On Connection and Belonging: Dr. Vivek Murthy in Conversation with Maribel Pérez Wadsworth

Um I am delighted to be here with you all today and especially to bring you my friend Dr. Vik Murthy uh who has spent the day with us uh today here in uh South Florida deeply uh listening to our community uh and seeking solutions for this as Rebecca said this epidemic of of loneliness. Um, and I'm just so thrilled to be with you here today and to share you with with my community. Um, I'll just kick us off with where we both began. You and I are both my audience. Um, as you heard, Paul Meadow and go Cavs. >> We know uh better than most that this is a special and really unique place. um we are uh diverse and different and more than maybe anywhere else in the world. How does being from Miami uh having grown up here, how does that informed your work? Um what did you learn in Miami about connection and >> Right. Well, well, thanks Arabel. Let me just say how just delighted I am to be back home and to be with all of you. It's to be old friends uh in the audience to have my parents here, my mother and father who are the whole reason I grew up in Miami. Uh and to be here with Marbel. Marbel is one of the key partners that we have had and a dear friend along with her staff who have helped us launch the together project to help advance this work around building connection and community. Very grateful for that partnership. Um, but she's also just a another incredible product of South Florida of Miami and there are so many incredible humans that have come uh from our hometown and I'm very proud of that. Uh, growing up here had a really profound impact on me. Uh, I came here when I was three years old. Uh, we moved here from New Finland which was, let's just say, not as hot. It was so cold in fact there that often the entire first floor would be snowed in. uh of houses. So, something we can't relate to down here in Miami, but my parents made the uh the wise move to come down. But when we came, we didn't really know really anyone. We didn't have a community here. We didn't have friends. We didn't have family. And so, the experience of coming here and then ultimately finding our people uh was an important a difficult but ultimately a very rewarding journey. And those people were the neighbors who we ultimately lived next to and got to know. They were the teachers in public schools who took an interest in my sister and me and looked out for us. Uh they were the patients that my mother and father cared for in the medical clinic that they set up uh near Baptist Hospital many many years ago. Patients whose families became like our family. And it was also the experience of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 living through that uh experience that frankly made folks who were acquaintances and that we happened to live next to become friends, close friends because we had to depend on one another at a time where we had no resources, no phone, no electricity. We just had each other. All of that taught me just how important community is, how much attention and focus it needs to really build it. But I've also realized over time how quickly it can be lost >> and what the consequences are when we stop paying attention to community. See, community isn't lost in tragic moments. It's more often lost very quietly over time as a result of the things that we just stop doing. We stop reaching out to a neighbor. We stop saying hello uh to people in the grocery store. We stop calling an old friend because life has gotten too busy. And then before we know it, we wake up one day and realize that we're more alone without community than we ever have been. So this is where I first learned about the importance of community. But uh lastly, I just say like my parents did a very good job of creating community. They never told us that's what they were doing. But at times when somebody we knew was struggling because they got sick, because they lost their job, because they lost a parent, parents would respond like in those moments. My dad would always say it matters not just what you do, but when you do it. Like calling a year later is not the same as showing up the day next day when somebody has lost their mother or their father and just showing up with food if you can, but most importantly with an open heart and with good wishes. And so one of my hopes, and we we'll talk a lot more about a lot of this, but one of my beliefs is that we need to be more proactive in showing up in other people's lives. I think a lot of times we don't do so because we get busy. We wonder about, hey, maybe they want their privacy. They'll ask us if they need something, so we wait to be asked. Um sometimes we're just not sure what to say or what to do. Sometimes we think we don't have anything to offer or that they probably have other people in their lives. But I will tell you, having talked to many patients about this over the years and talked to many people and communities as I've served as surgeon general that a lot of times that person who you think has the help they need, has the community they need, has the support that they need, they're actually alone waiting for someone to show up and hoping that someone does. So that's I think part of the cultural shift that we have to make if we really want to rebuild that sense of community that we all crave. >> You know along along those lines you just said you know it's that connection isn't lost in you know uh one tragic moment once already. In fact it's quite the opposite. We were talking earlier today about uh Hurricane Andrew something that so many of us move the third year in this community and that was a moment of clear come together. What is it about those moments that still draws us back to one? >> Yeah. >> Well, I think crises are powerful uniters because we're scared. Uh we often are in circumstances where we don't know how to manage everything and our own. So crisis wake us up to the fact that the only way we can get through this is together. But that's not always true with crisis. And I think unfortunately recently in the experience of COVID we saw an example of how in the face of a crisis you can come together but then very quickly fall apart if the crisis persists for a long time if it becomes politicized and polarized. Um, so but the other thing is crisis is a powerful way to bring us together, but it's also costly, right? I mean, Hurricane Andrew like came at a price, if you will. I don't just mean financial. I mean, there's a real human toll uh to many of us. And so, the question is, can we find ways to come together without requiring a crisis, a category 5 hurricane going through like our community? And that's the real challenge and the importance of this work. And and I will just say this that the hunger for building community is growing. It is so strong and this is something that really surprised me because when I began my first term as surgeon general back in the end of 20 2014 um which feels like a different world uh frankly but one of the first things that I did was I started on this listening tour traveling around the country asking people did what do you need? What's on your mind? How can I help? And I was struck how often this issue of loneliness came up. How often people said that they just didn't feel like they had someone to rely on, someone they could lean on in their life. And I was hearing this not just from people we stereotype as being lonely, like the senior citizen maybe living on their own who doesn't have family around. I was hearing this from college students who are surrounded by thousands of other kids on campus. Right? And I was hearing this from busy parents who are around people physically all the time, but feel like at