2021-04-06 Finding happiness ☀️ in challenging times

    10:57AM Apr 7, 2021

    Speakers:

    John Werner

    Alison Sander

    Esther Dyson

    Hayley Reardon

    Kunal Sood

    Cory Pesaturo

    Robert Waldinger

    ​Wade Davis

    Keyun Ruan

    Max Holm

    Alex Frankel

    Keywords:

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    societies

    people

    technology

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    pandemic

    world

    point

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    thought

    joy

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    challenge

    Oh,

    Alex, that was amazing. Did you want to say something about it and why you're dedicated to happiness? Well,

    this opera is that was a Quint. Okay toucheth it's dick Johnson's first Aria from Funchal, Adele west by Giacomo Puccini. And that particular opera has brought a lot of happiness to Andrew Lloyd Webber because he ripped the theme of music of the night, literally note for note from that particular Aria from this opera. And he now pays an undisclosed amount to the Puccini foundation every year, but he's making so much money off of Phantom. He's plenty happy about it.

    Great. So Alex, I don't know if your voice is still ready. But can you play something for like another 90 seconds? Or should we go to the jazz musician from Spain?

    Let's jump into the jazz musician from Spain. I'm a little out of shape. That's all I got for the moment.

    No worries to our musicians. Three of them are new to this week. We have Alex and you just met max. And we have Hayley and Cory back again. So welcome to imagination is where we curate powerful dialogue with pioneers in innovation who are changing our world. And tonight, we have a great group. This is a continuation of some of our great events. Our first event was on streaming with Neil, from Netflix. Our second event was on cars, the Mars rover and the president of Tesla. Our next event was on venture with Esther Dyson and James courier. Then the event after that with was Forbes, with Mike, the CEO of Forbes and shriya, who is sure to be a 30 under 30. And then last week, we had AI with Tom Gruber, Alex Wisner gross, Rebecca Kleinberg and Esther fujiki, we had four people. So Max, actually, if you could just pause for a second as a give some remarks. So this is imagination action. We have lined up over 150 speakers throughout the year, every Tuesday night. Every at the top of every new show, I share a few that we just secured. Jordan gray is the top us decathlete and she's a female and she's advocating that the 2024 Olympics include the decathlon for women. We also have Patti Ballenger, who's the chief of staff to the president of Harvard. And her son is also going to do a show with with her Jordan Ballenger and he produced the Tom Brady Hulu video and so there's some interesting sports stuff there and mother daughter. We also just added Beth Comstock, who's the vice chair of GE. We also added Carlos Cashman, the CEO of thrass. Do we are added Elliott rousse, who is a biomechatronics runs a lab and biomechatronics and University of Michigan. We added gl lipoly Rao, who in 1988 was a doctor in Rochester, New York, and he decided that he wanted to go back to his home country. He found a patron in Bollywood to fund the little institute that he started and now it's one of the most important AI hospitals in the world based in Hyderabad Lv Prasad Eye Hospital. We also added john Hawthorne who founded mass challenge. There's a lot of interesting stories but behind that one of the largest incubators in the world. Next week, we're going to have a theme of space, exploring Outer Space searching for habitable planets and traveling in zero gravity worlds. a galactic journey with five experts. We have Katie Coleman a two time International Space Station habitant. She actually played The flute with Jethro Tull as she was circulating circulating the earth at 1800 miles an hour. We have Ben schwegler, who was the chief scientist for Disney, and he's been hired to build a habitat for for the moon. We have Eric hintermann, who is working on Moxie that's on the rover right now on Mars, helping to create oxygen. We have Julian DeWitt who is an exoplanet expert, and has made the news for finding some planets recently. And we have Robert zellen. JPL exoplanet astronomer, so next week should be good. In the following weeks a week after that. April 20. We have life sciences, biotech and vaccines. We have tal Zacks, the Chief Medical Officer for majorna. One and rica's a futurist, and Jane Metcalf, the founder of Wired Magazine. The week after that we have a show on the brain with Ed Boyden, and one of his protegees Dubliners, Shanker who has her own lab. And then on May 11, we're thinking of having all the musicians for the show, do a show just on them and interview them and find their life stories. So now, I'd like to welcome you all to imagination in action. And I want to introduce our speakers. We have some great speakers. Today, we have Robert Waldinger, who grew up in Iowa. He I think, is the third person running the study that he runs, I call him the Green Lantern superhero because the ring was passed to him. It's a study that started with 724. people close to half, went to Harvard, the other half grew up in the neighborhoods of Boston actually lived in in Dorchester in the neighborhood where I think a lot of the people in the study were from, I think a department store had hired him, or hired, commissioned this study, to figure out about happiness and how to inform them on on hires, and of the 724 people 60 are still alive today in their 90s. And they're about 2000 sons and daughters. And and from Robert, we're gonna learn a lot about happiness. Some people think it's money and fame. He's gonna tell us what he thinks it is. And I helped produce a TED talk that he did. And I remember calling up Ted saying this is really good. And they have one day a year where the talk sits on the homepage for two days. That's the New Year's every other day, it was just one talk today. And I said, Oh, I think his is worthy for that two days. And they put it there and it started ascending at a very fast velocity. And today, it's the 10th most popular TED talk in the history of Ted, I think it's in the 38 million views. Robert can't get on a train or plane or go to a restaurant without being recognized. And we're excited to have him a little known fact Robin Chase, who is one of our other future speakers who created Zipcar, her daughter's number 11th. Ted speaker, so we have another connection there. We after we interview, Robert or you're going to meet Wade Davis, and he's the modern day Indiana Jones. He's the most well known anthropologist. He's lit himself on fire among the sacred societies of Haiti. He drink blood with the nomads of Kenya, he turned the taking of psychedelics into an actual science. He's lived among more than 15 indigenous societies. He's one of those guys who who gives honorary who gets a number of honorary degrees, and he gives graduation speeches that go viral. his doctoral thesis was made into a Hollywood movie. And he lives on an island both Alice and I have been to his home, it feels like a home out of the Lord of the Rings. And he's great and his two daughters Tara is a musician teaching French immersion. Another daughter, studied international relations in Arabic and live for three years in Jordan and works at the DOJ on AI. They're following in his footsteps. What wait is prime most known for his writing, he's written 23 books and during the pandemic, he wasn't traveling as much. And he wrote a really impactful article for Rolling Stone his most popular read article of 2020 for them, and if you haven't read it, you definitely should read it. And then last person I want to introduce is Kyon. I am going to defer to her to pronounce her last name correctly. But Kay, we're so excited. We have Robert who studied a longitudinal study. We have Wade who goes around the world studying different communities and cultures. And then we have khanjan, who's kind of putting a stake in Grant saying this is this is something that we should aim for, for the future. And I think it's a it's a great mix. She's an expert in cloud forensics, a branch of cybersecurity. She's active in cyber economies. She's introduced six new laws in cyber economics. She's the head of security and risk and compliance at Google Cloud. She's coming to us from London today, she founded the happiness Institute, and found out and foundation she brings together leading science on the future of happiness, fulfillment and well being. And when I think of the big tech, I think of HP, kind of validating gay marriage before policymakers did in government, and I wonder, as someone who's trying to think about happiness, how getting the big tech firms to think about it could help lead to leadership in our society. She thinks about integrating happiness in the high tech world and measuring happiness and pride toward prioritizing happiness in an era of planetary crisis and technological. Exponential growth. It's a timely topic, she's asking, Where does happiness fit in? And she's been doing tech since 12. And she's currently a millennial. And I do not think that Wade or Robert are millennial, so we have some age diversity on this. So welcome to imagination action.

