 2: a little bit. It doesn't mean shame, not beating myself
Speaker 2: up but just just deep remorse and like I wish it,
Speaker 2: and to allow yourself to like deeply experience that feeling
Speaker 2: and then by and large, maybe thirty seconds later, maybe
Speaker 2: two minutes later, that feeling lifts and becomes much more manageable.
Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit about these kind of
Speaker 2: ruminative thought loops and how interacting with our feelings, embracing
Speaker 2: our feelings can can help us move forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we crave what researchers call cognitive closure.
Speaker 1: So we want and white answers. We want clarity, We
Speaker 1: want to definitively understand why things turned out the way
Speaker 1: they did. And I believe that it is that desire
Speaker 1: for clarity that gives rise to these sorts of mental spirals.
Speaker 1: And oftentimes when we climb out of the rubble of
Speaker 1: a change or a negative event of some kind, all
Speaker 1: we see around us is gray. There's no black and white.
Speaker 1: Everything is uncertain. And I actually think that in the
Speaker 1: longer term, yes, we can use all of these techniques
Speaker 1: in the short term, right, but over the longer term
Speaker 1: we have to train our psyche to become far more
Speaker 1: comfortable with uncertainty. Our brains are not wired to like uncertainty.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite studies shows that we're more stressed
Speaker 1: when we're told we have a fifty percent chance of
Speaker 1: getting an electric shock than when we're told we have
Speaker 1: a one hundred percent chance of getting an electric shock.
Speaker 1: So we would rather be certain that a negative thing
Speaker 1: is going to happen than have to grapple with any
Speaker 1: ambiguity or any uncertainty. But I think that's more of
Speaker 1: a lifelong mission. Right, is to become comfortable with grace
Speaker 1: space and to not have all the answers. I think
Speaker 1: the devilish side of rumination is that we fool ourselves
Speaker 1: into believing that if we can just stumble upon an answer,
Speaker 1: it'll solve the problem. It'll give us a resolution we need.
Speaker 1: Like if I can just figure out why my partner
Speaker 1: left me, no one will ever leave me again. If
Speaker 1: I can just figure out all the things that could
Speaker 1: threaten my family's safety, I'll be able to keep them safe.
Speaker 1: If I could just figure out why I lost my job,
Speaker 1: then I can make sure I always have job security.
Speaker 1: These this is just fool's gold right that we're playing
Speaker 1: with in those moments, But it is so it's so
Speaker 1: attractive to our minds to just want to get that
Speaker 1: clarity right, that we will do anything to try to
Speaker 1: find it, and then to your point, to try to
Speaker 1: avoid the negative emotions that accompany that discomfort, right, and
Speaker 1: the more that we can now, I want to caveat
Speaker 1: one thing, which is it is important to acknowledge negative
Speaker 1: emotions and not to suppress them, but it is also okay.
Speaker 1: The research shows to distract yourself temporarily to engage in
Speaker 1: healthy activities and behaviors that give you a reprieve from
Speaker 1: the negative emotions. So researchers used to say, or at
Speaker 1: least there's popular narratives online that if you don't persistently
Speaker 1: confront your negative emotions, they're going to rear their ugly
Speaker 1: head heads and decades from now and you're going to
Speaker 1: be in therapy for the rest of your life. That's
Speaker 1: been shown not to be true and doesn't account for
Speaker 1: individual differences. So a lot of people actually find distraction
Speaker 1: to be a healthy, productive coping mechanism, and it shows
Speaker 1: to be very advantageous in the long run. That said,
Speaker 1: you don't want to suppress the negative emotions because to
Speaker 1: your point, when you're suppressing the negative emotions, that's what
Speaker 1: can give rise to these very unproductive thought loops.
Speaker 2: Well, Maya The Other Side of Change, who we become
Speaker 2: when life makes other plans is brilliant and check out
Speaker 2: her wonderful podcast, A Slight Change of Plans And this
Speaker 2: was so much fun. I hope you'll come back on
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I would love to come back. We barely scratch
Speaker 1: the surface.
Speaker 2: I know there's so much more to dig into, but
Speaker 2: I got so much out of reading your book and
Speaker 2: having this conversation. Thanks for coming on soul Boom.
Speaker 1: This was my favorite favorite conversation you've ever had in
Speaker 1: my whole life.
Speaker 2: Even with your husband.
Speaker 1: This is my favorite conversation that I've had about the book.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thanks man the soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation,
Speaker 1: you might enjoy listening to the first chapter of the
Speaker 1: Other Side of Change, which we featured in this feed.
Speaker 1: It's called a sneak preview of Maya's new book, And
Speaker 1: if you've already read the book, I'd be so grateful
Speaker 1: if you could share your experience on Goodreads with either
Speaker 1: a quick rating or review. It really helps new readers
Speaker 1: find the book. The link to that page and the
Speaker 1: excerpt I just mentioned are both in our show notes.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a week with another episode of
Speaker 1: a slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then