Dr. Maya Shankar: How to Shape Your Identity & Goals

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.520 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.400 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.600 | Today, my guest is Dr. Maya Shankar.

00:00:18.240 | Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist

00:00:20.360 | who did her undergraduate training at Yale University,

00:00:23.040 | her PhD thesis at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar,

00:00:26.440 | and a postdoctoral fellowship also in cognitive science

00:00:29.160 | at Stanford University.

00:00:30.780 | Dr. Shankar also served as a senior advisor

00:00:33.000 | to the White House,

00:00:33.980 | and she founded and served as the chair

00:00:36.480 | of the White House Behavioral Science Team.

00:00:38.700 | Dr. Shankar is also the host of her own podcast entitled

00:00:41.460 | "A Slight Change of Plans."

00:00:43.080 | And indeed, Dr. Shankar herself is no stranger

00:00:45.800 | to having to make major changes to one's life plans.

00:00:49.160 | As you'll learn today,

00:00:50.560 | prior to all of those incredible accomplishments

00:00:52.840 | that Dr. Shankar has achieved,

00:00:55.360 | she was a student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music,

00:00:58.520 | preparing her life to become

00:01:00.320 | a professional concert violinist.

00:01:02.720 | But as you'll also soon learn,

00:01:04.400 | she then experienced a career devastating injury,

00:01:07.500 | forcing herself to have to reframe everything

00:01:10.840 | about her life plans and her own identity.

00:01:13.960 | And that's really what we talk about today.

00:01:15.440 | We talk about identity,

00:01:17.480 | not just Dr. Shankar's prior and current identities,

00:01:20.440 | but of course, your identity.

00:01:22.240 | We pose a number of questions geared toward getting you

00:01:24.880 | to ask, who am I really?

00:01:27.060 | Do my goals align with who I am and what I want?

00:01:30.520 | Dr. Shankar shares with us the research on identity,

00:01:33.800 | goals, motivation, and plans,

00:01:35.980 | as well as many practical tools

00:01:37.760 | to answer those key questions that guide us down

00:01:40.920 | either the correct or incorrect trajectories in life.

00:01:43.520 | She shares with us, for instance,

00:01:45.240 | how to assess on-paper goals

00:01:47.440 | of the sort that you would see on a CV.

00:01:49.760 | So which school, which job, which salary,

00:01:52.240 | which spouse, et cetera, et cetera,

00:01:54.520 | and how to relate those to the deeper feelings

00:01:57.260 | that relate to one's ability

00:01:58.980 | to continually pursue a given goal,

00:02:02.120 | knowing that it's the right goal for us.

00:02:05.240 | We also talk about the science of feelings,

00:02:07.480 | what they can and cannot tell us,

00:02:09.420 | and when they should or should not serve as a compass

00:02:12.940 | for guiding our everyday and longer-term decisions.

00:02:16.480 | By the end of today's episode,

00:02:17.740 | you will realize that Dr. Shankar

00:02:19.740 | is essentially handing you a science-supported roadmap

00:02:23.700 | for how to determine and assess your identity and goals

00:02:27.140 | and how one influences the other,

00:02:29.480 | that is, how your identity influences your goals

00:02:31.860 | and how your goals influences your identity

00:02:34.400 | in becoming the person that you want to be.

00:02:37.080 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:39.780 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:42.360 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:44.500 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:02:46.420 | about science and science-related tools

00:02:48.380 | to the general public.

00:02:49.800 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:50.940 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:05:12.060 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Maya Shankar.

00:05:15.100 | Welcome, I'm so happy you're here.

00:05:16.740 | - Thanks, Andrew.

00:05:17.580 | It's great to be here.

00:05:19.020 | - I have a lot of questions about identity,

00:05:22.820 | about goals and motivation, and about change in general.

00:05:27.500 | But I'd like to start off with identity.

00:05:30.420 | And I'd like to divide it into two segments.

00:05:34.100 | The first is how we form an identity.

00:05:36.780 | And, you know, we'll get into your story

00:05:39.020 | in, I hope, a bit or more detail.

00:05:42.020 | But when we're younger, we tend to ask questions

00:05:45.760 | about ourselves, but also about the world around us.

00:05:48.860 | We want to learn what our parents do for a living,

00:05:52.560 | what the workers on the street are doing that for, et cetera.

00:05:56.340 | How much of our early identity do you think

00:05:59.540 | is formed by observation of what we are doing

00:06:03.960 | versus observation and labels of the people

00:06:07.680 | that are around us and closest to us?

00:06:10.080 | - Yeah, it's a great question.

00:06:11.680 | I think a lot of it is based on what we see around us

00:06:14.220 | and what we see is deemed successful and society privileges.

00:06:19.220 | And there's a concept called identity foreclosure,

00:06:22.520 | where actually when you're young, right,

00:06:24.800 | it's not just that you're observing

00:06:26.180 | what your parents are doing

00:06:27.280 | or what your peer group is doing.

00:06:29.480 | They impose their own structures on you.

00:06:31.920 | And so what that can do is it can really limit your mindset

00:06:35.240 | in terms of what it is that you want to achieve

00:06:37.940 | and what it is that you're capable of achieving.

00:06:40.000 | And so oftentimes when people experience

00:06:42.700 | identity foreclosure, they have to take a lot of active steps

00:06:45.900 | to overcome whatever biases or limitations

00:06:48.880 | they experienced as a young person,

00:06:51.200 | given what they were projected to do or believe, right?

00:06:55.560 | So identity can be about what you do.

00:06:57.160 | It can also be about what you believe in the world, right?

00:06:59.360 | And so a lot of those belief systems are also passed on.

00:07:01.920 | You inherit belief systems from the people

00:07:05.160 | that surround you when you're young.

00:07:07.120 | And if there's one thing that I've learned,

00:07:09.280 | it's that we tend to put a huge premium

00:07:12.160 | on what it is that we do.

00:07:14.040 | We tend to define ourselves by what we do.

00:07:16.760 | And you can see this in the questions we ask young children.

00:07:20.480 | What do you want to be when you grow up, right?

00:07:22.340 | We never say, who do you want to be when you grow up?

00:07:24.480 | What kind of person do you want to be when you grow up?

00:07:26.000 | We say, what do you want to be?

00:07:27.900 | And the consequence of that kind of mindset

00:07:30.960 | is that we end up anchoring our identities very firmly

00:07:33.740 | to what it is that we do.

00:07:35.360 | And I certainly, you were talking,

00:07:36.860 | you were alluding to my personal story, right?

00:07:38.640 | I started playing the violin when I was a little kid,

00:07:42.060 | six years old, became absolutely obsessed.

00:07:45.060 | And for the large part of my childhood,

00:07:47.900 | I was first and foremost a violinist.

00:07:50.680 | I mean, if I had met you, I'd be like, hey, Andrew,

00:07:52.740 | I'm a violinist.

00:07:53.560 | And then the second up would be, I'm Maya.

00:07:55.560 | That's how tethered my identity was to being a violinist.

00:08:00.000 | And then fast forward to when I'm a teenager,

00:08:02.960 | these huge dreams of going pro and becoming,

00:08:07.240 | yeah, just like hopefully a professional violinist

00:08:10.140 | for the rest of my life.

00:08:10.980 | And then I tear a tendon in my hand.

00:08:13.760 | My dreams end overnight.

00:08:16.260 | And suddenly, there's this profound loss of identity.

00:08:22.040 | Because what I hadn't realized is that in losing the violin,

00:08:25.100 | sure, I was losing the ability to play the instrument,

00:08:27.300 | but I was actually losing a huge part of who I was.

00:08:30.480 | And that was so destabilizing and so disorienting for me.

00:08:33.840 | Because when you define yourself by the what,

00:08:36.120 | then as soon as the what goes away, you're like, oh my gosh,

00:08:38.800 | who the hell am I, right?

00:08:39.900 | What do I do?

00:08:40.480 | What value do I bring to the world?

00:08:43.000 | And what I experienced at the time

00:08:45.700 | is known in cognitive science as identity paralysis.

00:08:50.480 | Maybe you felt this way during various transitions

00:08:52.600 | in your life.

00:08:53.200 | But basically, who you are and what you're about

00:08:57.200 | is suddenly called into question.

00:08:59.300 | And you end up feeling really stuck, right?

00:09:03.040 | You don't have the courage to imagine

00:09:05.240 | what a future could look like.

00:09:07.120 | And I certainly fell prey to identity paralysis.

00:09:10.200 | And it took me a long time to figure out

00:09:13.000 | what my path would look like moving forward.

00:09:15.720 | But I learned a really valuable lesson

00:09:18.720 | from that very formative experience

00:09:21.000 | I had with change about how it is that I should define myself.

00:09:24.580 | And for what it's worth, I don't think our desire as humans

00:09:28.240 | to have identities is going anywhere.

00:09:29.720 | We're not going to be able to dispose of identities.

00:09:31.920 | And we shouldn't, because our self identities

00:09:34.360 | bring us so much meaning and purpose in our lives, right?

00:09:37.360 | You're a podcaster.

00:09:38.200 | I'm a podcaster.

00:09:38.940 | You're a scientist.

00:09:39.700 | I'm a scientist.

00:09:40.320 | These things are actually really helpful and motivating.

00:09:42.700 | So we don't want to do away with identities altogether.

00:09:45.560 | But what we can be more particular about

00:09:48.680 | is what we anchor our identities to.

00:09:51.840 | And I have learned in my adult life

00:09:54.160 | to anchor my identity to why I do the things I do rather than

00:09:58.000 | what I do.

00:09:59.400 | And I found this to be a much more durable, reliable

00:10:02.960 | relationship.

00:10:03.800 | So to make this concrete, let's think about the violin, right?

00:10:07.960 | Sure, I loved playing.

00:10:09.240 | I loved how music sounded.

00:10:10.680 | I loved the way the violin felt. But when I stripped away

00:10:14.680 | all the superficial features of the violin, what I really,

00:10:17.700 | really loved and was so drawn to as a young child

00:10:21.440 | was the emotional connection that I

00:10:24.120 | could form through my music.

00:10:26.800 | So that might have been with my orchestra mates, my chamber

00:10:29.680 | musician friends, playing solo and performing

00:10:34.360 | in front of an audience.

00:10:35.360 | And ideally, we all feel something new

00:10:38.040 | that we haven't felt before.

00:10:39.400 | I mean, it's kind of an intoxicating feeling

00:10:42.080 | when you're little to have the ability to inspire

00:10:44.960 | new feelings in people, right?

00:10:46.840 | And I was so drawn to human connection.

00:10:51.000 | And when I realized that human connection was

00:10:54.000 | at the heart of what it is that drives me as a person,

00:10:57.040 | like what lights me up every single day

00:10:58.720 | is a desire to connect with others,

00:11:00.440 | to understand other people, to understand their psychology,

00:11:03.800 | to understand how their minds work.

00:11:05.960 | Then when the violin was taken away from me,

00:11:08.920 | even in terms of the narrative I tell myself about my life,

00:11:11.360 | I could still find that same core underlying future

00:11:14.960 | elsewhere.

00:11:15.840 | And I have been able to, right?

00:11:17.120 | I found it as an academic, as a cognitive scientist who

00:11:20.380 | studies the science of connection and emotion.

00:11:23.640 | I've seen that connection play out in the work

00:11:27.020 | that I did in public policy when I was at the White House.

00:11:29.560 | Obviously, with my podcast, "A Slight Change of Plans,"

00:11:32.160 | you're forming these intimate connections of people every day.

00:11:35.440 | And so even though it feels in my life

00:11:38.640 | like I've done such disparate things,

00:11:40.640 | there actually is a powerful through line

00:11:43.680 | that connects all of them.

00:11:45.360 | And that is my desire to connect emotionally.

00:11:47.640 | And so what I would recommend to people who are listening,

00:11:51.040 | especially if they're in the throes of change

00:11:53.080 | and they're feeling destabilized by that threat to identity,

00:11:56.080 | that loss of identity, is to try to figure out

00:11:59.240 | what their through line is.

00:12:00.760 | What are the underlying features of the things

00:12:02.760 | that you used to do that you absolutely loved?

00:12:05.280 | And can you find the expression of that elsewhere?

00:12:09.240 | I love that.

00:12:09.880 | And I have so many questions.

00:12:12.000 | The first one relates back to childhood identities

00:12:15.880 | and how we often can project onto children

00:12:18.680 | what they are likely to become.

00:12:21.040 | I see that as mostly benevolent.

00:12:24.460 | You observe a child playing with trucks in the sandbox,

00:12:28.360 | and we say, oh, they're going to become a contractor.

00:12:32.600 | We tend to project roles that are fairly high up

00:12:36.520 | within occupation hierarchy.

00:12:39.800 | Like any parents, you wish for the best possible life

00:12:43.920 | for your kids.

00:12:46.000 | But I can see the perils of doing that

00:12:48.920 | if then the kid starts to think, well,

00:12:50.760 | that's what I'm bound to become because it is restrictive.

00:12:54.640 | I also am fascinated by the fact that when

00:12:57.480 | we are adolescents and teens, there's

00:13:00.320 | a tendency to ask questions about identity, like who am I?

00:13:04.280 | I don't know many 40-year-olds that

00:13:07.880 | say who am I at one's core, one's essence.

00:13:12.080 | And we might change careers, change relationships,

00:13:14.420 | change geographies, all sorts of things.

00:13:17.280 | But there must be something going on

00:13:19.520 | in the brain in those adolescent and teen years that

00:13:23.600 | forces this question of self, of who am I?

00:13:27.280 | And teenagers and notorious are trying on different uniforms,

00:13:31.240 | different friend groups, different behaviors as a way

00:13:33.720 | to sort that out, sometimes in ways that support them

00:13:36.880 | and sometimes in ways that act as pitfalls.

00:13:39.880 | So I'm curious about what's known

00:13:42.200 | about how we develop our own identity from the inside out

00:13:47.040 | as well as from the outside in.

00:13:48.560 | Yeah, no, that's really interesting,

00:13:50.960 | and it's also something I'm very curious about.

00:13:52.880 | I mean, we know from neuroscience research

00:13:54.800 | that there are significant changes that the brain

00:13:57.800 | undergoes during puberty and other periods of adolescence.

00:14:01.560 | And the primary change that we see

00:14:04.280 | is a desire for independence.

00:14:06.200 | And so one reason why we see teenagers grappling

00:14:09.840 | with this question of who I am is that they're actually

00:14:12.080 | breaking from these structures that they grew up around,

00:14:16.400 | the imposed structures, the identity foreclosure

00:14:19.760 | that they might have experienced and are starting

00:14:22.040 | to figure out for the first time or wanting

00:14:23.800 | to ask the question for the first time, who do I want to be?

00:14:27.040 | What do I want to do outside of the systems

00:14:30.280 | that I've grown up in?

00:14:31.680 | And I think this is one of the primary reasons why

00:14:34.600 | we find that during teenage years, this sort of question

00:14:38.440 | is asked more commonly.

00:14:40.360 | I think that one challenge that we can face--

00:14:45.160 | because you said this one word that really caught

00:14:47.800 | my attention, which was, what's my essence?

00:14:50.280 | And one of the things I studied as a cognitive scientist

00:14:53.320 | is the psychology of what's called essentialism,

00:14:55.720 | so our underlying belief that there

00:14:59.080 | are essential qualities to people that are immutable.

00:15:02.560 | And there's lots of studies with young children and adults

00:15:05.400 | showing that we really believe that people

00:15:07.300 | do have these essences, right?

00:15:09.080 | And unclear what that even means in a metaphysical sense.

00:15:13.360 | I don't know what that would even mean.

00:15:15.680 | But I think that the challenge in believing

00:15:17.960 | that we have essences is that it leads

00:15:20.720 | us to believe that there are these truly immutable states

00:15:24.760 | about ourselves that we're incapable of changing.

00:15:28.360 | And I think this can give rise to feelings of shame,

00:15:32.280 | for example.

00:15:33.040 | So what is shame?

00:15:34.600 | Shame is not the feeling, oh, I did something bad.

00:15:37.480 | Shame is the feeling, I am bad, right?

00:15:40.140 | It's not that I lost at something.

00:15:41.760 | I failed at something.

00:15:42.680 | It's that I'm a loser.

00:15:44.320 | I'm a failure.

00:15:45.640 | And so the problem when we try to figure out the essence piece

00:15:49.280 | is that it doesn't give you the kind of malleable way

00:15:51.620 | of thinking that actually there might not

00:15:54.360 | be something that's so defining about you

00:15:56.080 | that you're incapable of changing.

00:15:58.040 | As humans, maybe all we are are collections

00:16:00.480 | of behaviors and thoughts, right?

00:16:02.520 | And there's nothing more to it than that.

00:16:05.040 | And I find that way of thinking a bit more freeing

00:16:07.840 | when it comes to who we are.

00:16:09.040 | Because I think it allows us to cultivate

00:16:12.020 | more of a growth mindset.

00:16:13.120 | I think it prevents us from engaging

00:16:15.120 | in these very harmful self-narratives

00:16:16.920 | that a lot of people tend to have about themselves.

00:16:19.440 | I mean, probably a lot of people listening to your podcasts

00:16:21.980 | are self-critical.

00:16:23.240 | I'm a very self-critical person.

00:16:24.920 | We listen to this because we want to improve.

00:16:26.800 | You know, I'm a fan of your show because I want to be better

00:16:28.680 | and I want to improve.

00:16:29.600 | But that also is often accompanied

00:16:31.280 | by a lot of self-borating and questioning of self, right?

00:16:34.640 | And so yeah, I think I've just tried

00:16:37.440 | to have a slightly more capacious understanding of who

00:16:40.920 | I am and also recognizing that there might not really

00:16:44.080 | be these essential features that are immutable.

00:16:47.360 | I don't know if you resonate with this notion

00:16:49.200 | of like the desire to feel that we have essences.

00:16:53.040 | Yeah, I used the word essence without thinking too carefully

00:16:56.880 | about exactly what I meant.

00:16:58.040 | But what I'm trying to say when I said essence is, you know,

00:17:05.600 | as a child, I did certain things and I enjoyed some of them.

00:17:11.160 | I didn't enjoy others and I really disliked others.

00:17:14.280 | A very famous neuroscientist who's

00:17:15.880 | at Caltech named Marcus Meister, people literally

00:17:18.120 | refer to him as the great Marcus Meister, once said,

00:17:21.040 | and I totally subscribe to the fact

00:17:22.800 | that neural circuits in the brain

00:17:25.020 | basically divide our sensory experience along

00:17:27.160 | with dimensions of yum, yuck, and meh.

00:17:30.280 | There's not a lot of in-between, right?

00:17:32.800 | Because the circuits ultimately have

00:17:34.240 | to drive either forward movement toward more, right?

00:17:39.240 | Appetitive behaviors in nerd speak or aversive, leaning out,

00:17:43.360 | I don't want that, or just kind of a neutral response.

00:17:46.480 | A yum, yuck, and meh seems to be the trinary response.

00:17:53.320 | And there is this component of childhood,

00:17:56.720 | I think, where we are foraging naturally using our senses,

00:18:00.840 | experiencing yum, yucks, and mehs,

00:18:03.320 | and hearing yum, yucks, and mehs from our parents,

00:18:05.920 | that's good, that's bad, that's whatever, it's neutral.

00:18:08.960 | But at some point, I certainly have had the experience,

00:18:12.880 | and I've observed others, I think,

00:18:14.840 | having the experience of feeling something that's

00:18:18.480 | on a different dimension entirely, which

00:18:20.320 | is this notion of delight, which is that it sort of fills

00:18:23.960 | your body with a sense of so much yum

00:18:28.100 | that it gives you energy to do so much more of it in a way

00:18:32.040 | that is almost on a different plane.

00:18:34.840 | And I'm not trying to be spiritual or metaphysical

00:18:37.400 | about it, but it feels distinctly different.

00:18:39.320 | And I don't know what it represents,

00:18:41.280 | but I think that's that piece that perhaps even

00:18:44.560 | as a scientist, I don't really need

00:18:46.320 | to assign a neural circuit to.

00:18:49.640 | Do you think what you're describing in part is

00:18:51.480 | the feeling of awe, like when you talk about delight,

00:18:53.760 | do you think part of it is a feeling of awe?

00:18:56.640 | Yeah, the first time I went to New York City

00:18:58.400 | as a six-year-old kid, I remember thinking,

00:19:00.720 | and I still feel every time I'm there,

00:19:02.320 | I can't believe this place exists.

00:19:03.880 | It's like a human tropical reef, like everywhere

00:19:07.320 | you look, there's life.

00:19:08.320 | So that was awe and delight, although I saw some things,

00:19:11.640 | this was New York in the '70s, and there were some things

00:19:13.880 | like Times Square in the '70s, right?

00:19:15.480 | If anyone's seen that show, "The Deuces,"

00:19:17.040 | I mean, it's like, it looked like that.

00:19:18.880 | Especially as a young kid, it was kind of aversive.

00:19:22.280 | So it wasn't always awe, but the delight for me

00:19:25.560 | was in learning and certain animals and certain things

00:19:28.280 | for you as the violin, and I want to make sure that I--

00:19:30.360 | And awe, by the way, I mean, it can be aversive, right?

00:19:32.440 | So awe isn't necessarily, I think in the Western world,

00:19:35.100 | we think of awe-inspiring experiences

00:19:36.940 | as having a positive emotional valence,

00:19:38.920 | but they can also have a negative emotional valence.

00:19:41.080 | So the two criteria for a satisfying and awe-inspiring

00:19:45.280 | experience, and a lot of this work

00:19:46.960 | comes from Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley,

00:19:49.420 | yeah, is one, there should be some element

00:19:52.660 | of perceived vastness.

00:19:54.580 | This is all reference-dependent, so it's all based

00:19:56.960 | on your own frame of mind, right?

00:19:59.320 | But there's this sense of mystery and wonder

00:20:02.040 | at just how vast either the physical apparatus is,

00:20:05.800 | like Times Square, it's this massive set of buildings,

00:20:09.840 | and it kind of overwhelms your senses because

00:20:12.260 | of all the lights and sounds that are hitting your visual

00:20:14.920 | system and your auditory system.

00:20:18.380 | There's also conceptual vastness,

00:20:20.440 | so we can feel awe when we feel the delight

00:20:23.880 | of a new scientific discovery, right?

00:20:26.180 | Or in my case, like for the first time,

00:20:28.400 | reading a book about how the mind works.

00:20:30.680 | I just remember marveling at this organ

00:20:32.860 | and just being completely in awe of how it works.

00:20:36.720 | And then the second criteria for an awe-inspiring experience,

00:20:39.400 | which I think might have been met as well when you were

00:20:42.240 | in New York, is what's called a need for accommodation.

00:20:44.900 | So it's just a fancy way of saying

00:20:46.460 | that we have a certain mental model of the world,

00:20:49.100 | and typically in the presence of awe,

00:20:51.220 | we need to assimilate this new information with our existing

00:20:54.700 | model because it challenges it in some way.

00:20:57.160 | And it actually leads us to have more open minds

00:21:00.820 | because we realize, wait a second,

00:21:03.740 | I have this existing vision of what the world is like,

00:21:06.040 | and now I'm experiencing this new thing,

00:21:07.780 | and I need to kind of make it work.

00:21:09.160 | I need to integrate it with my existing

00:21:10.960 | understanding of the world.

00:21:12.080 | And that's the mind-blowing part of it, right?

00:21:14.740 | But I absolutely-- I mean, I remember my childhood

00:21:17.300 | experience kind of mirroring your experience in New York

00:21:19.540 | was I was 12 years old, maybe 11 years old.

00:21:24.200 | I was at a summer music camp.

00:21:25.900 | It was late at night.

00:21:26.800 | I had my disc man, which is how we listened to things back

00:21:30.500 | in the day.

00:21:30.980 | I recall.

00:21:31.660 | I had a CD in there.

00:21:35.020 | It was the Beethoven Violin Concerto by Anne-Sophie Mutter.

00:21:38.620 | And I was like, I was so young, Andrew.

00:21:41.140 | So I still don't know how to use words

00:21:43.340 | to describe how it is that I felt

00:21:46.140 | something that was so powerful and so transcendent.

00:21:49.980 | But I remember listening to the first movement

00:21:52.220 | of this violin concerto, and it consumed me.

00:21:56.140 | I mean, I felt chills up and down my spine.

