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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
There was a moment in hosting A Slight Change of Plans where I remember I was going on a walk and I realized for the first time, oh my God, this is not even really a show about change.
It's a show about identity.
And that insight was born from the fact that so many of the stories I was hearing revealed that
that one of the biggest reasons why change is so scary is because it can threaten our self-identity in these really potent ways that are very uncomfortable.
Now, let's think about self-identity for a moment.
It's very helpful for us to carry them, to have these identities, these labels, these roles we give ourselves, right?
If I identify, for example, as an athlete, it's funny I've chosen that because I so don't identify with it,
That's actually the last thing I'm qualified to identify as.
But while we're in this magical world together on a Thursday, let's just pretend that I'm an athlete.
It gives me an immediate feeling of camaraderie with my fellow athletes, right?
So I feel a sense of community and group membership.
I feel meaning and purpose in everyday life, right?
Each day is imbued with a mission, which can help stave off existential dread and feelings of nihilism.
So there's a lot of advantages to carrying these identities.
The problem is that when an unexpected change happens to us, it can threaten that identity.
And we can feel very unmoored.
So I experienced this actually when I was a little kid.
I was an aspiring concert violinist.
I started playing when I was six.
And I studied at the Juilliard School of Music under Itzhak Perlman.
Showing 21–40 of 1,518 · page 2 of 76
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