    We're tonight we're finding happiness in challenging times across cultural comparison. And we're going to hear from a top top happiness researcher, and ethnographic studies about who really finds happiness. What is happiness? What does happiness feel like? Does happiness vary across cultures and age groups? And what can we do each day to be happier. So I'd like to introduce Alison Sander, who is going to kick us off with questions to Robert Allison, it's always a joy to to do the show with you. And welcome to our sixth show.

    Thank you so much, john. And this does seem like perfect timing, as we're on possibly wave four of COVID to actually think about happiness and really the use clubhouse to get your views on happiness and and to hear from such amazing experts with very, very diverse views. So Robert, can you tell us a little bit more when you first got interested in the topic of happiness? And what drew you to the topic? Were you from a family with abundant happiness without a lot of happiness? Give us a little sense of what brought you to this rich topic?

    Well, I was, I was from a family that was that had lots of happiness, and some real challenges and some sorrows. And it was kind of like most of the families I've come to know, in my research and in my life, but I guess I, I've been more interested in the experience of just being human. And that's primarily what we study, happiness is a big part of it. And my interest was really, in recognizing that a lot of what we go after, because we think it will make us happy, it turns out not to make us happy, it's we're kind of bad at knowing what makes us happy. And I kept seeing it, I saw it. As a teenager, I certainly saw it in college and in medical school. And I began to wonder about what actually happens to people as they go through their lives. There's, you know, what I saw is a great deal of hype about what we're supposed to want, and what we think is supposed to make us happy. You know, as john said, you know, money and fame and lots of awards. You know, john just named all these amazing awards and that people have won and, and yes, they're great, and we should all be proud, but they actually don't make us that happy. So my question was, Well, what does make us happy? And I, I think one of the things I start out with is making a distinction between happiness and well being cause happiness. In my jargon, hedonic happiness is really that feeling of Am I feeling happy right now. And that is something that comes and goes, all day long, fluctuates moment to moment, hour to hour. The idea that we can always be happy is a total myth. No human on the planet is always happy, of course. But there is this thing we often call well being dragged different deaths, a kind of sense that life is okay. Even during the hard times, and well being is something that I've seen that we can actually build, and that there are very clear components to well being that you can put in place and maintain in your life, different from the ups and downs of happiness. So that's what I'm interested in. And that's what I study.

    Hey, Robert, so this this longitudinal study you did what, what has it taught you about happiness? And what do we not realize about happiness? As you kind of look, look at the data and and as you're on the future generations of the original people in the study? How are the family units looking? And where are they deriving happiness?

    Well, the data are data and lots of data from around the world point to many of the same things that the United Nations does a World Happiness Report every year now put out by really sophisticated scientists, social scientists, demographers, psychologists, and they, they survey people all over the world, and they find a lot of the same components to people feeling like they have a life, that's decent. And we find that in our study, too. And so it's basically First of all, having your material needs met. So that means having a roof over your head, having enough money to send your children to get a decent education, having access to good health care, being able to put food on the table, not being insecure with respect to food, those are the kinds of basic things that everybody feels they need to have a good life, beyond that extra income, doesn't move the needle of happiness at all. So the you know, the billionaires are no happier as a group than the people who are basically comfortable enough materially. But then what people say they need is trust, they need to be able to trust in their neighbors, and they need to be able to trust that their governments are not corrupt, and that people will do what they say. And we found that certainly in, you know, our study, these people we followed for 83 years. And they found us all over the world. And as you can imagine, trust, the degree of trust, that people typically have in their neighbors and in their governments is very different in different places in the world. But the one element that we were surprised by is this idea that people want opportunities to be generous. They want opportunities to be able to donate to other people. And not just money, but donate their time, donate their energy, foster the well being of other people in the world. And that people who feel like they have that in their lives are typically happier. And this is people all over the world, all demographics, all economic groups, everybody wanted some way to be able to be generous. So what did we learn? Well, probably the biggest thing we learned was the thing I gave that TED talk about on your stage, john, which was that good, warm relationships keep us not just happier as we age, but they also keep us healthier. And that was the thing that we didn't believe when we started looking at our data. And finding this. What we found was that the people who reported warmer, closer relationships and more connections with other people actually aged better, they became disabled, less often and less soon in their lives. They got type two diabetes, less often they arthritis, heart disease, all of those diseases of aging, preventable diseases of aging, really less frequent among people who were more ensconced in warm relationships. And we didn't, as I said, we didn't believe it. And then other research groups started finding the same thing. And we began to believe it. And now we've spent the last five to 10 years studying how that works. How, how could warm relationships actually get into our bodies and affect our physiology, and we're finding a lot of evidence as our other research groups for biological changes that happen based on the quality of our relationships. So that has been the biggest takeaway. I think, for me, from this 83 years study. We've got going

