Soul Boom - U.S. Surgeon General's Final Prescription: A Path to Fulfillment and Community

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the now former U.S. Surgeon General, joins Rainn Wilson in this powerful episode of Soul Boom to explore the loneliness epidemic and its profound effects on mental and physical health. They discuss the societal shift from community-centered values to hustle culture and the dangers of social media, offering practical ways to reconnect with ourselves and others. Dr. Murthy shares insights on the triad of fulfillment—relationships, purpose, and service—and why these are key to rebuilding community and finding meaning in modern life. Thank you to our sponsors! Calm (40% OFF a Premium Subscription!): https://calm.com/soulboom MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboomstore.myshopify.com/ God-Shaped Hole Mug: https://bit.ly/GodShapedHoleMug Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to soul. We're in a major inflection point, a great time, a great challenge. These are opportunities for us to step back and ask ourselves, where do we really want to go? If our goal is truly to be fulfilled, which is what I want for my kids, I think what most of us want for our kids, we need to take a different path.

We need to shift away from this triad of success and ask ourselves, how can we make this triad of fulfillment, relationships, purpose, and service, which will give us community. How can we make that the center of our efforts in terms of how we raise our kids, how we design our curriculum and experiences in schools, how we design our workplaces

and how we think about our neighborhoods. But if we can rebuild community, then whatever threats may come, whether it's a future pandemic or worse than climate crisis, I believe that we can come together and deal with it. There are few things we can't do together. There are many things that we fail to do when we're alone.

there it's me rain wilson and i want to dig into the human experience i want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution let's get deep with our favorite thinkers friends and entertainers about life meaning and idiocy welcome to the soul boom podcast vivac welcome to soul boom um and we're just so pleased as punch to have you here you know what you've done as surgeon general of the united states is uh you are a territorial revolutionary working in the halls of government, as folks may or may not know, you're most famous for declaring a new epidemic in the United States. And that is the epidemic of loneliness. And it's kind of debilitating health impacts. Can we just start there as a way in? I know you've got a lot more to say. And this new book coming out, this letter to America,

we're going to dive into that as well. But tell us about your diagnosis of the epidemic of loneliness in the United States. You know, loneliness was not an issue I thought about as a health issue when I was in medical school or when I was in residency or even when I began my first term as Surgeon General. But this was even though, like, I had experienced a lot of loneliness as a kid. I mean, I really struggled a lot being a shy and isolated, you know, trying somewhat introverted kid. it was not always easy to make friends.

And I remember, like, one of the scariest times for me in the day was lunchtime when you walked into the cafeteria and I didn't know there'd be somebody to sit next to. So I've very... Let me just jump in right here because recently we had on our show, Bobby Altoff, who's a social media influencer, podcaster, humorist, TikTok creator. She had the exact same story.

She talked about her... suicide attempt and her depression and anxiety as a young girl in really kind of stark and harrowing terms. And a lot of her stories started around the lunchroom at school. And I just think that shows this universality of that experience, of feeling alienated, of feeling lonely, not fitting in, beginning at the school and specifically in kind of a heightened social situation,

whether you're, you know, the Surgeon General of the United States or whether you're a TikToker. So I just needed to throw that in. No, thanks for sharing that and I'm sorry that she went through that and I didn't realize at the time when I was dealing with it that I wasn't the only one.

You know, you go through these experiences of being lonely and you think I'm the only one who's lonely. And especially these days, you know, everyone has a profile on social media or elsewhere that often shows them living life, enjoying everything, being at parties, you know, it feels like everyone's got their life together. people are having a great time.

But it masks the fact that a lot of people are in fact struggling. And it's only years later that when I reconnected with old friends from that time, from childhood, that many of them said, oh, you were lonely too? So was I? I just didn't know that I was the only one. So even though I had those experiences, though, right?

Early in life, I still didn't think about loneliness as a health issue. I didn't learn anything about it in medical school or in residency, even though many of the patients that I was caring for, they would come in for a blood clot or an infection or a heart attack. But then in the background of their story would be these deep struggles with loneliness. Wow. It only came onto my radar, though, as a true public health issue during my first term,

as Surgeon General, which I began to end in 2014. I started traveling the country and talking to people and just asking the basic question, how can I be helpful? And the questions that came, the stories that came forth were often stories of loneliness and isolation. So I remember a young woman on a college campus saying to me, you know, I've got thousands of classmates all across campus here, but no one really knows me. I don't feel like I can be myself. I had parents who would tell me that they were interacting with other people all day long at work in the school community, etc.

But they felt they were carrying all of life's burdens by themselves. And, you know, even CEOs, members of Congress, like they would all tell me that they too felt like they couldn't really confide in people, be honest about what they were going through. they felt like they were always on, they felt alone. So however I looked at it, and all these different swats of life, people were struggling with loneliness. And as I dug into the science around this, I realized two things.

And one is that loneliness is exceedingly common with more than half of young people struggling with loneliness today and a third of adults. But it's also consequential for our health, increasing our risk of heart disease, dementia, premature death, but also a risk of anxiety,

depression and suicide. If you look at the overall mortality impact of being socially disconnected, it's comparable with smoking and with obesity, which are classic public health issues. Are people more lonely now than they used to be? Where there are loneliness studies in 1975 or in 1989 or something like that that shows the increase in loneliness,

the fact that you would render it an epidemic? also hand in hand with that, you had to deal firsthand with the opioid crisis. And a lot of health professionals talk about diseases of despair. And they connect loneliness, depression, anxiety with opioid use and drug use that some folks will state are drugs that are used to relieve us

of this underlying despair. Do you see a connection there as well? I do. I do. Loneliness is a source of deep pain in people's lives. We are made to connect with one another, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. And when we lose that, we do feel like a deep sense of pain. It's almost a spiritual pain, if you will. And people respond to pain in different ways. You know, like if there are healthy ways of responding to pain, if I'm feeling pain and stress and I reach out to somebody, or I go for a run and get some exercise. Get therapy.

Yeah, we get therapy or pray. Prate. All of these things can be helpful. But there are other ways we can look to deal with pain too. We can lash out at other people. We can try to numb the pain with alcohol or with drugs. We can turn to violence as well. And it's not to say that people who turn to those harmful pathways are bad people.

No, look, we are all susceptible to this at some way. But Richard Rohr, Father Richard Rohr had a beautiful quote I always remember. remember, he said pain that is not transformed is transmitted. And if we don't... Whoa, say that again. Sure. That's crazy deep. Well, credit to Father Rohr, but pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

We don't transform and address the deeper roots of our pain. Then we are consigned to transmit it to others in various ways, whether it's through our relationships or through other pathways. And so getting to the deeper roots of pain is important. And in addressing loneliness and isolation, what I was finding was a profound source of pain in people's lives that was under the surface. It's not something that was being written about in the paper. People weren't raising their hands in town halls and telling there are members of Congress, I'm lonely, I'm isolated. People weren't saying this.

But as I dug into that, I came to see that this is exceedingly common and having a profound impact on our health and in our overall well-being. And the source of this pain being loneliness. Yes. Specifically. Disconnection. That's right. Alienation. You write about in your new book how, and you've said in interviews previously about how social media should have a health warning.