the end of the day, they've got to carry all these burdens of how to navigate a rapidly changing world that they don't even understand. They have to carry all these burdens on their own. I would hear from a CEO who would say, "Hey, he's really lonely doing my job and I can't really be myself and talk honestly about what I'm struggling with because people are going to think I'm weak and so I got to keep everything to myself." And this is a recipe for loneliness. Loneliness happens not when you just don't have people around you. More often, it happens when you can't show up as who you really are. When you feel like people don't understand you. When you feel like you just can't be yourself. And that's what's happening sadly on college campuses all across America today. >> I want to take us back. You um have called Molenos a public health. It certainly is that. I would add it's probably also a policy crisis and a communications crisis and infrastructure crisis when you step back and look at the full picture. How do you begin to decide where to start to address this problem? >> Yeah. Well, I mean I think you put it beautifully Marba which is that is all these crises and it's often at the root of many of these crisis. For a long time, we just thought of issues like loneliness and community as things are nice to have, you know, like like apple pie, like it's great. We can have it, but we can probably survive without it. But what we've learned since then is that I know some of you can't survive without apple pie, and sometimes I feel the same way. It's a dessert aisado. But the truth is that the science now is increasingly and pretty much unequivocally telling us that if you don't have community, a sense of connection in your life, that increases your risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide. So mental health risk goes up. It's also telling us that physical health risk goes up. And not by a small amount. I'm talking about a 30% increase roughly in the risk of heart of heart disease and stroke. a 50% increase in the risk of dementia among older people and an overall mortality impact or life shortening impact that's comparable to smoking or obesity. Now, no one would contest that smoking is an important public health concern or that obesity is as well. Well, the data is telling us very clearly now that being socially disconnected is just as important in in terms of its impact on our health, but it goes so far beyond health. As Marbel pointed out, the impacts are much more broadly on society. So societies, the communities that are actually more deeply connected to each other are more economically prosperous. Students who feel more socially connected have better academic outcomes, right? Communities that are more connected are also safer. They have lower rates of crime. And finally, just out of curiosity, how many people here are concerned about division and polarization in our country? >> It's a problem. It's like almost universal the concern around it. Turns out when you don't know people, it's easier to turn against one another to be incited to do so whether it's by a foreign actor trying to weaken America or by somebody else trying to sell you a product or win a campaign or whatever it might be. But we are more easily charmed against each other when we don't know each other, right? So if you care about any of these issues, polarization of the economy, education or health, or public safety, it turns out working on improving social connection community is a vital part of what we have to do. And that seems pretty obvious when I explain it that way, but that's not how we operate. We tend to look far downstream and try to address things after they've already occurred without looking at root causes. Right? But it would be the equivalent of of me saying this. If I deprived you, for example, of water for a long period of time, your kidneys would start to shut down, right? Your liver would get affected. You may start to have problems with your gut, with your intestines, right? Eventually, it's going to affect your cardiovascular system. At some point, you're going to find it's harder to breathe. Yeah. The way we approach these challenges right now in society when we don't look at root causes is we say, "Okay, so we need to get a cardiologist here, a gastronurologist, a liver specialist. Um we need to get all of these specialists here to figure out how to fix this." The other way to look at that is to say we need to get this patient water >> because that is what's missing. And it turns out when it comes to social connection, this is the water and the food that we need to sustain ourselves. When we don't have it, can the impact and consequences show up everywhere in society? But this is our opportunity. >> Warning signs. What are some of those key >> warning signs that you see? You've done a lot of research on this. You spent a lot of time in community where people are worried. What are some of those warning signs that our civic leaders, our, you know, business leaders, others can really understand are fueling this crisis. >> So, here are some of the symptoms. I Let me talk about it society and then individually because I I do want all of you to just think about people in your life who may be struggling with loneliness and let's talk about how you can help them, too. But at a societal level, here's how I would think about it. A community is a place where people know each other, where they help each other, and where they build things together. If you look at those three things and you ask yourself as a leader in your community, is this happening in my neighborhood, in my city, in my state, that gives you a sense of whether you have community or not? Do people actually know each other? You can start as granular as do people know their neighbors? And a lot of times the answer is no. If we don't, you could ask like how many people do you have that you could rely on in a crisis. Okay, you could there are scientific scales, the UCLA loneliness scale. Three questions, that's it. It can help you assess people's state of loneliness. The part about people helping each other is important too because it's helping comes through formal and informal acts of service, right? Formal is like I volunteer for uh you know the forumla's house and I help you know serve meals you know on weekend. It's a way of formal service. Informal services, you know, I know my neighbor is having a hard time with mobility, so sometimes I'll rake their lawn, right, just to make sure that um you know that they've got the help they need or I'll drop off a casserole uh because I know that it's hard for them to cook. Those are informal acts of service. You can track those. In fact, we do track those in a lot of communities. And unfortunately, what we find is that in many communities, it's only a minority of people who are participating in formal and informal acts of service. The building together is very important as well. There is no shortage of challenges that we face. Whether it's thinking about how to make sure we dialogue better, address income inequality, address, you know, bullying and harassment, deal with climate change, whatever the issues may be, there are a lot of them. And none of these can be solved alone. They require us to build solutions together. a society that can build together what's local projects and neighborhoods all the way scaled up to policy solutions. That's a society that has a strong sense of community. So these are three elements I think about in assessing whether community is strong or weak. But finally in an individual level it is very hard to tell whether people around you are lonely. And loneliness I think of it as a great masquerader right and if if I tell you these numbers you'll realize that you know people who are lonely. So, well, actually, let me just ask you, how many people here know somebody in your life who's struggling with loneliness or isolation? So, most people, and I tell you that one out of three adults in America right now are struggling with loneliness. One out of two young people are actually struggling with loneliness. 