    Robert, you're also that's so fascinating to hear. And you're also in your many different roles, the director of the Center for psychodynamic therapy, and research at Mass General Hospital, which I believe has given you a front row seat watching how COVID has impacted our mental health. So when you talk about the critical fabric of warm relationships, how is this affected by a year of quarantine? And what do you see from the people who got through that unscathed versus the people who are still devastated?

    Well, such a good and complicated question. I mean, I think the people who got through unscathed are lucky, and privileged. And I don't even mean privileged in the negative sense that we often use it but just that some people were lucky enough to be at points in their lives, where the losses were not as tremendous, the lost precious years of schooling, or the lost precious years of connecting with other teenagers, when you're desperate to form those relationships in your teenage years. People who were lucky enough to have enough space, so that they could be at home with the people they live with, but be able to get away or tired, or people who were not forced to go every day into dangerous, overly stress situations. So that the people who had the hardest time, of course, were the people who could not escape the dangers of the pandemic health care workers, people who worked and essential workers in grocery stores and first responders of all sorts. So there's a whole range as we know, the extent to which people survived and some people even thrived during COVID, while other people found it devastating. As far as relationships go, we thought had to two things happen at once during lockdown. Because we were frozen in place, right? So for many of us, we were frozen in place with the people we live with. And that could be wonderful. Or it could be terrible. I mean, there's there's this old joke about marriage that we pledge ourselves to each other, for better or for worse, but not for lunch, that we never sign up to be with each other 24 seven, and suddenly, the pandemic consigned many of us to our homes with each other in a way that we've never been before. And so, and with children and with other relatives, with roommates, who you're living with, but are not necessarily your closest friends. And so that made for some deepening relationships, it also made for a lot more conflict, the incidence of divorce is up, incidents of domestic violence is up. In addition to being frozen in place with people, we've been isolated from other people. So we know this, particularly with older adults who are more vulnerable to COVID, and therefore has to be extra careful. And many people who live in faith live in nursing homes live in retirement communities, would live for visits from children, grandchildren, friends from the outside, and those visits were cut off. And so, and many people who live alone, more than 30% of Americans live alone in in their own households. Those people struggle more, because they don't have the free access to other people in their lives that they did before the pandemic. So all of that puts stresses on us in different ways, being too close to being too distant. And too, so that's what we're all struggling with. And then as we emerged from the pandemic, we were going to try to understand what the toll was, but it's certainly what we see in in, you know, certainly in my psychiatry department at Mass General Hospital, is a markedly higher prevalence of depression and anxiety during the pandemic. As many as 40% of adults have said that they have been depressed at one time or another during the pandemic. But that's a long answer, Allison, but it's a big question you asked.

    Oh, that's such a great answer. Thank you so much, Robert. That's really helpful.

    Robert, is it true that people are happier as they get older? Is there an arc of happiness or a pattern that happiness tends to take as we navigate the passages of life?

    There is. And so and one things I want to say is that this is there's a caveat here, which is because we all know people who get more unhappy as they get older, and certainly people who suffer from health problems, yes, they get less happy. But when we study large populations, as a, as a group, we get happier, from about middle age on until our health starts to decline. We, our mood gets better, we prioritize well being more well being in the moment, and we let go of lots of a lot of the shoulds. And the obligations that we never really enjoyed. This comes from the work of a psychologist at Stanford named Laura Carstensen, who's done a lot on this, she has something she calls socio emotional selectivity theory, and it's a it's a long phrase, but really what it means is that has the reality that life is short, thinks the and more and more as we get through middle age and into old age, we start paying attention to what we want to do right now to maximize our happiness. And that that makes us happier. So rather than our mortality, making us more depressed, it actually gets us to do the things that keep us happier. And there are lots of wonderful studies of this. It's it's a very cool body of research.

    That is that is really gratifying to see. Yeah, and I and I hope all the gym viewers on this called take up too, because you know, that line that life gets better at 40. I don't know that it happened for me at 40. But I do think it happens at some point. So thank you. This is such a great topic to share. So, Robert, you have the incredible distinction of being a Zen priest, as well as a Harvard psychiatry dress as well as quite a bit more hats, as I'm sure our audience is discovering. But what role if I can ask you does your religion and spirituality play in your life for happiness? And looking at all the complicated data on religion in the US? What role do you think it plays in happiness across the country?

    Yeah, well, first of all, I never dreamed, the last thing I ever dreamed I would become is a Zen priest that is like, totally nuts as far as I'm concerned. But about 15 years ago, I discovered a Zen teacher and wandered into our Monday night Zen group. And the rest is history. I and it's really more of a spiritual practice than a religion. But it's really a another way of trying to explore this experience of being human in the world. Because what Buddhism and particularly for me, Zen is about is not it's not just relaxation, or being calm, it's really a whole way of understanding the experience of being alive in the world. And what I find is that it infuses my psychotherapy practice, I see patients every day in psychotherapy, and it infuses my research, it shapes the questions that we ask people really big existential questions about how they feel about their lives and, and what they feel is most important, and what they want to make live in the world because they're here in the world, that those are the big things that then keeps bringing me back to any spiritual tradition can do that any religion has it. Not so much the rules and regulations that would that we are more aware of in different religious traditions, but every religion has this kind of spirituality and, and offers us ideas about the meaning of life, if you will, in the big existential questions. And for me, that's been a huge help.