And there's so many different issues to unpack with social media. You know, you can look at your average American and they've got, you know, a thousand people following them on Instagram and they've got pictures of them petting their dogs and on vacation and everyone looks happy and you're like, oh look, I have a thousand friends, you know, like I have hundreds of friends. But those friends, are they really there for you? Will they show up if you're sick? Or do they just occasionally put a heart next to a post? There's a lot more dangers than that, but I'm wondering if you can speak specifically to this very divisive. Ooh, there's a pun in there. divisive issue, get it?

Device. Oh. Divisive. There you go. Say? I like that. I made the Surgeon General laugh with a really lame dad joke and I apologize. Well, as a dad, I appreciate the dad joke.

Okay. Thank you. I got you there, Ray. Look, I think that what really matters in terms of loneliness and connection is the quality of your relationships, not the quantity. Okay. But the shift towards social media and the online nature of our relationships ended up shifting the focus from quality to quantity. We had friends and now instead we talk about followers.

We had confidants and now we talk about contacts that we have online. And there's a real difference. And what matters at the end of the day is not how many friends you have, but how many people are there to show up for you when there's a crisis. How many people really know you for who you are and can give you some. honest real talk, you know, when you're going down the wrong path. How many people can you be yourself around? That's really what matters. And you might only need one or two people like that in your life. But all the contacts and followers in the world won't necessarily save you in the midst of a crisis or help you feel like you're seen and like you really belong. And so that is what I worry

about with social media is in part that. But the reason I call for a health warning on social media is because, number one, I wanted people to understand what the data is telling us about social media, which is that when it comes to young people in particular, to adolescents, that social media use is associated within increased risk of mental health harms, specifically anxiety and depression symptoms. With adolescents who are using three or more hours of social media a day, we see a doubling of the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms. And by the way, the average you use among adolescents today is 4.8 hours.

Holy moly. And that's just social media. We're not talking about all screen time. But the other thing I wanted people to know is that unlike many other products that young people use, that kids use, and even that many of us use, as adults,

social media has not been demonstrated to be safe for kids. When your kids get into a car, when you put a young child into a car seat, when you think about the foods that a child, you know that there's some safety standards that were established and that had to be met. You go to Disneyland and strap yourself into to a roller coaster, there's safety standards.

That's right. There are no safety standards that have been established and enforced here. And so what you have instead is a global experiment that has been conducted on all of us, particularly on our kids, with social media. And the results, by the way,

have generally not been very positive. Like, while there are some benefits that people can get from social media, staying in touch with old friends, a forum for expression, for sharing ideas, too often what we find is that, what young people tell us themselves, because they tell me this directly,

that using social media often makes them feel worse about themselves. Nearly half of adolescents say that social media makes them feel worse about their body image. We know that a third of adolescent girls say they feel addicted to social media. A third of adolescents are staying up until past midnight or later on school nights using their devices. And much of that is social media use.

So it's also impacting schoolwork and reading and other things they should be doing. That's right. So if you're spending 4.8 hours a day on social media, one of the key questions is what are you not doing? What are you not doing? Exercising. So what I worry about is of four areas in a child's life that are suffering

that are critical for development are in-person interaction, sleep, physical activity, and learning. And by the way, I think as adults, we should also think about those dimensions of our life and how those are impacted by our use of social media. but just take the sleep part, for example. Like when you get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water or to use the bathroom,

most people now have their devices within arm's reach. And when they get up in the middle of that, they'll check. They'll maybe check social media. Maybe they'll look at their inbox. That actually, that's problematic for a few reasons. One is because you can easily get sucked into staying on your phone,

for minutes or much longer, perhaps. So it takes away from quantity of sleep. but also it can interrupt the quality of your sleep as well. And we know both really matter. And for young people in particular, when you disrupt the quality and quantity of sleep, that can increase their risk for poor mental health outcomes. So for all these reasons,

I actually think that what we have in social media is a technology that's been developed with very little transparent evaluation of its impact on health and virtually no safety guardrails that have been placed externally and essentially no accountability either for the harms that are already taking place.

Like the number of parents reign, who I have sat down with, who have lost a child to suicide after they were mercilessly bullied and harassed on social media, has just been so tragic. And I was just literally a few days ago was with one of these mothers

who had lost her son after he was not only bullied online, but after the algorithm on social media started pushing videos to him that encouraged him to take his own life and sort of walking him through how he would do that and this mother wait how is that possible well it's not like possible it's happening and it's happened to a lot of children because i've met many of their parents and this mom asked me she said the very basic obvious question why is this allowed to happen why is my child getting messages that tell him to hang

himself as a way of solving his problems. And I could tell you so many stories of parents like this. But there's a large contingent of people that feel like these media companies should be self-policing and self-regulating. And that's just preposterous. They're not going to do that because they've generated these algorithms to keep people locked on their devices. It works on me.

I'm a 50-year-old, eight-year-old man. And the YouTube Shorts algorithm goes from like skateboard accident to cute otter, you know, to jello recipes. And I'm hooked. I'm like, ah, we. And I'm a pretty conscious guy in control of my faculties. You know, if I'm 16, forget about it. But so would you be a proponent of government intervention? Well, I think there absolutely needs to be government intervention here in the same way that there was intervention around cars.

and safety standards in place. Because the experiment of letting companies police themselves and make the platform safe themselves, we run that for 20 years and that's been a failure. And it's not to say that companies haven't taken some steps to try to make the platform safer. But what I really care about as a parent at the end of the day is where is the evidence that the platforms are actually safe,

that those measures have worked and have removed the harms. And when we talk to independent researchers, my team, my office, as when we were putting together our report that we issued last year on social media and youth mental health, researchers routinely say that they can't get the full data from companies

about the health impact of those platforms on our kids. And I don't want to feel as a parent that a company is hiding something from me about how its product is affecting my children. So we not only need data transparency, but we need the government to require that because the companies aren't doing it on their own.

And this is interesting with the car industry as well, you know decades ago there was a similar argument that was being made oh the industry knows how to regulate itself it'll make cars safer we don't have to worry about these cracks and related debts they'll address it but that didn't really happen to the extent it needed to but it was when the government put in place safety standards that we got seatbelts and airbags and crash testing and it's why on roads we got speed limits right and other measures and traffic lights that helped us to reduce motor vehicle deaths over time so we need those safety standards for social media there's actually interestingly broad bipartisan support for this.

There's not a whole lot of bipartisan collaboration on a lot of other issues, but on this one there is. Yet Congress still needs to push something over the finish line so that we can ultimately put standards in place, make social media safer for our kids, and in the process, make life just a little bit easier for their parents, for whom technology and social media are the top two causes, top two reasons they cite parents,

as to why they believe parenting is so hard today. And parenting is hard today. I speak to parents all the time. I speak to teens all the time. You know, when I do talks around the country and these issues are, they're hitting hard and they're taking lives. I'm so glad that you're addressing them in your work.

If we're ignoring the social and spiritual dimensions of health, then we're not fully appreciating all the contributors to our overall well-being. And that's why I think part of the journey that we've been on, not just me during my time in office, but more broadly, I think, is a global community. So understand health in its fullest form. And this is why actually some years ago, the WHO even came out and said actually social health is an important dimension of health in addition to mental health and physical health, right?