50%. That means somebody you know is struggling with this. even though it may seem from what they post on social media that they're at parties all the time having a great time taking vacations living it up even though they may put on a you know a strong face to the outside world but the truth is look we become like professionals at wearing masks and hiding how we really feel right we've got raised that to an art form in in society and that may have its utilities here and there but I'll tell you it is exhausting to walk around with a mask all the time to feel like you just can't be who you are. Say what you feel. Express just what's going on inside you. And so if you recognize that someone you know is lonely, the basic ones you can do is one, we can start to check on people more often. Spending five minutes a day reaching out to someone you care about, not with an agenda, which is to say, "Hey, I was thinking about you. I wanted to check on you, see what's going on." Second thing we do is five minutes a day to help someone. Right? That could be something as simple as somebody spills their groceries in the grocery store, you just take a minute and help them pick it up. Someone's lost on the street, you take a moment to give them directions. Uh someone at work was quiet during a meeting and you suspect, "Huh, they're not usually quiet. Is something wrong?" You actually you take a minute after the meeting just to say, "Hey, just notice you were quiet. Is everything okay? Do you need anything?" These seem vanishingly small, but when it comes to building community, the small things are the big things. It's these small acts of kindness that people remember. And there's like actually good research that tells us that it's the small acts and not the grand gestures that often stay in people's minds and their hearts to longest remind them that they are in fact not alone. That there's somebody who sees them, who's thinking about them, and who cares about them. >> I think it's such a good way to put it. The small things are the big things. You know, we've all done these small acts and we don't even think about them or we see those and we feel that in that moment, right? It's a heartfelt kind of moment. And so being more intentional about that, no doubt, um is helpful. You um referenced social media sort of the veneer and the mask that exerts the sort of alternate movers to some degree that exists there. So I I want to segue then to talk about uh technology. I feel like we'd probably devote this whole hour to a conversation about technology and its effects on on society, but specifically um technology on the one hand has enabled um more connection in some ways. Um it it has also uh probably enhanced a sense of isolation and social comparison and other things that are really problematic. How do you think about the role of technology in either amplifying a sense of loneliness or potentially easing it again with its ability to connect to >> Yeah, this is a great struggle I think in modern times is how to make sure technology helps and doesn't hurt us not only as social connection but in our lives more broadly. And I'm just curious how many people here have struggled in your relationship with your phone or with social media either one. Yeah. So, it's a very complicated relationship. >> And here's the here's how I think about it. Does any of you remember like the old days when Facebook first started like back in 2002? Some of you may even remember Friendster and MySpace. Yes. Some back there. Yeah. I was on these black. I remember them. And I was like so curious and I was just starting my residency training and I remember I got I got on Friendster thinking, "God, I've lost touch with so many high school friends. Maybe there's some Palmetto alums who are on here." And I found a bunch of Palmetto friends who are on there. It was so great to be able to reconnect with them and then to be able to message them and actually like engage in and then to go see them afterward because we reconnected. It was a beautiful thing. developers. >> That's not what social media is today, right? That was an but the promise of community in those original days spoke to many people even at times where I think loneliness rates were lower. We all crave more community where I think technology can be helpful and social media in particular is when it's a bridge to offline connection. What is happening too much now it has become a substitute for in-person connection. Right? So we've taken friends and replaced them with followers, taken confidants, replaced them with contacts. We took a focus on quality relationships and replace that with a focus on quantity. We look at how many friends do I have, how many followers do I have on social media. But and then but at some point I think we all realize that that 379 contact on LinkedIn is not the one who's showing up for you in a crisis at 2 in the morning. It's not the one that is turn you're turning to when your parent is sick or your child is ill. Uh we need in-person relationships. But I think that and this is where I worry about the younger generations in particular is for those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age. We have a different point of comparison. We may struggle with social media, but we have a sense of what it was like before. We have maybe relationships that we built before, social skills and comforts that we built before, even if they've attenuated or atrophied. But what if you never grew up with any of that? What if you're a digital native and social media is just what you knew from the get-go? That that's was the your example of what social interaction was. It's a very different life. And what I think it's not surprising then that we see among younger generations broadly speaking obviously many exceptions but broadly speaking we see less comfort with social interaction with starting a conversation with someone you may not know with sitting next to somebody in the cafeteria who is a student at your school but maybe you don't know them yet uh with dealing with conflict. You know, one school that I visited in New York told me that they started doing training sessions for incoming freshmen about how to talk to your roommate because they realized that nobody was comfortable talking to their roommate because disagreements might come up and they didn't know how to handle that, right? So, I remember being in another school in Michigan uh where the students told me, they said, you know, when we walk into the cafeteria, we we have got to psych ourselves up for it. We got to tell ourselves, okay, well, I don't really know who this person is. we're going to sit next to you, but we're going to somehow find a way to make it happen. It's scary, so sometimes we try to go in pairs to sit next sit down at the cafeteria in case there's somebody we don't know. Um, I mean, you would think that it was describing like an act of like walking into like a war, you know, uh, and dealing with like a major calamity. We're talking about walking into the cafeteria like in school. So, I think and again, I don't blame young people. I mean, that is the easy and I think incorrect path to take is say, "Oh, this generation is weaker. They just don't get stuff. they're like something's wrong with them. I think we would all be like this if we grew up uh today. But I think