00:21:58.640 | My heart would race along with the melody.

00:22:01.620 | It felt otherworldly, right?

00:22:03.320 | And I think that was kind of what you were getting at before,

00:22:05.820 | where it's like it's this altered state of mind.

00:22:09.340 | And the language I've used since to code that experience

00:22:12.800 | is that it was an awe-inspiring experience because I think both

00:22:15.220 | things happened, right?

00:22:16.220 | I was impressed by the vastness of the experience.

00:22:20.540 | It also sent me through time in this interesting way,

00:22:23.380 | you know, back to like the time of Beethoven, right?

00:22:26.260 | So vastness can exist along a temporal horizon.

00:22:29.160 | And then the need for accommodation, which was--

00:22:31.640 | I hadn't studied cognitive science at this point,

00:22:33.680 | so I remember thinking, I cannot believe a collection of musical

00:22:37.920 | notes arranged just so can make me feel this way.

00:22:41.900 | And then if you were to tweak it just slightly,

00:22:43.860 | just like take the E flat and move it down the stream

00:22:47.280 | a little bit, emotional resonance completely gone

00:22:49.920 | from the passage.

00:22:50.880 | And there was just something so simple and magical

00:22:53.880 | about that realization.

00:22:55.000 | So anyway, resonate with this kind of delight and awe

00:22:58.680 | experience that you described.

00:23:00.180 | Yeah, I'm so glad you describe it that way.

00:23:02.980 | You know, this isn't a discussion

00:23:05.720 | about my experience, but for me, I

00:23:08.340 | realize now that New York was awe-inspiring.

00:23:11.840 | Prior to that, the only thing similar

00:23:14.760 | was discovering animal specialization, something

00:23:18.080 | I'm still fascinated by, the sensory systems of animals

00:23:20.480 | and how they experience the world

00:23:22.540 | and how humans experience the world.

00:23:24.080 | And then ultimately, it was--

00:23:25.600 | well, then I went into skateboarding

00:23:27.240 | and that whole landscape and then eventually

00:23:29.080 | into neuroscience.

00:23:31.000 | The difference between the New York experience of awe--

00:23:34.400 | and I do think that's what it was--

00:23:36.440 | and biology, animals, and eventually neuroscience

00:23:40.320 | is that, like your experience with music

00:23:43.720 | and realizing that the movement of a note

00:23:45.800 | could change something fundamentally,

00:23:48.280 | when it came to learning about biology and neuroscience,

00:23:51.520 | I felt not just awe, but a sense of delight in that I felt

00:23:56.280 | there was a place for me there.

00:23:58.040 | And what came out of what you just described really,

00:24:01.280 | really resonated in terms of this moving of a note,

00:24:04.300 | because it took something from a passive experience, I believe,

00:24:07.560 | of that's this incredible thing over there,

00:24:09.880 | like New York City was awe.

00:24:11.740 | But I didn't see myself having any kind of verb state

00:24:16.160 | within it that would change it or alter it how it is or for me.

00:24:22.440 | Whereas with music, for you, or I think neuroscience,

00:24:24.680 | when I realized that you could do experiments,

00:24:26.960 | you could actually do some sort of manipulation.

00:24:29.600 | And through that, hopefully, unveil something fundamental

00:24:32.860 | about how the brain works.

00:24:34.320 | I thought, there's a place for me here.

00:24:36.360 | And so I think there's something about the experience

00:24:39.680 | of something, just from a raw sensory perspective--

00:24:42.480 | music or animals or neuroscience in the examples we're

00:24:45.680 | using here--

00:24:46.560 | but then realizing that there's a verb state of self,

00:24:49.160 | like that I could enact something within it that

00:24:51.920 | could give me more of that.

00:24:54.320 | Whereas I think when, as a young kid in New York City,

00:24:56.640 | I just didn't feel any way that I could plug into it,

00:24:58.800 | except in a passive way.

00:25:00.000 | Because it's the difference between a kid who--

00:25:02.000 | and this wouldn't have been me-- who sees a game of soccer,

00:25:04.560 | football, or baseball, or watches the Olympics

00:25:06.760 | and goes, that is amazing.

00:25:09.080 | And the kid that says, I'm going to go do that.

00:25:12.240 | In fact, I could do that.

00:25:13.280 | And I could maybe do that even better, or even half as well.

00:25:17.640 | And so the delight, I think, is in the possibility

00:25:21.440 | of engagement.

00:25:22.920 | And I'm fascinated-- a friend of mine

00:25:24.640 | who's a trauma therapist, he's not a neuroscientist.

00:25:26.960 | He always says, nouns are just very slow verbs.

00:25:29.720 | But verbs are far more exciting because they create

00:25:32.000 | this anticipatory activity.

00:25:34.120 | Anyway, I want--

00:25:36.280 | I love-- before you move on from that,

00:25:38.040 | I love that you said that because you're

00:25:39.440 | helping me realize something really important about how

00:25:42.360 | I saw my role as a violinist.

00:25:44.160 | And I'm never going to modify the notes on the page

00:25:48.180 | because obviously I'm going to be faithful to what Beethoven

00:25:50.760 | wrote.

00:25:51.160 | This is what made you a great musician and me a--

00:25:53.280 | by the way, I was a failed violinist.

00:25:55.000 | They pulled me out of it because the neighbor's dogs howled.

00:25:59.160 | I was in Suzuki method.

00:26:00.320 | I was in Suzuki too, yeah.

00:26:01.400 | I was so terrible at it that they literally

00:26:03.760 | made me stop playing music just to protect the neighborhood.

00:26:06.880 | That's adorable.

00:26:07.920 | And we'll talk about the science of quitting maybe later,

00:26:10.620 | but that was a great choice for you.

00:26:14.000 | But what I'm realizing is that there

00:26:16.080 | was that element of defining self

00:26:20.000 | through the pursuit of the instrument.

00:26:22.080 | And I saw a place for myself exactly like you did,

00:26:26.200 | where I thought, I decide how this phrase unfolds.

00:26:30.520 | I decide how much vibrato I use.

00:26:32.480 | I decide exactly what the angling of my bow

00:26:35.320 | is and the cadence and the pacing and the emotion

00:26:38.440 | that I bring to the experience.

00:26:39.920 | And when you see a place for yourself,

00:26:42.620 | that takes an awe-inspiring experience.

00:26:45.320 | And actually, there's a translation process

00:26:48.380 | where you become something bigger than what

00:26:51.220 | you thought you could be.

00:26:52.340 | And actually, it's so interesting

00:26:53.260 | you mentioned this, Andrew, because I've

00:26:54.840 | been chatting recently with a guy named Reginald Dwayne Betts.

00:26:58.220 | And he spent nine years in prison.

00:27:01.220 | And he's now a internationally renowned scholar.

00:27:03.580 | So he committed a carjacking when he was 15 years old

00:27:09.100 | and then went to an adult prison for nine years.

00:27:12.540 | As a 15-year-old?

00:27:14.000 | He just turned 16 by the time he got his sentence.

00:27:16.220 | Yeah, it was totally wild.

00:27:17.940 | And he actually talks about the fact

00:27:21.940 | that there was this underground library in the prison system.

00:27:26.020 | And he didn't know what he could be in the prison, what identity

00:27:31.480 | he could take on, when everyone seemed

00:27:34.700 | to be defined by what crime they had committed, right?

00:27:37.620 | It felt like his imagination was so limited to--

00:27:42.140 | and talk about identity paralysis, right?

00:27:44.020 | I mean, you're denied all your basic freedoms

00:27:46.460 | in this environment, right?

00:27:47.540 | So you really don't even have the ability

00:27:48.940 | to imagine what more you could be.

00:27:50.320 | So one day, he gets a book called The Black Poets.

00:27:53.700 | And in the book, he read a poem by Etheridge Knight, who

00:27:57.800 | had also spent time in prison and had

00:27:59.340 | written this incredibly stirring poem about the criminal justice

00:28:02.420 | system.

00:28:03.600 | And he goes by Dwayne.

00:28:05.580 | What Dwayne shared with me is he said,

00:28:10.780 | I was awe-inspired by what I was reading.

00:28:14.020 | But the most important thing that

00:28:15.420 | happened in reading that book and understanding

00:28:17.580 | the author's history is that it gave me something to be.

00:28:21.580 | I saw a place for myself in this world.

00:28:24.980 | And he wrote-- I mean, he was so prolific.

00:28:28.560 | He wrote like 1,000 poems in the year

00:28:31.220 | after he stumbled upon this book.

00:28:33.460 | And he ended up winning the MacArthur Genius Award.

00:28:35.980 | He went to Yale Law School.

00:28:37.100 | I mean, he's just crushed it ever since.

00:28:39.340 | But I think he stumbled upon a really important point, which

00:28:41.840 | is there's a fascinating science of awe and all the benefits it

00:28:45.660 | can confer to our well-being.

00:28:47.300 | But it can also serve as an entry point

00:28:49.740 | to helping to define our identities in new places.

00:28:52.480 | And I just love that.

00:28:53.420 | I think it's a wonderful way to think about it.

00:28:56.180 | Yeah, when we see ourselves entering

00:28:59.260 | a sphere of experience that is evoking awe,

00:29:04.980 | I do think it's something about it converts to this delight.

00:29:09.100 | Although, I have to acknowledge that language

00:29:10.980 | is insufficient to describe a lot of what we're referring to,

00:29:14.340 | right?

00:29:14.820 | That even the most reductionist language of biology

00:29:20.500 | can't grab the higher order emotions and complexity.

00:29:25.420 | Not yet, anyway.

00:29:26.340 | We just don't have a language for it.

00:29:28.960 | I'd like to talk more about the violin,

00:29:31.020 | not just because I failed miserably at the violin.

00:29:33.600 | But actually, I figured out pretty early on I

00:29:35.560 | wasn't going to be a musician.

00:29:37.380 | I still have absolutely no ability to read music.

00:29:40.100 | I can memorize the lyrics very easily.

00:29:41.920 | And I love music.

00:29:43.340 | And I love classical music as well as other forms of music.

00:29:46.480 | But zero musical talent.

00:29:49.360 | You, on the other hand, got quite good at violin.

00:29:54.220 | It was interesting for me to learn that the violin was

00:29:57.380 | a bit of a rebellious choice for you given your family history.

00:30:01.320 | And you and I do both share this fairly unusual fact

00:30:05.980 | that both of our fathers are theoretical physicists.

00:30:09.380 | So did you feel pressured to be a scientist or something else?

00:30:12.320 | And being a musician, was that initially looked

00:30:15.220 | at as a route to poverty or a bad choice?

00:30:19.180 | Or were your parents a bit more cautious?

00:30:21.040 | Like, oh, OK, that's great.

00:30:23.000 | But maybe make that a supplement to your other studies

00:30:25.520 | and pursuits?

00:30:26.540 | Yeah, so I'm the youngest of four kids.

00:30:28.240 | And kind of stereotypically, my three older siblings

00:30:31.040 | were total math whizzes.

00:30:32.240 | They were taking the SAT when they were very young

00:30:36.160 | because they were so talented.

00:30:38.480 | But I think one antagonist to some of those cultural forces

00:30:41.200 | is that my mom, when she had grown up in India,

00:30:43.760 | had felt very stifled by her environment.

00:30:46.480 | Like, as a young woman who is very capable and very smart--

00:30:49.840 | I mean, she majored in physics--

00:30:52.160 | she was mostly kept to the spaces of domestic chores,

00:30:57.500 | occasional singing lessons.

00:30:59.860 | But mostly, her job was like, do your homework

00:31:01.900 | and then help with cooking and cleaning and whatnot.

00:31:05.000 | And so when she moved to this country with my dad

00:31:07.700 | in the 1970s, she was actually very excited.

00:31:12.860 | She was 21 years old, by the way.

00:31:14.300 | So long story short, she met my dad 20 days prior

00:31:17.620 | to their getting married.

00:31:18.700 | So it was an arranged meeting.

00:31:20.220 | And my dad is doing his postdoc at Harvard in physics

00:31:25.120 | at the Society of Fellows.

00:31:26.340 | And my mom just joins him after a winter break in the dorm.

00:31:30.140 | And everyone's like, hey, man, how was your break?

00:31:32.260 | And there's like, I went snowboarding.

00:31:33.840 | And I went whatever, to Tahoe.

00:31:35.460 | And my dad's like, I got married.

00:31:37.680 | And so this new couple arrives.

00:31:39.840 | And my mom was so lonely in this country.

00:31:43.020 | I mean, this was before you could text your parents

00:31:45.520 | overseas or use a WhatsApp group.

00:31:47.360 | So she could only handwrite letters to her family back home.

00:31:50.460 | And her goal was, you know what?

00:31:52.360 | I'm going to create a little army around me

00:31:54.200 | in the form of children.

00:31:55.240 | So she had four kids.

00:31:56.880 | And she was absolutely intent on exposing us

00:32:00.920 | to as many extracurricular activities as she could.

00:32:03.320 | So I have two older brothers.

00:32:04.520 | And I have an older sister, especially her girls.

00:32:07.340 | She said, you can do whatever you want.

00:32:10.960 | Lay the land when you're young.

00:32:12.500 | But when you find something that you're passionate about,

00:32:14.840 | I really want to give you the opportunity to explore it.

00:32:17.220 | And I think I really benefited from the fact

00:32:18.920 | that she had been denied that kind of exposure

00:32:22.500 | and the ability to pursue her dreams, artistic or otherwise.

00:32:25.980 | And so she was really hell-bent on making sure

00:32:28.280 | that we kids were able to.

00:32:29.520 | I think they were--

00:32:30.360 | I mean, my older three siblings played musical instruments,

00:32:32.820 | so like clarinet, trumpet, flute.

00:32:34.560 | I think they were surprised by my affinity for it.

00:32:37.440 | Because when I was six, my mom brought down my grandmother's

00:32:41.080 | violin from the attic.

00:32:42.080 | So my grandmother had played Indian classical music.

00:32:44.360 | So that's where she was sitting cross-legged

00:32:46.200 | on the floor and your violin's facing the ground.

00:32:48.240 | It's a very different style of music.

00:32:50.920 | But as like a parting gift, my grandmother

00:32:52.680 | had given it to my mom and said, hey, bring this with you

00:32:54.380 | to the US.

00:32:55.540 | So she opened the instrument that day.

00:32:57.420 | And I just instantly fell in love with it.

00:33:00.100 | And I asked very quickly for a quarter-size violin of my own.

00:33:05.420 | And while my parents had to nudge

00:33:07.680 | me to do all sorts of things, they really

00:33:10.440 | never had to push me to practice,

00:33:12.080 | which felt extraordinary at the time.

00:33:13.860 | Like, OK, clearly the violin is something

00:33:15.960 | that Maya has intrinsic motivation for.

00:33:18.120 | Because how is it that we're not asking her

00:33:20.360 | to have to practice all the time?

00:33:23.480 | Similar to you, actually, Andrew, I never--

00:33:25.880 | to this day, I have a really hard time reading music.

00:33:28.200 | So I never-- I was a terrible sight reader.

00:33:31.480 | I couldn't-- if you put a piece of music in front of me,

00:33:33.980 | I would not be able to tell you probably

00:33:35.680 | what it would sound like today.

00:33:37.120 | I learned entirely by ear.

00:33:38.680 | So I started with the Suzuki method, which, as you know,

00:33:40.980 | is entirely by ear.

00:33:42.440 | And then I had an extremely very kind, awesome,

00:33:47.600 | but very inexperienced teacher.

00:33:49.180 | I was his first student.

00:33:50.640 | My mom went backstage at a symphony concert

00:33:52.800 | in New Haven, which is where I grew up,

00:33:54.800 | and just asked the concertmaster, like, hey,

00:33:56.760 | will you teach my daughter?

00:33:57.880 | And he's like, sure.

00:33:59.000 | Never taught anyone before, but I'll give this a go.

00:34:01.600 | And so we just made things up along the way.

00:34:03.480 | I mean, he would play stuff, and I would mimic it.

00:34:05.640 | And I would let my emotions and my whatever innate musicality

00:34:09.460 | guide me.

00:34:10.880 | And eventually-- I mean, I think what that did actually

00:34:14.160 | is really interesting from a skill building perspective.

00:34:17.400 | My technique absolutely suffered in the long term

00:34:20.080 | from not having a more structured approach.

00:34:22.560 | But I was able to fall in love with this endeavor much more

00:34:25.920 | quickly than other kids who had drill sergeants that

00:34:28.840 | were forcing them to, like, practice their scales every day

00:34:32.040 | and practice A2s.

00:34:33.040 | I mean, that stuff is so boring, right?

00:34:34.640 | And when you're a little kid, you just

00:34:36.100 | want to bang your head against the wall

00:34:37.600 | when you're put up against that one.

00:34:39.060 | So there's so many barriers to actually enjoying

00:34:42.500 | the fun parts, which are actually playing the pieces.

00:34:44.740 | So the one kind of fun aside about my musical journey

00:34:47.300 | is I got to jump straight to the fun stuff.

00:34:49.400 | And I think that helped me cultivate a much more natural

00:34:51.840 | love of the instrument.

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00:35:58.780 | The intrinsic motivation part is so key.

00:36:00.780 | I've talked a few times before on the podcast about this,

00:36:03.980 | I think, now famous study that was done at Bing Nursery

00:36:07.080 | School at Stanford, where they observed what kids did during

00:36:09.820 | free time.

00:36:10.440 | And then they rewarded them or didn't reward them.

00:36:12.280 | And then they later removed the rewards.

00:36:14.040 | And the essential takeaway is that receiving rewards

00:36:17.160 | for something that a child was initially intrinsically

00:36:21.040 | motivated to do undermined some of that intrinsic motivation.

00:36:24.680 | So I have to wonder whether or not

00:36:26.360 | the fact that your parents neither encouraged

00:36:28.700 | nor discouraged your violin playing

00:36:30.800 | might have allowed you to fully express and lean

00:36:33.320 | into your intrinsic motivation, as opposed to, for instance,

00:36:37.120 | in my case, we are distantly related, not closely related.

00:36:41.920 | But there is a great violinist by the name

00:36:43.960 | of Bronislav Huberman, who has a street named after him

00:36:46.860 | in Israel.

00:36:47.360 | There's a famous picture of him and Einstein playing violin

00:36:49.740 | together.

00:36:50.240 | And I was told about that early on.

00:36:52.560 | And when I failed to play well after a couple of practices,

00:36:56.680 | I was convinced that there was no way

00:36:58.260 | I was going to live up to it.

00:36:59.760 | And I quit.

00:37:00.280 | That's a high bar, man.

00:37:01.180 | It's a high bar.

00:37:02.200 | It's a high bar.

00:37:02.920 | I didn't have any such role models

00:37:04.180 | that I was trying to be like in my family.

00:37:05.680 | Yeah, it turns out I'm--

00:37:06.720 | but exactly.

00:37:07.880 | And so I think that there's actually more opportunity

00:37:10.840 | in kids leaning into, and adults probably,

00:37:14.800 | leaning into the sensory experience of what they're

00:37:17.840 | doing and not putting that up against some benchmark.

00:37:20.960 | And I worry about that today so much with social media

00:37:23.480 | and with video games, where in a video game or on social media,

00:37:27.120 | you can see something being done at the very highest level,

00:37:30.200 | often by someone quite young or early in their career,

00:37:33.960 | to the point where it can be a little bit overwhelming.

00:37:36.240 | And I think then we start measuring ourselves

00:37:38.960 | against metrics that are not about the experience.

00:37:42.920 | That said, your parents, whatever they did,

00:37:46.840 | worked out well enough that you became very proficient.

00:37:49.940 | You succeeded in getting into Juilliard,

00:37:51.840 | which is, at least from my understanding,

00:37:53.560 | is the most competitive music preparatory.

00:37:58.240 | Is that how you refer to it?

00:38:00.160 | That one can possibly go to.

00:38:03.160 | And so at that point, had your identity

00:38:06.440 | merged with the behavior, and were you still

00:38:08.920 | enjoying yourself up until the point

00:38:10.960 | where you had this injury that we'll also talk about?

00:38:13.640 | Yeah, I was still enjoying myself

00:38:16.680 | around the time when I auditioned

00:38:18.160 | for Juilliard in particular because of exactly what you

00:38:20.400 | said, which was everything was kind of beating

00:38:23.000 | my expectations and my parents' expectations

00:38:25.360 | up until this point, which is that we didn't really have any.

00:38:28.560 | And so it all just felt like icing on the cake.

00:38:31.560 | Wow, our kids found something that they really love.

00:38:34.840 | This is great, right?

00:38:35.720 | It can sometimes take you years, decades

00:38:37.680 | to figure out what it is that you love,

00:38:39.280 | what you're passionate about.

00:38:40.200 | And I think we go through this renewal process

00:38:42.120 | often in our lives, right?

00:38:43.040 | I've had to have moments in life where I'm like,

00:38:44.480 | what do I like again?

00:38:45.400 | What do I love again?

00:38:46.600 | And so it's not also a one-time experience.

00:38:49.640 | But there was a thrilling aspect to my musical life

00:38:52.180 | when I was young, which is, again, everything kind of felt

00:38:54.520 | like bonus.

00:38:56.180 | So one story I love sharing is about how I even got

00:38:59.020 | into Juilliard in the first place.

00:39:02.300 | My parents-- so my dad's a theoretical physicist,

00:39:05.520 | as you mentioned.

00:39:06.440 | My mom helps immigrants get green cards

00:39:08.380 | to study in this country.

00:39:09.820 | Neither of them had exposure to the classical music sphere,

00:39:14.020 | right?

00:39:14.540 | So they're like the opposite of tiger parents.

00:39:16.320 | Like, even if they wanted to be tiger parents,

00:39:17.860 | they wouldn't know how to be tiger parents in this domain

00:39:20.480 | because they lack the connections and the wherewithal

00:39:23.400 | to figure out what it would mean to go pro and to access

00:39:26.680 | the best teachers or whatever.

00:39:27.920 | So my mom, who is a very fearless person by nature,

00:39:31.940 | she knew that at some point, my passion for the violin

00:39:35.000 | was surpassing her ability to connect me

00:39:38.300 | with the right resources.

00:39:39.860 | And so one weekend, we were in New York,

00:39:43.240 | all inspiring New York.

00:39:44.900 | And I had my violin with me because I had another audition.

00:39:48.740 | And we were just walking by Juilliard, the building.

00:39:52.140 | And my mom was just eager for me to see it from the outside

00:39:54.640 | because it's just really cool as a kid, right?

00:39:57.060 | It's like all your musical idols went to this place.

00:39:59.220 | I just wanted to see it and imagine

00:40:01.220 | what it would have been like for Pearlman to go in and out

00:40:03.480 | and Midori to go in and out.

00:40:04.680 | It was Yo-Yo Ma, right?

00:40:06.080 | It was so exciting.

00:40:07.480 | And as we're passing the entrance,

00:40:10.080 | my mom looks at me and says, hey, why don't we just go in?

00:40:14.880 | I was like, what are you talking about?

00:40:16.900 | She's like, let's just go in.

00:40:18.280 | What's the worst thing that can happen?

00:40:19.960 | And I'm like, security guards and a lot of other terrible

00:40:22.780 | things, mom, right?

00:40:24.380 | But I had a youthful enthusiasm that propelled me

00:40:26.900 | into the building that day.

00:40:29.300 | She strikes up a conversation with a fellow student.

00:40:31.520 | And her mom finds out that she's studying with a top teacher

00:40:35.260 | at Juilliard, asks if we can get an introduction.

00:40:38.200 | Within an hour, I'm auditioning for this teacher on the spot,

00:40:41.420 | right?

00:40:42.140 | No idea that this was going to happen.

00:40:43.720 | Wild.

00:40:44.780 | Yeah, he tells me--

00:40:47.620 | he has what I prefer to as a muted enthusiasm

00:40:51.020 | about my playing.

00:40:51.800 | Doesn't think I'm great, but see something.

00:40:54.040 | He told me later he liked my personality, my enthusiasm.

00:40:56.520 | So I got the personality card coming out

00:40:58.400 | of that music audition.

00:40:59.480 | Great.

00:41:00.920 | And what he did is he said, look, I'm with you.

00:41:04.520 | I don't think that you're ready.

00:41:05.900 | You would not get into Juilliard if you auditioned today.