So we recognize these four dimensions, physical, mental, social, spiritual, that gives us the ability to not only assess them, but to nurture each of them and to recognize that there's a deep interplay here. If as a doctor, and I encounter this many times, if I'm seeing a patient who's struggling with loneliness, and I'm recognizing that that loneliness is making them feel like they don't have like an enthusiasm or zest for life, that they're losing their will to live, that makes them less engaged in caring for themselves, going to follow up appointments, taking their medications, you quickly start to see how this starts to impact other dimensions of their health as well. And so as a doctor, I think it's as important for us to take care of physical

health as it is mental health and social health and to support people and caring for their spiritual health. These all really matter when it comes to a fundamental well-being. Are there Hindu ways of viewing the totality of one's health that see it as kind of a unified field rather than something that's kind of bifurcated into little sections? Well, I think the flavor of Hinduism that I was brought up with my parents would look at them as all part of a central force that impacts your health. I think the tradition of Ayurvedic medicine, which has been practiced in India for a long time, also I think takes a broader view of the sort of forces that contribute to health and well-being in the body. And when they're not tended to, you can manifest in mental and physical disease. Now, I'm not trained in Ayurbidic medicine, so my understanding of it is much more.

more limited. But I do think whether it's Ayurvedic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine or other healing traditions, one of the things that I think we can glean from some of these other traditions is an imperative to look at health more broadly than just the physical. You know, sometimes we may see physical manifestations, you know, of disease, but oftentimes there are other elements that are pointing toward this. And look, there was a time even in my own life where people didn't think that there was a link between mental and physical health, right, until we started to do more and more studies that showed us that actually people's mental health

impacts your physical health. When you have somebody who's had a heart attack and you look at people who struggle with depression versus those who have a heart attack who aren't struggling with depression, the people with depression have worse post-heart attack, post-MI outcomes. We're starting to see the science tell us,

you know, more clearly that there's a relationship between these elements. We talked earlier about loneliness and all the data there that tells us that social health really does affect our risk for physical and mental illness. So, yeah, these connections are becoming increasingly evident, but I think it has implications for how we think about training doctors and how we think about talking about health more broadly. And the good news to me about some of these dimensions of health is that to nurture yourself

in these dimensions, you can do that in ways other than by solely going to the doctor or into a hospital. There are things we can do in our lives to nurture our social and spiritual health and nurture our physical and mental health. And so if we can empower people with some of those tools, then we can help people to live healthier lives. You talked about doctors being trained. Are doctors being trained in this way of thinking? So doctors are increasingly being trained to recognize that mental health really does matter and it's connected to physical health. Yes. We're at the very beginning, very early stages, of training starting to reflect the social dimension of health and to recognize that loneliness and

isolation really do matter. That's very, very insipient. I wouldn't say it's a standard part of curricula. It's not part of training programs and residency, but it's something that more and more educators in medicine are starting to realize. I have a friend who's a cardiologist, Dr. Ravi Davay, and he said that the connection between heart disease and heartbreak is staggering. And it's so obvious. I mean, we have a broken heart emoji that we send to each other, like, oh, my poodle died, and you send broken heart emojis. But literally, a broken heart affects heart health.

He says he sees it time and time again. And it doesn't necessarily mean just a broken heart like, oh, a divorce or someone died. But loneliness is part of that broken heart emoji syndrome. Yeah, that's right. And there's actually something that he may have talked to you about called broken heart syndrome, right, or also refer to in medicine as Takatsubo's cardiomyopathy. And I've actually seen people with Takatsubo's cardiomyopathy who have this broken heart syndrome where in a setting of extreme, like sadness or extreme emotional reaction, their body was flooded

with things called catacolamines, which are the things that our body produces, you know, in stress states. and in high concentrations, those can actually be directly toxic to the heart muscle, to the myocardium, as it's called, and can actually lead to real dysfunction. Like I've seen echocardograms, ultrasounds, of patients with Takatsubos,

where you look at it and you think, wow, this person is in florid heart failure. Their heart is pumping at a fraction of the strength that a normal heart pumps at. But then over time, as that stress and that pain resolve, you redo the ultrasound, and it looks like a normal heart, eating with full force.

I saw a number of those cases during my residency training, and it was just a very clear message to me that, wow, what happens and our minds and hearts really does impact, you know, the rest of our body. But I think even at a more, not at an extreme level, but a more chronic level, you see the loneliness, the impact it has on our health. One of the theories is that this is actually mediated

through a stress response, that loneliness is actually a physiologic stress state that our body is in. And the reason is because like thousands of years ago when we were hunters and gathers, we found safety in numbers, right? So we took turns watching around the fire at night to make sure they weren't predators. We shared food to make sure nobody starved

from an insufficient food supply. So when you were separated from your tribe, that meant that you were actually a greater risk of death. Oh, yeah. And we knew that, right? So what that meant is that when I'm separated from my tribe, I know I'm in danger, so that puts me in a fight or flight state and a stress state. Now imagine if that's how you're feeling all the time.

Yeah. You never really do reconnect with the tribe or build a connection in the first place. So something chemically and neurologically is firing when one is lonely, where on some base human level, your body and your chemistry is saying, help. This is, we're in danger because we are not connected. That's right. I should be a doctor.

I'm going to medical school. We can write up a medical certificate for you at the end of this if you like. Oh my gosh. Can we hang on the wall next to my son's preschool diploma? But the thing that's striking about that is that stress response, that actually in the short term can be helpful, right? Because the stress response in the short term mobilizes us to action, right? In the setting of an acute threat, it might enable us to run away really fast, right? or to spurred action to like find a solution

or whatever it might be. But chronic stress actually does damage our body over time. It increases inflammation in our body, which damages tissues and blood vessels, increases our risk of heart disease and other illnesses. So short-term stress can be beneficial. Long-term stress can be actually quite destructive to the body. It's one other peculiar and unexpected thing

that actually happens with this response, which is when you're in this, stress state, you also become hypervigilant. So what that means is that you are more likely to look at something as a threat than you otherwise might be. And look, there's evolutionarily great reason for this, right? If I'm alone separated from my tribe and a twig cracks behind me, even if there's a 1% chance

that it's a predator, I want to interpret it as a threat because my life could depend on it. But imagine that you're living in the modern day and you're dealing with chronic loneliness and you're experiencing the hyper vigilance of that. And imagine that I'm the one who's struggling with this, let's say, and then you come up to me at work, you realize that I'm lonely,

and being the kind, compassionate person that you are, Rain, you say, hey, babe, you want to have lunch? Now, the normal response would be to say, oh, that's so nice, Rain is, like, reaching out. He sees that I'm, like, struggling here. Yeah, I'd love to have lunch, rain. The hypervigilant response might be, why is Rain asking me this?

Does he have some ulterior motive? Maybe he's taking pity on me, and he feels like, he's looking down upon me like no I don't need that screw that no I'm not going to get together rain I'm busy now in the outside that seems that seems silly it seems counterproductive and it is counterproductive but it's a result of this hypervigilance that we experience when we're in a state of chronic loneliness and experiencing the stress that comes with it when I think about spiritual health rain I think about the sources of meaning in our life and one of the most

powerful sources of meaning that we have are the people that we engage with. Those could be friends and family. It could be the people we serve through our work or through our volunteering in the world. But that people are an incredibly important source of meaning, like potential meaning, like in our life. There are other sources of meaning too. You know, people might find meaning in their connection with nature. People might find meaning through their connection with the divine, you know, and through religious practices or other spiritual practices. And I do want to say that for 100,000 years, there was no disconnect between a connection to nature and to the divine.