what we have to understand is that like people's willpower, people's desire for human connection is no different now than it was uh a couple of generations ago. What's different is the digital environment that people grew up in. And so I think we have to now be intentional in ways we didn't before about ensuring that people have the social skills, exposure and comfort uh to be able to build community and connection. It's why look I think about this as a parent myself. I have an eight and nineyear-old. Marble, you and I have talked a bunch about parenting and how we want to raise our kids to be fulfilled and happy. And one of the most important things I think we can do, all of us, whether you're parents, whether you're aunts and uncles, whether you're grandparents, you have any kids in your life, one of the most important things we can do is help them build social comfort and social skills. It's why I actually think when we think about schools, schools have one of the hardest jobs right now because I think the job of school is to prepare kids for the future. Does anybody know what the future's going to look like in five years? No. It's like changing every day. So, this is a real challenge now for schools to figure out like what are you supposed to do to prepare kids for the future? And while I don't have a crystal ball either, one thing I do know for sure is that if schools and parents, communities were to help train kids in building healthy relationships, in collaborating with each other, in working together on projects, on resolving conflict when it arose and not running away from it. Those skills, I can guarantee you, will be not just useful and critical, but even more so in 10 years than they are today. And that will help distinguish kids who end up succeeding and thriving versus ones who work really, really hard but ultimately end up struggling. >> You and I have talked about this and and you have your two children. I know you and your wife are very intentional about making sure that they're correct with social skills, but concretely what are a couple of things >> that you do or have them do >> that maybe the rest of us can begin to employ ourselves? So here's what we're doing and we actually have struggled with this and the reason is because you know the pandemic was a really hard time for kids across stage spectrum but one of the things it did for them or did to them I should say is it it impacted their social development and truth is like we we saw that in our kids too. They were young at the time, but they went from being like very outgoing and interactive to being very, very shy, intensely shy with strangers. And it's taken us some time to get them to open up, to raise their hand, to even be comfortable asking a teacher when they need something. Like, it's taken a while. But here are the things that we do like with them. Number one, we recognize that everything starts with modeling the behavior that we want them to take. So we tried now more and more to have friends over to have them see us spending time with friends saying hello to people on the street we may not know exchanging a few words of conversation with the person at the cash register in the grocery store or the person in the retail store that we go to uh or the person in the metro who we run into. We want them to see us engaging with people we know and don't know in healthy ways. That's number one. Lead by example. Number two is we want them to actually we realize that unstructured playtime is really important for kids. Really important. And that might seem obvious to some of you. It is completely not how we structure the lives of children today. I just came from spending time with high school seniors uh at a small round table. I think I asked them one question and they had so much to say for like the next 45 minutes about this. I just asked them like somebody how they're doing or like how they and what they talked about and you know keep in mind they're coming fresh off of this intense experience of having applied to college which is like no joke thank god I got into college like 26 or whatever years ago 30 years ago um I don't think I would cut it today but they put me through this intense experience and what they kept saying over and over is there's no time or space in our lives for friends like we like to hang out with friends. But when are we supposed to when everything around us is telling us that we've got to be as competitive as we can in our grades, with our test scores, that we have to have a job, that we have to volunteer, that we have to tutor, and we also have to, by the way, be in school all these hours. They're like, we start the way way before school and way after school, and we don't know when we're supposed to have time with friends. So, what we do with our kids is uh and I think we're like the weird parents of school whose kids aren't involved in like 50 activities. Uh, I think people think that we're probably failing our kids, but what we do is we have a few activities that they do. They learn the piano. They do a couple other things, but we try to have a lot of time where they just get to hang out with their friends. We have friends over our house. We will let them go to their friends houses. We will do playdates in parks. Like we just with no agenda other than just to play. And kids work out a lot of stuff when they play. You know, as you know, it's all it's not just privilege time. They're working out how to communicate, manage conflict, that kind of stuff. That's the second thing we do. And then the third thing we do is we we actually try to talk to them about their friendships and their relationships. And it's getting easier and easier as they get older u because they're thinking about their friendships too. But we want to understand like what are they doing with their friends? By the way, it's very hard with an eight nineyear-old to figure out what they talk to their friends about. Like you spent two hours with your bro. What did you guys talk about? Oh, nothing. Like you we all just came back from a swim ring. Did you talk about what you did for spring break? No. >> I was like, did you talk about what you're going to do for summer? No. Did you talk about class? No. I was like, I have no idea sometimes like what they talk about. But I do know that the simple practice of opening up the conversation with them is one that will yield dividends over time. And because we re raise it with them and ask them like how their friends are, we ask them like, you know, if there was a fight in school, we asked them like, oh, how did that happen? Like why do you think that happened? If you're upset at somebody, we ask them about that. is they realize it's important for us to talk through relationships together and that how you deal with conflict, how you deal with joy, how you decide what you share with friends. Uh that all of that is part of helping our kids grow socially. Um look, I don't I'm not saying this because I think we know exactly what to do. Um it doesn't matter if you've got a medical degree. It doesn't matter if you've been surgeon general of the United States. Doesn't m none of this matter. Doesn't matter if you went to Miami Patter senior high school. None of this matters when it comes to parenting because we're just often as lost as every other parent out there trying to figure out like how to manage things, how to prepare our kids for the future, you know, whether to keep our kid home from school, you know, when they have a temperature of 99.9 or 100.1 is the cut off, is enough, but we're we're struggling with the same things everyone else is struggling with. Um, but what I do know is that the more we focus on the social development piece, the better