    Great, thanks

    for your time cut in john. I mean, just to follow up on the other half of that, Robert, what about for the rest of the country? I mean, as you watch the statistics of less people going to church or more people being atheist. I mean, does that in any way affect our collective happiness? Or is that really just a whole different score and index?

    Well, it's how you know some people argue that that what religion and spirituality do So well is help us with the meaning of life. Right? And that when people don't have that, as an anchor, they look for other things to try to give life meaning. So, you know, people will, will look to making tons of money to give life meaning even though money if you think about is actually quite empty, you can't eat it you can't eat doesn't keep you warm. They'll look to achievement, which you know. And so, one One idea is that we need something to help us with the big questions of life. And so are there things we can find? And, and we're actually trying to do some of this work bringing the findings of our lifespan development research into a format that people can use to inquire about their own lives. It's not spiritual, it's really more a kind of adult socio emotional learning, but it may, it may approach that kind of big question. explorations that spirituality often allows us to do. Great, thank

    you, everyone. You've just heard from Robert Waldinger. Now we're gonna go to Wade Davis, we're gonna do a brief musical interlude from Max home. He is an award winning jazz pianist and composer, his next releases with the voice, and he's playing live, I think it's like midnight, in Valencia, Spain. So Max, if you can play 90 seconds, as we transitioned to wait.

    John, thank you so much. I can post fulfillment TV in different genres, and always looking for potential collaborators. So feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, we're here on a clubhouse. Just wanted to throw that out here. This is a Latin jazz tune called Eva. I hope you enjoy. If you do, you can hear the full version on Spotify. So without further ado, here we go.

    Great, thank you, Max. Now, modern day Indiana Jones, a guy who is written 23 books, and is an inspiration. Allison, why don't you kick off questions?

    Definitely, what a treat. And thank you so much, Robert, for kicking us off. So Wade, you've been described as a cultural entropy, anthropologist, and have spent time as john said, with indigenous cultures in more than 20 countries, and I think every continent. So let's start with the question of whether happiness is even the right term to use when we broaden the well being discussion to include many other cultures and indigenous societies? And what is it that you think indigenous societies live for if it's not happiness?

    Well, thanks very much. Let me just jump in on a couple things Robert said that really interests me. You know, this idea of material possessions being the the avenue to contentment, I was just recently with a friend of mine, Chris Riley, who many of you may know he invented the slogan, just do it for Nike. And he said, really brilliant guy, and he use the term aspirational excess. In other words, Americans in particular North Americans are sold this bill of goods that if we only get more and more and more, somehow we'll achieve contentment. And as Chris pointed out, that once you get beyond $75,000 a year, or maybe twice said, if you're a couple of whatever, you don't really need much more than that. And I was reminded that as well. A friend of mine, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, wrote a book in France called on happiness, which is massive bestseller which was quite unusual, because in France is you know, people don't even believe in the idea of happiness. But in the book, you know, he cites the Buddha's saying that to try to seek contentment or happiness, through the achievements of the material realm, that alone through material possessions is futile, futile is casting a net into a dry riverbed if you're seeking fish. I was reminded of that just this weekend when a dear friend of mine passed away, tragically from a serious illness and I remember the home she had in Montecito and Santa Barbara, adjacent to that of Oprah Winfrey, and I had never seen a home so palatial. It felt like staying in your own private Ritz Carlton. But at the end of the day, it felt just like that, stay in your own private Ritz Carlton. And I remember when I was with her at that time, I had just come back from Borneo having lived with a nomadic rainforest people called the Penang, who of course, in their culture, they have nominally no incentive to acquire material possessions, they have an active disincentive to do so because ultimately, at some point in time, everything has to be carried on your back. And because everything can be made readily from natural products found readily in the forest, there are no specialists and so there is no notion of wealth. And in that society, the greatest recrimination falls upon those who suffer from something called sycuan, which is a failure to share in that society, there is no word in the language for Thank you. Because sharing is an automatic reflex, you never know who will be the next to bring the food to the collective table. I'll never forget one night when I gave a cigarette to an old Penang woman in a remote encampment in the forest. And watch this she tore it apart to distribute the individual strands of tobacco equitably to every hut of the encampment, obviously rendering the product useless but honoring her obligation to share. And so the question becomes, in a society like that, how do you measure wealth, and wealth is actually defined explicitly in terms of the strength of social relations between people, because if those relations fail, everybody suffers. And you see how these ideas bifurcate through a culture so for example, in hunting and gathering societies, there's almost always from the Inuit of the High Arctic, to the banana, the forests of Borneo to the Waorani in the northwest Amazon, a tremendous sanction against direct confrontation. Because if, for example, john and Robert and I and our families are together as a hunting group, and suddenly john doesn't get along with Robert and I side with, with Robert, and john is forced to break off with his family, it means by definition, that night, his children have a two thirds less chance of eating. So in these societies, again, sharing is an involuntary reflex. And I remember, we brought three punana at their request on a global tour, as part of an advocacy campaign trying to fight for their rain forests, and they landed, first major stop on a global tour was in Vancouver. None of them had ever been to a city, let alone a major town and nothing in Vancouver. impress them more than homelessness, they could not understand how a culture of such abundance could allow such misery to exist, because I really do live in a world where a poor man seems to the mall.