That's right. So that has to be in some way, shape, or form in our chemistry, in our neurology, in our DNA even, that the divine and nature are intricately interwoven and not two separate ways to connect, but continue. Yeah, and so if you think about these really important sources of meaning, what's happened, I think, over time is I actually think we took a lot of these for granted. I think, you know, over the years, like a lot of people just grew up in places where there was a spiritual tradition,

right, or a faith belief system. They happened to live in nature because we didn't live in the kind of crazy congested, you know, settings we live in today. And you were born into and grew up with the same communities, you know, that you had the beginning, you had at the end, and you had your whole life. And so when we have relationships and we have a connection to nature and we perhaps have religious practices all just baked in as part of the default in our life, we may not need to do a whole lot to proactively go out and search for spiritual sustenance because it's there. But I think what's happened in relatively recent history is that our world has changed profoundly. We can't rely on those relationships anymore because we move around a lot. We change jobs. We go places for school.

The shift from offline to online relationships has really diluted the quality of our relationships and the quality of our dialogue. And so lots change in our relationships. The thing that's changed in our, in terms of our engagement with nature is that we're cut off from nature a lot. Participation in faith institutions has gone down quite a bit over the last half century as well. And for reasons, I think that I can certainly understand in many cases. But the combination of all of these together has I think led to a real crisis of meaning. And I think for many people, and when I talk to young people in particular, I always ask them the following question. I ask them, how do you define success? And what I'm really asking them, Rain, is how does society

define success for you? Right. And what they often tell me is that success is being what they see online, especially amplified on social media, is that there's a triad. of success. And that triad is fame, wealth, and power. And if you can get all three of those, well, gosh, we'll write books about you, make documentaries about you, you'll be in the papers, right? You'll really have made it. You really have made it. And now a lot of times, very interestingly, when young people tell me this, it's not with great gusto and enthusiasm. Like, yes, this feels right. It's almost in some cases of the resignation that, well, not sure if this is going to work. It feels like we constantly have to hustle after this. They talk about this

hustle culture, you know, that they feel caught up in where they have to, you know, just pile on more resume builders, more achievements, more internships, more this, that, and the other, just so that they can get closer to that triad of success. But inside, even though they're not sure it's going to make them happy, they also don't want to be left behind, right? And if this is the way the world is going, they feel like they have to, you know, follow this formula. So that is another problem that we have that I think has actually detracted from our overall well-being and particularly our spiritual and social health because we not only can't just rely on the default being these core elements, you know, spiritual health and well-being, but we're actively being pulled in a

different direction. We're being pulled toward a triad of success marked by fame, wealth, and power, and away from the true triad of fulfillment, which is grounded in relationships, purpose. and service. Real success is that second triad that you're talking about, which isn't necessarily celebrated on Instagram. What is it? Fulfilment. The triad of fulfillment is relationships, purpose, and service.

That's the time tested triad of fulfillment. Talk a little bit more about the service component. We haven't gone there yet. So relationships we're getting to, again, community. What about service? service is an expression of our interdependence, and our interdependence is the way that we've evolved to be over thousands of years.

If we're not serving each other, then we're disconnected from each other. If we're disconnected from each other, then we're suffering, we're in pain, and that's bad for our mental and physical health. So service, what's interesting to me about service is that service has long been looked at as something that I, somebody who has something,

do for you, somebody who doesn't have something. service is actually much more sophisticated than them. Services, yes, maybe help that you're providing somebody, but you're something really powerful that you're getting in return for that. You're getting a connection to another human being. You're getting the ability to experience significance in a world where so many people feel insignificant. And you often get the ability to learn something about life.

Like every time I walk into the room and see a patient, you know, you might look at it from the outside and say, oh, you are a doctor serving a patient. But every time I would walk out of there, often with some insight, big or small about life, some reflection that I was pushed to do about my own life, you know, that was spurred by their story, right? So there's a lot that we gain,

and what the science actually tells us very interestingly, is that service is actually good for our health, for our physical health and for our mental health. It reduces our risk of heart disease. It increases, it's associated with increased life, expectancy. It's a great way to address loneliness. Service is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness. It lifts our spirits. And so service is, I think for too long has been thought of as, okay, one more thing that we've got to do like going to the gym, that we've got to add

on to our lives. It looks good on our resume, helps get us into a college. Right. But service, the way I saw my parents exemplify it as I was growing up, was actually more of a way of life. because service isn't just volunteering for an organization in your community. It's how do you choose to be a service to people in your day-to-day interactions in life? If somebody is just having a difficult day, do you take the minute or two to just ask them how they're doing and then just to pause and listen to what they actually say? If somebody looks like they are working, they're really busy and so they miss lunch, right? Do you swing by the cafeteria to just get something for them? You know, it takes five minutes, but it could make all the difference in their day.

Like service is how we remind each other that we matter, that we care for each other. And that's why it's a really essential component of community. You know, I think of communities having three core pillars. Communities about the relationships we have, about the service that we render. And it's also about the purpose that we have. Our purpose, when it's rooted in contributing to the lives of others, that's powerful. In real community, we find purpose in each other. It gives us something to wake up for.

My father said something very interesting to me some years ago, which really surprised me. Can we get your parents on the podcast? Absolutely. They would be great, and they're really funny too. I'm not kidding. They sound amazing. They're incredible people. But my dad out of the blue one day just said to me, he said, you know, I never really felt lonely or empty until I left my village in India.

Ooh. And what was striking to me about that is feeling empty. My father had so little seemingly in the village. He grew up in dire poverty. And when I say poverty, I mean, not enough money to buy clothes and slippers, right? He didn't wear, I think, footwear until he was like 15 or 16 and he got a blister because he was so not used to wearing anything on his feet. Not enough money for pencils for the kids at school.

Not enough money for food. So they often had to dilute their bowls of dollar grain each night around the tables. There was enough for each kid. I mean, real, real poverty, no running water, like no indoor plumbing, nothing like. like that, no electricity. But despite that, in the village, people actually knew each other, and not just their names, they knew their stories, and they chose to spend time with each other. People took care of each other. If your kid was out mucking around doing something that was problematic, another parent would step in. If your child was also in distress, another parent would

step up and bring them in. And people woke up each day feeling like they were going to grow crops, rice, coconut, mangoes, et cetera, to help feed people in the village. They got up feeling like their job was to help keep the village safe so that everyone was okay. So they found purpose in each other. They made it a practice to serve each other and they knew each other. They were in relationship with one another. That's why my father, despite having so little, actually felt like he had so much. And it's why he and my mother made it such a point to model community for us because they missed that when they left India and they knew just how essential it was.

So what you're talking about really is the essential link between community and service. Like there's not a differentiation. Like, oh, here's my community and then my service is over here. Like service and community were intertwined in his village experience. They absolutely were.

They absolutely were. And that's why it was a way of life. It wasn't like, okay, from four to five, I'm doing service, you know, on Thursdays. It was just how they led their lives. Yeah. My father passed away a few years ago, and as I speak about a lot on the show, that was that greatly impacted me. He was also a great spiritual teacher to me as a member of the Baha'i faith. And one thing I was always frustrated with him about is I didn't see him doing the kind of service that one would see from the outside. Like how many hours per week are you? you know, mentoring someone or volunteering somewhere or working at a soup kitchen or or what have you.