off they'll be. Um and lastly, this is I just want to leap I want you to just remember one thing about health that I did not learn in medical school but which I have learned since often from people all around the country is that there are four dimensions of health that we have to pay attention to if we truly want to be well. Four dimensions. There's our physical health which we all understand because that's what health has always been for years and years and generations. There's our mental health, which thankfully we're starting to talk more and more about in society. There's our social health, which has to do with the quality and health of our relationships. And there's a fourth dimension, which is our spiritual health. Our spiritual health is about where we find meaning and purpose in our lives. We may get that from our faith tradition. We may get that from raising our children. We may get that from different places. But we need all four of these dimensions. If I'm physically and mentally well, I've got great friends, but I have no sense of meaning or purpose in my life, which is, by the way, what more than 50% of young people from between 18 to 24 said on a survey recently, that they had no sense of meaning or purpose in their lives. You cannot find fulfillment without a sense of meaning or purpose. And so if we want our kids to be well, if we want to be fulfilled in our lives, we have to pay attention to these four critical dimensions of health. >> So um let's talk about love. You um you speak about love as a core value in your prescription for uh and I'm going to I'm going to read something because I think it's it's so important. You say to build community requires love. Love not as a sentimentality but as a commanding force with the power to build, strengthen and heal. Love as generosity and kindness as hope grace, love as courage. >> What are some of the ways that you see love in action? >> Right. >> Yeah. You know, as hard as these times may seem and as costic as our dialogue may feel at times, as cruel as it may feel, we treat each other, you know, in modern times. I have found there's actually a lot of love in America. It's a lot of love right here in my own. And that love shows up in interesting ways. You know, I was at a high school in Nebraska where a couple of students met with me who said that they were part of a hope squad. So, what's a hope squad? Anyone here know what a hope squad is? Few people. That's hope squad is this this thing that now exists in a number of high schools around the country where students pick a few members of their class to be the hope squad leaders. And those kids are in charge of going around and checking on people who they see are having a hard time. They're bringing hope. It's a form of love. I think about Baltimore where I was recently a couple months ago. It's beautiful program that was started by young by then, a young woman and her husband, a program called Thread. And Thread is this program where adult volunteers in the community make a 10year commitment to struggling high school students in Baltimore. A 10-year commitment. And what that means is you just show up for them whatever they need. It's three or four adults paired to one student. And if that kid is struggling because they don't have lunch, if they're struggling because they got called in the principal's office through a threat of getting expelled, they're struggling because they they can't understand the subject matter uh for a class or if they're in prison and need bail, whatever it is, you show up. And why? because that is what family does. So, Thread has created this beautiful family and you might think that the kids are the ones who are helped the most and they saw by the way a 10x increase in the graduation rate among these students after they started the direct program. But the real profound impact is also on the volunteers who found a sense of meaning and purpose, who found a deeper connection to other people, their fellow par, you know, parents if you will, as well as the students. Like, you know, in a world where so many people feel like they're just on their own to have someone who steps up and makes a 10year commitment to you, I mean, that's that's everything. But look, this love shows up in so many small ways. I saw it during the pandemic with neighbors who would check on other neighbors who they were worried were alone and were sick. Uh I saw it in teachers who were worried to death about their students and even though classes were virtual for some period of time, they would go out of their way to check on those students and make sure that their families were okay. I saw it in hospitals where nurses and doctors would put themselves in harm's way, would quarantine themselves from their own family for weeks and weeks and weeks so that they could be in the hospital treating people before there was a medication to treat it, before there was a vaccine, before there's anything. They would put themselves on the front lines. That's love as well. Like love is a way of living. It is the oxygen that we need in order to thrive to sustain ourselves. And I think for too long what we've done is look at love as sentimentality and as a source of weakness, as something that's soft. But for anyone here who has a child in your life that you care about, whether you're an aunt or an uncle or mom or dad or grandparent, if that child was in harm's way, you would risk your entire self to protect that child. And you do that because of love. Love makes us strong, not weak. And what I want in Miami, in America, and around the world is for love to actually be reflected in everything we do and how we treat our friends, our family, and our strangers. I wanted to be reflected in how we design the curriculum in school. So our kids not only learn math and history and science, but they learn the power and the importance and how to be kind, to be generous, to be courageous. I want our workplaces to not only speak of love, but to reflect it in policies and how we treat each other. I want our policy makers at local, state, and federal levels to realize that leading with love is what we need our elected leaders to do. And I want people when they go to the ballot box to think about values like love and to ask themselves, does my leader reflect this or not? because having been in positions and been around elected leaders at every level uh from local city council members to the president of the United States to prime ministers of other countries. I will tell you this 95% plus of the decisions that leaders make they make behind closed doors when no one is looking. The only thing that is guiding them in those moments are their values. >> Yeah. So we can say that we want to vote for somebody because we like their tax policy even though we don't like their values. That's not an investment in the future of the country we love or the city we love or the state we love. So to have a society that is powered by love means it has to be reflected at every level, right? In our government, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, and in our families. And the good news is that this is actually who we are. If you just for a moment think about moments like of unguarded love, of kindness or generosity that you've either extended to someone else or that you've received, those are the moments that feel really good, right? The moments that make us feel human, the moments that remind us that we actually match. And so we have the power to actually bring more love into the world and to lead with love, to change how our kids think about love. again to see it as a source of strength. And if we can do that, then I have great confidence that we can build institutions and programs