    Great. Wait. you've, you've influenced in a number of national National Geographic specials, and my personal favorite, you've, you've helped create three episodes of The X Files. I'm curious, what are the elements of modern society that you think we may have gotten wrong? If happiness is our goal? In other words, what are some of the elements that when you look at indigenous societies that you've traveled to and, and lived among, and written about, make you wonder about our current formula for from Venus,

    there's not a dichotomy between us. And then there are 7000 voices, languages spoken by humanity. We represent a few strands of that, you know, extraordinary fabric of social life. You know, I spent a lot of time underground indoor drawing, looking at the Upper Paleolithic cave art with a friend of mine, Clint, national poet. And the most amazing thing about that art form, it's clearly not hunting magic. But there's some there's some attempt of our Paleolithic ancestors to reconnect to something. And I think that's their animal nature. And I think what the art does is it celebrates or it's an attempt to reach back across that era vocable divide and whether that divide was caused by the invention of language, increasing the size of the brain are some other evolutionary catalysts. We clearly at one point were of an animal nature, and then we were not. But the fascinating thing is, if you think of the cave art of Chavez 2000 years ago and Lascaux a mere 17,000 years ago, the aesthetic doesn't change. So in other words, if those were sort of Postcards of nostalgia and attempt to reach into an animal nature, the prototypic birth, if you will, of shamanism, ours was a very long farewell because the chronological distance that separates, shows a from Lascaux is five times the distance that separates us today from the building of the Great Pyramids at Giza, and out of that kind of yearning came to two great questions, how and why and these were the departure points for all inquiry, the kind of slivers of insight around which cultures crystallized and how a culture answers those two questions, really determines its worldview. Now, in in, you mentioned also Robert, this idea of the comfort of faith, you know, one of the things that we broke out of, in our efforts in the Enlightenment to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith, even as we liberated the individual from perhaps the tyranny of the collective Now both of those things were the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And when de cartes said that all that existed his mind and material, as a stage set became just a human stage set upon which the human drama unfolded with plants and animals, but props in that drama, to the point where as Saul Bellow said, science made housecleaning of belief. We throw out all notions of myths, magic, mysticism, but critically metaphor, and in doing so we achieved great autonomy and personal freedom. But of course, we gave up the comfort of faith. And in doing so, we cast the individual adrift. You know, even when we get married, we talk about starting a family as if we didn't already come from two families. You know, we think nothing of having a cousin in Florida and Aunt in Seattle, set of grandparents in San Diego, we take this sort of as a given. For most cultures around the world, it would be seen as very anomalous. And one of the things that that break has done once we limited metaphor, we also do animated the world sort of mountain was just a pile of rock, a forest, mere mere cellulose and board feet. And we severed our relationship with the natural world, which was also one of the foundations of our strength, and a key to our sense of contentment, and our sense of, of purpose and identity. And it makes a huge difference. I mean, if I for example, john was raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock. That makes me fundamentally different to in my godchildren, in the mountains of Peru, who were raised to believe that a mountain was an apple deity that will direct their destiny. I was raised in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to believe that the salmon forests existed to be cut. That was the foundation of the ideology of industrial forestry that I practiced in the woods. That makes me very different from my brother's a monster Kwok walk, walk, who believe that those same forests of your boat of hoopoe can the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that will have to be embraced during the homicide initiation. Now, the issue isn't who's right and who's wrong? Is a mountain, a pile of rock, is it a deity, it's how the belief system mediates the relationship between the natural world and the society with profoundly different consequences, both for the ecological footprint and for the sense of belonging, the spirit of place that people have, it's like it's large Terrelle said, you know, just as landscape defines character culture springs, from a spirit of place and fidelity to land becomes a core connective tissue amongst the people, that particular culture.

    Oh, my gosh, that is so rich. I'm glad that that Jon's recording this and that we can all go back and spend time on that I feel like you just took us through 1000 years that kind of set modern man adrift. I guess I want to sort of get your views weighed on something else that Robert brought up, because he touched on the mental health crisis that's afflicted the West and our Western paradigm. And I think what you're talking to is some possible reasons for that. But I'm curious, how does depression anxiety? If there is such a thing as a mental health crisis? How does that show up in indigenous societies? Let's say before the West has sort of destroyed them and and if they do show up, how are they addressed? So is is basically depression and a mental health crisis indigenous in indigenous people or is that something that comes with Western civilization?