He didn't do that kind of service very often. He didn't do it, but it wasn't a daily part of his life or a weekly part of his life. But what he did do, and this is, again, another component of a Baha'i idea of when one is feeling low and down, you spread joy to other people and uplift other people, and that is service. And when I think about my father,

and I've shared this before, but I'm really struck by and moved by how he saw every room that he went into as an opportunity for service. So you go in the Starbucks and there's service. You can make someone laugh, you can connect with someone, you can high-five someone,

you can compliment someone. You know, you go to a dinner party, you go to a gathering, you go to work. There's opportunities for service in every little interaction that you do. If you're service-minded, and it doesn't mean, again,

oh, I have something and I'm giving something to you. Service can be certainly the giving of joy. Upliftment, you know, inspiration, a compliment, a connection, a handshake, you know, and there are a lot of people doing that kind of service. One of the things I talk about in Soul Boom

is how we threw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. So many people in my generation, Gen X, some boomers, some millennials are kind of like, religion is bullshit. I see all the hypocrisy of it. So I'm jettisoning anything and everything having to do with it.

Well, one of the things that, of course, religion gave you was community. You know, every neighborhood had its church, every area had its, you know, synagogue or temple depending on, you know, or mosque, depending on where you're living. And there is a great deal of good that came out of that and a commonality of purpose. And we want to protect and shelter and uplift and feed and clothe and house and, you know, care for people when there's a hurricane or a tragedy or a death in the family. and that's one of the things I think culturally we lost when we said, you know, essentially fuck you to religion. Oftentimes for a very good reason.

But can you speak a little bit to that? There has been a shift away from religion, particularly among young people, but what's been really interesting is I was talking to a group of chaplains, university chaplains, who, you know, tend to the... Baroon Sony? Verun was one of them, yeah.

But Varun, in fact, was the one who brought the chaplains together for me to learn from. And one of the things that Varon and the others said was that religious affiliation has gone down among incoming freshmen, but spiritual hunger is actually very high. And I think that there is this deep. And you're talking about Gen Z right now, which is great. Yeah. And I've noticed that as well.

I think younger people kind of look at my generation having rejected anything and everything to do with religion and oftentimes spirituality. And the younger generation is like, well, wait a second. Things are kind of falling apart a little bit here. Maybe we should reinvestigate. Yeah. And look, the truth is that people may choose to fill their spiritual hunger with religion or they might choose other pathways, right?

But I think, to your point, I think it's really important to recognize that that spiritual hunger is there because that is a hunger for meaning. It's a hunger for purpose. and that's just part of our DNA as human beings in some ways, figuratively speaking, that we do crave meaning. Like we want to know that our lives matter, that we're part of something bigger than ourselves. And religion gave us that for many years, and plenty of other challenges associated with

it. And there are other ways that people may be finding that today. But I think when we fail to recognize that it's an important need, that that spiritual hunger is real, then I think it's a problem because then we just, don't help people figure out how to meet that need. And it's real. I suspect that you and I both know people who sort of made it by traditional standards, right? They've got a lot in their bank account. They're, you know, pretty well known. And, you know, they've got a long list of accomplishments. Resumase pretty big. Steve Carell. Right. He would probably say you, I would assume.

He would never see. I'll have to ask Steve. I'm putting some money in. the fact that he would say you're in that crowd. But the thing is, when you actually sit down and talk to them, a lot of those people are actually not happy, right? And they're asking questions like, is this it? Is there more to it than this? Like, does my life really matter? Like, and even like the fame that people look at from the outside and say,

wow, is that amazing, they have that, even starts to grate on them sometimes. I'm saying, oh, these people don't really know who I am. They just want an autograph, whatever it might be. So sometimes we look at these things from the outside and think, oh, wow, this is it. They've made it. but in the absence of that deeper source of meaning and purpose, like we all wither,

and I think that's fundamentally what this spiritual drive and hunger is about. It's about a search for meaning and for purpose. And I think we should be recognizing that need and helping young people talk about it, talk about it with each other, explore it, understand how to not shove it to the corner as something that's important to do only after you take care of your grade point average and this, that, and the other. but to recognize that, hey, this is actually a core part of our life. You know, like in the same way that, like, we used to in medicine look in nutrition as something that wasn't that important, right?

Or at least not nearly as important as everything else we were doing. I just give you an illustration of this. What I was taught about nutrition in the 70s growing up was just preposterous. It's just like eat lots of processed wheat and a lot of meat, and you'll be fine and healthy and happy. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you that even in medical training, right, like when I went through medical school, which was, you know, between 98 to 2003, not that long ago, about 25-ish years ago,

my nutrition education consisted of seven weeks of classes that were once a week in the evenings and optional, right? So think about how many kids actually went to that, right? It was like less than 10. And that was just a reflection of the fact that nutrition just wasn't seen as a priority. And now we've learned differently. Wow, food actually is a profound impact on our health and well-being. In a similar way, I think what we need to do is move from a stage of recognizing that this hunger for meaning and purpose is just something incidental to recognizing its essential part of our well-being. And so the question that I think we should be asking is in our families, in our schools, in our workplaces, how do we nurture and support that search for meaning and purpose?

Because if we can do that, we can really help people. How do we do that? One way we do it is we start by talking about it and by recognizing that this is an important dimension of health. In the same way that when we started talking about loneliness a few years ago, more and more people said, wow, I feel seeing that this isn't just something that was indulgent for me to think about. It's really matters for my health.

That's like the first step. I think the second step is actually to bring people together to actually talk and share about their experiences. When we do this with regard to loneliness, when we've had college campus, you know, like visits, for example. where we bring people together and give them a chance to hear each other's stories, that validates the hunger that they have, in that case for social connection, in this case for meaning and for purpose.

And then one thing that starts to happen is in people start to help each other, which is a profound thing. See, like, people and communities have incredible resources and ability to help regenerate and heal each other. We can, like, be a great source of healing in each other's lives if we only are able to be transparent and open and honest with each other about what we need. The fallacy sometimes is to think, or the trap, is to think that, wow, if workplaces and schools are going to play a role in this,

they need to have the solution to someone's meaning, they answer to where they should find purpose. That's actually not what workplaces have to, and schools have to take on entirely. What they have to do is validate the issue is important and create a space for real conversation, open conversation, like on these topics. When you do that, that generates all kinds of interest

and people coming together to help one another and pathways to meaning and purpose that can profoundly change people's lives. In your very long letter to America, this prescription for America, it's centered on community. And I think about this a lot in terms of our heritage, my heritage as an American,

where independence don't tread on me, you know, kind of every man for himself, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps way of being is so lauded. You know, you talked about people achieving fame, wealth, and power and status being on the cover of magazines. Well, it's also people that are independent. And so often we lose our idea of our interdependence. and the focus of the letter is on community. I've been thinking about that since I read the letter.

I think about that in terms of myself because one of the things I've posited on this show several times is that the answer to America's mental health crisis is right in front of us, and it's existed since the mid-70s, and it's called Dungeons and Dragons. Because you get a group of people, Now everyone plays online, which is dumb,

but you have to sit around a table. You've got your silly dice and your little figurines and your maps and your charts and your monster manual and you're working together as a team, elbow to elbow to get treasure and kill monsters and it takes hours and it takes teamwork and it's a lot of fun and you order pizza and everyone should try it.