00:41:08.880 | However, I take residence at a summer music program

00:41:13.080 | in Colorado.

00:41:13.960 | If you come there for five weeks,

00:41:15.400 | we can do an intense boot camp where I try to skill you up

00:41:19.300 | and get you to learn your first scale and your first etude,

00:41:22.860 | which you will need to pass the Juilliard audition

00:41:24.940 | and also maybe hopefully get you to read music a little bit

00:41:27.660 | better than you can right now.

00:41:29.540 | And I went to that summer camp, and I worked my butt off.

00:41:33.420 | I mean, you're also in this incredibly intensive

00:41:35.860 | environment where everyone your age is there,

00:41:38.140 | and they're all practicing their age equivalent, right?

00:41:41.400 | And so I felt very inspired by that.

00:41:42.940 | And I ended up getting into Juilliard in the fall.

00:41:46.000 | And it was such a wonderful reminder

00:41:48.920 | that when opportunities are not served

00:41:51.640 | on a silver platter for you, you just

00:41:53.560 | have to have this kind of imaginative courage

00:41:56.960 | and what my mom had that day to figure out a path from point A

00:42:00.200 | to point B. She really just created a plate for me

00:42:03.560 | and said, OK, you're prepared for this thing.

00:42:06.480 | We're going to get you in front of this teacher.

00:42:08.440 | And that's a lesson I use time and time again

00:42:11.600 | when I felt like there was something cool I could be doing.

00:42:14.820 | The opportunity did not exist.

00:42:17.340 | So for example, when I was in the White House,

00:42:19.300 | the job that I wanted, which was to be

00:42:21.720 | a practitioner of behavioral science, did not exist.

00:42:24.420 | And so I sent cold emails, and I pitched them

00:42:27.080 | on the idea of creating a new position for a behavioral

00:42:29.460 | science advisor.

00:42:30.440 | And then I said, hey, by the way,

00:42:31.860 | if you create this position, could you

00:42:33.560 | also consider hiring me to play that job,

00:42:36.220 | even though I've had no public policy experience

00:42:39.040 | and I've been an academic for the entirety of my adult life?

00:42:42.800 | And they said yes.

00:42:44.440 | And so it was such an energizing lesson

00:42:48.220 | to learn as a young kid, which is you can do the cold call.

00:42:52.280 | Oftentimes, there's few consequences.

00:42:54.160 | You'll just get rejected.

00:42:55.200 | I mean, that's truly the worst thing that's going to happen.

00:42:57.000 | But it's one thing to be told that.

00:42:58.620 | It's another thing to have lived the experience out

00:43:00.940 | and to see how amazing the aftermath can be.

00:43:04.680 | And that's what I got to experience as a young kid.

00:43:07.620 | - Amazing, and so let's all express some thanks to your mom

00:43:11.160 | for barging in the door.

00:43:13.760 | And to you, because you also had the agency

00:43:16.280 | to do the audition on the spot.

00:43:18.280 | I think a lot of kids and adults would have thought,

00:43:20.800 | I'm not ready, I'm not going to do this.

00:43:22.660 | But it takes a certain gumption to just do it, right?

00:43:27.660 | And also to integrate the feedback.

00:43:30.860 | And then I'm curious about this camp.

00:43:33.120 | I went to a few camps of different types,

00:43:36.340 | crashed a few camps, that's a different story.

00:43:38.440 | Turns out if you show up, you can get by for a few days

00:43:40.600 | before they realize that you're not one of the main,

00:43:42.560 | oh yeah, no, there's a whole other set of stories there.

00:43:44.960 | - I love it, Andrew.

00:43:46.320 | - But I'm curious, you're among very driven,

00:43:51.320 | maybe even obsessive kids.

00:43:54.880 | Were they nice to one another?

00:43:56.840 | Do you recall the kid that was the best?

00:43:59.400 | - Oh yeah, Rachel Lee.

00:44:00.560 | - There you go, isn't this incredible?

00:44:02.160 | - Oh my God.

00:44:03.000 | - How we remember these names.

00:44:03.840 | - Yeah, total prodigy.

00:44:05.280 | I bristle when people say like,

00:44:07.440 | oh, like Maya was a young violin prodigy.

00:44:10.380 | I'm like, no, I wasn't.

00:44:11.940 | And there's no false humility in my saying that.

00:44:14.600 | I just actually saw what prodigies were like

00:44:17.560 | and I was not one of them.

00:44:19.000 | I mean, truly just talk about awe inspiring.

00:44:22.660 | I'm like, how is it that music comes

00:44:24.440 | so effortlessly to Rachel?

00:44:26.880 | I feel like she was born with a violin in her hands.

00:44:30.040 | I mean, that's how it felt whenever I watched her play.

00:44:32.560 | And it's a double-edged sword.

00:44:36.160 | On the one hand, you're driving inspiration

00:44:38.600 | from the incredible talent you see around you.

00:44:41.080 | On the other hand, you feel demoralized so often

00:44:44.680 | because you're running up against whatever limitations exist

00:44:48.640 | when it comes to your natural talent and your work ethic.

00:44:52.600 | Like at the end of the day,

00:44:53.440 | I was never the hardest working violinist.

00:44:56.260 | My mom insisted that we were well-rounded kids.

00:44:59.340 | I played soccer all through elementary school.

00:45:01.640 | I auditioned for the school play, "Really Rosie."

00:45:04.800 | I did art classes.

00:45:06.780 | It was just really important to both my parents, I think,

00:45:09.640 | that we had just relatively normal lives.

00:45:12.520 | And I was studying alongside kids

00:45:14.220 | who had literally left half their families behind

00:45:18.760 | in their home country, had moved with one parent

00:45:22.520 | to a studio apartment in Manhattan

00:45:25.740 | or in Colorado for this camp,

00:45:27.320 | and were devoting their entire lives to this pursuit.

00:45:30.760 | And so I felt like I was a super envious kid.

00:45:35.680 | Like I was always looking around being like,

00:45:37.980 | "I suck and they're great," right?

00:45:39.400 | We talked about like having a self-critical personality.

00:45:42.360 | - I think a lot of kids feel that way.

00:45:45.400 | I think at that age,

00:45:46.980 | and this sometimes extends into adulthood,

00:45:49.120 | we have this tendency to try and find benchmarks

00:45:52.840 | of where we are, you know?

00:45:55.120 | And sometimes that turns into a hierarchical thing,

00:45:59.300 | sometimes very lateralized, but trying to figure out

00:46:01.540 | where you are in the landscape of things is,

00:46:03.540 | it just seems like it's kind of fundamental

00:46:05.720 | to the teenage experience.

00:46:07.240 | - Yeah, and your universe shrinks too, right?

00:46:09.400 | So like you're no longer getting access

00:46:11.080 | to what the average kid violinist sounds like.

00:46:13.880 | I mean, you're in the elite of the elite,

00:46:15.400 | and so it's so intimidating.

00:46:17.420 | And I often felt, I felt like what happened is,

00:46:21.260 | especially when I became a teenager,

00:46:22.880 | so two things happened when I became a teenager.

00:46:24.640 | The first is that my violin life just started

00:46:27.480 | to speed forward.

00:46:28.380 | So it's like Pearlman invited me

00:46:30.480 | to be his private violin student, you know,

00:46:33.400 | considered the best violinist in the world.

00:46:35.100 | It was an incredible experience.

00:46:38.560 | I felt so overwhelmed even by the opportunity.

00:46:41.280 | I'd also stumbled upon MTV and was like,

00:46:43.080 | do I even want to do classical music?

00:46:44.560 | Like Britney Spears is doing much cooler things.

00:46:46.520 | So that was my version of like teenage rebellion

00:46:48.520 | was coming home from school

00:46:49.860 | and what I should have been practicing watching MTV.

00:46:52.760 | But the other thing that happened is

00:46:54.760 | I went through the natural teenage process,

00:46:58.120 | which is I became very self-conscious.

00:47:01.780 | I became more insecure.

00:47:03.240 | I was trying to figure out who I was, who I am.

00:47:06.060 | And I think that was the period of my life,

00:47:09.060 | my high school years,

00:47:10.320 | when I was the least happy as a violinist.

00:47:12.260 | So I described to you earlier

00:47:15.480 | that incredibly awe-inspiring experience

00:47:17.860 | of listening to the Beethoven Violin Concerto

00:47:20.040 | and it feeling other worldly

00:47:21.720 | and feeling like I could see a world

00:47:24.600 | beyond my own personal wants and needs and desires, right?

00:47:27.120 | Really made me feel small against the backdrop

00:47:29.440 | of this magnificent world.

00:47:30.760 | And I liked that feeling of smallness.

00:47:33.160 | And when I was in my teenage years,

00:47:36.000 | we're all in this highly narcissistic state of mind.

00:47:39.840 | We're like consumed with ourselves and how we feel.

00:47:43.440 | And I just felt like I gave some of my worst performances

00:47:46.860 | when I was a teenager.

00:47:47.840 | And I often found to your point

00:47:50.080 | about these pressure cooker environments,

00:47:53.200 | my best performance were actually just to the public.

00:47:56.080 | My worst performances were when I was in my little studio

00:47:59.240 | having to play for my peers.

00:48:01.060 | Like that's just sapped all the joy out for me

00:48:03.120 | because I was, yeah, just like really tough on myself.

00:48:05.900 | And I lost, that was a period of time where I lost touch

00:48:09.740 | with what it is that I loved about music.

00:48:12.540 | And of course there's an ebb and flow.

00:48:15.200 | I had magical experiences playing the violin

00:48:17.440 | when I was a high schooler,

00:48:18.420 | but I just think if you were to do like the average of joy,

00:48:22.040 | like pre 12 and then post 12,

00:48:24.200 | the average joy was much higher before I became a teenager.

00:48:27.960 | - Yeah, there's so many things to extrapolate from that.

00:48:30.960 | I really feel that when we get into a mode

00:48:33.800 | of trying to hit milestones that are extrinsic,

00:48:37.820 | that it really can undermine our love of what we're doing.

00:48:41.640 | But if we keep going and we can reframe

00:48:45.760 | what those external rewards are,

00:48:47.600 | in part by just realizing that they're so transient

00:48:50.200 | compared to the delight that we can experience.

00:48:53.260 | What I mean is that I don't think of delight

00:48:55.140 | as something that wells up in us and then dissipates.

00:48:58.520 | I think of it as something that changes our nervous system

00:49:01.540 | in a way that gives us access to new abilities.

00:49:03.660 | I really do.

00:49:04.500 | I mean, being a faculty member at Stanford,

00:49:06.000 | you know, you look to your left, you look to your right.

00:49:07.660 | And it's like, I literally in the building,

00:49:09.300 | I mean, I've got a Nobel prize winner below me.

00:49:11.520 | Like the people buy a MacArthur award winners

00:49:13.580 | all over the place, like everywhere you turn.

00:49:15.060 | And these people do other things too.

00:49:16.980 | So they're like, you know, oh no, also D1 athletes.

00:49:19.520 | And they've got five kids

00:49:20.580 | and all their kids seem to be doing great.

00:49:22.120 | They're like, who are these people?

00:49:23.360 | And it becomes very important in that environment

00:49:26.480 | to just shrink your spirits.

00:49:29.160 | Like what's, you know, one foot in front of you

00:49:31.520 | and just keep going and not pay attention.

00:49:33.120 | But it's hard to do, not by way of comparison.

00:49:35.840 | 'Cause I actually get excited about being immersed

00:49:39.560 | in a group of where everyone's doing well.

00:49:40.880 | I do think being among all these other incredibly talented

00:49:44.180 | and driven, although you carefully said,

00:49:47.120 | and importantly said rather,

00:49:48.760 | that you did not see yourself as talented.

00:49:50.640 | It's very clear that you have a ton of grit

00:49:52.920 | and hard work clearly went into it.

00:49:54.920 | I think that word talent can be a little bit misleading.

00:49:57.520 | So we wanna underscore the fact

00:49:59.980 | that you've worked incredibly hard.

00:50:01.920 | But I think that it's a tough thing.

00:50:04.240 | You know, it's hard for us to develop much in isolation

00:50:07.180 | and it's also hard for us to stay connected to the source.

00:50:10.980 | - Yes, the source, exactly.

00:50:12.480 | - And that's a word that I stole from a former guest

00:50:15.200 | on this podcast and a good friend of mine

00:50:17.080 | who's the great Rick Rubin,

00:50:18.440 | one of the most successful music producer

00:50:20.360 | rock and roll music producer involved.

00:50:21.800 | He talks about the source, you know.

00:50:23.600 | So there are so many different trails

00:50:27.360 | we could go down here.

00:50:28.180 | Just one thing briefly is I, again,

00:50:31.960 | completely miserable at music,

00:50:34.320 | but I once saw Itzhak Perlman in the airport

00:50:38.080 | with his family.

00:50:39.080 | I was with my father, who's a huge classical music fan.

00:50:42.020 | And we watched him and he said, "Watch."

00:50:43.800 | And it turns out he was getting onto our plane.

00:50:45.800 | He sat in first class next to his,

00:50:47.600 | I presume, Stradivarius violin.

00:50:50.000 | His violin got a first class seat.

00:50:52.240 | He got a first class seat

00:50:53.600 | and his family sat across from him.

00:50:55.400 | And my dad said, "His violin is so important

00:50:57.920 | "that it gets its own first class seat."

00:50:59.880 | I couldn't believe it.

00:51:01.440 | - So great.

00:51:02.280 | - So in any event.

00:51:04.120 | - I think just one thing to your point,

00:51:06.100 | one reflection I've had,

00:51:07.880 | and this kind of goes back to this question of identity,

00:51:10.120 | right, which is when you are

00:51:12.680 | in these very competitive environments,

00:51:14.300 | and again, I'm sure a lot of people listening

00:51:15.640 | are in very competitive environments,

00:51:18.300 | you feel that so much can be taken away from you,

00:51:21.220 | just in terms of mental wellbeing,

00:51:23.100 | because you're always looking at the world

00:51:25.300 | through a comparative lens, right?

00:51:26.780 | You're benchmarking yourself, as you said.

00:51:28.620 | Like there's benchmark and where do I fall

00:51:30.840 | on the continuum of mediocre to great, I don't know.

00:51:34.460 | And yesterday I had a terrible performance,

00:51:37.320 | so that's gonna set me back, et cetera, et cetera.

00:51:40.260 | I have found that when I've anchored,

00:51:44.340 | when I re-anchor myself to what Rick Rubin referred to

00:51:47.440 | as the source, and identify the characteristics of music

00:51:52.140 | or other pursuits that really energizes me,

00:51:55.640 | it feels like I'm actually insulated

00:51:59.040 | from a lot of the external noise,

00:52:01.320 | and I bring a lot more clarity and focus

00:52:04.020 | to the work that I do every day.

00:52:05.140 | So there's two things that I think define me as a person,

00:52:09.480 | at least right now, right, I allow for that malleability.

00:52:12.280 | One is that I'm a deeply curious person,

00:52:15.220 | and the second is that I really relish

00:52:17.920 | getting better at things.

00:52:19.200 | I love seeing progress internally.

00:52:22.100 | And in my violin life,

00:52:26.760 | no one could take those two things away from me.

00:52:29.420 | In my current life, as a cognitive scientist,

00:52:32.260 | as a podcaster, like you just can't take those from me.

00:52:35.560 | Like no one can take that joy from me.

00:52:38.640 | And it feels protective in a really important way,

00:52:41.480 | which is, for example, I mean, I pour,

00:52:44.080 | I mean, just like you, I mean, I see the labor of love

00:52:47.140 | that you put into the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:52:48.700 | It's extraordinary.

00:52:49.540 | I put so much time and energy and thoughtfulness and love

00:52:53.240 | into making a slight change of plans.

00:52:55.320 | But at the end of the day,

00:52:56.160 | when you put the episode out into the world,

00:52:57.820 | you just don't get to control what the reaction is, right?

00:53:00.540 | Your favorite episode

00:53:01.900 | might not be everyone else's favorite episode,

00:53:03.860 | and that's just something you have to deal with, right?

00:53:05.920 | But what I found is that if I really relish the process

00:53:09.140 | of making the episode, right, it fed that curiosity,

00:53:11.680 | and I got better.

00:53:12.840 | As an interviewer, I got better as a thinker.

00:53:15.640 | I got more clarity on a topic that I was curious about.

00:53:19.080 | I mean, it just, it gives me a foundation

00:53:22.420 | that feels really sturdy.

00:53:24.120 | Do you know what I mean?

00:53:24.960 | It's just, yeah.

00:53:25.880 | - Well, those things are intrinsic to you,

00:53:28.200 | and they are, I guess now we're using nomenclature,

00:53:32.720 | but they're not what we would call domain-specific.

00:53:35.280 | Like the curiosity, the desire for progress

00:53:37.920 | through effort and through focus,

00:53:41.140 | those are music, they're not music irrelevant,

00:53:44.340 | but they're music independent.

00:53:45.920 | And that actually brings me to a very important component

00:53:50.700 | of your work and your life arc,

00:53:53.420 | which is this notion of recreating

00:53:57.620 | and refinding identity in new endeavors.

00:54:02.040 | So if I understand correctly,

00:54:04.160 | and hopefully you'll embellish on this,

00:54:06.540 | you had the unfortunate, perhaps unfortunate, right?

00:54:11.340 | Experience of playing the violin

00:54:13.520 | and then injuring your finger very badly

00:54:15.140 | to the point where it was,

00:54:17.100 | at least for your music career, career ending.

00:54:19.860 | - Absolutely.

00:54:20.740 | - And that happened when you were how old?

00:54:23.060 | - I was 15.

00:54:24.420 | - So given how much of your identity

00:54:26.460 | and energy was put into violin,

00:54:29.340 | that must've been devastating.

00:54:31.680 | And yet you obviously, I don't want to say recreated yourself

00:54:36.600 | because I like the idea that this essence within you

00:54:39.860 | has many opportunities and forms.

00:54:41.740 | And I like it as an example for everybody

00:54:44.020 | having some essence of many things

00:54:46.700 | that could give them delight.

00:54:48.100 | And that it's something about the feelings associated

00:54:52.220 | with a given choice of occupation or hobby or behavior,

00:54:56.420 | or perhaps relationship, right?

00:54:58.740 | Relationships end sometimes by decision, death,

00:55:00.740 | or otherwise, and people are devastated.

00:55:03.380 | Their identities are completely,

00:55:06.100 | at least in their minds, obliterated.

00:55:07.740 | And then people have this amazing ability

00:55:10.060 | to recreate themselves and new circumstances.

00:55:13.200 | So if you could take us back to the time when you were 15,

00:55:16.100 | you have this injury, what was your initial mindset

00:55:18.860 | in the days and weeks after that?

00:55:20.900 | And then if you would, could you link that up to some of the,

00:55:24.620 | what I see as incredibly important work that you've done,

00:55:28.020 | helping people understand not just who they are,

00:55:31.060 | but how to identify the components of who they are

00:55:34.900 | that are truly indomitable, that just cannot go away,

00:55:39.240 | like your drive for curiosity and hard work.

00:55:42.340 | - And human connection, yep.

00:55:43.740 | Yeah, in the days and weeks and months and year after,

00:55:49.320 | I felt terrible.

00:55:52.340 | It was awful because I don't, I think in my case also,

00:55:56.420 | you just, when you're a kid who's really like bubbly

00:55:59.220 | and energetic, you just kind of move forward

00:56:01.100 | and you don't always think about how identity defining

00:56:04.900 | the thing you're doing is, you just do it.

00:56:06.780 | And so it was really interesting,

00:56:08.900 | I think in losing the violin,

00:56:10.500 | that's actually when it became so salient to me,

00:56:13.700 | how much the instrument had meant to me

00:56:15.740 | and had defined who I was.

00:56:17.620 | And so I felt a dampening of some of my more organic traits,

00:56:22.620 | like I was less curious for a long time.

00:56:27.020 | - Could I, I'm gonna interrupt you on purpose.

00:56:29.100 | I apologize, but at the same time, I'm not apologizing

00:56:32.140 | 'cause there was something that you said

00:56:33.300 | in a prior discussion that just keeps ringing in my mind,

00:56:36.160 | which is that your body and your nervous system

00:56:38.820 | actually grew up around the violin.

00:56:41.860 | Like that to me was just, I will never forget that statement

00:56:45.540 | and I wanna also thank you for it

00:56:47.020 | because that to me is perhaps the most profound way

00:56:51.100 | to describe an experience of identity

00:56:54.340 | is that your nervous system and your body

00:56:57.780 | isn't growing up with something or alongside it,

00:57:00.340 | but that much like a relationship of a human kind,

00:57:05.260 | human humankind, that your body is actually developing

00:57:08.380 | around this object.

00:57:10.620 | - It absolutely developed around the ergonomics

00:57:13.180 | of playing the violin.

00:57:14.260 | So to this day, my right shoulder is slightly elevated

00:57:17.380 | to my left, relative to my left

00:57:19.060 | because of all the hours I spent doing this.

00:57:21.460 | It makes strength training really annoying

00:57:23.580 | because I always have this slight imbalance

00:57:26.260 | and I have a light scoliosis in my spine as well,

00:57:28.980 | also from this posture.

00:57:30.740 | And yeah, it feels intimate in a way.

00:57:34.140 | It's like, wow, the shape of my body, right?

00:57:36.700 | Like my architecture was defined by this instrument.

00:57:41.700 | And so it's left this indelible, you know,

00:57:47.020 | it has this like imprint on me that will never go away.

00:57:51.940 | And I think that a lot of us feel this disorientation, right?

00:57:56.940 | So it might not be that you lost the ability

00:58:01.660 | to do something you love.

00:58:02.580 | It could be that you lost someone that you love, right?

00:58:04.660 | It could be that you lost your mojo or whatever, right?

00:58:09.660 | I mean, there's so many types of loss

00:58:12.540 | and so many kinds of grief we all experience

00:58:15.180 | as human beings.

00:58:16.460 | And I think in all those cases, again,

00:58:19.140 | it really feels like the rug has been pulled out

00:58:20.900 | from under you because this thing

00:58:23.220 | that gave you so much meaning and so much purpose

00:58:26.100 | and so much energy in life no longer exists.

00:58:28.380 | And so I think for a while, yeah,

00:58:30.900 | I felt kind of like lost at sea

00:58:32.540 | and I assumed I'll never find anything

00:58:35.220 | that I'm as passionate about.

00:58:37.060 | And I think what my dad did for me at that time,

00:58:40.940 | so, you know, theoretical physicist,

00:58:42.540 | so he's an academic and he said,

00:58:44.660 | "I think you should just read a lot.

00:58:47.460 | Just like read a bunch of stuff."

00:58:49.620 | And I was like, okay, I mean,

00:58:52.860 | I'm supposed to be in China this summer

00:58:54.340 | touring with my classmates.

00:58:55.660 | I am at home in Connecticut with my parents,

00:58:58.460 | perusing their bookshelves.

00:59:00.420 | So like slightly less cool summer situation,

00:59:02.300 | but, you know, I had a lot of time on my hands

00:59:03.940 | 'cause I wasn't in Shanghai.

00:59:06.420 | So I started, you know, perusing the bookshelf

00:59:08.100 | and then I came across this pop science book

00:59:10.660 | called "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.

00:59:13.860 | And that was a turning point for me.

00:59:18.500 | I mean, I was headed to college maybe later that year.

00:59:23.140 | I opened up this book and it detailed

00:59:26.260 | our marvelous ability to comprehend and produce language.

00:59:32.900 | And up until this point in my life,

00:59:34.660 | I had completely taken language abilities for granted,

00:59:38.140 | just like something that I did.

00:59:39.860 | And I just like kind of learned it along the way.

00:59:41.860 | And when Pinker pulled the curtain back

00:59:45.420 | and revealed how sophisticated and complex

00:59:49.060 | the cognitive machinery is

00:59:50.340 | that's operating behind the scenes

00:59:52.660 | that gives rise to language, my mind was truly blown.

00:59:56.700 | I was like, wow, I never thought about it.

00:59:58.700 | It's not like we, with three-year-olds,

01:00:00.100 | not like we sit down with them and we're like,

01:00:01.380 | this is a gerund, this is a passport, whatever.

01:00:03.780 | There's no, they just learn

01:00:05.300 | because they have these kind of light switches

01:00:07.500 | in their brain that are, you know, activated on and off

01:00:10.420 | depending on what language they're learning.