    Well, you know, I think it was Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, I thought it'd be a good idea. You know, you know, is it clearly in my experience, I've been indigenous societies were clearly there's, you know, cases of severe autism or Down syndrome, and people with true physiological afflictions. And they're that my experience is that they are kind of just like, sort of tolerated, they're just part of the community. And they do their funny things that are sometimes embarrassing. I mean, for example, amongst the wild Ronnie, the men were traditionally only close with, with a string of palm fiber, that would would tie the force gap against the belly, but from their point of view, that was fully clothed, and they would be mortified if that string broke, and the penis dangled, as you were, I would be if we were found naked in Central Park. But there was a young kid, I remember who was obviously physiologic and mentally challenged, and he was always sort of playing and sort of masturbating in public, and no one's sanctioned him, they just sort of, you know, like a dog or something or a child, you know, just don't do that, you know. But then the other question, the kind of ailments that Robert has studied all his life, you know, a lot of these things are so culturally rooted, right? I mean, one of the things when I, my PhD was trying to find the pharmacological basis of zombies, you know, I was sent down to Haiti to try to find a folk poison that was said to bring on parent, a state of apparent death so profound to could fool the western trained physician, and identified a folk preparation that could do the deed. But it was equally important for me to understand obviously, what the what the notion of zombie meant to a Haitian person who believes in the idea in the very fiber of his being, you know, as a preacher of the Great British anthropologist, spoke about the close cycle of belief of certain societies, and particularly the newer who believed in witchcraft. And the way to illustrate this is to say, Okay, if as we're on this clubhouse chat, the roof falls down, kills 10% of the audience. And we ask ourselves, well, why did that happen? Well, we'll say it was, you know, engineering problems. No, no, why right now, in this clubhouse talk, well, we'll suddenly say, well, it was coincidence chance. But those are meaningless youth and isms that allow us to evade the challenge of causality. In many traditional cultures, no event can have a life of its own. And so there's a circular web of thought within which one can maneuver with great intellectual dexterity, but you can't step outside of that. We have a thought because you can't think your thoughts are wrong. And in those kinds of societies, you know, we use the term psychosomatic, which doesn't mean fake, it means mind body. And and, you know, we all know that happens. I mean, no one's no one gets sick The day after they fall in love. And lots of people, as Robert will tell us get terribly depressed they after they fall out of love. And to understand the zombie thing, I had to know what it might mean to the individual, because I've witnessed in Sarah, you know, individuals in the state of trance brought on by the power of the belief system, handling burning embers with utter impunity. And in fact, much of the time I was in Haiti I, in the early months, I felt like that line from the Dylan song, you know, there's something happened here, but you don't know what it is Mr. Jones, and I became really interested in this whole idea of psychological or psychophysiological, illness and death, which is a huge literature, going back to a classic paper on what was called Voodoo death has nothing to do with African worship, written by the head of the Harvard Medical School in 1940, where a man called Captain had examined these cases of soldiers in World War One who had died effectively of fright with no. And he looked into that and, you know, the question becomes, can the mind affect the body that bears it? Well, it turns out in the 19th century, there were all kinds of conditions that don't exist today, that were seen to be serious pathological challenges, including one condition where young English men in a psychotic claps would strike heroic poses, like a statue, and this was written about with great sincerity and familiarity, people are so afraid of premature burial 18th century, but there was this rig Nicky attention, which was this whole kind of Rube Goldberg thing you with your car to make sure you could let people know when you actually woke up. So my point there is that, as I'm sure Robert, even in his own practice, some of these psychological conditions are culturally rooted and based and in that sense, products of a cultural imagination as much as anything else. At the same time. It's difficult To assess what's going on no matter how intimate one is, with a culture like that is about a sauna in the northwest Amazon, but the one thing I would would stress is the power of community. You know the the the the end the role, particularly in many Amerindian societies have the Sharman. Now, shamanism is no substitute for allopathic medicine, believe me, if any of us cut an arm off in a car accident, we wouldn't want to be taken to a shaman. But on the other hand, in societies, particularly those who lack access to medical care protocols, the shaman plays a very effective role in the treatment of psychological and spiritual and magical illness, which is often seen to be one of the same. And there's a certain level of intuition in the demonic practice that is that of a priest that of a physician, and in some cases that have a nuclear engineer who periodically goes to the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world.

    Great. Wait, this is our last question to you, then we're going to hear from Hayley Reardon, he's going to do a musical interlude. And then we're going to go to our last speaker and then open up a dialogue and open up to our audience, I just want to point out that you're in imagination in action. And our last speaker, Sonny Bates, who's a future speaker, connect us to and I see Sonny has joined us, I also see a few other speakers in the audience, I see. Lin Yang, I see Esther Dyson. And, and on May 11, some of the musicians that you're hearing Tonight, we're going to do a deep dive and interview them. And there's, we really value the musicians. And wait, I hope you're right, but I do hear a beeping in the background, maybe a smoke alarm without a battery, you may want to look into that. So our last question to you Wait, is this you have delved deeply into the wisdom of the indigenous world? Do you think we have done enough to understand the wisdom from the rain forest from? And where can listeners go to explore and better understand the wisdom from the indigenous world? You know, I feel like you bridge a bunch of worlds and, you know, help us understand what what we may want to appreciate more?

    Well, you know, I almost reject the notion digitus is sort of implies the exotic other and after all, we're all indigenous to this planet all in the question is not the traditional versus the modern, but you know, what kind of world we want to live in? And how do we move ahead. And, you know, the great revelation of our time, really is come from two scientific point moments of illumination. One was, of course, the vision of the Earth from space, which has changed everything, as we all know. But the other is the consequence of this sort of journey of genetics, which has revealed the genetic endowment of humanity to be a continuum. You know, race is a total fiction, we're all cutting the same genetic cloth. We're all descendants of the same ancestors, and many of whom walked out of Africa some 65,000 years ago. But the really extraordinary thing is to realize that if we're all cut from the same genetic cloth, we all share the same genius and how that genius is expressed. It's just a matter of choice. You know, we may have indulged in a marvelous way, technological wizardry, other people's like those of the deserts of Australia have placed that same energy and acuity into understanding the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth. So there is no hierarchy in the realm of culture. Every culture has something to say each deserves to be heard, you know, the other peoples aren't failed attempts of being modern, each culture all 7000 languages, represents a unique answer to a fundamental question, what does it mean to be human and alive? So it's not as if indigenous versus modern, you know, the thing we have to remember is that it's this modern paradigm of ours dominant and ubiquitous as it may be is, in fact, the anomaly when it comes to attitudes towards the natural world, for example. And when we talk about the wisdom of the indigenous, I would say, it's a real wisdom of those who live with an awareness of our dependency on each other, who have relations based on reciprocity and some iteration of the fundamental idea that the earth owes its bounty to people, people owe their fidelity to the earth. That basic simple equation defines, in fact, the way of life of the vast majority of human beings, our way of thinking about it, where the earth has something, you know, inert, to be extracted from, is very anomalous, I mean, the batasan of the Northwest Amazon, their strongest cultural intuition. Spiritual intuition is the complete belief that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality. The Australian Aborigines, you know, offended the British with their lack of interest in progress. But that was in fact, the ethos of their society. Spaces. The whole purpose in life in Australia wasn't to change anything, but rather to do the ritual gestures necessary to keep the world exactly as it was, at its time of its creation, it'd be like if Adam and Eve had, you know, we put all our energy into pruning shrubs in that garden, ever since their fateful conversation. And the interesting thing isn't to say who's right and who's wrong, you know, if we'd followed those insights of the Aboriginal people, we wouldn't have put a man on the moon. But we wouldn't be talking about climate change, you know, and our capacity to transform the life support systems of the planet. So it's, it's really the question really is not the traditional versus modern or, or keeping anyone frozen in time or, or denying anybody the the genius of modernity, the best of science, the best of medicine, is to ask the question, how can we all move forward together in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world in which all peoples can benefit from the genius of modernity, but critically without that engagement, demanding the depth of who they are as a people, because the reason that's important is not simply human rights, its geopolitical stability and survival. Culture is not trivial. It's not decorative. It's not the songs we sing the prayers we utter. It's ultimately a body of moral and ethical values that we envelop everybody, with to keep at bay, the barbaric heart that lies within all humans. It's a culture that allows us, as Lincoln said, to seek the better angels of our nature and when culture is lost, chaos ensues. And so this is really the argument for maintaining respect for the multiple expressions of the human heart that become manifest in culture.