and policies that help us heal, that help us bind the wounds that so many of us are struggling with right now and that take our country from a place where we sometimes feel like we're struggling with division and with strife to a place where it feels like we are starting to road together. not all have the same beliefs or same ideas or same opinions, but that we understand each other a little bit more, that we care more deeply for one another, and that we're willing to sit together and to row in the same direction to make sure that the future is brighter for us and for our children. because I I take a lot of hope and and also inspiration from those words which I suspect um our friends here today are also feeling because it's not necessarily um the rhetoric of our political leadership >> at large >> across the board um these days. So so hopefully uh there's a path forward. Um you have really devoted since leaving office you devoted your time to crisscrossing this country and spending time in communities many of them are night cities as you did here you're in Miami today it tell us what stood out uh maybe just fresh on your mind from your visits today about how Miami's thinking about connection and belonging are there themes you're seeing across these cities uh what can you take way uh maybe continuing on with Singapore. >> Yeah. So, I think there's a lot we can take away and what is encouraging is um there's so much what I think of as social entrepreneurship happening on the ground that often doesn't get written about in the papers or covered in the news, but is incredible. And people are doing this often without a lot of resources, right? And I'll tell you just about some of what I've encountered, including in Miami. But like in Maine, for example, I met a young couple uh that has decided to bring together and host politic dinners in rural parts of Maine. It's called they built a program called Community Plate. It's a simple but powerful example how to bring people together and start building relationship. You know, when I was in in Charlotte, North Carolina, this is a wonderful church uh that I visited that has set up a series of ministries to help people find others that they can work with and get support from. Whether it's a ministry around parenting or a ministry uh for folks who are dealing with chronic illness uh for people who are struggling as caregivers. This is helping people find some support and come together. They also have this wonderful night they call the the walk-in night. Periodically, after the football game, all the kids from the community will come and after the game, instead of going out uh somewhere and maybe doing something that could be dangerous, they come to the church and have a sleepover with food, music, all kinds of great stuff, right? They're building community through that church. Um you know, there are so many examples like this, you know, that I encounter around the country. We were just in Lexington uh with our ninth uh partners and they had just finished with a civic assembly uh there where they picked about 30 or 36 uh 30 to 40 citizens actually come and be a part of an effort uh to amend the city's charter uh and to help be a part of the the process essentially of of governing uh their community. And it's not only helped to result in some changes in the community and the the city charter, but it's actually built these beautiful friendships, you know, for people who work together on a cause that they actually cared about. And so what's interesting data even about jury duty when people participate, you know, how people like grown when they get the summons, you know, in the mail, they're like, "Oh, we got to do jury duty, etc." But if you actually look at people who actually end up serving on a jury, their level of civic engagement, engagement and service actually goes up after they serve on a jury. And uh I was with my uh my book agent recently uh and I I was chatting with him and he told me about his jury duty experience and he said he said to me he said after he did that he he felt such a sense of pride because he said that was his way of serving his country. He's like I never served in the military. I never served in government. He's like, "This is my way of serving." And I and it was an incredibly positive experience. So, here here in Miami, you know, I I I spent the day here. I've obviously know this uh this committee uh reasonably well, but I've also been struck at the efforts to create third spaces where people can gather. I was with uh one of the leaders of the Miami Worker Center earlier today, you know, who said that at a time when the hard it's hard to get their spaces and expensive, too. They're opening up their space for people to use for free. And when they have gatherings, they provide child care. They provide transportation because they know those are hard for people. They provide food. They set norms such that if you've got a child who's having a meltdown, that it's okay to bring that child. You don't have to feel embarrassed or that you can't participate in a community gathering. these small but powerful examples of local entrepreneurship. This is how we change not just what a community experience is, but this is how we change norms and culture of what's acceptable, what's desirable. It's how we get past the pessimism that so many of us often feel hampered by and we achieve actually more of a sense of possibility because we see what people are actually doing. So that gives me great hope. But I think if we want to truly build a movement around our country for community, what we've got to do is number one, we have to tell the story of community and why it's important. And we have to keep telling that story. One of the cardinal ways that movements fail is they invest in the infrastructure, in the programs, they put the resources there, but they haven't brought people on board at large scale to believe in it, to participate in it. And so even if those programs succeed briefly, they quickly, you know, fade out. So we need to tell the story. The second thing is we've got to put the resources into building the social infrastructure that we need. That's everything from transportation, the third spaces to the support, the financial support for local entrepreneurs to be able to fund these programs. And one of the things that Knight has done really well in Mon Georgia, for example, is drive funds into their community foundation that are now being used to to support micro grants. So that if you've got an idea for how to build community for 15, 20, 30 people, you can do that. You can get a small amount of funding to start a program for that. Now, most foundations would say, well, unless you've got something that's going to really scale to tens of thousands of people, unless you have, you know, an evaluation program in place and a partnership with researchers to be able to do this, maybe we can't really take a risk on you. But when foundations like I take a risk on local entrepreneurs, it doesn't just help build community. It gives them a sense of hope and faith that somebody believes in them. And once you give people hope and faith in themselves, it's so telling what they can do, right? The last thing that we have to do though is we've got to build community for community builders. The great irony I have found all across America is the people who are doing this incredibly hard work on their own of trying to pull people together around potlucks and dinners and service activities. A lot of times they would tell us, gosh, you know, this is tough, lonely work. We feel like we're doing it all our own. We don't know who we lean on for advice, for help, just for someone to listen. So, we've got to build a support