But I was thinking about the various ways that I've found community. That's what the letter, triggered for me, you know, throughout my life. You know, I found community. I was a nerd, but I found community in marching band. I found community in Model United Nations. Yeah. I found community in being a drama nerd. I think one of the reasons I started acting is just I love theater people so much. It was such a glorious bunch of misfits and I fit right in. I wasn't the biggest misfit there. And you, and again, in theater, you've got all these people pitching together, not just the

the director, the designers, the stage crew, you know, to do something greater than themselves. What's greater? The storytelling that they are going to achieve. Sometimes on the office, you felt it, and occasionally you feel that when you're making some film or television, that there is a greater purpose to what you're doing, that it is a community of people coming together for something greater. But then throughout my life, I have definitely been at my most miserable when I've been separated from community. And I have definitely felt the most meaning and vitality from being connected to my faith community as a Baha'i from my 12-step recovery community, even my little silly tennis club and the, you know, the USDA matches that we play and the text

chains that we get into, that these are all communities that that, that bring us meaning. So this is your final letter, maybe not final letter to America, but your closing letter to America after two rip-roaring adventures as our surge in general. Can you talk a little bit about the need for America finding community in 2025? This is a combination of two terms of work, which I've been so privileged to have and never thought I would have a chance to serve my country in this way. And I come away feeling tremendously just benefited by just the stories I've heard and the beautiful relationships that I've built and been exposed to. But I have seen Rain in so many corners of our country as it reaffirmed for me just the fundamental goodness of people.

The people, even when the cameras are off and no one is looking, people are stepping up and looking after neighbors who are struggling. Their parents are staying up long hours. to make sure their kids are all right. We have a lot of kindness and generosity and compassion, like in our country. It doesn't get covered in the papers very much. It's not what is lauded or amplified on social media so often. It doesn't get you to click.

If you're scrolling through a news feed and you're like, someone was nice to someone else, you don't click on that. You click on outrage. Exactly. And because we don't see it, we can't perceive it and we think it's not there. And so more and more we've come to feel that the world is meaner and meaner,

that people care only about themselves, that it's more important to be right than to be kind, more important to be powerful than to be just, because that's what it looks like, you know, when we consume the digital world around us. But I've seen something very different. And what I've seen are the underpinnings of what we need to solve the big challenges that are in front of us,

whether it's economic inequality, climate change, polarization, and division. The essence of this is community, because community is the foundation on which we build everything else. We can have the best policies, the best programs. We can have resources,

financial resources, invest in all kinds of things. But if we don't have a community of people who care about each other, then we can build anything that's truly works and that's sustaining. For any society to work, people have to know each other,

they have to help each other, and they have to be invested in each other. Those are the elements of relationships and service and purpose. And that's what we are now charged to rebuild. And the good news is this is not transforming ourselves into someone that we fundamentally aren't. This is about pushing aside the layers and layers of disappointment and cynicism that have developed and built over time and seeing what we all actually came into this world with.

which is I believe an intuition and an inclination to reach out to each other, to be empathic, to be kind. My kids' reign are six and eight, right? They're small. My son, ages is eight, my daughter, Shanti, is six. And I watch them each and every day, and I see these beautiful qualities that they exhibit, not because I taught them or my wife taught them, but because that's just who they are. The other, some months ago, I was dealing with some real shoulder pain because I had a frozen shoulder.

And for anyone who's listening to this, who's ever had a frozen shoulder, you know that it, one, it really sucks. I had a friend who had that, yeah. Yeah, brutal. It's brutal. And you know, one of the things you're not supposed to do is make sudden movements,

because I can really sting. My daughter was sitting with me in the dining table, and me and my kids loved to just throw balls and play sports with each other, and so she threw a ball toward me. And I reached out to catch it instinctively, and immediately regretted it because I felt this intense pain in my shoulder.

And I immediately, like, dropping to my knees, it was so intense. I was like, holding my shoulder, eyes squeeze shut, just waiting for the pain to subside. And it was in that moment that I felt this small hand on my shoulder. And I felt this small head

leaning against my head. And I opened my eyes and there in front of me was my son. He's eight years old. He didn't go to sensitivity training. Nobody walked him through a course on 10 steps and be an empathic human being. He did what came naturally

to him, as so many of our children do, that seed of empathy and compassion and love is within each of us. It may be buried, but it is not gone. And part of our calling, part of what we must do and going forward, is to ask ourselves, not only how do we rebuild community, how do we re-center our lives and relationships and purpose and service, which are the pillars of community, but how do we pay attention to how we do that, to the manner in which we approach it, to the values that guide us? And in my mind,

there are two fundamental forces that fundamentally guide what we do. One is love and one is fear. Fear can manifest as anger, as insecurity, as jealousy, as rage. Love can manifest as kindness, as generosity, is empathy. And that love can also inspire courage.

For anyone out there who thinks love is weak, you only need to see the sacrifice, is that a mother or father make for their child, to know that love actually makes you strong and out weak. You only have to spend time with some of the members of the uniformed services that I have the privilege of serving alongside to see how they sacrifice each and every day, not only for the country they love,

but for their brothers and sisters in arms. Love is powerful. And this is our, I think, these moments that we're in, we're in a moment in a major inflection point, a great time, a great challenge. These are opportunities for us to step back and ask ourselves, where do we really want to go as a society? What is our goal?

If our goal is truly to be fulfilled, we want our children and ourselves to be healthy, happy, and fulfilled, which is what I want for my kids, I think what most of us want for our kids, we need to take a different path. We need to shift away from this triad of success and ask ourselves, how can we make this triad of fulfillment, relationships, purpose, and service, which will give us community. How can we make that the center of our efforts,

in terms of how we raise our kids, how we design our curriculum and experiences in schools, how we design our workplaces, and how we think about our neighborhoods. This, to me, is the most pressing issue that we have to deal with because if we don't rebuild community, I think our future is going to be really tough.

But if we can rebuild community, then whatever threats may come, whether it's a future pandemic or worsening climate crisis, I believe that we can come together and deal with it. There are few things we can't do together, but there are many things that we fail to do when we're alone. I think the biggest crisis facing young people today

has to do with hope. And that's what you're essentially talking about. But the fact that so many young people feel hopeless, they don't feel that there's a way out of the societal ills. They don't feel that there's a way out of climate change, of militarism and nationalism, of the toxic divide that's kind of been metastasizing

in our political partisanship. This absence of hope, this idea that the world cannot get better, I think is really the greatest threat to our way of life. And isn't that essentially what you're talking about? There might be a lot of people listening to what you just said

and roll their eyes. and be like, give me a break. Your lovely son put his hand on your shoulder. But that's not what I see when I go out on the road and there's road rate. That's not what I see when I pick up a newspaper. That's not what I see when I look on my Twitter feed. That's not what I see when I go into my cutthroat work environment.

I see people at each other. So what else can you say in terms of practical steps to help us feel like we can make a difference and that hope and change are possible and that everyone plays a role, not just our politicians, not just people in power, but we all play a role at the grassroots.

I'm glad you asked, Rayne, because actually I find it very interesting, the loudest voices and the loudest images that we have in our society often are these dissonant voices or the person with rage or the person with anger, person operating in some way that's inconsistent with the values that most of us believe in.