    So well put, and thank you, Wade. Now I'd like to call Hayley to the stage to do a brief musical interlude. And then Allison will kick us off to our last and final speaker to get a dialogue going.

    Thank you, john. This is a song of mine called good that I feel inspired to play based on this very rich conversation. Thanks for having me.

    You drive all the way cuz you want to

    drive don't bother you.

    I just said thank you.

    Laundry like he sued your so maybe, Oh, do I

    still show but we'll do everything to be who they say they should. But you

    do it because you're good.

    You're good.

    Thank you, Haley. And again, on May 11, we're going to interview all our musicians, we opened up with an opera singer. Then we had a jazz musician, then we had a folk musician. And after our next speaker, we'll have Corey who set the world record for the longest accordion play 33 hours. And he's the Michael Jordan of the accordion. Three time international champion. But our next speaker, welcome to the stage, our someone you lead us.

    Definitely. Karen, thank you so much for joining us, I believe from London, so quite late in the morning. We're so grateful, as john mentioned, Sonny Bates for connecting us and I think the audience is in for a treat. You've spent more than 22 years in technology, as john said, starting at the age of 12, and are now serving if I have the title correctly as the head of security in the UK for Google's cloud and working for alphabet. We know these are your personal views. But how do you think that our pervasive use of technology influences happiness in the world today?

    Thank you very much john and Addison for curating this conversation and happy to join as well from from London. My views are very much aligned with both Robert and Wade, we are still in search of the central human centric values around happiness and well being that should guide us to build societies and from my perspective systems, supported by future technology, our lives To see technology as a magnifier of who we are, we influence technology, not the other way around. If we set the right goals and success matrix for technology and underlying economics, for joy and happiness, technology can exist solely to maximize joy. The real problems are three. So the first one is that technology has been the center of the industrial revolutions up to this point. And productivity is the only success metric that we track. productivity has a positive influence on happiness up to a point when it becomes irrelevant if we just keep producing more. Second is current mainstream economics failing to be adapted to unique characteristics of digitization, and the core of the challenge being valuation models for digital assets. The absence of appropriate valuation models for digitization has encouraged extremely limiting revenue generation models, such as the ads model, that resulting toxic object objectives for product development. The one thing technology is good at and we'll continue to get better at is optimization. But we're not good at finding the right problems to solve or a set of optimal goals that satisfy satisfy both short term and long term objectives. technologist alone cannot come up with these goals, and it requires wide collaboration and collective imagination. I'm very confident that AI and technology can help us accelerate anything in coming decades if we can frame these appropriate goals in time. I'm not worried about technological technical failures, but worry about philosophical failures in which we pick the wrong problems to solve.

    My second point to the question is about the new economic paradigm and can it be a joy economy, there is no doubt we are in a new industrial revolution. But a new economic paradigm is yet to emerge. Historically, major developments in our value theories have been driven by industrial revolutions, machines and factories were invented during the first Industrial Revolution. That's when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations electric power and mass production were invented during the second industrial revolution. That's when Marginal Revolution happened. digital economy has played a central role in a third and current Industrial Revolution. But we do not yet have a major economic breakthrough that can explain the new ways how value is created is distributed and consumed, which is the essence of economics. Compared to physical assets, where we have international trading standards in place to the granularity of shoelaces in the digital realm, there is no consistent definition of what digital assets means no accounting standards for companies to report digital assets from the balance sheet. While this problem still need to be solved, there is another thing called exponential growth. If you're familiar with the box like super intelligence or the second Machine Age, there is a famous chart on the trajectory of human progress through time and we are currently faced with a close to 90 degree trajectory, mostly powered by the Moore's law, the curve is so steep that it is beyond human comprehension if we can continue to measure things with human scale. In my theory, I reversed Moore's law to put things into perspective, the progress of productivity and computing in 2018 is 4009 96 times of the progress into cells in year 2000 in length, 18 years in human time is equivalent to 4096 years in machine time. So standing in front of this 90 degree curve, it is of existential importance, to ask the right questions and one of them can be how do we measure progress and if this is not, if it is not measured by productivity, it can be about joy, the arrival of abundance of intelligence and productivity? Well, for sure give birth to a new economic paradigm, when humans can be finally liberated from labor. And can it be and can this creates a joy economy? So going back to finding the appropriate set of goals, I can hardly find a better goal than solving happiness. If I think like a researcher we are figuring out the origin of the universe detecting gravitational waves going to Mars, but how much do we understand the complex internal and external conditions for happiness? If I think like a philosopher, is there a deeper meaning than how to live, sustain and scale, a joy, a joyful life? If I think like an economist can we We all go and make a list of 50 things that bring us joy and then create an economy simply based on those things. So going back to my initial point that technology is a magnifier of who we are, we influence technology and not the other way around. The only way forward is human empowerment, inspired by millennia of human development, we must find the core values that should be in the center of this new economic paradigm. So that technology can help us build them further.