for those community builders. We did a gathering in Montana recently and we thought maybe some of the value people would get out of that, the community builders we brought together, is that they learn skills from each other, they stay in touch and be able to help each other in the future. And they did that. But we found the greatest value for them was just being in a space with other people who cared deeply about this. People who they could lean on, people who they came to see as brothers and sisters and a common cause. So this work is possible. This movement is one we can build, but we have to focus on it. We have to make it a priority. We have to see it for what it is, which is nothing less than central to us building a society that can function, that can thrive, and that can ultimately be a place where our kids can find the fulfillment that they want. >> I'm gonna I I want to make sure that we have time for a couple of questions from our audience. Sure. They have um submitted some questions to us and so I I'll I'll read the question. if you're here, you can wave. This question came from or um if still in the room with us. There she is. Okay. Um she writes, "You've described music as one of the most powerful medicines for loops. On your listening tour, what have you learned about how cities can turn those musical moments of connection into lasting community belong?" >> Oh, thank you for the question. Uh I've had so many of these experiences o over the years uh when I was in office where I realized just how powerful music was as a way to bring people together. And it's not just you bring an audience together. It's about the experience you're creating for that audience. There's something about music that helps us transcend to a different state that takes us to a place that words alone can't take us. And when we feel that together, frankly, it's like having a spiritual experience together, right? I remember when Taylor Swift was touring a few years ago. Uh I never went to that concert, but I had many friends who did. And what was interesting is that they would rave about the concert like what an incredible life changing life-changing literally that word was used many times like experience it was. When I would ask why, the actual songs that were played were never like one, two, or three on the list. Interestingly, I found like yes, they loved like the actual songs, but it was experiencing them with other people. It was seeing the joy on other people's faces, the transformation. It was seeing older girls giving friendship bracelets to younger girls they didn't even know but who they wanted to feel like you know there's somebody who's thinking about you who's got your back. It was those experiences that made them feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves. That's what music is a power to do. So when you think about what communities can do to make that possible I would love to see communities using public spaces more to have concerts just open concerts. don't have to be complicated but places where people can come and gather you know on this summertime like close to where I live in Washington DC. Uh the Navy at the Navy memorial site are the Navy and actually even a few of our other sister services would come together and hold a public concert that anyone could attend. It was always one of the great joys of the summer because kids would dance, people would just revel in the music, people would be with folks that they normally weren't with. Um, so using their spaces with that can be powerful. The other thing is helping people work together on creating something like a musical experience is powerful because again so much of the joy that we get is not in the end product, it's in the building. Can we have our kids in school work on projects to actually create musical experiences for their communities, for their school community? Like that like that dude could be powerful too. And the last thing I'll mention is whenever we have musical experiences, creating an opportunity for the audience to participate in the music is very powerful. How many of you have been to a concert where you were asked to sing along? Take a guess. And keep your hand up if it felt good. There is something magical about when you're allowed to participate in the creation. When you do it in a group, you also don't have to worry that you everyone's going to hear your terrible voice, right? Or that you're not going to measure up. Uh because I was just with a um really a master vocalist recently, just two weeks ago, and he told me a very interesting thing. He said, "When groups sing together, even if it's a drunk, rowdy bunch of young guys at a soccer game, when they sing together, they almost always end on T, which I had never noticed before, but the more I thought about it, more videos watch like, you know what, he's kind of right. There is something extraordinarily powerful about singing together." And so whenever we have these mutual musical experiences, having at least one or two songs or pieces that people can participate in, even if it's just one chorus line that they all sing together, that elevates the experience. And so we have to make this part of our day-to-day community experience. I'm not talking about a concert that we do once and then we just move on and hope the community has been created. I'm talking about what would it be like if you experienced what I experienced 20 years ago in Barcelona when I visited where in these open plazas people would just show up and there would be musical performances and people would dance and it was just part of the week that's the kind of experience that we can create in our communities as well. I can confirm having attended the Taylor Swift era tour at Hard Rock. >> Here we go. >> That it was truly a sense of communal joy um that I really in the moment wanted to bottle it. Um we have I I think time for probably one more of these questions. My team is nodding at me. Um I I think I listen to you Aubrey. Um but this uh question comes from uh medical student ARP is in medical audience. um our plan as uh you know if you spend quite a lot of time thinking about uh patients and the communities they come from coming away with a sense that in America we don't value together >> uh compared to sorry collective cultures in other countries is that your sense >> I I think as human beings we value comm community connection and community. I think we value that as individuals as much in America as we do anywhere else I visited. But I do think what is different I think in America what has happened to us is that the institutions that used to support that instinct >> have weakened over time. We have fewer people who belong to recreational leagues, service organizations and faith organizations. We have technology that's moved us more and more toward doing things entirely by ourselves. Ordering groceries that get delivered to our home, ordering anything you need online as opposed to having to go to a store. Uh we don't show up at the post office anymore. There not many common spaces that we all go to. So we become more isolated. So I think the desire and the need is there. But I think the other piece is from a cultural perspective. I do think that what we have done in our country is we have a strong culture of threat that tells us that being successful is being self-reliant and being self-reliant is not needing anyone. Should be able to do everything by yourself. Should not have to lean on anyone. If you do, that's a sign of weakness. That I think is quite destructive. It's not to say that people shouldn't strive to build their skills. Absolutely they should. It's not that people shouldn't strive to be able to do as much as possible. Sure, that's