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
Certain futures that are destiny for people who have been in prison, for people who are college dropouts, for people who are full-time caregivers, for widows, right?
We just have our minds go to places and we think, this is the kind of future I'm going to have now that I am X.
But we know from research that our brains can needlessly constrain ourselves in terms of what's actually available to us.
And one way to crack open our imagination about futures that are available to us at these inflection points is to experience what's called moral elevation.
So moral elevation is that warm, fuzzy feeling in our chest that we get when we witness someone else's extraordinary actions, their moral beauty.
So that might be someone's amazing selflessness or courage or resilience or kindness or ability to forgive, you name it.
If it's an amazing human trait, it will inspire moral elevation.
But importantly,
Moral elevation doesn't just make us feel good, it actually rewires our brains.
It changes our brains because when we witness someone else doing something that defies our understanding of what humans are capable of, it cracks open our own imagination about what we might be capable of.
And that opens up all of these possibilities of future selves that we didn't think were on the table.
Another way, so for example, in the book, I talk about this guy, Dwayne, who was sentenced to nine years in adult prison for carjacking he committed when he was 16.
And he was super fearful of who he might become behind bars.
And it's only through an encounter of moral elevation that he has in prison with a fellow prisoner where he sees him violating all these stereotypes he had around what a prisoner is like.
So this guy he encounters cares for the younger prisoners.
He teaches them how to box.
And Dwayne had thought, oh, you have to be ruthlessly self-interested in prison.
This guy wakes up an hour early before count time and does 250 push-ups.
He irons his prison clothes, right?
Dwayne says...
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