Maya Shankar

speaker

1,518 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 5 Jul

Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.

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TED Talks Daily · Why you fear the unknown — and what it can teach you | Maya Shankar, Simone Stolzoff · 5 Jul 2026 podcast

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsis.

which actually means revelation.

And I find that etymology so instructive because yes, change can upend us, but it can also reveal things to us about who we are and what our values are and what our perspectives are and what our abilities are.

And that revelation brings into the light parts of us, parts of who we are that were previously hidden from sight.

I think it's very easy for us to believe in everyday life that we have a fairly good command of who we are as human beings, but the reality is that

We've only had access to the parts of us that were revealed to the world, revealed to us, in response to the seemingly random set of life experiences we've had.

It's a set of data points that aren't comprehensive.

And so one thing that's beautiful about change is that in being a

creating tension or creating pressure in some way, you start to see parts of you that you just didn't ever think to evaluate or investigate or even really acknowledge in the first place.

And Simo, I know both of us and our books on more personal notes, right?

I have a whole, I didn't expect for the last chapter of my book to be more memoir than anything else because I had spent the earlier chapters interviewing other people, but

As I was writing the book, I was navigating these own changes and losses in my own life.

I alluded to this earlier, but my husband and I were not having success in starting a family.

And one of the many things that these experiences of loss and despair revealed to me was I had placed a lot of my self-worth as a woman in...

having children.

And it might have been from cultural influences.

I think society also tells us that that can be our primary value in this world.

And in revealing a belief that I had, I was able to realize like, hey, just because I have this belief doesn't mean that it was developed on this sturdy foundation of thoughtful reasoning, right?

Most of the beliefs we had, we just inherited through

you know, teachers and messages from pop culture.

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