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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
It doesn't just restore our faith in humanity.
It actually rewires our brains.
And that's because when we witness someone else engage in behaviors that violate our understanding of what humans are like, what humans are capable of in the best way possible.
it actually cracks open our own imagination about what we are capable of.
And for Duane, this manifested in the form of this moral elevation, manifested in the form of a fellow prisoner named Bilal, who he came across about one year into his prison sentence.
And for Duane, Bilal violated all of the stereotypes Duane had in his head of what it meant to carry the label of prisoner.
So in Dwayne's mind, you had to be ruthlessly self-interested.
You have to keep your cards close to the chest.
You should never build friendships or get close to anyone else or it could be jeopardizing to your health and well-being and overall safety.
But Bilal was the kind of guy who made it a point to stand out.
You know, his uniform, his prison uniform was crisply ironed every day and he was clean shaven and he would get up two hours before count time to do 250 push-ups and he spent his free time
coaching the younger men on how to box so that they could protect themselves from the threat of violence within prison.
And so Dwayne would see him teaching these young men how to box in the prison yard.
And Dwayne says that Bilal was kind of taking this stance like, no, this is who I'm choosing to be.
as a prisoner.
And it was a radical experience for Duane because he, for the first time, realized that perhaps he wasn't destined to become a certain person, to have a certain future, just because he was a prisoner.
And it was with that more empowered mindset that when he stumbled upon a book of poetry while in solitary confinement a few weeks later and read a poem about a young Black man who had experienced sexual violence in prison, a 14 or 15-year-old, in this poem, he realized, well, you know, I can't do for the young men here what Bilal's doing.
I'm not strong.
I don't know how to box.
But what I can do is dignify their experiences through the written word.
Showing 141–160 of 1,518 · page 8 of 76
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