01:00:12.020 | And it was so fascinating to learn about language development

01:00:16.300 | about neuro-linguistics, about syntax and semantics.

01:00:20.580 | And so I just remember thinking language is fascinating.

01:00:24.500 | Cognition is fascinating.

01:00:26.020 | And I'm also now wondering

01:00:29.500 | about all these other systems that are in place, right?

01:00:32.420 | So this is what's involved in language,

01:00:33.980 | what's involved in, you know,

01:00:36.220 | the complex math equations our dads do, right?

01:00:39.100 | Like what's involved in, what's the mental processing

01:00:42.980 | behind a new discovery or an insight or an aha moment

01:00:45.820 | or falling in love or falling out of love?

01:00:47.660 | I mean, it just lit up my imagination.

01:00:50.140 | And very similar to you, Andrew,

01:00:52.540 | I love that we have this connection.

01:00:54.220 | You said when you learned about like neurobiology

01:00:55.900 | and neuroscience, you saw that there was a place

01:00:57.820 | for yourself in there.

01:00:58.900 | And I remember reading this book

01:01:00.300 | and because it was a pop science book

01:01:01.940 | and I love pop science books 'cause sometimes, you know,

01:01:04.060 | even if they don't fully do justice to the science,

01:01:06.780 | they can take someone who's never had any exposure

01:01:09.580 | to the subject matter.

01:01:10.940 | And it's thrilling to learn about the thing, right?

01:01:14.700 | I would never have gotten the same experience

01:01:16.580 | had I opened up an introduction

01:01:18.500 | to cognitive science textbook, okay?

01:01:20.060 | It would not have had the same impact on me.

01:01:21.540 | So like shout out to pop science books everywhere.

01:01:24.540 | - Thank you for saying that.

01:01:25.580 | And you know, and here I'll just thank you

01:01:27.820 | because I think that many of my colleagues

01:01:30.460 | in academic science at Stanford and elsewhere

01:01:32.540 | feel that way, but I think many don't.

01:01:34.160 | They think of it as quote, "Dumbing down of things."

01:01:36.740 | But I'll tell you, rarely, if ever,

01:01:39.880 | does somebody just wander into a university classroom

01:01:42.760 | and hear a lecture on accident.

01:01:44.840 | I mean, maybe if your mom was at the helm,

01:01:47.140 | they all would.

01:01:47.980 | So mom's everywhere, barge right in.

01:01:50.080 | But I think it's, I actually, I'll go a step further

01:01:55.160 | and I'll do this so that you don't have to.

01:01:58.480 | And these are not your words, these are mine.

01:02:00.160 | I think that there's actually a pretty intense arrogance

01:02:03.300 | to the idea within the established scientific community

01:02:08.160 | that pop science books, while they might not be exhaustive,

01:02:12.060 | provided they're accurate and they're making an attempt

01:02:15.060 | to educate and draw people in from all sectors,

01:02:18.060 | like, amen to that.

01:02:19.500 | I just can't hear a counterargument in my head or elsewhere

01:02:22.420 | where that's not one of the best things that people can do.

01:02:25.600 | So regardless of, you know, people's motivations

01:02:30.600 | for picking them up in the first place,

01:02:33.180 | I mean, they brought a lot of people into the curiosity

01:02:36.080 | and delight that is science or music, or, you know,

01:02:40.720 | I think that we, the more positive, benevolent, you know,

01:02:45.400 | safe sensory experiences that we can expose young people to,

01:02:49.320 | the greater probability that we're gonna flesh out

01:02:51.080 | those professions with the greatest number of diverse minds

01:02:55.120 | who are gonna have the best ideas.

01:02:57.080 | I mean, it's really, I think that there's a ton of foresight

01:02:59.600 | in what you're describing that, you know, picking up a book

01:03:03.340 | is now what you're also now a PhD in, I mean,

01:03:07.180 | in cognitive science and you did your postdoc at Stanford.

01:03:09.500 | I mean, you're a scientist, presumably because you went

01:03:12.900 | into the bookshelf and picked up that book.

01:03:15.100 | - 100%, and I think it was also role modeled for me

01:03:18.080 | because my dad, despite being in a very, very technical

01:03:22.220 | field, spent a large part of his career actually working

01:03:25.580 | on the translation of complex subjects

01:03:28.620 | and trying to convey them to general audiences.

01:03:31.960 | And I loved witnessing this 'cause it's like,

01:03:34.660 | if you can figure out a way to communicate

01:03:36.960 | about theoretical physics to a general audience,

01:03:40.000 | I mean, wow, that's a masterful pursuit, right?

01:03:42.600 | - Well, Feynman, Richard Feynman.

01:03:43.640 | - Yeah, Richard Feynman, exactly.

01:03:45.100 | - No one really knows what Feynman did

01:03:46.680 | for his Nobel Prize work except physicists.

01:03:49.180 | You know that most people you ask them,

01:03:50.420 | what was Feynman's Nobel for?

01:03:52.100 | And they're like, I don't know, I don't know.

01:03:54.580 | He said something about birds and taxonomy

01:03:56.380 | and how it's less interesting than quantum mechanics.

01:03:59.140 | - Yeah, and one of the reasons that I love Huberman Lab

01:04:02.220 | and I just love the work you do is that you are taking

01:04:05.560 | concepts that might've been inaccessible

01:04:07.800 | to the average person and you're making science accessible.

01:04:10.900 | And I feel so much gratitude to every scientist out there,

01:04:15.900 | every researcher out there who thinks that

01:04:18.780 | it's worth their time to be a practitioner of their work.

01:04:22.660 | Because ultimately, I mean, think about how many lives

01:04:24.940 | you're changing through the show by trying to break down

01:04:27.360 | some of these more complicated things into concepts

01:04:30.540 | that people can understand and relate to

01:04:32.700 | and actually act on.

01:04:34.100 | And it also reminds me, part of my job

01:04:37.780 | when I was in the Obama administration

01:04:40.940 | was translating insights from behavioral science,

01:04:43.780 | from cognitive science into interventions

01:04:46.820 | that my government agency colleagues could implement

01:04:48.920 | in the Department of Veterans Affairs

01:04:50.380 | and the Department of Defense, Department of Education.

01:04:53.460 | And that same translation process

01:04:55.380 | was part of that effort too.

01:04:56.780 | And I think it's really, really hard to do well.

01:04:59.620 | I respect it so much.

01:05:01.380 | I respect pop science writers who do a good job so much.

01:05:05.180 | And yeah, I think it's a wonderful service.

01:05:07.660 | They don't have to spend their time writing these books.

01:05:10.460 | They could just publish more research papers,

01:05:12.820 | which is the currency that academic institutions care about.

01:05:15.820 | And so I see it as just like a public good

01:05:17.900 | of what they're doing.

01:05:18.860 | - Yeah, I do too.

01:05:19.740 | And right back at you because you're doing it as well.

01:05:22.020 | And so we're all better off for it.

01:05:23.920 | So thank you.

01:05:25.660 | I'd like to take a quick break

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01:06:31.980 | - So I want to go back to this injury to summer at home,

01:06:36.980 | to discovery of something new.

01:06:40.460 | Was it at that point that you realized,

01:06:43.020 | ah, the feeling of excitement that I'm getting

01:06:45.600 | from learning about neuro-linguistics and related topics

01:06:49.300 | is somehow similar to the excitement

01:06:52.860 | that I was feeling about the violin,

01:06:55.420 | or maybe even superseded that excitement?

01:06:57.180 | I mean, at what point were you able to make the pivot

01:07:00.860 | with confidence that this is the new trajectory?

01:07:05.540 | And an important component of that

01:07:08.140 | that I'd like to understand is you also had to cut ties

01:07:11.460 | with the past, something that's very hard to do.

01:07:14.300 | I mean, I grew up with a number of kids

01:07:16.100 | who became very successful teen athletes, really.

01:07:20.860 | And some of them, once they ceased to keep up

01:07:24.540 | or they had an injury or something,

01:07:26.000 | their identity stayed attached to the past

01:07:29.300 | in a way that did not allow them to move forward.

01:07:31.340 | Fortunately, many of them did find new identities

01:07:34.940 | in business or in other endeavors.

01:07:37.720 | Some became quite successful.

01:07:38.960 | But I've seen very often

01:07:41.740 | that when people achieve early success

01:07:44.740 | and then they hit a cliff,

01:07:47.500 | that it's very hard for them to part

01:07:48.900 | with that former identity.

01:07:50.600 | There's one of the perils of early success.

01:07:52.640 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:07:53.860 | I wouldn't say that it's superseded the excitement

01:07:58.540 | that I had with the violin.

01:08:00.060 | I would say the quality of the excitement

01:08:01.820 | felt very different.

01:08:03.180 | And that's actually important to convey

01:08:05.060 | 'cause I think when someone loses the ability

01:08:06.700 | to have a passion, they're seeking

01:08:08.460 | exactly the same sensory experience,

01:08:11.660 | exactly the same high that they experienced

01:08:13.780 | the first time around.

01:08:14.820 | And I think that's a really high bar.

01:08:16.540 | And sometimes it's more of an apples

01:08:18.500 | and oranges type situation.

01:08:19.820 | So with the violin, there was a really deep

01:08:23.700 | sensory aspect to the experience.

01:08:25.820 | I mean, I felt things, right?

01:08:28.260 | You're playing and then you're feeling things emotionally.

01:08:31.380 | And it all felt super visceral.

01:08:34.380 | And that was where the passion emerged from.

01:08:36.380 | It was just this very visceral feeling

01:08:38.220 | of this is so beautiful and awesome and I love it.

01:08:41.500 | With the cognitive science stuff,

01:08:43.980 | my intellectual brain was delighted.

01:08:46.580 | And it's just like a different expression of passion, right?

01:08:49.780 | I think the big pressure test was not,

01:08:52.920 | if I had held myself to the bar of,

01:08:54.460 | do I love this as much as the violin?

01:08:56.740 | There's no way that I would have been confident enough

01:08:59.160 | to pursue anything at that point.

01:09:00.980 | So instead, I really think the question I asked myself

01:09:04.120 | at that time, which was a service to me

01:09:06.520 | in my more compromised psychology was,

01:09:10.280 | am I curious enough about this thing

01:09:11.900 | to ask more questions about it?

01:09:13.960 | Do I want to learn more?

01:09:16.000 | And I found naturally three days later,

01:09:19.120 | I went to the library and I got another book

01:09:24.120 | on the cognitive science of language.

01:09:26.460 | And then I got a book on the science of decision-making.

01:09:29.740 | So there was curiosity and honestly, that was all I needed.

01:09:34.700 | That was the little seedling that I needed to see

01:09:37.440 | if it could go somewhere more.

01:09:39.500 | I took that as a very strong signal.

01:09:41.260 | Like I care to learn more about this

01:09:43.200 | and I don't care to learn about everything, right?

01:09:46.220 | And I remember perusing the course book

01:09:49.800 | of my undergrad institution

01:09:51.280 | and they had a cognitive science major, which was awesome

01:09:53.880 | because not all schools had one at the time.

01:09:56.600 | It was a very new major, it's interdisciplinary.

01:09:59.280 | You approach questions of the mind

01:10:01.200 | from multiple perspectives.

01:10:02.400 | So from the perspective of neuroscience, linguistics,

01:10:06.000 | philosophy, psychology, computer science, and anthropology.

01:10:11.000 | So you're just like a bunch of different disciplines.

01:10:15.340 | But that was when I thought,

01:10:16.740 | ooh, I can at least see if I can get into this major.

01:10:19.300 | I remember it was like a selective major, it was selective.

01:10:21.540 | And so I freaked out of course

01:10:22.600 | and had super imposter syndrome.

01:10:23.980 | It was like, I'm not gonna get in to the program.

01:10:26.500 | But thankfully I got in and I think that's, yeah,

01:10:29.700 | that's where I was able to connect

01:10:30.820 | like this little seedling of curiosity

01:10:33.100 | to the actual pursuit of the thing, right?

01:10:38.100 | And that's a really important translation

01:10:40.280 | because there can often be a mismatch.

01:10:42.340 | You're really passionate about something,

01:10:44.260 | but you actually hate the process, right?

01:10:46.280 | Like you hate the actual work that's involved

01:10:48.260 | in getting better at it.

01:10:49.620 | And I was lucky in my undergrad because I fought my way,

01:10:53.540 | my mom's style, barging into classes

01:10:56.040 | that like really would only accept seniors or juniors.

01:10:59.480 | And I was like, I'm a lowly freshman, but like accept me.

01:11:02.400 | And I was able to run experiments on adults.

01:11:04.840 | And I was actually able to see what it would be like

01:11:07.280 | to be a researcher, to ask novel questions

01:11:10.780 | and to get the delight that you feel, right?

01:11:13.940 | When you're in a lab

01:11:14.780 | and you're actually testing out new hypotheses.

01:11:16.640 | And so it was really important that I saw

01:11:19.500 | that I not only was excited,

01:11:22.120 | but that I could actually enjoy parts of the process

01:11:24.620 | of getting better.

01:11:25.960 | - I love your description of curiosity

01:11:28.180 | because it makes me think that in some way

01:11:30.680 | it has something to do with a deep motivation

01:11:34.360 | and desire to figure out what's next

01:11:37.340 | or what's around the corner

01:11:38.540 | without an emotional attachment to the outcome.

01:11:41.500 | The curiosity is really just trying to figure out

01:11:43.140 | what's there as opposed to hoping

01:11:44.580 | that something specific is there.

01:11:45.860 | And sometimes even the surprises are more exciting

01:11:48.340 | than our predictions.

01:11:49.680 | I think the quote was initially from Dorothy Parker.

01:11:54.620 | I think this is debated, but I think it was,

01:11:58.360 | the cure for boredom is curiosity.

01:12:00.860 | There is no cure for curiosity.

01:12:03.300 | - Oh, that's awesome.

01:12:04.680 | I hadn't heard that.

01:12:05.520 | - Yeah, I believe it was Dorothy Parker,

01:12:08.020 | sometimes misattributed to Agatha Christie,

01:12:10.500 | but I think it was Dorothy Parker.

01:12:11.500 | And what I love about it is that

01:12:12.740 | there's something about curiosity that when it's genuine,

01:12:16.940 | it's self-amplifying, it's an upward spiral

01:12:19.860 | because there is no end point, right?

01:12:22.020 | I mean, that's one of the things that you learn

01:12:25.580 | early in sciences, you learn, you test hypotheses,

01:12:30.020 | you get answers and you get more questions

01:12:31.620 | and you inform hypotheses and you do that until you die,

01:12:33.800 | basically, and they can be a little bit dark.

01:12:36.600 | But when you think about it as a journey

01:12:38.120 | that it's just so much fun along the way,

01:12:41.180 | if you're just really interested

01:12:42.640 | in knowing what the answers are

01:12:44.320 | without getting too attached to the answers,

01:12:46.280 | it just feels like it just, even as I'm describing it now,

01:12:48.680 | it's like they just can just fill you up

01:12:51.160 | and it provides more energy for the next round

01:12:53.480 | and the next round.

01:12:54.360 | And that really came through in your description

01:12:56.200 | of cognitive science.

01:12:57.820 | I also find it interesting that

01:12:59.660 | you couldn't read sheet music, at least not very well.

01:13:02.480 | You were so deeply immersed in an endeavor, violin playing,

01:13:07.480 | that is not of verbal language.

01:13:10.860 | And then you went into a field that's about,

01:13:13.220 | or initially you were sparked an interest in a field

01:13:17.260 | through an understanding of verbal language.

01:13:20.020 | And earlier you said that the thing that bridges the violin

01:13:23.940 | and what came next as a passion and pursuit

01:13:27.220 | was this desire for human connection.

01:13:29.820 | At what point did you realize that?

01:13:31.560 | And here, I do wanna emphasize that

01:13:34.220 | while we're talking about your story,

01:13:35.380 | I hope, I can only imagine that people

01:13:37.920 | are starting to think about

01:13:39.180 | what are the intrinsic points of motivation

01:13:42.760 | for what they're doing and what they've done?

01:13:45.200 | Asking the sorts of questions that I hope everyone

01:13:48.680 | is asking, what is it really that motivates me

01:13:52.420 | to love this and to see a place for myself in that?

01:13:56.320 | 'Cause those are ultimately, I think the questions

01:13:59.660 | that everyone should and can ask.

01:14:02.860 | - Yeah, it took me a really long time.

01:14:06.260 | It's actually only been in the last few years

01:14:07.960 | that I've discovered this.

01:14:09.340 | I discovered this as a result of creating

01:14:11.820 | a slight change of plans.

01:14:12.820 | So my desire to create the show

01:14:17.820 | came from a very personal place,

01:14:20.240 | which is that I'm terrified of change.

01:14:22.620 | So even though I've had these formative experiences

01:14:24.600 | with change, I'm a creature of habit.

01:14:27.200 | I'm willing to change my habits.

01:14:28.780 | For example, I now take caffeine 90 minutes after I get up.

01:14:31.800 | - How's that working for you?

01:14:33.000 | - Very well, even today, okay, I'm a good disciple.

01:14:36.760 | - Well, I like to think that people afford themselves

01:14:40.040 | some flexibility.

01:14:41.040 | If you gotta run to the airport,

01:14:42.800 | 60 to 90 are the occasional within 30 minutes

01:14:46.240 | if you have to, but nobody's perfect.

01:14:49.320 | Nor should we strive to.

01:14:50.160 | - I'm a student, so I'm willing to update my habits,

01:14:51.600 | but I'm a creature of habit.

01:14:53.080 | And there's a couple reasons why we as humans

01:14:57.800 | are scared of change.

01:14:59.940 | And I think one of them, which is incredibly relatable,

01:15:02.220 | is that change is filled with a lot of uncertainty

01:15:05.920 | and we hate uncertainty.

01:15:08.080 | We will go to irrational lengths to avoid uncertainty.

01:15:12.060 | So one of my favorite studies coming out

01:15:13.800 | of cognitive sciences is one involving electric shocks.

01:15:17.480 | And what they found is that people are far more stressed

01:15:22.160 | when they're told they have a 50% chance

01:15:24.240 | of getting an electric shock

01:15:25.440 | than when they're told they have a 100% chance

01:15:28.200 | of getting an electric shock.

01:15:30.000 | So we would rather be sure, certain,

01:15:32.320 | that a bad thing is going to happen

01:15:34.120 | than to have to deal with any feelings

01:15:35.920 | of uncertainty and ambiguity, right?

01:15:38.320 | - That result, I love that you brought up that result.

01:15:41.360 | It still is bewildering to me

01:15:43.600 | because when you think about it,

01:15:45.780 | a 100% trial to trial shock means you just,

01:15:50.560 | you have to take on the, okay, bring it,

01:15:53.120 | just bring it on kind of mentality.

01:15:55.680 | But if you did that for every trial

01:15:57.840 | and then half of the trials, you don't get shocked.

01:15:59.880 | You'd get the, we know there's a dopamine release

01:16:02.840 | from the lack of punishment.

01:16:04.480 | So the ideal strategy is the same

01:16:08.760 | and yet somehow people are averse to the uncertainty.

01:16:11.160 | - Yeah, we just, we don't like uncertainty.

01:16:14.280 | Even though, again, the uncertainty is what drives

01:16:16.340 | that dopamine first, right?

01:16:18.020 | And yet we bristle certainly at that uncertainty.

01:16:22.780 | And so I definitely am like, please, status quo, everyone.

01:16:27.240 | We'd love the status quo.

01:16:28.340 | Even when the status quo has been suboptimal, Andrew,

01:16:31.100 | I've been fine with the status quo.

01:16:32.420 | So part of it came from my desire to figure out, okay,

01:16:35.000 | how is it like a slight change of plans, right?

01:16:37.200 | It marries science and storytelling

01:16:39.380 | to help us figure out strategies for better managing change.

01:16:42.160 | So I wanted to figure out how are people coming to terms

01:16:44.960 | with uncertainty?

01:16:46.400 | And one of the things that I realized,

01:16:49.060 | I learned from the guests on my show and also the scientists

01:16:52.380 | is there's this concept called cognitive closure.

01:16:55.560 | And it is the need to arrive at clear,

01:16:58.900 | definitive answers to things, okay?

01:17:01.400 | It's basically opposite of this open-ended curiosity

01:17:04.380 | that you just described, which is with cognitive closure,

01:17:07.120 | you have a need to, you aren't indifferent

01:17:10.120 | towards what the answers are.

01:17:11.640 | You aren't indifferent towards what the questions are.

01:17:13.840 | You care about everything.

01:17:14.900 | You care about micromanaging every part

01:17:16.740 | of the curious process from point A to point B.

01:17:19.760 | And there's a lot of research showing that

01:17:22.440 | when we reduce our need for cognitive closure, right?

01:17:25.760 | When we come a little bit more open to the unbidden, right?

01:17:29.680 | Like to mystery, more open to awe-inspiring experiences,

01:17:34.600 | we can experience huge boosts in wellbeing.

01:17:38.160 | And we can become a lot more resilient

01:17:39.880 | in the face of change.

01:17:40.800 | So that's something that I'm working on, which is like,

01:17:42.800 | okay, maybe I can reduce my need for cognitive closure.

01:17:46.280 | And the other thing that I am starting to appreciate

01:17:50.360 | is one reason that we kind of, we get changed wrong

01:17:55.360 | and we maybe fear it more than we should,

01:17:59.480 | is that when we anticipate what a change

01:18:02.640 | will be like in the future,

01:18:04.280 | we tend to imagine how our present day selves

01:18:07.760 | will respond to that future change, right?

01:18:10.000 | So it's almost like a magic mirror.

01:18:12.000 | It's Maya in present day, going through this mirror,

01:18:15.920 | comes out the other side.

01:18:17.440 | Two years from now, she's the one who's overcoming

01:18:19.440 | the challenges of a diagnosis or some other life change.

01:18:23.080 | And what we forget is that the big changes in our lives

01:18:27.020 | can change us in pretty profound ways, right?

01:18:31.520 | And when we recognize, and we all fall prey

01:18:34.320 | to this illusion.

01:18:35.160 | So it's called the end of history illusion.

01:18:36.380 | So this is work by Dan Gilbert.

01:18:37.640 | And basically what it says is we fully acknowledge

01:18:40.880 | that we've changed considerably in the past.

01:18:43.420 | So you think back to your skateboard days, right?

01:18:45.520 | I think back to my high school days and I think,

01:18:48.000 | oh my gosh, of course I've changed.

01:18:49.320 | Like I would be embarrassed to listen to any interview

01:18:51.480 | I gave when I was younger, right?

01:18:53.560 | Like what were the thoughts I was even thinking?

01:18:55.840 | So we will see it, absolutely.

01:18:57.720 | We were totally different 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

01:19:01.080 | But when it comes to thinking about the future

01:19:03.000 | and projecting into the future,

01:19:04.680 | we are absolutely convinced that who we are right now

01:19:07.360 | in this moment is the person that's here to stay.

01:19:10.520 | And that can lead us astray when it comes to thinking

01:19:14.160 | about how we will respond to change because we forget

01:19:17.280 | that there's actually a lot of wiggle room

01:19:19.120 | around who we become.

01:19:20.360 | And to your point, I mean, I love the point

01:19:22.160 | you made about curiosity.

01:19:24.000 | What that means is we wanna be curious

01:19:27.120 | not just about the things we do,

01:19:28.640 | we wanna be curious about ourselves.

01:19:30.780 | One huge lesson that I've learned from the interviews

01:19:35.500 | that I've had on a slight change of plans

01:19:36.960 | is that I need to constantly be auditing myself

01:19:40.160 | through my change experience

01:19:41.880 | to figure out how I have changed.

01:19:44.560 | Because when we experience change,

01:19:46.940 | it doesn't happen in a vacuum, right?

01:19:48.640 | So let's say I get a promotion

01:19:50.340 | or I enter into a relationship or I leave a relationship

01:19:53.380 | or some other, again, narrow slice of my life is altered.

01:19:57.960 | We can think of that change as happening in a vacuum, right?

01:20:01.160 | As being confined to just the unique area of our life

01:20:04.200 | that that change exists in.

01:20:06.120 | But of course we are incredibly complex creatures.

01:20:09.740 | Our psychology is incredibly complex.