But those aren't the only voices. They feel like when I travel around the country, I usually often will ask people in sort of quiet conversation, if they can think about one person who inspired them recently. And almost everyone can think of someone. Because even though those other voices and images may be loud, we all can think of often a teacher who helped us. Somebody maybe in our parent community who looked out for our kid when we were were having a tough time and we were late for pickup and they swooped in and picked up our kid.

Or the person who helped serve us at a restaurant who was just really kind that day and was patient while we took like 10 minutes to figure out what we wanted in our order. People can think about someone. And part of our challenge is to figure out how to move toward those positive examples and away from that negativity. Here's some concrete things we can do. Number one, you need to spend less time online and more time offline. line. The online environment is not representative of reality a lot of times, and it's distorting

our perception of the world into one that is meaner, more vitriolic, and more divided than the real world actually is. Amen, brother. The second thing we need to do is when we feel despondent, we need to stand up and help somebody else. Because helping other people actually gives us our faith back. It allows us to see that we can be useful. Because one of the great things about cynicism is it can lead to disempowerment, right? But you help somebody, you feel empowered immediately, and you help them feel better too. The third thing that we need to all do

is we need to spend time actually engaging and talking to other people. And talking, by the way, it means also listening. By listening is how we learn. It's so often in conversation centers, we're so focused on how am I coming across. Like, other person's talking, we're just thinking about what we're trying to say, et cetera.

If we can focus more of our conversation on listening to other people. That will actually help us deepen our relationships with other people. And our relationships are buffers to stress. They're the source of hope and renewal that we often need in life. The person who's truly fulfilled

is not somebody who never experiences a moment of despondency or somebody who's never unhappy. These are people who go through crises of hope all the time, but they bounce back quickly from it because they have anchors in their life. And those anchors are often

their relationships or the people they engage in the conversation with who help them see that the world is more complex and has more beauty in it or the people that they help in their life and serve so yes this can feel like a really onerous difficult time it can feel like the challenges in front us are just too big to surmount but this is when we have to we have to pull back and change course and by again getting back into the offline real world, spending time helping others, and spending time engaging more people in conversation and listening. This is how we rebuild our faith, our hope in humanity. It's how we build a pathway forward for a community that can ultimately support us. Look, we're not the only people who have

ever in history had to go through a time where there was great challenge, right? I wasn't alive during World War II, but from everything I read and the people I've talked to, I don't think it was a walk in the You know, things look pretty, pretty dark. I was there. It was rough. So, and there are other times in history where things looked really, really bleak. But here's the thing I always try to remember. Good people with hearts full of love can change the world.

That is what works. We are good people. All of us. We have that inside us. That's our DNA. We have the ability to, operate from a place of love, generosity, with kindness, with compassion, and to allow that to be a source of strength and courage for us as we stand up for the people we love. We can, through that,

change the world. That is what has worked, like in the past. It's what we're called to do right now. This is bigger than a single policy or a single program. This is about fundamentally asking ourselves where do we want to go? Who do we want to be as a country, as a people? Can we live out those values? And to me, living out those values, operating from a place of love means that that informs how we treat other people, the issues that we choose to speak up on. It informs the decisions that we tend to make in our workplaces and in our schools. It impacts who we choose to be our leaders on the local school board or in our community organization or our condo board. Because all of these are reflections of our values. And we have to talk more about values because they matter. They shape

how we live and what we do. I would suspect and I would assert that the vast majority of people in our country, I think have a shared set of values that they can gather around. The idea that we should be kind to each other, that we should take care of other people, not just ourselves, that we should be generous whenever we can. These are values that I see demonstrated each and every day. But we've got to help our kids see that these are values that matter, right? The people that we lift up, that we choose to write stories about or having the news. Like, why are we doing that? It's like, my son the other day, I was reading an article, and there was a picture of Elon Musk, you know, in the article.

My son walked up behind me and he said, oh, I know who that is. I said, oh, how do you know who that is? I was surprised. He said, oh, my friends were talking about him in school. I was like, well, what were they saying about him? This is like maybe a year ago. And what he said, like slightly disappointed me, he said they were talking,

kept talking about the fact that he's a richest person in the country. What I really had hoped it, he would say, is that they were talking about this is the man who actually made electric cars, like really popular, you know, because he cared about the planet. Or this is a man who's helping send rockets to the moon and not the moon to space, you know, and hopefully, like, find a pathway to Mars, right?

Those are contributions to humanity. those are ways of being a part of something bigger than ourselves, right? But the question that made me think about is, what message are we sending to our kids about what really matters in life based on who we hold up as successful, what we choose to focus on, like in their contribution to the world and their role in the world? So these are all things, I think, that we are now called to do.

And we can start, we start small, we start in our lives. Because I think if anything that we've learned over the last few decades, it's that building things from the top down is not a sustainable way to do this. We have to change hearts and minds. We have to all choose to operate differently. We have to choose to prioritize people and purpose and service in our lives.

And if we do that, we'll build a community that we need and that our kids need. Well, a community that can stand up for each other, that can advocate for the policies that lift all of us up over time. That can step in when disaster sets in so we look after each other

and they can ultimately provide a sense of hope that we all need to get through life. One thing I would add to your formula is an important part of every religious and faith tradition. Tickna Haan famously said, you know, the only way out is in. And that is a relationship with the internal. And this is an aspect of spirituality that oftentimes gets shoved aside in favor for our fast-paced life. and social media and our phones and our screens. Yeah.

And that is a sense of interiority. Prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading inspirational texts, holy texts, kind of taking time every day for stillness and for taking stock, you know, giving ourselves a kind of like an internal MRI of how, you know, how am I doing? What do I need?

You know, my therapist always says, like, anxiety isn't a thing. Anxiety is a warning flag. It's a red flag fluttering in the breeze. It's saying, what do you need right now? What do you need? Oh, I need a hug. I need a nap. You know, I need a good meal.

I need to put my phone down. I need to connect with someone. I need to be of service. I need to be in nature. that it's a warning sign really. So I would humbly add to your beautiful equation of the triangle of fulfillment, something that spirituality does give us.

And again, in every faith tradition, besides the community and the sense of meaning and why, but taking that time for stillness and a turning in. I'm so glad you said that. Rain, you're exactly right. I think many people are almost scared to be alone with themselves these days.

We have this illusion, especially through our devices that we never have to be alone. And there's a difference between loneliness and solitude. That is exactly right. Solitude is something that we can seek and find peace

and actually meaning in. That's right. Because to truly address loneliness, you need connection to others and connection to self. And the connection to self, we experience when we understand the value that we bring to the world, we understand our place in the world. We often need some moments of reflection to get there.

We need regular solitude in our lives. And I think I've often had people ask me, hey, I'm an extrovert. I'm not really into solitude. I can't do that. The truth is that whether we're introverts or extroverts, we all need moments of solitude. We may differ on how much time we need in solitude. As an introvert, I actually need a little bit more. perhaps to my extrovert friends do.

But we all need it. And that solitude is a state of welcome aloneness, but it's a time where we can let the noise around us settle, when we can reflect deeply, when we can ask ourselves and check in with honestly how we're feeling. Because so much of life, we just keep running through one thing to the next, and we're not even recognizing what we're feeling or what we're going through. And I think for some people, you know, early in my life,

prayer was the way I did that. And meditation became a more common pathway for me. And so now it's both, you know, meditation and prayer. For some people, it's music. You know, just being able to sit down and just listen to something that puts them in a place of stillness. For other people, it's sitting out on their front step and just feeling the breeze against their face or walking through nature. Could be the soul boom podcast. Could it be a soul boom podcast?