great. But it does mean that we shouldn't look at needing other people as a sign of weakness. Because it's not because thousands of years ago, the person who tried to do it all on their own and be self-reliant in that sense, that person died because they got eaten by a predator. They starve because they have didn't have enough food. The people who survived and lived the longest were the people who worked together, who were interdependent, who worked hard. You know, being interdependent is not like about taking it easy or sliding off. It's about working hard, but it's recognizing that that old African proverb is actually right, which says that if you want to go fast, go alone. You want to go far, go together. You know, this whole discussion that we're having around community, this is about policy. It's about programs, but most fundamentally, it's about culture. And it's about a fundamental question as well about do we have the desire and the urgency to shift our culture toward more togetherness, toward more community. Do we have the power and the ability to do that? I do think yes, we have the power. I do think we have the ability. The question is, do we have the will, >> right? And we start to change that culture by the small things that we start to do in our day-to-day lives. Every time you reach out to someone to check on them, you make that person feel that they're value, but you remind yourself that you also have value to bring to the world. You make that person more likely to reach out to other people. The ripple effects that we have are quite extraordinary. We don't always they know that because we don't see the ripples, right? But if you just think about your own life, about people even over the last year who have had a positive impact on you, maybe who checked on you when you were struggling, someone who reached out to help you when you were sick, uh somebody who gave you some counsel when you really needed and restored your faith in yourself when that faith was faltering. Does everyone have somebody in mind? Yeah, most of you do. That person may or may not realize how much of an impact they had on you. And we the science is actually clear that we dramatically underestimate the impact that we have on other people. So this effort to build a community grounded in love, guided by love. This is within our grasp. This is what we were born to do. This is how we were designed to live. And it's not an effort to transform us into something that we're not. This is about returning home to what we have always wanted to be, always wanted to experience. The sense of belonging, a sense of joy, and a sense of meaning. You know, when I look at my kids, uh, you know, each day I I I do so as a parent who wants what every other parent wants for them to be deeply fulfilled. But I also feel a great deal of worry. But I don't know if I can make sure that they find that fulfillment. I don't know if the world is going to support them ultimately or support any of our kids in that. But what I also know is that the only way that changes is if people like you and people like me and people like Marbel and people like Oral and people like all of us come together and start making those changes in our day-to-day lives. And if we have faith that the more of us who do this together, the more that culture will start to shift and change. the more we make different choices about what issues we support in the public square, what policies we advocate for, what kind of culture we want in our workplaces and in our schools. All of that starts to shift our culture and that is where we get our hope from. We will not find our hope all the time in the leaders we elect or in the programs that are launched in our communities. where we will most often find our hope most reliably is in each other and that's where we have to start looking now and when you look there you will find that there's tremendous reasons uh to actually be hopeful so that's why I do this work it's because I've been given the great blessing and privilege of having met so many people around our country who remind me that the world is not as bleak as the headlines may make it seem that hope is not as far away as in the news may make it seem that hope is often right here, hidden from view, but within our grasp. If we are willing to look for it, if we're willing to be it ourselves. And so, if we can do that for each other, we can do that for our kids, the world will be better. And we will restore a sense of hope. And when people have hope, there is no telling what they can do, what they can build, what they can create. The great challenges that are before us, whether it's income inequality, climate change, I know a challenge, you know, that we've been thinking about a lot here in Miami. We start to find solutions for these when we're able to come together and work together because we care about one another. Because we start to believe what we know about each other, that we're parents, that we're grandparents, that we're citizens first, and what we're less likely to believe, uh, what we're told, the division and sort of other narratives that we're told about why we should hate each other. We start to believe in each other when we know each other. So my hope for all of you is that you will be able to take this work around community building and find a home for it in your own daily practice. And what I want to leave you with today is some very simple exercise I want you to do with me. Just I want you to close your eyes for a moment and just imagine that you are many years into the future toward the later stages of your life. having lived a full life and now sitting in a rocking chair reflecting on all of it. I want you to think about what would you want to have had in that life to have made it deeply fulfilling. If there were just one or two things, what would they be that would make you say, "This was a life well lived. This was a good life." And now open your eyes. I'll tell you that when I spend time with patients at the end of their lives, when I sit by their bedside and hold their hands, when I have the great gift and privilege of being able to talk to them about what they reflected on looking back on all those years, they never talk about how much was in their bank account. They never talk about how big their corner office was or about their list of accomplishments. What they always talk about are the people in their lives, the people they love, the people who broke their heart, the people they wish they had spent more time. The good news is that we don't have to wait till the end of our lives to recognize what they knew. which is that it is our relationships when everything else has edged out and faded out. It is our relationships that rise to the top. It's our relationships that matter. So, let's start the work today of reaching out to one person when you leave here who you care about, of reaffirming one student in your life who may be struggling, of reminding a neighbor, that in a world reverend feels anonymous, that you're there, that you know them, and that you care for them. That's the foundation that we will build together. And on that foundation, we will build a community, a state, a country, and a world that's deeply connected and deeply fulfilled. I thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you for the incredible dose of inspiration um and hope and optimism this afternoon and for a concrete prescription to pick up that phone to make that call to check on the people you care about um who had an impact in your life. Um I always find having that one yes >> clearcut action gives us that sense of agency and and really fuels the optimism. So, thank you so much. Again, please another hand for Dr. Newi.