01:20:11.760 | We live in these remarkably complex ecosystems.

01:20:15.280 | Change in one area of our life

01:20:16.760 | will inevitably have spillover effects

01:20:18.600 | into all other parts of our lives

01:20:20.520 | in ways that are extremely hard to predict.

01:20:22.760 | And so, I think a lot of your listeners

01:20:25.760 | are familiar with the research showing

01:20:26.920 | we're really bad cognitive forecasters, right?

01:20:29.000 | We're bad at predicting what's gonna make us happy,

01:20:31.560 | what's gonna make us sad, how long we're gonna be sad,

01:20:33.840 | how long we're gonna be happy.

01:20:35.280 | Well, one of the reasons for that

01:20:37.200 | is that we forget that we are a dynamic entity

01:20:40.740 | that might change as well, right?

01:20:42.400 | That our preferences might change,

01:20:44.220 | our choice sets might change.

01:20:46.000 | We might change in these really profound ways

01:20:48.240 | that we don't realize.

01:20:49.080 | And I think there's an inspiring message coming out of this,

01:20:52.860 | which is one, like what we're capable of right now

01:20:56.320 | really might not be what we're capable of later.

01:20:59.240 | And what I found in my own experience is that,

01:21:04.000 | you know, when it comes to our, it's interesting,

01:21:05.680 | when it comes to our self-perception,

01:21:07.760 | because we have a first person perspective on who we are,

01:21:10.720 | we tend to think that we have a very comprehensive,

01:21:13.960 | like veridical understanding of who we are, right?

01:21:15.800 | Like I have a pretty good grasp of who I, Maya am

01:21:18.500 | and what I'm capable of and what I value

01:21:20.400 | and what my identity is.

01:21:22.980 | But the reality is that that understanding

01:21:26.920 | is based on the random set of data points

01:21:30.260 | that I've happened to collect over the course of my lifetime

01:21:33.100 | based on the random set of experiences and opportunities

01:21:37.360 | and failures and successes that I've happened to have.

01:21:39.860 | Right?

01:21:40.700 | - And if I'm not mistaken,

01:21:42.460 | there's a salience to the negative experiences often.

01:21:47.220 | - Absolutely.

01:21:48.060 | - For reasons that make sense according to nervous systems

01:21:49.920 | that want to keep us safe, et cetera.

01:21:51.720 | But for instance, you remember the name

01:21:53.520 | of this child prodigy.

01:21:54.840 | - Rachel Lee.

01:21:55.680 | - Rachel Lee.

01:21:56.520 | My sister still talks about, I won't say their names

01:21:58.880 | because we know that these people are still around,

01:22:01.500 | unfortunately, the names of some of the girls

01:22:05.360 | in junior high school that were particularly popular

01:22:08.600 | and perhaps not kind.

01:22:10.440 | - You mean Kellen, Lindsay, and Jacqueline?

01:22:12.280 | - Yeah, perhaps not kind to her.

01:22:13.100 | - Oh no, I remember them.

01:22:13.940 | - Right, exactly.

01:22:14.780 | Perhaps not kind.

01:22:15.620 | - Were they nice to me?

01:22:16.440 | Not super nice, but it's okay.

01:22:17.280 | - Yeah, there's a lot of web searching nowadays

01:22:19.080 | for what these people are up to now.

01:22:20.640 | Anyway, not by me.

01:22:22.920 | This is, anyway, I have a sister.

01:22:24.640 | We occasionally touch into this.

01:22:26.460 | She's doing great, fortunately.

01:22:27.720 | So yeah, there's a salience to the negative experiences,

01:22:32.620 | but I think what I'm hearing, and I totally agree with,

01:22:36.060 | is that we'd like to think that we have complete

01:22:40.220 | or at least adequate self-knowledge,

01:22:42.620 | but that we likely don't.

01:22:44.160 | And so what are some of the ways

01:22:45.580 | that we can get better data on ourselves

01:22:49.160 | in ways that can help us?

01:22:50.580 | Is that through the application of mentorship?

01:22:55.160 | Is it asking people for an honest assessment of us

01:22:59.660 | with, of course, the willingness to hear

01:23:01.520 | what they have to say?

01:23:02.620 | What are some of the, I love zero-cost behavioral,

01:23:07.160 | but what are some of the zero-cost behavioral sources

01:23:10.540 | that people have around them in order to ask these

01:23:14.420 | what I think are really fundamental questions?

01:23:17.380 | - Yeah, so there's two information asymmetries,

01:23:21.040 | let's say, that we're trying to solve for, right?

01:23:22.520 | So two areas where we might not have full knowledge

01:23:24.980 | of who we are for one of two reasons.

01:23:26.400 | So one is that we have an incomplete understanding

01:23:31.180 | of who we are just based on the random set of experiences.

01:23:33.580 | And the second is that going through this big change

01:23:36.760 | actually alters us in some way, okay?

01:23:38.780 | So if we're trying to solve for the,

01:23:40.400 | I think the second problem is actually easier to solve for

01:23:42.900 | in that we often just don't even know to look inwards

01:23:46.900 | during a big change to see how we've changed

01:23:49.140 | because we think, oh, I'll just pay attention

01:23:51.060 | to how I'm performing at work

01:23:52.340 | 'cause that was the new variable

01:23:53.580 | that was thrown into my life.

01:23:54.700 | And we forget to evaluate other parts of our lives,

01:23:57.540 | like what impact has this had on my relationship?

01:23:59.980 | What impact has this had on my overall wellbeing, right?

01:24:02.820 | Am I different?

01:24:03.660 | Do I have a different set of preferences?

01:24:04.760 | Do I care about different things?

01:24:05.820 | So in the second category, become very inquisitive

01:24:09.700 | about who you are over a longer timeframe

01:24:12.300 | and assume that it's not a static state.

01:24:14.680 | When it comes to the first bucket,

01:24:16.540 | which is how do we develop a more complete

01:24:19.360 | and richer understanding of self?

01:24:21.460 | I think it's actually about surrounding yourself

01:24:24.520 | with a diverse set of people,

01:24:26.300 | people that you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards.

01:24:28.540 | I think this solves for a bunch of social ills,

01:24:30.500 | which is that, again, we tend to live in our silos, right?

01:24:32.960 | And we're really averse to talking to people

01:24:34.720 | who have different points of view.

01:24:36.240 | But I will tell you, at times,

01:24:37.640 | I've learned the most about myself.

01:24:40.060 | I've learned the most about my weaknesses

01:24:42.380 | and sometimes my strengths from talking with someone

01:24:45.180 | that I vehemently disagree with.

01:24:47.180 | And it's a really hard thing to do.

01:24:49.080 | It's very painful.

01:24:50.520 | But in terms of like edifying experiences go,

01:24:54.460 | it's through those conversations

01:24:55.900 | that I almost see this mirror reflected back on me, right?

01:24:58.340 | Like, wow, I'm much more aware

01:25:00.220 | of how I'm coming across to that person

01:25:01.900 | 'cause they disagree with me about something

01:25:03.440 | or they're not someone I would normally fraternize with.

01:25:06.540 | And it's just bred more self-awareness in me.

01:25:09.980 | And so I would encourage people

01:25:11.260 | to actually seek out connections in uncomfortable spaces

01:25:15.500 | because that will allow you to fill in

01:25:17.720 | at least some of the gaps.

01:25:18.580 | Now, some of the gaps will truly only be revealed to you

01:25:21.680 | because of life experiences.

01:25:23.140 | So I'm thinking in my own life.

01:25:25.220 | So I thought I grieved in a very particular kind of way.

01:25:29.220 | And then during COVID, my husband and I experienced

01:25:32.660 | multiple pregnancy losses with our surrogate.

01:25:35.500 | And I found myself grieving

01:25:37.300 | in a way that was completely foreign to me.

01:25:39.580 | I don't think talking to anyone would have revealed to me

01:25:41.700 | that I was gonna grieve in this way

01:25:43.620 | where usually I would reach out to people

01:25:45.300 | and I would wanna stay connected

01:25:46.340 | and I became so shut off and closed off

01:25:48.660 | and I didn't wanna talk to anyone.

01:25:50.060 | For days after the losses, I was so disoriented.

01:25:53.400 | There I learned, oh, actually you can respond

01:25:57.340 | in a diverse set of ways to grief, right?

01:25:59.180 | Like you don't have a singular experience with grief,

01:26:01.200 | but I might've only learned that

01:26:02.300 | from the actual experience of confronting it.

01:26:05.320 | That said, I do think there's a lot of value

01:26:07.500 | in trying to fill in gaps in knowledge or self-awareness

01:26:11.640 | through these more quotidian conversations

01:26:13.800 | you have with people.

01:26:15.600 | - I love, love, love what you said about

01:26:20.120 | deliberately placing oneself into environments

01:26:22.960 | where we receive critical feedback from people

01:26:25.600 | that we view as quite disparate from us,

01:26:27.980 | at least in terms of our experience of them.

01:26:31.300 | It was the great Karl Deisseroth,

01:26:34.360 | another incredibly accomplished neuroscientist,

01:26:37.920 | happens to be a colleague of mine at Stanford,

01:26:41.160 | who, he's a psychiatrist, and he said,

01:26:43.220 | we think we know how other people feel,

01:26:45.440 | but we really have no idea how other people feel

01:26:47.800 | unless we ask them.

01:26:48.920 | In fact, most of the time,

01:26:49.760 | we don't even really know how we feel.

01:26:51.480 | We're not very good at gauging our own emotions.

01:26:53.560 | So credit to Karl for making that statement.

01:26:55.720 | But with that said,

01:26:57.120 | I think getting a sense of how other people see us

01:27:01.780 | and disagreement in particular

01:27:03.720 | can be incredibly informative.

01:27:06.720 | - I just want to say one other point on this,

01:27:08.080 | which is I think getting feedback from others

01:27:10.900 | almost gets a bad rap these days in society.

01:27:12.960 | 'Cause it's like, you should only care

01:27:14.200 | about who you are inside, who you know yourself to be.

01:27:17.280 | And I'm like, dude, we are social creatures.

01:27:19.320 | It absolutely matters how I come off to others.

01:27:22.560 | I mean, I think that should be a huge part

01:27:24.920 | of my self-identity, should be how I impact others.

01:27:28.280 | And I think we should be shameless

01:27:30.400 | about integrating that into our understanding of self.

01:27:32.960 | If I feel like I'm an excellent person inside

01:27:35.840 | and I'm regularly wounding the people around me,

01:27:38.660 | that matters, that's relevant to how I see myself.

01:27:41.820 | And so I do worry sometimes with the current

01:27:44.380 | cultural climate that we're pushing ourselves

01:27:45.980 | so much towards the space of like,

01:27:47.700 | all that matters is authenticity and being yourself.

01:27:50.680 | I mean, first of all, sometimes yourself isn't awesome.

01:27:52.740 | You might want to actually optimize

01:27:54.020 | or like change some things about yourself to be better.

01:27:56.740 | I think that's a good thing.

01:27:57.740 | And then second, it's okay to care what other people think.

01:28:01.660 | Usually they're great barometers

01:28:03.220 | of things that you might not be aware of

01:28:04.740 | in terms of the impact you're having.

01:28:05.940 | So I just want to like be a lobbyist

01:28:08.420 | for caring what other people think, just for a moment.

01:28:11.220 | - Yeah, I agree.

01:28:12.300 | This is one of the reasons why I say

01:28:13.660 | at the end of every episode

01:28:14.780 | that I do read all the comments on YouTube.

01:28:17.700 | I think I was raised in an academic culture

01:28:21.580 | where feedback on lectures, student feedback was critical.

01:28:25.700 | I mean, it is important, I believe,

01:28:27.020 | to be a selective filter because when in the old days,

01:28:32.020 | we'll say there was an opportunity to map the statements

01:28:34.900 | to the grade that the student received,

01:28:36.460 | you can no longer do this.

01:28:37.880 | So you would often see that some of the worst,

01:28:39.980 | you know, some of the worst feedback

01:28:41.740 | was I hated, it was unclear, exactly.

01:28:44.460 | And then you'd look at their grade and you'd say,

01:28:46.060 | well, okay, this helps explain.

01:28:49.160 | And yet it was also important to understand

01:28:52.180 | where that could have represented some failings on my part.

01:28:55.740 | And a classroom is but one environment.

01:28:58.260 | I think the online environment is where this gets tricky

01:29:00.860 | because of the way that we all differ

01:29:05.140 | in our capacity to receive critical feedback.

01:29:08.220 | And sometimes the harshness of one form of feedback

01:29:11.820 | sends people, you know, feeling, you know,

01:29:14.580 | back on their heels or feeling, you know,

01:29:16.700 | even ego or emotionally injured

01:29:18.660 | in ways that they actually feel is traumatic.

01:29:21.140 | And I think that's part of the problem

01:29:23.580 | is that we don't really have a way to gauge.

01:29:28.580 | I mean, we know inappropriate when we see it.

01:29:31.420 | We know appropriate when we see it,

01:29:32.860 | but all the stuff in between,

01:29:34.140 | 'cause it's on a continuum really,

01:29:35.900 | is where it gets tricky.

01:29:39.060 | I certainly think integrating the possibility

01:29:42.120 | that somebody might be right,

01:29:43.720 | what is it that they say in certain forms

01:29:46.360 | of personal developments?

01:29:47.240 | Like, you know, if somebody is coming at you

01:29:48.560 | with an argument about you,

01:29:50.000 | the best state of mind you could have is you might be right

01:29:52.620 | because that lets you hold your ground a bit.

01:29:54.380 | It still maintains a boundary,

01:29:56.540 | but you're not saying you're right

01:29:57.820 | and you're not saying you're wrong.

01:29:59.360 | You're sort of on, you're in a kind of a flat-footed stance

01:30:03.000 | where you could move either way.

01:30:04.420 | And I like that, this idea of,

01:30:05.360 | well, they might be right.

01:30:06.320 | And then you can say, no, or yes.

01:30:08.700 | But in any case, I just want to throw out both hands

01:30:11.460 | and as many votes as I can as one individual to say,

01:30:16.460 | yes, I totally agree.

01:30:18.240 | More direct feedback and disagreement is great.

01:30:23.240 | It's wonderful.

01:30:26.100 | And I think in science,

01:30:27.020 | you're used to people saying harsh things about your work

01:30:29.860 | until they eventually say,

01:30:30.760 | okay, you can publish the paper.

01:30:32.540 | I grew up in the culture of skateboarding

01:30:34.020 | where like nothing's good enough

01:30:35.580 | and then occasionally something's good.

01:30:38.380 | And in the landscape of podcasting,

01:30:40.340 | I think the comment section is a great way to get feedback.

01:30:45.220 | And that's why I continue to encourage feedback.

01:30:47.140 | It sounds like you do as well.

01:30:48.100 | - Yeah, I think, I try to just every endeavor that I pursue,

01:30:51.900 | I try to approach with a lot of humility.

01:30:53.980 | And I think if I were to describe at work, right,

01:30:57.280 | I lead this team.

01:30:58.360 | And I think if you were to ask people

01:31:00.620 | what my defining trait is as a leader,

01:31:03.060 | it's actually not like strong convictions.

01:31:04.940 | It's actually a willingness to update her opinions

01:31:08.540 | on things, her belief systems,

01:31:10.140 | her strategy based on incoming information.

01:31:13.140 | I really, really pride myself

01:31:15.040 | on having a flexible mindset about stuff

01:31:17.460 | and not being stubborn.

01:31:18.820 | This is true in my marriage, right?

01:31:20.700 | Like my husband, Jimmy and I really pride ourselves

01:31:22.700 | in like saying, you know what,

01:31:26.540 | based on what you just shared, I'm changing my mind.

01:31:29.180 | Like you're right and I'm wrong, right?

01:31:31.340 | And if you can actually start to value that,

01:31:33.300 | if you could start to see that as a virtuous quality,

01:31:36.740 | I think historically, right, when we think about leadership,

01:31:39.580 | we've thought about people who are incredibly resolute

01:31:42.500 | in their convictions,

01:31:43.340 | but that doesn't allow the space to,

01:31:46.700 | again, beige an update, you know?

01:31:49.340 | Update your mindset when you get new information

01:31:51.940 | or you realize that you erred in some way

01:31:53.920 | in terms of the logic that you used or what have you.

01:31:56.240 | And I've been extremely intentional

01:31:58.660 | in every sphere that I've worked in

01:32:00.260 | to have this very open mind

01:32:02.540 | and to be very open to critical feedback.

01:32:04.600 | It does not mean that I take every piece of feedback, okay?

01:32:08.720 | Obviously, I have some criteria I use to decide

01:32:11.580 | whether it's meaningful feedback

01:32:13.460 | or it's not meaningful feedback, right?

01:32:15.700 | But the locus of my pride is not in being right

01:32:20.700 | or having a strong conviction.

01:32:23.260 | It is actually in my willingness

01:32:24.600 | to have a more dynamic state of mind

01:32:28.660 | regarding lots of issues.

01:32:30.060 | Maybe that's just what it means to be a scientist, right?

01:32:32.860 | Like you have to be willing to update

01:32:34.780 | in the face of new information.

01:32:36.380 | - I am nodding for those that are listening.

01:32:39.420 | I'm just nodding and thinking yes, yes, and more yes,

01:32:42.860 | because I think that we all need more of that as individuals

01:32:46.360 | and if we can't get it from our work setting

01:32:48.100 | or group setting,

01:32:49.060 | sometimes asking a friend can be extremely useful.

01:32:52.500 | I have a friend, he happens to be a professor

01:32:55.060 | at a university back East.

01:32:56.460 | I won't embarrass him by disclosing where he's at,

01:32:59.900 | but I recall as a junior faculty member,

01:33:02.380 | because he knows me well,

01:33:04.220 | he's a few years behind me in our career trajectories,

01:33:06.160 | but asking him for an honest assessment,

01:33:08.460 | I asked for the most brutally honest assessment,

01:33:10.660 | me that he could give and some of it stung.

01:33:13.460 | Some of it stung.

01:33:14.500 | He was relating some ways in which I show up as a friend

01:33:17.240 | and I'm super present and I have this tendency,

01:33:19.440 | I'm pretty introverted,

01:33:20.280 | I'll disappear for long periods of time.

01:33:22.280 | In college, they call me Dart

01:33:23.520 | 'cause I'd show up at parties, I'd be there

01:33:24.740 | and then I would disappear for like two weeks

01:33:26.020 | and just be in my books,

01:33:27.200 | say hi to people and just keep going,

01:33:28.980 | sort of in and out of connection.

01:33:30.940 | I've worked hard to change that over the years.

01:33:33.540 | I think I have, but who knows.

01:33:37.280 | In any event, a friend who knows us well,

01:33:39.820 | that you insist on, don't give me any compliments,

01:33:42.660 | just give me the harsh stuff, that can be very useful.

01:33:46.380 | - And that reminds me of some research by Ethan Cross.

01:33:49.780 | So he looks at how we can tame our mental chatter.

01:33:52.880 | And if you don't have the friend available to you,

01:33:56.300 | there is a really easy distancing technique

01:33:59.660 | that you can use when you're in the throes of a problem

01:34:01.900 | where you are trying to actively reframe something

01:34:04.500 | or maybe see where your blind spots are.

01:34:06.500 | And that's by thinking about your problem

01:34:09.060 | from a third person perspective

01:34:10.600 | versus a first person perspective.

01:34:12.220 | So you play the role of someone who's giving advice

01:34:14.800 | to a friend in your head, but that friend is actually you.

01:34:17.780 | And it actually promotes some degree of objectivity

01:34:21.620 | and like emotional distance from that,

01:34:24.500 | again, that fuzzy hazy set of feelings

01:34:28.020 | that you have around the emotion, right?

01:34:29.220 | You're trying to like get rid of that piece

01:34:30.920 | so that you can bring a slightly more sober

01:34:34.300 | recommendation to the situation.

01:34:35.380 | So that can be really helpful.

01:34:36.620 | And then the other thing to do is,

01:34:39.460 | I think when we're facing challenges,

01:34:42.100 | when we're going through a hard time,

01:34:43.620 | we do have an instinct to want to vent, right?

01:34:46.380 | And again, in this era of vulnerability and whatnot,

01:34:48.360 | we're told like, yes, share everything that's on your mind.

01:34:51.340 | It can actually be counterproductive to vent.

01:34:53.260 | And the reason for that is that when you're venting

01:34:56.780 | about a hard situation that you're going through

01:34:58.500 | or something that you're frustrated about with yourself,

01:35:01.820 | typically the person you've invited into the conversation,

01:35:04.780 | they're a nice empathetic person.

01:35:06.580 | They want to make you feel better.

01:35:08.180 | And so what do they do?

01:35:09.140 | They offer emotional balm in the situation.

01:35:11.180 | They're like, oh my God, that does sound terrible.

01:35:13.980 | You were so wronged.

01:35:15.180 | I'm so sorry you went through that.

01:35:17.400 | Instead of playing the role of what Ethan calls

01:35:20.240 | like a cognitive advisor,

01:35:21.840 | which is actively trying to challenge

01:35:24.100 | the narrative you're telling about your situation,

01:35:26.540 | actively trying to get you to question

01:35:29.840 | whether the way you're portraying the situation is accurate

01:35:32.140 | and actually trying to get you to reframe

01:35:34.500 | aspects of the situation.

01:35:35.780 | And so when we think about venting,

01:35:38.300 | when it comes to again,

01:35:39.140 | filling in those blind spots about ourselves,

01:35:41.020 | you might want to tell your friend at the outset,

01:35:43.620 | like you even said, lay off the nice stuff.

01:35:47.080 | I just want to hear the hard stuff.

01:35:48.180 | You want to tell your friend at the beginning,

01:35:50.240 | look, I'm having this challenge with my colleague at work

01:35:53.020 | where the guy at the gym is giving me a really tough time.

01:35:54.920 | I don't know what's going on.

01:35:56.140 | I'm going to have, here's the situation.

01:35:58.780 | Rather than trying to make me feel better

01:36:01.100 | about the situation,

01:36:02.580 | I want you to actively find holes, poke holes

01:36:06.220 | in the way that I'm thinking about this thing

01:36:07.820 | so that I can try and find some reframing strategies

01:36:11.180 | to see the situation from a different vantage point.

01:36:13.360 | So these are all called distancing techniques, right?

01:36:15.180 | Third person versus first person.

01:36:17.020 | And actually there's some really interesting

01:36:18.500 | neuroscience research showing that

01:36:20.940 | when we view our problems and ourselves

01:36:23.280 | from a third person perspective,

01:36:25.320 | neural activity in areas associated with hostility

01:36:28.680 | and aggression actually decrease.

01:36:30.780 | And so that can be really helpful when it comes to,

01:36:33.340 | resolving interpersonal conflict

01:36:34.960 | or trying to see where you might have been wrong.

01:36:37.320 | - I love these examples because especially the one where

01:36:40.280 | one does it on their own,

01:36:41.460 | that truly doesn't require anything except to-

01:36:43.320 | - You can be the introverted Andrew, still do this.

01:36:45.260 | You don't even have to go to the party

01:36:46.580 | and then ghost everyone.

01:36:47.700 | - Yeah, well, I don't, yeah, back then it would have been,

01:36:49.820 | there were no cell phones or smartphones rather,

01:36:52.340 | but yeah, it was a bit of ghosting.

01:36:53.860 | It was just, I can reset with small numbers of people

01:36:58.220 | that I'm close to, but I found at that time

01:37:02.580 | a need to go into an isolated space

01:37:05.580 | to do what I need to do to reset myself.

01:37:08.260 | But I realized there are certain forms of communication

01:37:10.180 | that are still required.

01:37:11.460 | Like I'm alive, I still get this.

01:37:14.240 | I still get this from my mother every once in a while.

01:37:15.900 | So like, if you don't reach out,

01:37:18.140 | and not only do I not know what's happening with you,

01:37:20.220 | but I also don't know if you're okay.

01:37:21.660 | And I'm thinking I'm a grown man, of course, I'm fine.

01:37:23.660 | And then I, of course, use the worst possible response

01:37:26.540 | that any son or child could give,

01:37:28.000 | which is listen, if something happened to me,

01:37:29.640 | like someone, like the police would contact you

01:37:31.780 | or the hospital would contact you, which is not reassuring.

01:37:35.340 | So kids everywhere, call your parents.