But we all need these moments of solitude. And so, like, when I think about how do we address something like loneliness in particular, I think if you could take five minutes to connect with somebody just to check in with them each day. You could take five minutes to do something small to help somebody each day. If you could take five minutes to be in solitude each day. And connect with yourself. Connect with yourself. After 15 minutes would help you more powerfully address loneliness and so much else that we,

that we try, you know, episodically. But like service, building a connected life is really about a lifestyle, right? It's not about one thing. It's not about a warrior weekend, you know, where we just choose to do a massive amount of connection on a Saturday and then we are lonely for the six days thereafter. But seeing, how do we build this like regularly in small bits into our life? And that solitude, that really matters. I almost think at this point that it's almost like we need to teach, people need to relearn

how to be alone in those moments of solitude and actually enjoy it. Because there's also, I think, this myth of efficiency that we, in productivity that we're operating under, which tells us that we've got to be maximally productive. And any time where we're not actually doing something, responding to an email, checking off a box on our to-do list, running an errand, is wasted time, right? Which is another driver to multitask. But I think that we've defined productivity primarily in economic terms. but not necessarily in well-being terms.

And sometimes that five minutes in solitude that you spend can help you tremendously to function in the rest of your day or the five minutes of meditation. So yes, I do think you're absolutely right to point out the need for all of us to build in some solitude into our day-to-day experience. And it might be a little uncomfortable or challenging at first if one isn't used to it.

But with time, these things become not just more comfortable, but really important lifeline in sources of support. It's all about connection, right? So we've spoken a lot about connecting with others and service to others. You connect with yourself. You can also connect with your higher power and you can connect with nature.

It's a different, you know, it's different tentacles of the octopus all seeking connection, but nature, God, connecting with the self in reflection and contemplation, connecting with others, serving others, finding those groups, those communities, that's that is what is is so inspiring about your message to America and your work in terms of living in love and not in fear well no thank you rain this is um this is a parting prescription that I'm writing but it really is a

a love letter to me a country to you and to millions of others perhaps but really you know really is a many ways a love letter to a country that I have enormous gratitude to you. do. You know, my parents came here with high hopes, but they didn't know what would happen when they moved all those years ago to America. They didn't know if they'd be welcomed. They didn't know what hardships they would find. They didn't know if this would truly be home. And yes, they've encountered the share of hardships. We all have in the family and no different than many others who come to the United States. We encountered our share of racism and discrimination. We've encountered our share of economic hardship. But throughout all of that, like we've found this incredible people, neighbors,

public school teachers who like supported me and my sister and saw something in us when we couldn't see it in ourselves. We just found people who became part of a community who helped us. In some cases, we thought we were helping them. Turned out they were helping us. The patience my parents cared for. Many of them ended up helping us as a family, you know, over time because they became part of our community. So I just have enormous gratitude to our country. And I don't want us to forget about what truly matters most in what we've built in America, which is this sense of togetherness, this sense of community, this sense that gives people the ability to hope and dream big dreams. It's very hard to dream and achieve big dreams on your own. If you look at the most of the

stories of folks who have created extraordinary things, you find that there were people behind them. Maybe it was a family, maybe it was a group of friends. Well, that's shattering the myth of the American independent, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, because you really dig a little deeper. And it does take a village, and it takes an incredible wife, or it takes a clergy member or a family member,

or a school teacher, or just someone, a mentor that helped believe in a person. I mean, what little success I've had was due so much to the great teachers and directors and friends and mentors and my incredible wife along the way. Yeah. That has helped me build this really middling podcast empire. I would use a different word than middling for your podcast in your career. Exemplary, perhaps. But you're right.

I mean, look, and that's why, you know, as I finish this term, you know, as Surgeon General, what I want most of all and what I want to continue working on hereafter is to make sure that the country that we're describing, you know, one that's fundamentally rooted in togetherness and these core values of generosity and compassion, that that country is there for our kids going forward, that that model of those values remain at the center of our country. It doesn't mean that we can aspire for other things. It doesn't mean that the pursuit of wealth or fame or power is bad either. We can have all of those things, but we have to be mindful of what's at the center. What's the foundation for our well-being?

And ultimately, it is the community that you and I've been talking about that we all need in our life, that I've been blessed to experience over time. And that is going to be the most powerful driver and determinant, ultimately of whether we are healthy, happy, and fulfilled. You end your letter with this beautiful quote I'd never seen before from John Lewis. Civil rights, icon, representative, there's an old African proverb when you pray, move your feet. As a nation, if we care for the beloved community, we must move our feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and to not tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate,

to heal and not to kill. In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house, the American house, the American family. It's true. We have a choice to make about whether we want to be a family, whether we want to be a house. Any society, any country that cannot stick together will ultimately fall apart. People do not come together and see in each other

a reason to be hopeful, to invest in each other, to feel a commitment to each other. We can't continue. It's just like the model of a regular family. When people stop caring about each other and helping each other and being invested in each other, that family falls apart. The same is true for countries.

And that's our work now. It's to get back to the basics of figuring out how we start caring for each other more and helping each other more, investing in each other, It's easy to hate someone when you don't know them. It's a lot harder when you see their humanity and recognize that they care about and worry about their kids

the same way you do. John Lewis had a lot to teach us about how to live life well. And in that quote, I found one of his most powerful essence, which is a reminder of what we should aspire to to be one family, be the American family. And that's a mission that I find worthy of dedicating my life to and that I hope more and more people will see. as part of their mission as well.

And just like a nuclear family helps support the American family, a great and strong American family and support the world family of humanity sharing the resources of one planet. And this is one of the things I would love for us to lead on as America. We've led in many things, like over the years.

But when we are facing this deeper crisis of spirit, not just in America, but around the world, as people are feeling increasingly disconnect, from each other, from purpose and meaning, as division on polarization on the rise. Can we show up as an example of how to rebuild family, how to refocus on community, how to do it in a way that's informed by the values

that really matter, love, generosity, kindness, and compassion, and to see those as sources of power and strength? I'm not talking about sentimental love here. I'm talking about love as a muscular force that allows us to build and create and overcome obstacles, that's what we can do as a country. That's the example that we can set for the world. And if we do that, my God,

I think that the impact that we could have on the global community, the way that we could lift up humanity would be absolutely extraordinary. Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming in the Soul Boom Studios. What a beautiful letter and what a beautiful message. and you've helped us so much in your various tenures as surgeon general, and especially highlighting mental health and loneliness epidemic and a way out of it.

So this was just a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much, Rain. And I got to thank you as well for what you've done to put this deeper crisis of spirit on the map to make spiritual health something people are thinking about. To talk about spirituality openly, we don't use that word very much, spiritual. and we should because it's something that's meaningful to a lot of folks. And it's important for humanity. So I want to thank you for that.

I remember years ago encountering Soul Pancake, one of your early ventures. When I was at a point in my life where I was a little bit lost and trying to figure out what to do. And I saw that and I was like, wow, here's somebody who's really trying to get at what matters in life. So you've continued on that mission and built extraordinary things. So just the bottom of my heart, thank you, Ray. Thank you. Thank you so much, doctor. The Soul Boom Podcast.

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