01:37:37.100 | - Your poor mother, Andrew.

01:37:38.100 | - I know, I know.

01:37:39.140 | - Just call her a bit more, come on.

01:37:41.380 | - Still working on it.

01:37:44.220 | - It is a work in progress, venting.

01:37:47.580 | I'm so glad that you brought this up.

01:37:50.100 | I think that there are these buzzwords now, authenticity.

01:37:54.080 | I do think that there are certain forms of communication

01:37:58.220 | that can be injurious to people.

01:38:02.420 | And yet I think having some internal buffers

01:38:06.220 | to all that incoming stuff, I mean, it is important.

01:38:09.500 | I mean, you can't be online.

01:38:10.720 | And I think everyone is pretty much online these days

01:38:13.740 | without having some policies for oneself

01:38:16.580 | and how you're gonna deal with this stuff.

01:38:18.100 | How am I gonna be a selective filter?

01:38:19.780 | I think knowing the ends of the continuum,

01:38:21.500 | like this is clearly benevolent kind discourse.

01:38:26.500 | This is clearly bad.

01:38:28.740 | I'm gonna block this or get rid of it.

01:38:30.140 | But then within that middle range,

01:38:32.300 | having some rules and policies for how to filter it,

01:38:35.440 | either by time of day that you look at it or getting input,

01:38:38.780 | but considering the, it might be true,

01:38:42.220 | it might not be true, what people are saying.

01:38:44.860 | - And like you said, you were talking about memory

01:38:46.620 | and how we tend to overweight negative experiences.

01:38:50.780 | And I did find myself, so I gave this speech

01:38:55.060 | and it was posted and I was looking at the comments

01:38:57.320 | and I literally, any time I brain coded a comment as positive

01:39:01.060 | I just skipped right past it.

01:39:02.700 | I was literally just searching for the negative stuff.

01:39:05.300 | - As if the positive is generic

01:39:07.920 | and the negative is somehow genuine.

01:39:10.180 | - Yes, and I had to make it a mental,

01:39:11.980 | I had to make a mental note.

01:39:12.860 | Hey, it's okay to marinate in the messages that are saying

01:39:17.620 | that this really helped them in some way.

01:39:19.500 | And they really enjoyed the thing.

01:39:21.660 | And again, for self-critical people,

01:39:24.100 | I think it takes an extra step to remind yourself

01:39:26.540 | to also read the good stuff

01:39:28.300 | and to allow that stuff to count too.

01:39:30.780 | - Well, we did an episode on gratitude

01:39:32.460 | and one of the big surprises that came to me

01:39:35.940 | in researching for that episode was that the best evidence

01:39:39.900 | for gratitude having positive effects on neural circuitry,

01:39:42.720 | neurochemistry comes from when we receive gratitude

01:39:45.940 | as opposed to give gratitude.

01:39:47.220 | This is what's often lost in the discussion about gratitude.

01:39:49.580 | So all the more incentive to give gratitude

01:39:52.060 | and to be aware of when it's coming your way

01:39:54.900 | and internalize it.

01:39:56.620 | There is a small category of people out there I think,

01:39:59.100 | hopefully small, that so bask in positive feedback

01:40:04.100 | that it amplifies their narcissism,

01:40:06.060 | but it's clear that you are not one of those people.

01:40:08.980 | So zero minus one risk of that happening.

01:40:12.140 | I wanna talk a little bit about goals

01:40:16.520 | as it relates to motivation.

01:40:19.100 | Because you've done a lot of important work

01:40:23.100 | and what I consider is organization of this,

01:40:27.920 | what would otherwise be a pretty complex space.

01:40:30.620 | What is more important to most people

01:40:32.460 | than being motivated and focused and excited

01:40:34.980 | hopefully on endeavors that they enjoy

01:40:37.300 | and that inspire delight.

01:40:39.980 | But tell us about what can not just initiate,

01:40:43.980 | but what can sustain motivation.

01:40:46.580 | Because we've talked about the dopamine system

01:40:48.260 | on this podcast many times before,

01:40:50.300 | but that's a pretty reductionist way to look at it.

01:40:52.500 | And you have a different perspective

01:40:54.260 | that I've really benefited from learning a bit about.

01:40:57.420 | - Yeah, so when it comes to goals,

01:40:59.340 | I mean, it's first important to recognize

01:41:01.000 | that there's two parts of a goal, okay?

01:41:03.380 | So there's the way that we define the goal

01:41:05.740 | and then there's the way that we pursue the goal.

01:41:08.380 | And I think we tend to overlook the first category,

01:41:11.060 | how we define the goal,

01:41:12.380 | because oftentimes our goals seem

01:41:14.980 | like they should be so obvious to us, right?

01:41:17.560 | I wanna lose weight.

01:41:18.820 | I wanna avoid sleeping late

01:41:20.580 | so that I get a good night's sleep.

01:41:22.020 | I wanna build muscle mass, right?

01:41:23.380 | Like these are things that just seem

01:41:24.660 | like they should just be intuitive, right?

01:41:27.020 | But what research and behavioral science shows

01:41:30.180 | is that not all goal frames are made equal.

01:41:32.980 | In fact, really small tweaks to the way

01:41:35.780 | that we frame our goals can have an outsized impact

01:41:38.740 | on whether or not we're successful at reaching that goal.

01:41:42.420 | So one such framing is whether you frame your goals

01:41:45.260 | in terms of an approach orientation

01:41:49.000 | or an avoidance orientation.

01:41:50.660 | So let me talk about what this means.

01:41:51.700 | So an approach orientation would be,

01:41:54.920 | I want to eat healthier foods, right?

01:41:57.180 | Avoidance would be, I want to avoid unhealthy foods.

01:42:00.300 | Okay, so in the context of say your social life,

01:42:03.220 | approach would be, I want to be in a relationship.

01:42:06.040 | I wanna enter a relationship.

01:42:07.860 | Avoidance would be, I want to avoid feeling loneliness.

01:42:11.080 | Okay, I wanna avoid feeling isolated.

01:42:13.660 | Now, the reason why these two frames

01:42:17.660 | are important to consider is that they can have

01:42:20.780 | a different impact on our motivational states.

01:42:23.100 | And they can also have a different impact

01:42:25.660 | on the emotional response that we have to success

01:42:30.380 | and failure in these domains.

01:42:32.240 | So what we tend to find is that when you frame something

01:42:35.540 | in an approach orientation way, when you succeed,

01:42:40.180 | that success is met with feelings

01:42:42.100 | of pride and accomplishment.

01:42:43.900 | We find that it leads to a boost in motivation,

01:42:46.380 | boost endurance, it boosts perseverance, okay?

01:42:50.240 | When you frame something in terms of avoidance,

01:42:52.660 | success is met with feelings of calm and relief.

01:42:56.320 | So kind of like a, ooh, wipe the forehead,

01:42:58.540 | like thank goodness I avoided that calamitous outcome

01:43:01.220 | or thank goodness I avoided doing that really bad thing.

01:43:03.700 | - Back to neutral.

01:43:04.580 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:43:05.820 | And so it is fine to frame goals in terms of avoidance.

01:43:10.700 | And actually sometimes it's just personality dependent.

01:43:12.780 | Like some people are more driven by fear

01:43:15.380 | or they need a lot more urgency to drive them.

01:43:17.700 | But it is important to know that the approach orientation

01:43:22.460 | is on average more motivating.

01:43:24.380 | And so you might want to think of reframing your goal

01:43:26.720 | in terms of approach versus avoidance.

01:43:28.820 | The other advantage to approach is that

01:43:31.480 | when you frame something as avoidance, right,

01:43:33.100 | I want to avoid doing X, I want to avoid doing Y,

01:43:36.040 | it's really hard to measure success, right?

01:43:38.540 | It's like, are you really tracking every time

01:43:41.860 | you're tempted by the chocolate chip cookie

01:43:43.700 | and you don't actually eat it?

01:43:45.460 | That's really hard to measure, right?

01:43:47.060 | And we do better when we can measure success and failure,

01:43:49.960 | right?

01:43:50.800 | So it's easier to track the number of times

01:43:53.500 | you approach a salad, right?

01:43:55.000 | You approach something that's healthy.

01:43:56.480 | And so anyway, so it's really interesting to see

01:43:58.840 | how they get in this really subtle shift.

01:44:01.300 | And we see this across the board in behavioral science

01:44:05.180 | can have such a big impact on behavior.

01:44:07.380 | And on this framing thing, I'll just share

01:44:09.920 | one little anecdote from my time working in government.

01:44:12.420 | So we were trying to motivate veterans to sign up

01:44:15.860 | for a employment and educational assistance program.

01:44:19.720 | So this is after their years of service.

01:44:21.640 | And this is a really important benefit

01:44:23.340 | that the government offers for free because the transition

01:44:25.840 | from military to civilian life can

01:44:28.540 | be very fraught with a lot of psychological and physical

01:44:32.380 | obstacles.

01:44:33.500 | And so I remember the Department of Veterans Affairs,

01:44:36.020 | they had almost no money to fund a marketing program

01:44:39.420 | around this.

01:44:39.940 | They said, Maya and team, we've got one email

01:44:43.020 | that we're going to send to vets and have at it,

01:44:45.740 | but that's all we're working with.

01:44:47.620 | And my teammates and I ended up changing just one word

01:44:51.800 | in this email message.

01:44:53.320 | Instead of telling vets that they were eligible

01:44:55.440 | for the program, we simply reminded them

01:44:57.720 | that they had earned it through their years of service.

01:45:01.000 | And that one word change led to a 9% increase in access

01:45:04.780 | to the benefit.

01:45:05.440 | And it's based in a psychological principle

01:45:08.920 | called the endowment effect, which

01:45:10.300 | says that we value things more when we own them

01:45:12.960 | or in this case have earned them.

01:45:14.920 | And so I shared this example only

01:45:16.300 | to say that is such a small change, right?

01:45:19.440 | But we just know that, again, these small little tweaks

01:45:22.260 | in the way that we talk to ourselves,

01:45:23.800 | the way that we frame our goals can have a really big impact

01:45:26.480 | on our behavior.

01:45:27.880 | I'm fascinated by that result. Some people hearing it

01:45:31.120 | might think, OK, 9%, is that really that great?

01:45:33.840 | But we're talking about a one word change.

01:45:37.960 | And the scale of the federal government, right?

01:45:40.780 | So 9%.

01:45:41.640 | Big organizations, hard to argue that things change quickly

01:45:47.540 | in big organizations.

01:45:48.620 | A discussion for another time.

01:45:51.140 | But eligible versus earned, I mean, again,

01:45:54.660 | I come back to this possibility that there's something

01:45:56.900 | about words like earned that invoke a verb state within us

01:46:02.580 | that makes us more action oriented,

01:46:06.620 | similar to being able to see ourselves in some landscape

01:46:10.340 | that can evoke delight or awe, as opposed

01:46:13.180 | to just seeing the landscape that evokes delight or awe.

01:46:19.120 | Yeah, I'm really hung up on this because I

01:46:20.960 | think one of the major challenges,

01:46:23.800 | it seems, for behavioral change is that most people do wait

01:46:28.820 | for the stick as opposed to feeling into the carrot,

01:46:32.880 | so to speak.

01:46:34.420 | I mean, all you have to do is look

01:46:35.860 | at the enormous number of people who

01:46:38.120 | are struggling with health related issues for which there's

01:46:42.620 | now a lot of active debate.

01:46:43.900 | Is it genetically determined or et cetera?

01:46:46.340 | And setting all that aside, it's just very clear

01:46:48.680 | that there are a number of behavioral things--

01:46:51.460 | sunlight, sleep, exercise, social connection, nutrition

01:46:55.440 | among them--

01:46:57.520 | that there's no pill for, there's no injection for,

01:47:00.940 | there's absolutely no replacement for.

01:47:03.260 | So getting people to change their behavior is hard.

01:47:06.660 | Telling people that they're capable sometimes helps,

01:47:10.280 | but doesn't seem sufficient.

01:47:12.560 | So what are some more of these verb states

01:47:16.340 | that people you think can internalize that give them

01:47:20.360 | access to the real sense of possibility

01:47:23.420 | and get them changing their behavior?

01:47:25.500 | Yeah, and behavior change is very hard.

01:47:28.060 | I sometimes bristle at some of the hacks

01:47:30.340 | that I see online because I'm like,

01:47:31.940 | I don't think there's a lot of evidence that supports

01:47:33.620 | that this works.

01:47:34.280 | So what I'm sharing today is actually backed by really

01:47:38.380 | high quality research.

01:47:39.700 | One of my friends and mentors, Ayelet Fishbach,

01:47:44.020 | has done a lot of this work at the University of Chicago

01:47:46.260 | on goal setting and motivation.

01:47:48.460 | A couple other things for people to consider.

01:47:50.340 | And by the way, I love this space

01:47:51.700 | because I'm obsessed with goals.

01:47:53.040 | So I love getting better at things

01:47:54.420 | and I'm using all of these insights in my own life.

01:47:57.220 | So it is truly a delight to get to share them.

01:47:59.960 | OK, sidebar.

01:48:01.380 | Important sidebar, I would argue,

01:48:02.900 | because you live this stuff.

01:48:04.460 | You don't just research it, you live it.

01:48:06.120 | Yes, it's totally me search or whatever they call it.

01:48:09.280 | So who sets the goal matters?

01:48:12.680 | So a lot of us work with coaches, trainers, mentors,

01:48:18.140 | bosses.

01:48:19.180 | That's great.

01:48:20.160 | It's really, really helpful for people in our lives

01:48:23.220 | to bring structure to our goals, to push us along,

01:48:25.820 | to motivate us.

01:48:27.280 | But when other people are setting our goals,

01:48:29.900 | setting our targets for us, it undermines

01:48:32.580 | a really valuable source of motivation, which

01:48:35.060 | is being in the driver's seat.

01:48:37.380 | We love steering in our lives.

01:48:40.860 | We love feeling agency.

01:48:42.420 | We love recruiting our own agency

01:48:44.320 | when it comes to achieving our goals.

01:48:46.180 | And so we talked about how people

01:48:48.980 | will go to irrational lengths to avoid feeling uncertainty.

01:48:52.720 | People also go to irrational lengths

01:48:54.300 | to preserve their agency and control over a situation.

01:48:57.420 | So there's some really interesting research

01:48:59.220 | that's come out just in the last few years showing

01:49:01.620 | that humans prefer to use their judgment over an algorithm

01:49:07.620 | that they know performs better than their judgment

01:49:10.540 | but did not involve them.

01:49:12.500 | And they're much more satisfied with the outcomes

01:49:14.540 | when it's them that's in the driver's seat.

01:49:16.920 | And so what this means, I think, in everyday context

01:49:20.740 | is not to do away with trainers and coaches and whatnot.

01:49:23.200 | Every trainer and coach is listening.

01:49:24.740 | Don't hate me.

01:49:25.380 | OK, you're sticking around.

01:49:27.460 | But what they can do is they can build something

01:49:31.280 | of a choice set into your day-to-day programming, right?

01:49:35.260 | So let's say that at work you have a certain skill

01:49:38.000 | that you're trying to build.

01:49:39.160 | Ask for a set of options to choose from.

01:49:41.100 | Own the targets more.

01:49:42.440 | You will see a boost in motivation.

01:49:44.020 | Let's say you're working out with a trainer.

01:49:45.800 | They're like, it's leg day.

01:49:47.140 | OK, I'm going to own some of my targets, right?

01:49:49.280 | Are we going to go hard on deadlifts?

01:49:50.740 | Are we going to go hard on squats, whatever it is?

01:49:53.100 | And so build some agency into the experience

01:49:55.980 | because nothing supplants that kind of intrinsic drive

01:49:59.540 | and the feeling that you own the success or the failure.

01:50:05.200 | Again, I think to your earlier point,

01:50:06.900 | what we're really trying to do with some

01:50:08.480 | of these behavioral insights is capitalize

01:50:10.760 | on our natural state as humans, right?

01:50:14.180 | Like, what drives us?

01:50:15.200 | And it turns out we really love being in control.

01:50:17.660 | Well, why don't we monopolize on that

01:50:19.540 | when it comes to our goal pursuit, right?

01:50:22.400 | So we're trying to figure out those areas of psychology

01:50:24.740 | that we can leverage.

01:50:25.960 | That's fantastic.

01:50:26.840 | The word agency is so key here.

01:50:28.940 | I think it explains that earlier result, the shock experiment.

01:50:33.460 | People having agency over their response to 100% of the time,

01:50:39.300 | at least it's giving them some sense of control

01:50:41.560 | and mitigating it.

01:50:42.740 | Whereas when it's random 50-50, or rather,

01:50:47.060 | when it's random 50% of the trials,

01:50:48.860 | then even though the outcome is better on the whole,

01:50:54.220 | it's perceived somehow as a reduction in agency.

01:50:57.700 | There's something fundamental there for sure.

01:50:59.580 | When I started my laboratory

01:51:00.900 | and there was an additional pressure to publish papers,

01:51:04.880 | this is before getting tenure, I used to ask students

01:51:08.720 | in postdocs when the paperwork would be ready.

01:51:11.340 | And then finally, I stopped asking and just said,

01:51:14.380 | "Why don't you tell me when the deadline is?"

01:51:17.100 | Awesome, yes.

01:51:18.020 | And not a single one failed, or rather, I should put it

01:51:21.440 | in the positive light, every single time they succeeded

01:51:24.480 | in beating their estimate because they were

01:51:27.820 | in control of that endpoint.

01:51:29.520 | So it was, at times, challenging for me, but they set a date.

01:51:36.080 | And also, by the way, if they need to extend

01:51:38.420 | that date outward, we did.

01:51:39.960 | That was their choice.

01:51:41.240 | They said they needed more time.

01:51:42.620 | The rule in science that I think applies a lot of places is,

01:51:45.320 | I always like the phrase, "As fast as I carefully can,"

01:51:48.620 | because you don't want to rush, right?

01:51:50.760 | But that sense of agency, I like to think translated

01:51:54.060 | to more joy for them.

01:51:56.880 | And certainly, there was a lot of productivity from them.

01:51:59.860 | And they might be listening to this, and so they can put

01:52:02.560 | in the comments whether or not I'm telling the truth here.

01:52:05.740 | Most of them are professors now, so that's good.

01:52:07.280 | - Well, that probably means they succeeded.

01:52:08.780 | - Oh, they definitely succeeded.

01:52:09.780 | The question is whether or not I had anything to do with it.

01:52:11.680 | My advisors always said, "The best thing you could do is

01:52:14.060 | support your students in postdocs

01:52:15.420 | and then just get out of their way."

01:52:17.140 | Because the really good ones are, you can't control them.

01:52:20.220 | You're just trying to not screw things up for them.

01:52:22.820 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:52:23.660 | No, there's a lot of intrinsic motivation there.

01:52:26.380 | - Curious about the difference between lone pursuits

01:52:30.700 | and group pursuits, because I know you understand a lot

01:52:33.100 | about groups, and I want to make sure that we talk

01:52:35.700 | about groupthink, although that has

01:52:37.980 | such a negative connotation.

01:52:39.660 | But the way that we tend to kind of revert to the mean

01:52:44.660 | when it comes to our thinking and our opinions,

01:52:47.700 | and certainly our explanations of who's right

01:52:50.300 | and who's wrong when we are in a collection

01:52:52.020 | of like-minded people.

01:52:53.260 | - Yeah.

01:52:54.100 | - This could also be, you know, phrased as,

01:52:55.860 | "What are the dangers of being among like-minded people?"

01:52:58.520 | (laughing)

01:52:59.660 | And then we'll relate that back to motivation.

01:53:01.780 | But what are the dangers of being among like-minded people?

01:53:05.140 | - Yeah, I mean, well, in the context of goals

01:53:09.240 | and motivation, it can be very, very helpful to be

01:53:12.240 | in the context of like-minded people.

01:53:13.700 | And the reason for that is we often don't see failure

01:53:17.180 | up close when it comes to people pursuing their goals.

01:53:19.660 | But if we are in the presence of people whose values

01:53:21.660 | we share, who have a similar commitment to doing something,

01:53:24.540 | and we see up close that they sometimes have those days

01:53:27.440 | where they fail or we have the vulnerability to show

01:53:29.980 | when we failed, that can actually increase our resolve

01:53:32.580 | that the goals that we're trying to achieve

01:53:34.260 | are actually possible, okay?

01:53:35.980 | I think the danger of being in the like-minded spaces

01:53:39.180 | is around how it limits your frame of mind, right?

01:53:41.780 | So when it comes to the ideas that you have,

01:53:44.240 | when it comes to the convictions you have

01:53:46.740 | around your points of view, it can be very dangerous

01:53:49.500 | to only be in the echo chamber.

01:53:51.900 | And again, 'cause I wanna give people strategies

01:53:54.540 | to challenge their way of thinking without them having

01:53:56.700 | to socialize for all the introverts out there.

01:53:58.340 | I have a lot of compassion.

01:53:59.180 | I have introverted tendencies, so I get it.

01:54:01.740 | One helpful thought experiment you can use

01:54:04.740 | when you feel like maybe you're spending a little bit

01:54:06.360 | too much time around people who are just reinforcing

01:54:09.260 | whatever viewpoints you have is to ask

01:54:11.980 | how your belief system and your ideas

01:54:15.340 | and your opinions of things might have been different

01:54:18.100 | had you been born during a different time period

01:54:21.660 | and in a different family or cultural landscape.

01:54:25.040 | And what happens when it comes to our viewpoints

01:54:27.220 | is that they become so tethered to our identities

01:54:29.800 | that we feel like if we were to jettison

01:54:32.100 | a certain belief or value, we would be jettisoning ourselves

01:54:35.820 | and that feels way too threatening.

01:54:37.520 | It's way too destabilizing to engage in that.

01:54:40.340 | But the minute you imagine what it would have been like

01:54:42.300 | to have been born in a different family

01:54:44.200 | with a different religious belief system,

01:54:45.940 | with a different value system,

01:54:47.700 | all of a sudden you transport your same self, right,

01:54:50.460 | I'm still Maya, into this new environment

01:54:53.260 | and you start to see how non-precious

01:54:56.260 | some of your beliefs are, right?

01:54:57.620 | Maybe they don't have the sacred quality

01:54:59.860 | that you thought that they did.

01:55:01.140 | And so you might be more open to changing your mind,

01:55:03.960 | more open and receptive to challenging

01:55:06.060 | your own points of view if you engage

01:55:08.020 | in that thought experiment.

01:55:09.820 | - I recall you discussing a description

01:55:12.900 | of people watching a game of sport

01:55:17.180 | that involved bad calls.

01:55:19.340 | - Yeah, yeah, controversial referee calls.

01:55:20.780 | - Controversial referee calls.

01:55:22.620 | Yeah, if you could share with us a little bit

01:55:23.980 | about that result, 'cause I find it really interesting,

01:55:25.820 | especially the part where the experimenters

01:55:28.820 | can swap the identities of the teams in theory

01:55:32.660 | and then, well, basically what people come to realize

01:55:36.140 | is that our perception of the outside world

01:55:38.700 | is strongly informed by the group that we see ourselves in

01:55:43.620 | and often to our own detriment.

01:55:46.140 | - Absolutely, yeah, so this is a study from the 1950s

01:55:48.740 | and to your point, you know, we tend to think,

01:55:51.180 | okay, we're human beings, we're really enlightened,

01:55:53.260 | we're making decisions and we're engaging

01:55:56.260 | in judgments of things based on data and evidence and facts

01:56:00.180 | and, you know, surely my visual system wouldn't lie to me,

01:56:03.260 | so whatever I perceive is gonna be true

01:56:05.500 | and vertical, vertical representation of the world

01:56:07.740 | and like, not true, okay?

01:56:10.400 | A lot of our beliefs, and these are strong beliefs,

01:56:14.620 | I mean, again, they're what we believe to be fact

01:56:16.800 | about the world is informed by our group membership.

01:56:19.460 | So in this study, loyal fans of two opposing football teams

01:56:24.460 | watched these controversial plays, right?

01:56:28.180 | So where the referee made a call

01:56:29.960 | and they weren't quite certain

01:56:31.260 | if it was like in or out, let's say.

01:56:33.260 | And depending on your loyalty to the team,

01:56:37.220 | to whatever sports team, right, whichever side you were on,

01:56:40.020 | you were much more likely to favor calls

01:56:42.460 | that were made in your team's favor.

01:56:46.940 | And, you know, when you ask people

01:56:48.860 | coming out of a study like this,

01:56:49.980 | it's not like, yup, I knew I was biased.

01:56:52.860 | Like, I knew that I was basing my judgment

01:56:55.700 | of these referee calls based on my affiliation

01:56:58.220 | and my love of team X or team Y.

01:57:01.180 | You wouldn't think that.

01:57:02.000 | You think you were an arbiter of truth in this situation.

01:57:04.460 | You're just recalling what your visual system saw.

01:57:06.660 | And I think that shows how powerful

01:57:10.060 | these social forces are, how powerful

01:57:12.620 | our group affiliations are,

01:57:13.720 | because it can truly change the way that you see stuff, right?

01:57:17.900 | Of course it can then transform the way

01:57:19.460 | that you think about stuff.

01:57:21.040 | And so that to me is a powerful reminder

01:57:23.900 | that when we are in disagreement with someone else

01:57:26.700 | and we just try to bombard them with facts, right?

01:57:29.980 | I mean, you're a scientist, right?

01:57:31.420 | So if you're hearing someone say something

01:57:33.720 | and you're like, oh, that's not accurate, that's not true,

01:57:36.320 | your instinct probably is to say,

01:57:37.860 | have you heard about the 2017 study,

01:57:40.340 | the peer-reviewed journal article from PubMed,

01:57:42.340 | that da-da-da, right?

01:57:44.080 | But when you recognize that actually a large part

01:57:46.360 | of our belief system emerges from the groups

01:57:50.220 | that we identify with,

01:57:51.420 | I think there's an inspiring lesson that comes from this.

01:57:54.720 | So we shouldn't be too disheartened by the fact

01:57:56.340 | that this is true, but it helps round out our understanding

01:57:59.820 | of why it is that people believe the things they do.

01:58:02.660 | And as a result, we have more resources at hand

01:58:05.480 | to try to understand how we can change their minds, right?

01:58:08.180 | So one of the guys that I interviewed on my podcast,

01:58:11.820 | his name is Daryl Davis, he's a black jazz musician,

01:58:14.820 | and he was confronted by a member of the Ku Klux Klan

01:58:18.420 | at one of his performances.

01:58:19.840 | And it led, talk about a slight change of plans.

01:58:22.780 | I mean, he just went on a totally different life path

01:58:25.200 | and ended up convincing dozens of people

01:58:28.040 | to leave white supremacy groups,

01:58:29.780 | including the Ku Klux Klan.

01:58:31.740 | And when it comes to Daryl and his approach,

01:58:36.740 | well, one, he recruited people's agencies.

01:58:38.680 | So he never implied to them,

01:58:40.420 | "Oh, I'm trying to change your mind."

01:58:42.880 | He inspired, he always says like,

01:58:44.800 | "I didn't convince them, Maya.

01:58:46.080 | "They convinced themselves to change their minds."

01:58:48.220 | So he recruited their agency.

01:58:50.520 | But he also tried his absolute hardest

01:58:53.900 | to not question their fundamental and underlying humanity,

01:58:57.480 | right, so he tried to understand,

01:58:59.280 | like, why are you part of this group?

01:59:01.480 | This vile, vitriolic group?

01:59:03.920 | And some people would share,

01:59:05.140 | "Well, you know, it's a family tradition thing.

01:59:06.980 | "My father was in the Klan, my grandfather's in the Klan."

01:59:10.000 | Look, none of this excuses being in a hate group, okay?

01:59:13.880 | But it at least gave Daryl an understanding

01:59:15.980 | of some of the factors that were pushing them

01:59:18.380 | towards the group so that he might offer

01:59:20.500 | that sense of community, that sense of belonging

01:59:23.280 | somewhere else, maybe outside of a hate group, right?

01:59:26.260 | But if he thought that he was actually just fighting

01:59:28.320 | over facts, over whether African Americans

01:59:31.840 | should be treated equal to everyone else,

01:59:34.600 | then he would have lost that argument

01:59:37.480 | because he wasn't even fighting with the right currency,

01:59:39.840 | right, what was relevant.

01:59:40.760 | So what was so, I mean, this is my,

01:59:44.160 | it was the first episode of A Slight Change of Plans

01:59:45.880 | we ever released and continues to be my favorite

01:59:48.200 | because what was so thrilling about this interview

01:59:51.000 | is that the strategies Daryl used

01:59:53.840 | to convince people to change their minds,

01:59:55.320 | again, of these deeply entrenched, horrific views,

01:59:58.540 | were totally corroborated by the science

02:00:00.480 | of how we change people's minds.

02:00:01.760 | So he used a lot of really effective strategies,

02:00:04.400 | just intuitively, like he's just a mastermind

02:00:06.840 | behavioral scientist just by virtue of who he is,

02:00:10.160 | but he showed genuine curiosity

02:00:13.180 | for why it is they believe what they did,

02:00:14.860 | which is, again, extremely hard,

02:00:16.480 | I would not have had the equanimity

02:00:17.760 | to show genuine curiosity for why someone

02:00:19.820 | is in the Ku Klux Klan, but he showed that curiosity,

02:00:22.760 | he increased his question to statement ratio,

02:00:26.560 | so it's really important to ask people a lot of questions,

02:00:29.400 | and then he would ask people a really important question,

02:00:34.400 | which is, well, what in theory could change your mind?

02:00:37.520 | Like, what evidence would I have to give you

02:00:39.340 | in order to change your mind about X, Y, or Z?

02:00:42.280 | And the reason that I love asking that question

02:00:45.740 | is that it presupposes that someone ought to be willing

02:00:49.020 | to change their mind in the face of new information.

02:00:51.440 | So this harkens back to the conversation

02:00:52.800 | we were having earlier about the importance

02:00:54.160 | of having a malleable state of mind

02:00:55.400 | and being willing to update in the face of new info.

02:00:57.800 | Now, if the person in response says,

02:00:59.580 | literally, nothing will change my mind,

02:01:02.400 | okay, well then you know it's not worth your time

02:01:03.920 | to have the disagreement with them,

02:01:05.600 | but if they give you a little bit and say,

02:01:07.100 | well, maybe I would change my mind on vaccines

02:01:10.300 | if you were to tell me X, Y, or Z,

02:01:11.720 | maybe I would change my mind on immigration reform

02:01:15.300 | if you were to tell me this or that,

02:01:17.360 | now you have an in, right?

02:01:19.400 | But you do need to get them into the state of mind

02:01:21.440 | where they think, yeah, I guess in theory,

02:01:23.880 | I could change my mind about this thing

02:01:25.360 | that I feel absolutely resolute about.

02:01:28.000 | - I've never worked in public policy,

02:01:30.320 | but I feel very strongly that where I see failures

02:01:35.320 | and mass of public health policy or educational policy,

02:01:41.520 | almost always there seems to be a failure

02:01:46.920 | of even interest in understanding what motivates

02:01:50.040 | the other side's position.

02:01:51.440 | And this is where I just,

02:01:52.720 | this actually gets me frustrated to the point of motivated

02:01:56.120 | where it's like people are saying, you're wrong,

02:01:59.760 | you're wrong, know this, know that,

02:02:01.980 | to the point of it's almost maddening

02:02:04.400 | and far more seldom do we see people saying,

02:02:09.400 | okay, I'm gonna third person myself

02:02:13.280 | or I'm gonna put myself in the other person's shoes

02:02:15.000 | and say, why might they feel that way?

02:02:17.400 | Why would this person be listening to this individual

02:02:20.400 | as opposed to this public health individual?

02:02:23.360 | And look, without taking any stance on this

02:02:27.400 | 'cause it's a much bigger conversation

02:02:28.680 | than we wanna have right now,

02:02:30.120 | I could look at public health officials

02:02:33.280 | that just completely failed to understand

02:02:37.900 | the other side's position and vice versa.

02:02:40.680 | And that to me just says it's a communication failure.

02:02:43.880 | And I'll take this out of the COVID pandemic discussion

02:02:48.680 | as it's normally had and say that one thing

02:02:51.160 | that we know for sure is that in the 2020 to really 2022,

02:02:55.960 | but still 2023 landscape,

02:02:58.660 | there were so many mental health concerns, right?

02:03:01.860 | Everybody, right?

02:03:03.040 | Regardless of where people were on the vaccine debate,

02:03:05.040 | mass debate, lockdown debate, regardless of any of that,

02:03:08.140 | everyone's stress level was elevated.

02:03:10.200 | - Absolutely.

02:03:11.040 | - And there were very, very few top down

02:03:15.680 | from at the level of government's discussions

02:03:17.980 | about how to maintain circadian rhythm and sleep health,

02:03:20.800 | how to maintain health in general in that landscape.

02:03:24.360 | And that for me, it was just really shocking.

02:03:27.040 | It was also one of the reasons

02:03:28.080 | why we launched the podcast, frankly,

02:03:30.020 | is that I really feel that the tools were needed

02:03:32.480 | by everybody and should be zero cost to everybody.

02:03:35.620 | But what was clear is there was so much pointing of fingers

02:03:39.760 | and name calling and violence even

02:03:43.260 | that no one was saying like, why would people feel this way?

02:03:46.320 | Why would people trust these sources

02:03:47.800 | as opposed to these sources?

02:03:48.980 | And we can only conclude if we're good scientists

02:03:51.660 | that the landscape was ineffective, right?

02:03:56.660 | It was just ineffective and it continues.

02:03:58.800 | I mean, if you have the desire to take a reduction

02:04:02.560 | in dopamine by going on Twitter

02:04:04.080 | and following this back and forth that continues today,

02:04:06.720 | it's pretty ugly still.

02:04:09.320 | None of it seems really solution oriented.

02:04:11.360 | There are a few people out there

02:04:12.320 | who are trying to make it solution oriented, but not really.

02:04:16.320 | And so I don't wanna go into the dark aspects here,

02:04:20.960 | but it does seem like this willingness to take a look

02:04:24.920 | at why others might feel the opposite of how we feel

02:04:28.760 | is a very rare quality.

02:04:31.440 | And this gentleman, Daryl, what was his last name?

02:04:33.120 | - Daryl Davis.

02:04:33.960 | - I think I've seen a number of things with him.

02:04:35.980 | I mean, he's obviously extraordinary,

02:04:38.920 | but we call him that because people like him

02:04:41.120 | are exceedingly rare.

02:04:42.920 | So what can we do to cultivate that kind of mindset?

02:04:46.320 | Because I'm not pointing fingers here.

02:04:47.680 | I mean, I think we all have this default tendency

02:04:50.400 | to gather evidence the way that we gather evidence,

02:04:53.840 | draw conclusions, and then stand our ground.

02:04:56.960 | And I think it's detrimental to everyone.

02:04:59.840 | - So you're making me reflect on probably the greatest gift

02:05:02.800 | that being a cognitive scientist has given me in my life.

02:05:06.840 | Obviously it's fed my curiosity.

02:05:08.260 | It's been a delight to study things and learn things,

02:05:10.080 | but the greatest gift it has given me

02:05:12.900 | is empathy towards people.

02:05:14.860 | It is the greatest driver of human empathy

02:05:18.000 | to learn how our minds work.

02:05:20.260 | And I don't know if there's a substitute for that.

02:05:23.440 | Partly that's why I started a slight change of plans.

02:05:26.160 | We have story episodes where you hear from people like Daryl,

02:05:28.880 | but I interview scientists from all over the world

02:05:31.260 | about their areas of expertise.

02:05:32.640 | And I genuinely believe that the more we learn

02:05:35.640 | about how the mind works,

02:05:37.040 | the more we learn from my field of cognitive science

02:05:39.960 | about how we make decisions,

02:05:41.320 | how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world,

02:05:43.980 | how we come to be the people that we are,

02:05:47.340 | the more we can bridge these empathy gaps.

02:05:50.100 | And it's been profound for me.

02:05:51.460 | I mean, I feel so lucky to have been steeped

02:05:53.400 | in this literature for decades now.

02:05:55.700 | My hope is to invite people into the conversation

02:05:58.040 | because the more you learn

02:05:59.140 | about why people are the way they are,

02:06:01.640 | the more empathy you can extend and the more,

02:06:05.320 | I'm not even saying you need to extend an olive branch.

02:06:07.760 | I'm not saying that you need to compromise

02:06:09.800 | your own belief system,

02:06:11.280 | but at least you see that there might be an entry point,

02:06:14.160 | a reason to have a discussion with this person

02:06:16.520 | who believes things that are completely different from you.

02:06:18.600 | And we talked about gratitude a bit in this conversation.

02:06:22.080 | I feel immense gratitude that I have a posture of empathy

02:06:25.960 | as I move around in this world,

02:06:27.800 | because I have strong beliefs on things.

02:06:31.100 | I care a lot.

02:06:31.940 | I care about reducing human suffering

02:06:33.880 | and that I meet someone who I think is pro a policy

02:06:36.600 | that promotes human suffering.

02:06:37.840 | And of course, the visceral human instinct is like,

02:06:40.720 | to hell with you and your viewpoint.

02:06:42.160 | This is horrible.

02:06:43.000 | This is intolerable.

02:06:44.280 | But because I have this cognitive science hat on,

02:06:47.580 | it allows me to walk around

02:06:48.840 | with a slightly different viewpoint.

02:06:50.800 | And I really feel that I'm a better person

02:06:53.180 | as a result of that.

02:06:54.240 | And I've heard from listeners of a slight change of plans

02:06:57.320 | when they listen to these science episodes,

02:06:58.760 | whether it's the science of loneliness,

02:07:00.420 | the science of empathy, the science of meditation,

02:07:03.200 | I try to bring this empathetic spin to understanding,

02:07:06.560 | again, neuroscience and psychology,

02:07:09.760 | they have found that they are kinder to others.

02:07:13.620 | And so that's probably the best feedback

02:07:15.640 | that I've ever received on the show.

02:07:16.760 | It's like, people are like,

02:07:17.980 | I'm a nicer person to other people now,

02:07:19.780 | especially the ones I don't agree with.

02:07:21.200 | - And presumably to themselves as well.

02:07:23.240 | I mean, I know you've brought up the topic of empathy

02:07:26.740 | as a way to prevent burnout, right?

02:07:30.840 | And here, we're not just talking about job burnout.

02:07:32.640 | We're talking about the burnout that is inherent

02:07:36.080 | to like any long-term pursuit that's challenging,

02:07:39.020 | raising kids, being in a family.

02:07:41.160 | What is the great Ram Dass quote?

02:07:43.280 | "Think you're enlightened?

02:07:44.200 | Go spend a week with your parents."

02:07:45.800 | (all laughing)

02:07:47.320 | You know, like no matter how enlightened you are,

02:07:49.400 | it's like, I remind myself that I love my parents.

02:07:53.400 | I love my parents,

02:07:54.320 | but it's just a completely different frame shift.

02:07:58.040 | So, but also kind to oneself.

02:07:59.760 | I mean, I think there's starting to be some good neuroscience

02:08:03.880 | at the mechanistic level of empathy.

02:08:06.720 | Clearly, empathy is not the default state for most people.

02:08:11.640 | It's something that we need to cultivate as a practice

02:08:14.080 | and that we can cultivate as a practice

02:08:16.560 | along the lines of empathy,

02:08:17.800 | but also returning to a topic

02:08:19.840 | that we opened today's discussion with.

02:08:21.800 | You know, we built these narratives about ourselves

02:08:25.400 | starting in adolescence, maybe even earlier,

02:08:28.120 | and through our teen years,

02:08:29.280 | and we have various experiences,

02:08:31.140 | but I'm curious how we can continue to build narratives

02:08:34.900 | about ourselves and the role of narrative.

02:08:37.600 | You know, the I statements, the I am statements.

02:08:40.500 | And whether or not you,

02:08:43.920 | and we should all spend some time doing this.

02:08:47.760 | I mean, these days, you know,

02:08:48.880 | people exercise 'cause we know it's good for us.

02:08:51.160 | I hope people get sunlight

02:08:52.320 | 'cause they know it's great for them.

02:08:54.620 | That people perhaps have a meditation practice

02:08:57.440 | or a therapy practice or a journaling practice,

02:08:59.480 | but how is it that we can continue

02:09:01.400 | to evolve our narratives about self

02:09:03.400 | in a way that promotes some or all of the things

02:09:06.520 | that we've been talking about today?

02:09:08.560 | - Yeah, so empathy is really interesting

02:09:10.720 | because I think we have a lot of misconceptions about it

02:09:13.720 | and we have misconceptions

02:09:14.600 | about how empathetic we actually are.

02:09:16.740 | I would argue people are more empathetic than they think.

02:09:19.060 | And let me tell you why.

02:09:19.900 | So this comes from research

02:09:21.260 | by my friend, Jamil Zaki at Stanford.

02:09:23.600 | There's three distinct types of empathy.

02:09:27.240 | A lot of people don't know about.

02:09:28.200 | So the first kind is emotional empathy.

02:09:31.720 | And this is the one that feels very intuitive

02:09:33.760 | to most of us.

02:09:34.600 | So it's this visceral reaction I have.

02:09:36.260 | You tell me that you've had a really hard time.

02:09:38.800 | My eyes start to well up.

02:09:40.520 | I can truly feel your pain.

02:09:42.740 | And I just feel what you feel, okay?

02:09:45.760 | And that typically is what people think of

02:09:48.120 | when they think of empathy, period.

02:09:50.020 | They overlook two other types of empathy.

02:09:52.300 | The second type is called cognitive empathy.

02:09:56.040 | This is the ability to accurately diagnose

02:09:59.320 | what it is that's causing you distress in this moment

02:10:03.120 | and what it is that I could offer up to you

02:10:05.140 | to try to help ameliorate some of your suffering.

02:10:08.440 | The third kind is called empathic concern

02:10:11.900 | or it's known as compassion as well,

02:10:14.180 | which is the actual desire to help you,

02:10:16.840 | desire to help another person.

02:10:18.640 | And what's so interesting about these three types of empathy

02:10:21.380 | is that they don't correlate within people.

02:10:23.960 | You can be really high on the emotional empathy scale.

02:10:26.800 | You can have tears streaming down your face

02:10:28.860 | as you hear about your friend's divorce,

02:10:30.960 | but you might be really bad at diagnosing

02:10:33.240 | what it is that's causing them distress.

02:10:35.120 | You might be really bad at actually offering up

02:10:37.480 | a solution to their problem.

02:10:40.480 | Or you might lack the will.

02:10:42.360 | If you're sociopathic, you might just not have the will

02:10:44.320 | to help someone.

02:10:45.960 | And what's so interesting is that I think in our society,

02:10:49.840 | and this relates back to identity

02:10:51.720 | and the labels we give ourselves,

02:10:54.120 | I think our society puts a huge premium

02:10:56.520 | on emotional empathy.

02:10:59.220 | And we discount people who don't have that visceral response

02:11:02.280 | and we just immediately say, oh, they're not empathetic.

02:11:04.280 | And this happens from the time

02:11:05.200 | that we're really little, by the way.

02:11:06.320 | Like the kid who's crying on the playground

02:11:08.280 | comforting their friend, right?

02:11:09.640 | They're like, wow, that kid's got a ton of empathy.

02:11:11.520 | Oh, my older kid doesn't seem to really care about people.

02:11:14.780 | But they might excel in cognitive empathy.

02:11:17.080 | They might excel when it comes to empathic concern.

02:11:20.400 | So one of the things I was talking about with Jamil

02:11:22.680 | on a slight change of plans is,

02:11:24.700 | maybe we ought to think about empathy languages

02:11:28.080 | in the same way we think about love languages.

02:11:30.220 | People have different ways of expressing their empathy

02:11:32.520 | and we ought to value them equally.

02:11:34.920 | And that's been wonderful because I think even in the past,

02:11:38.520 | I would have had a really hard situation.

02:11:40.240 | I go to one of my friends

02:11:41.760 | and they just seem like a little bit more stoic.

02:11:44.840 | And I'm like, do you even give a shit?

02:11:46.880 | Why do you not care as much as I want you to care?

02:11:49.160 | It turns out they're fantastic at wanting to help me

02:11:52.280 | and understanding what's wrong with me.

02:11:54.120 | And I love the idea of giving a little more love

02:11:58.480 | to those second two buckets

02:11:59.640 | because I think it'll allow us to better recruit

02:12:01.780 | more empathy from others

02:12:03.000 | and also to see ourselves differently.

02:12:04.880 | To maybe for those people out there who are like,

02:12:06.440 | I'm not a very empathetic person.

02:12:07.800 | You might actually be more empathetic than you think.

02:12:10.440 | The second thing I wanted to share is about burnout, right?

02:12:13.120 | So you talked a little about burnout.

02:12:15.280 | People who rate really high on the emotional empathy scale

02:12:19.240 | tend to experience burnout at higher rates.

02:12:21.160 | So you can imagine healthcare workers, first responders,

02:12:24.840 | essentially what you're doing

02:12:25.700 | when you feel emotional empathy

02:12:26.940 | is you're carrying the burden of the other person's pain.

02:12:29.860 | So you can easily imagine how that can deplete you.

02:12:32.200 | And I think the instinct that we have when we're empathetic

02:12:35.240 | is to say, you know what?

02:12:37.000 | I'm just gonna shut myself off.

02:12:38.480 | I had that experience in 2020.

02:12:39.880 | I was like, there's too much bad stuff happening around me.

02:12:42.480 | Like I prefer to just not feel things.

02:12:44.180 | Thank you very much.

02:12:45.240 | And so I tried to close myself off

02:12:46.960 | from natural emotional reactions I would have to things.

02:12:50.400 | But what Jamil's research shows

02:12:52.880 | is that you don't actually have to.

02:12:55.380 | If you cultivate cognitive empathy and empathic concern,

02:13:00.000 | those can actually be protective against burnout.

02:13:02.680 | So you don't have to do away with empathy altogether.

02:13:05.200 | You just have to shift gears and be more selective

02:13:07.800 | about the kind of empathy that you're investing in.

02:13:10.120 | So I love this research because again,

02:13:11.400 | it just like opens your mind up to this whole world of empathy

02:13:14.420 | that you might've thought of as more like the singular concept

02:13:16.920 | and allows there to be a little bit more gray space.

02:13:19.780 | - I love the idea

02:13:20.620 | that there are different categories of empathy.

02:13:22.400 | It will also arm me with a response if ever.

02:13:25.660 | Hypothetically, someone says,

02:13:27.100 | I don't feel like you're really feeling what I'm feeling

02:13:29.340 | and therefore you're not empathic to my experience.

02:13:32.180 | Where I rate on these scales isn't important,

02:13:35.980 | but this notion of cognitive empathy,

02:13:38.640 | I think it's really important

02:13:39.480 | and probably one that most people haven't heard of.

02:13:41.380 | I certainly haven't heard of it,

02:13:42.980 | but I like to think that it really does exist

02:13:46.780 | and that it's at least-

02:13:47.620 | - And you might have it in spades, Andrew is so.

02:13:49.580 | - I don't know, you'd have to ask the people close to me,

02:13:52.720 | but that it is at least as important

02:13:55.460 | as the emotional empathy.

02:13:57.280 | Before we conclude, there is something

02:13:58.980 | that I unfortunately pushed us past too quickly

02:14:02.840 | that I want to return to,

02:14:03.800 | because I think it's something that so many people care

02:14:07.080 | about and live with each day,

02:14:08.660 | which is this issue of challenges with ongoing motivation.

02:14:11.660 | And forgive me for doing a bit of an anachronism here.

02:14:15.820 | I'm sort of jumping back to this

02:14:17.120 | because I realized that I pulled us off to another topic,

02:14:19.780 | but you've talked about the middle problem before

02:14:23.140 | and it's too important to not return to.

02:14:27.340 | So tell us about the middle problem

02:14:30.060 | and how we can overcome the middle problem.

02:14:31.980 | - And before I do that,

02:14:32.820 | do you mind if I give just a couple short strategies

02:14:35.340 | around goal setting?

02:14:36.320 | I just want to make sure I round out that section.

02:14:38.260 | - Not only would I not mind, I would be delighted.

02:14:40.860 | - Okay, I just want to make sure again,

02:14:41.900 | I share the wisdom that's helped me

02:14:43.740 | so much in my personal life.

02:14:45.220 | Okay, so, and I'll try to be fast.

02:14:47.600 | So the first is--

02:14:48.440 | - Please take your time.

02:14:49.280 | - Okay, but people have these goals to reach, right?

02:14:52.460 | I got to get them out running.

02:14:54.200 | So the first is to make sure that you are,

02:14:57.060 | so we've already talked about approach

02:14:58.660 | versus avoidant goals, right?

02:15:00.200 | We've talked about how who sets the goal matters

02:15:02.700 | and how if it's you, it's better, right?

02:15:04.700 | If you have some ownership over your targets.

02:15:07.340 | The third thing is to make sure that you're setting goals

02:15:10.060 | when you're in the same psychological

02:15:12.700 | and physiological state as the one you'll be in

02:15:15.380 | when you're actually pursuing the goal.

02:15:17.740 | Because we tend to have what are known as,

02:15:19.500 | this is again, I let Fishbox work,

02:15:21.020 | we tend to have empathy gaps between our present day selves

02:15:24.220 | and our future selves.

02:15:25.380 | And that empathy gap can lead us to be very compassionate

02:15:28.680 | towards 4 p.m. on Sunday, watching TV, Maya, right?

02:15:34.060 | And 6 a.m. Maya, who I hope is gonna be at the gym,

02:15:37.620 | like killing herself with a really high intensity intervals

02:15:41.420 | set or whatnot.

02:15:42.380 | And so if it is 4 p.m. on Sunday,

02:15:45.600 | probably not the best time for you to say,

02:15:47.280 | I'm gonna go to the gym every day, 6 a.m.

02:15:49.780 | If you actually are at the gym at 6 a.m.

02:15:52.340 | and you are feeling viscerally, the physiological pain,

02:15:56.740 | the psychological pain of having gotten up really early

02:15:59.340 | to do the workout,

02:16:00.420 | then it's reasonable for you to set that goal.

02:16:03.100 | But it's kind of the opposite of like they say,

02:16:04.940 | don't go to the supermarket hungry, right?

02:16:06.900 | Actually in this situation,

02:16:07.940 | you want to be in exactly the same physiological

02:16:10.900 | and psychological state you'll be in

02:16:12.320 | when you're in goal pursuit.

02:16:13.260 | It'll make it much more likely

02:16:14.300 | that you set reasonable goals and you actually reach them.

02:16:17.220 | The second thing that you might wanna think about is,

02:16:20.700 | so I don't know about you, Andrew,

02:16:21.620 | but I feel like I'm a goal purist by nature.

02:16:24.480 | So when I set a goal,

02:16:26.180 | the minute I like fall off even slightly,

02:16:30.060 | the goal is gone for me, okay?

02:16:31.860 | And I'm like, ah, I messed up.

02:16:34.780 | Like, let's start from the beginning.

02:16:35.820 | Let's start from scratch.

02:16:36.680 | I need a new goal.

02:16:37.780 | Like I've already messed up and it doesn't matter.

02:16:39.780 | So I feel like unless I achieve perfection

02:16:42.800 | in achieving my goals, I get very frustrated

02:16:44.660 | and I just fall off the wagon completely.

02:16:46.700 | So one thing that researchers have shown

02:16:48.340 | is that it's really helpful to build in

02:16:51.540 | what's called an emergency reserve into your goal setting

02:16:54.300 | or SLAC is another way of putting it.

02:16:56.900 | So let's say I have a goal.

02:16:57.960 | I wanna go to the gym every single day this month.

02:17:00.900 | It's really important and helpful to give yourself

02:17:03.500 | and you're not going soft on yourself, I promise,

02:17:05.840 | to give yourself, for example,

02:17:07.880 | three get out of jail free cards.

02:17:10.560 | Three days where for whatever reason,

02:17:13.000 | it's okay that you didn't go to the gym.

02:17:14.660 | You got sick, maybe you have kids who got sick.

02:17:17.080 | You're just not feeling motivated.

02:17:18.300 | It doesn't really matter what the reason is.

02:17:20.140 | You didn't go to the gym.

02:17:20.960 | But the important thing is that you're still on track

02:17:23.580 | to achieving your goal even if you miss those three days

02:17:26.060 | because you built them into the system.

02:17:27.800 | Okay, and the final thing I'll say

02:17:29.460 | about setting the goal is to try to capitalize

02:17:33.220 | on a phenomenon known as the fresh start effect.

02:17:36.260 | So this is work by my friend Katie Milkman.

02:17:38.020 | She's a professor at Wharton

02:17:39.860 | at the University of Pennsylvania.

02:17:41.660 | So what she's found is that in our lives,

02:17:44.440 | we have these big milestone moments

02:17:46.980 | where we break from the past

02:17:48.740 | and we're entering a new future.

02:17:50.540 | Okay, this might be moving across the country.

02:17:53.580 | It could be getting a new job.

02:17:54.920 | It could be getting married.

02:17:56.180 | It could be whatever, okay?

02:17:58.200 | But it feels like a big change.

02:17:59.960 | And that's a wonderful moment to try to introduce

02:18:03.340 | a new set of patterns into your life.

02:18:05.960 | In part because, again, you have a break in identity.

02:18:10.900 | But two, it's really easy to introduce new habits

02:18:14.060 | when a lot of your environmental circumstances are different.

02:18:17.260 | So I take a new job.

02:18:19.180 | All of a sudden I have a new route to work.

02:18:21.060 | Probably a good idea to not introduce a pastry stop

02:18:23.860 | every time I go to work 'cause I no longer am passing by

02:18:26.820 | that bakery every morning.

02:18:28.800 | So you wanna capitalize on fresh starts of that kind.

02:18:31.180 | There's also more arbitrary fresh starts

02:18:34.380 | that exist for all of us.

02:18:35.620 | And this is in the form of the first day of the year.

02:18:37.560 | So of course, New Year's resolutions,

02:18:38.940 | the first day of spring.

02:18:40.240 | Even the first day of the week can be very motivating

02:18:42.540 | because we all like clean slates.

02:18:45.280 | We like wiping away the past.

02:18:47.060 | We like embarking on a new future

02:18:49.500 | that's clean of failure and stumbling and whatnot.

02:18:52.600 | And so that can be a really powerful motivator.

02:18:55.060 | I love these suggestions

02:18:57.020 | because I do think that we like a clean start.

02:18:59.880 | There's something to that.

02:19:01.440 | Who knows why, but I think it's a universal trait.

02:19:06.140 | And perhaps shortening the time domain

02:19:08.680 | over which we think about our goals

02:19:10.700 | and success and failure could help.

02:19:12.300 | Like if they just say, the clean start is this afternoon

02:19:15.940 | because this morning didn't go so well.

02:19:18.260 | - Yeah, you don't have to surrender the whole week

02:19:19.700 | just 'cause you messed up on a Monday morning.

02:19:21.340 | - That's right.

02:19:22.180 | I'm sensing the perfectionist in you.

02:19:23.800 | And I know that it's a continuum.

02:19:25.740 | Some people don't, I don't wanna say suffer

02:19:28.500 | from perfectionism 'cause I think it's a great attribute

02:19:31.240 | in certain domains and can be challenging in others.

02:19:34.380 | But I love the idea of having a little bit of grace

02:19:39.380 | with one's goals and also what you said earlier

02:19:43.980 | of making the carrot compelling

02:19:47.580 | and not so much focusing on just the stick,

02:19:50.740 | making the carrot more compelling, so much there.

02:19:53.720 | What about the middle problem?

02:19:55.920 | - Yes, okay.

02:19:56.760 | - Because I do think that people do tend to go hard

02:20:00.820 | out the gate as it were and then people drop off.

02:20:05.760 | - Yeah, so yeah, all this stuff we talked about so far

02:20:09.160 | has been around defining the goal.

02:20:10.580 | And now we need to think about how we sustain our motivation

02:20:13.480 | to pursue the goal.

02:20:14.400 | And this can be super hard.

02:20:15.880 | Again, behavior change is incredibly,

02:20:18.840 | incredibly hard to sustain.

02:20:21.240 | So the middle problem.

02:20:23.340 | So the middle problem refers to the fact

02:20:25.160 | that we don't have stable amounts of motivation

02:20:28.800 | over the course of goal pursuit.

02:20:30.900 | We tend to have a boost in motivation

02:20:32.460 | at the beginning of the pursuit.

02:20:33.820 | We all feel this viscerally, right?

02:20:35.340 | I've decided I'm gonna do intermittent fasting

02:20:38.220 | or I'm gonna make sure I look at the sun every morning,

02:20:40.580 | the first moment that I get up or whatever the goal is.

02:20:43.900 | And that first day you are so motivated to get it done.

02:20:46.920 | In fact, the first few days, the first few weeks.

02:20:49.260 | And then you experience a boost in motivation,

02:20:53.060 | a higher amount of motivation towards the end of the goal.

02:20:55.460 | So we experience at the end of a goal

02:20:56.760 | what's known as the goal gradient effect.

02:20:58.460 | So we tend to experience monotonic increases in motivation

02:21:02.380 | the closer we are to the finish line.

02:21:04.820 | So we might even see in marathon runners, right?

02:21:06.580 | They're like, okay, I only have this remaining part to go.

02:21:08.720 | I can expend all my energy now

02:21:10.340 | to try to get over the finish line.

02:21:12.500 | There's a lull though in motivation

02:21:15.100 | in the middle of goal pursuit.

02:21:16.780 | And that's something that we wanna get ahead of,

02:21:18.340 | we wanna solve for.

02:21:19.980 | Now, obviously we cannot eliminate middles,

02:21:22.660 | mathematically impossible to eliminate middles.

02:21:24.780 | So what do we do?

02:21:25.780 | Well, we do something that you already alluded to,

02:21:27.700 | which is actually we shorten the time duration of our goals.

02:21:31.300 | So rather than setting an annual goal, right?

02:21:33.440 | Let's say that it's the new year,

02:21:34.640 | you're inspired to try to make 2023 the best year ever.

02:21:38.500 | But the problem with that is when you set an annual goal,

02:21:41.040 | now your middle is months long.

02:21:42.840 | So you're gonna experience that decrease in motivation

02:21:45.460 | for a healthy chunk of the year, which is not ideal.

02:21:48.420 | If you set a weekly goal by contrast,

02:21:50.780 | all of a sudden your middle's a lot shorter, right?

02:21:53.900 | All of a sudden you're dealing with like a few days,

02:21:56.540 | maybe a day or two.

02:21:57.540 | And so you wanna be mindful of the duration of the goal.

02:22:02.540 | Another thing that can help keep motivation high

02:22:06.120 | is to do what my friend Katie Milkman

02:22:08.260 | calls temptation bundling.

02:22:09.980 | So this has never one been my go-to strategy

02:22:13.580 | for having done every unpleasant activity in my life

02:22:16.340 | that I've had to do, okay?

02:22:18.080 | Folding laundry, doing the dishes.

02:22:19.980 | I actually really like working out like you do,

02:22:21.600 | so I don't need as much motivation,

02:22:23.060 | but sometimes I still need for high intensity days,

02:22:25.660 | I do need the motivation to do like the hard cardio.

02:22:28.260 | So to get on into working out in that way.

02:22:33.260 | So what is temptation bundling?

02:22:35.060 | You're pairing an unpleasant activity,

02:22:37.740 | like folding laundry, doing dishes, taking out the trash

02:22:40.460 | with an immediately rewarding, enjoyable activity.

02:22:44.460 | That can be listening to your favorite podcasts,

02:22:47.100 | which are of course the Huberman Lab

02:22:48.580 | and A Slight Change of Plans, obviously.

02:22:51.280 | It could be listening to your favorite pop music.

02:22:54.340 | But the really critical piece of the temptation bundling

02:22:57.100 | is that you have to forego the indulgence

02:22:59.700 | of enjoying that rewarding activity

02:23:01.980 | in all other spaces of your life.

02:23:04.500 | So for example, for me, I feel like a good pop song,

02:23:08.300 | I have like 25 really good listens

02:23:11.180 | and then it kind of becomes old hat.

02:23:12.580 | So just like, the excitement of the song wears off a bit.

02:23:16.020 | So there've been times where I'll be like

02:23:17.300 | cooking with my husband and he's like,

02:23:19.280 | "Hey, why don't we play, you love Kacey Musgraves,

02:23:22.780 | why don't we play that album?"

02:23:23.940 | And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, that's an album

02:23:26.200 | I can only listen to when I'm like lifting weights."

02:23:28.660 | - Maintain the potency.

02:23:30.420 | - You have to maintain the potency, right?

02:23:31.940 | You don't allow yourself to get the joy

02:23:34.420 | and edification of the Huberman Lab

02:23:35.820 | when you're not taking a walk

02:23:37.300 | and getting exposure to that morning sunlight.

02:23:39.100 | And it's such a simple strategy when you think about it,

02:23:42.580 | but I have found myself looking forward

02:23:45.060 | to really annoying tasks that I have to get done

02:23:49.380 | because I know I'm gonna get the enjoyment

02:23:51.140 | of something really fun that accompanies it.

02:23:53.780 | - Fantastic, is it important that the thing

02:23:56.220 | that one enjoys be done simultaneously?

02:23:59.300 | - Yeah. - So folding laundry

02:24:00.540 | while watching the Netflix thing

02:24:02.340 | or listening to a particular piece of music?

02:24:05.420 | - Yeah, you want them to coexist

02:24:06.740 | because then again, you get that immediately

02:24:08.180 | or most of the time, the things that we lament doing

02:24:10.460 | have really positive long-term outcomes, right?

02:24:13.500 | If I'm in the habit of keeping my house clean,

02:24:16.260 | there's long-term benefits.

02:24:17.220 | If I'm in the habit of exercising or eating healthily,

02:24:19.180 | there's long-term benefits,

02:24:20.540 | but I don't often feel the rewards in real time.

02:24:23.940 | So what you're trying to do is give yourself

02:24:25.940 | that rush of joy and excitement

02:24:27.660 | that accompanies the immediately rewarding activity

02:24:30.100 | so that in your mind, even just like neurally,

02:24:32.900 | the two things are coexisting.

02:24:35.000 | - Love it because it has such firm grounding

02:24:36.980 | in the neurobiology of reward and aversion

02:24:39.420 | and how to overcome aversion.

02:24:41.080 | There's deep neuroscience around this,

02:24:43.980 | but I've never heard it presented that way.

02:24:45.660 | So thank you for those incredibly clear

02:24:48.800 | and actionable tools for motivation

02:24:51.300 | because so many people struggle with that.

02:24:53.140 | - Yeah. - And I hear that

02:24:54.320 | all the time.

02:24:55.160 | - And I think, you talked about aversion

02:24:56.660 | and actually this is really important.

02:24:58.100 | So when we think about returning to our goals,

02:25:01.080 | which is often the hard thing,

02:25:02.220 | so you do it on a Monday and you have that same goal

02:25:04.720 | on a Tuesday and then on a Wednesday, on a Thursday,

02:25:06.460 | and by Thursday, you're kind of like,

02:25:07.860 | oh my God, it was so hard the first few days.

02:25:10.260 | Do I really wanna go back and do that,

02:25:12.260 | do the same workout on a Thursday?

02:25:14.020 | What's really helpful here to avoid some of that aversion

02:25:18.140 | is to be mindful of the way

02:25:21.300 | in which our minds process memories.

02:25:23.260 | So when we reflect back on how much we enjoyed

02:25:26.580 | or didn't enjoy an experience,

02:25:28.400 | we don't give equal weight to every moment.

02:25:31.380 | Each moment doesn't get uniform weight.

02:25:33.500 | Instead, we tend to give more weight

02:25:36.800 | to what's called the peak of the experience.

02:25:39.320 | So the experience that was most emotionally intense,

02:25:42.280 | the part of the experience

02:25:43.120 | that was the most emotionally intense

02:25:44.560 | and the end of the experience.

02:25:46.100 | So this is work done by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman

02:25:50.920 | and his collaborator Amos Tversky.

02:25:53.200 | So the peak end rule is what this is called.

02:25:55.240 | So you put a lot of weight on, again,

02:25:56.860 | that really emotionally intense moment of the experience

02:25:58.920 | and the end.

02:26:00.280 | Now, researchers have studied this in the context

02:26:02.800 | of lots of unpleasant activities.

02:26:04.860 | So in some studies, people are forced to plunge,

02:26:08.380 | submerge their hands in like ice cold water,

02:26:10.700 | or they looked at colonoscopies, for example,

02:26:13.060 | and how unpleasant those are.

02:26:14.940 | And what they found is that this is so interesting.

02:26:18.980 | So, okay, I'm nerding out a little bit

02:26:21.820 | 'cause I just like think that this field is so cool.

02:26:23.900 | Okay, so just having--

02:26:25.260 | - Nerding out isn't just tolerated,

02:26:26.940 | it is encouraged on this podcast.

02:26:29.180 | - I'm having a moment with cognitive science.

02:26:31.980 | This is such cool research

02:26:33.120 | 'cause what these researchers did, it's so clever.

02:26:35.960 | If you elongate the unpleasant experience

02:26:39.240 | by a couple minutes, let's say,

02:26:40.780 | so the hands in freezing cold ice water or the colonoscopy,

02:26:45.360 | but you make those last few minutes

02:26:47.180 | of the unpleasant experience slightly less unpleasant

02:26:51.260 | than the end of the experience would otherwise have been.

02:26:53.460 | Had you just ended the colonoscopy procedure as planned,

02:26:55.740 | had you just taken the hands right out of the ice bucket

02:26:59.100 | by, for example, increasing the temperature of the water

02:27:02.500 | by a degree or use your imaginations,

02:27:05.540 | whatever the equivalent is.

02:27:06.360 | - I was gonna say, how can you make a colonoscopy less--

02:27:08.380 | - There are mechanisms by which the pain can be less intense.

02:27:12.100 | - Physicians everywhere know them,

02:27:13.540 | but we are oblivious to them.

02:27:17.140 | - Anyway, you guys can do the mental work

02:27:19.380 | of figuring out what the equivalent is.

02:27:20.220 | - On Google. - On Google, on Google.

02:27:22.740 | What they find is that people look back

02:27:25.900 | on the experience more favorably.

02:27:27.700 | They have a more positive impression of the experience.

02:27:30.500 | Now, again, this is what's so miraculous about this finding.

02:27:34.660 | The overall duration of the unpleasant experience

02:27:37.880 | has been extended.

02:27:39.120 | There are more minutes of overall suffering, right?

02:27:43.560 | But the last few minutes are less bad

02:27:45.980 | than they would have been otherwise.

02:27:47.100 | And so people are, they view the experience more favorably.

02:27:50.540 | In the case of the colonoscopies,

02:27:51.780 | they were actually more likely to return

02:27:53.460 | for follow-up visits for their annual checkups.

02:27:57.300 | And so what does this mean in daily life?

02:27:58.620 | Well, what it can mean is,

02:28:00.240 | let's say you're like literally killing yourself at the gym.

02:28:03.580 | Okay, you have the hardest workout that you've ever had.

02:28:06.620 | Tack on a few minutes to the end of the workout

02:28:09.400 | that are still unpleasant.

02:28:10.580 | So you're still coding them as being part

02:28:13.000 | of the unpleasant working out experience,

02:28:15.340 | but are a little bit less intense and less painful

02:28:18.520 | than the workout and would have been otherwise,

02:28:20.620 | you might be more likely to return

02:28:22.240 | and actually do the hard workout.

02:28:24.180 | - Can we also say if somebody really enjoys their training,

02:28:27.140 | that the opposite would be effective as well,

02:28:29.740 | that perhaps if they really want to push it hard at the end,

02:28:32.820 | because that's the sensation that they particularly enjoy,

02:28:35.260 | that that could serve presumably the memory systems

02:28:38.060 | and the reward systems of the brain,

02:28:39.580 | such that they are more likely

02:28:40.780 | to return to the workout again.

02:28:42.020 | - Absolutely, you raise a fantastic point,

02:28:43.860 | which is when we talk about enjoyment in these contexts,

02:28:47.020 | it is all subjective.

02:28:48.760 | So I actually kind of love the feeling like I'm going to die

02:28:52.020 | because my heart is racing.

02:28:53.960 | So I mean, for whatever reason,

02:28:54.800 | I'm just wired to love exercise, right?

02:28:57.100 | And I love a heart strength training workout, right?

02:29:00.300 | And so for me, what enjoyment might look like at the end

02:29:04.020 | is like really, really, really intense, right?

02:29:06.420 | That might be what brings me back.

02:29:07.680 | But in other domains, absolutely not.

02:29:10.000 | Like that colonoscopy situation,

02:29:12.380 | I do not want that to be an unpleasant experience.

02:29:14.580 | And so there are lots of other domains in life

02:29:16.980 | where if you just tack on a few minutes

02:29:19.020 | onto something that's really tedious or really hard

02:29:21.580 | or really painful,

02:29:22.680 | it can make you more likely to commit to it later.

02:29:24.660 | But it's an excellent point.

02:29:25.820 | In all of these studies,

02:29:27.020 | you have to consider who the person is

02:29:29.700 | and what their natural psychology is like.

02:29:31.580 | And for everyone listening,

02:29:32.520 | you want to tailor these recommendations

02:29:34.540 | to who you are as a person.

02:29:36.300 | - Well, there are certain life demands

02:29:37.860 | that I find incredibly aversive.

02:29:39.980 | So I'm going to use this approach for those.

02:29:41.940 | I'm also going to use them

02:29:43.700 | in the context of things I really enjoy,

02:29:45.900 | because if one has the opportunity, I believe,

02:29:49.140 | to further reinforce the things that bring us joy,

02:29:51.780 | why wouldn't we?

02:29:52.900 | - Absolutely.

02:29:54.180 | - Fantastic recommendations.

02:29:56.260 | So now I could ask you a thousand more questions.

02:29:59.700 | And my hope is that you'll come back

02:30:01.240 | so that I can ask those thousand plus more questions.

02:30:04.860 | I have to say it is exceedingly rare

02:30:07.820 | that I talk to somebody either on the podcast or elsewhere,

02:30:11.860 | frankly, in my life that has such an incredibly

02:30:14.540 | wide breadth of knowledge

02:30:17.900 | and yet has so much depth of knowledge as well.

02:30:20.140 | It's clear that your many experiences through music

02:30:22.740 | and cognitive science, podcasting,

02:30:25.020 | and by the way, we're going to provide links to your podcast

02:30:27.900 | in the show note captions

02:30:28.900 | so that people can hear more from you as they should,

02:30:32.300 | and also your work in policy.

02:30:33.900 | I mean, you've put yourself in a lot of different domains,

02:30:36.480 | and I think that itself is inspiring.

02:30:38.860 | And whether or not it's by way of curiosity,

02:30:41.660 | human connection, or both, presumably it's both,

02:30:45.020 | and many other things as well.

02:30:46.900 | I know I speak on behalf of many, many people.

02:30:49.540 | I just say, thank you so much for doing the work

02:30:52.500 | that you do for continuing along these pursuits.

02:30:55.180 | I'm excited to hear where it might evolve

02:30:56.940 | in the future still, and frankly, just for being you,

02:31:00.720 | because it's clear that your enthusiasm, your curiosity,

02:31:04.500 | and your generosity with useful information is immense.

02:31:08.100 | So thank you ever so much.

02:31:09.460 | - Well, that's so gracious and kind of you to say, Andrew,

02:31:12.340 | and these conversations, like the one we just had,

02:31:16.380 | I mean, it's why I do the work.

02:31:17.680 | It's so much fun and so interesting,

02:31:20.180 | and you've given me so much food for thought.

02:31:22.220 | It really was a conversation, not an interview,

02:31:24.300 | and that's such a gift.

02:31:25.120 | And so I just feel gratitude that I can share

02:31:27.820 | my body of work and all the insights I've learned

02:31:31.060 | along the way with your listeners,

02:31:32.460 | and I really hope it's helpful to them.

02:31:34.340 | - It certainly is, and it's been an honor to have you here,

02:31:37.500 | so let's do it again.

02:31:38.740 | - Yes, let's do it again.

02:31:39.660 | Thanks so much. - Thank you.

02:31:41.740 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:31:43.660 | about identity and goals and motivation

02:31:46.580 | with Dr. Maya Shankar.

02:31:48.220 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

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02:33:43.500 | Thank you once again for joining me

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Dr. Maya Shankar: How to Shape Your Identity & Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast

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