    Thank you. You know, I think if anyone is should be depressed and worried about technology in the future, and that dystopia is coming, it's it's someone in your day job role, you know, you do cloud forensics, cyber economics, cyber security, and yet, you're not depressed, you're optimistic, and you're hopeful and you're trying to lead. My question is, what would it mean for technology to prime prioritize happiness and well being? And can you paint a vision for us? of what that would look like? I mean, I think of the movie Wally, I have this vision of technology and humanity, that animation. Are there examples you see of technology companies that are experiencing experimenting with this?

    Yeah, good question. So as you mentioned, that I've been in technology for 22 years, and I'm very far from being depressed. I'm very optimistic. And I spend a lot of time with people with background in risk. And we talk a lot about existential risk. And actually the reason why, you know, the idea of the, the happiness foundation and and Institute came to mind is from our discussion around existential risks, because I believe that it's equally important to leverage existential opportunity. So there are a few dimensions regarding how we can leverage technology to optimize joy. So firstly, throughout human history, we've been surviving from existential risks, our objective is not to die. But the risk mitigation mindset will not lead us to live the fullest life. absence from suffering is different from a legion human potential. It is equally important to leverage the existential opportunities of of all time, mostly created by technology. And the most important word is collective imagination, which you are creating through all these conversations for the future. Robert has done this amazing study of the past 88 but in the coming 80 years, we are likely to reach singularity. Our generations are faced with an unprecedented spectrum of fundamental choices that will influence happiness, from the possibility to live to 150 years with the longevity breakthrough to existential crisis from climate change. In the digital space, we are faced with possibilities from a digital Dark Age. Very much of my background where cybercrime or systemic design error can result in the entire digital civilization being deleted by the by mistake, too. A digital Renaissance where many new schools of thought may flourish and fundamentally move civilization civilization forward in unprecedented directions. So the question is, can technology not only help us be more informed can but can it also help us be wiser, Oscar Wilde defines progress as the realisation of utopia, which is a North Star, which may never be fully realized. Today, there is a proliferation of dystopian scenarios of concerns and risks compared to emergence of promising models of new utopia or a proliferation of diverse utopian models which can co exist in harmony. As one way it has said about the 7000 voices, Maslow's pyramid places, dreams and actualization at the peak of our needs. But many would argue having dreams are more important than mere survival, thriving for dreams and ideals have powered countless systemic change in human history. And the question is, if the Greeks have created the Olympics, what are we going to create in our generation?

    Wow. That is such a great gauntlet challenge to throw down there. I'd like to follow up a little bit more on something that you said earlier in your first answer, which is, what do you think we do and don't understand about how to measure happiness? And what do you think is the best metric out there today? I just in looking over preparing for this conference. I saw that in 1972 Bhutan introduced gross national happiness in 2007, Thailand released their green happiness index, then Gallup poll introduced Gallup well being then Oxford, initiated their poverty and Human Development Index and OECD launched their better life index. I mean, it feels like we have a lot of different agents out there, groping around trying to measure this, but as somebody who works with the algorithms and numbers, I mean, what do you think we What do you think are the best metrics we have out there now? And what is it that we are and aren't able to measure and happiness?

    Yeah, this is a very important question, Allison. So there are many matrixes out there today, including the ones you mentioned, the OECD, better life index, gross national wellbeing, gross national happiness from Bhutan, social progress index, and also, obviously, the World Happiness Report, which robot mentioned as well. And the current measurements track, many domains, covering health, life satisfaction, housing, income, jobs, community education, environment, governance, culture, freedom, safety, equality, and many other factors. So our favorite matrix is the World Happiness Report, because it's looking at multiple timescales of happiness. But the interesting finding from this year is that it pointed out that people were not less happy during a pandemic, which shows that happiness might be elastic, because people adjust to situations and people are also highly resilient. So that is a very interesting factor, because it is not, you know, there is elasticity with happiness. So in terms of how we can improve, or what can be measured better, there are quite a few points. The first is between subjective and objective measures. So happiness is, is definitely objective and universal, there are universal triggers of happiness, such as the smell of popcorn, or the taste of chocolate, and these things are cross culture. But happiness can be also highly subjective, and relative and elastic. There are people who can be very happy when they are very ill. And there are many people who have thrived during the pandemic. And I actually feel happier, I can't say happier, but I feel content, you know, during the pandemic. And the second one is individual, individual versus collective measures. So our society is very good at measuring individual success, but how do we measure quality connections and happiness within a group or within a community? And how do we understand deeper human needs and dreams, especially spiritual, spiritual needs that you know, you've covered previously in the conversation, and how to measure complex domains such as love and fulfillment, and I think these areas are extremely difficult to understand. And I think we want to understand how technology can help us unleash those domains. And another element is a lot of these matrixes are using a national indexes, such as the, you know, the same as GDP. But there is a whole body of study of the future of nations and, and also the need of global instruments. And there's a wise person who said, the structure of nations is too big for solving local problems and too small to solve global problems. And I think a lot of the challenges we face such as the pandemic and also the opportunities, such as digitization, they are all global issues that we need to have global instrument to tackle. So I would argue that if looking towards the future, if we come up with happiness model, weather tracking national index is a good effective approach. And also, the most important part is obviously the futuristic element. Because from the exponential growth point that I mentioned earlier that we are at the you know, we are at, you know, we're at the beginning of this 90 degree curve, and it's, it's more important that we are have reached a tipping point, that it's more important to plan future from the future than from the past. So the next 20 years is gonna be dramatically more different from how we planned the previous 20 years. And if we use a reference point of how our parents live our lives, live their life to plan our life, we might miss important critical decisions, to do the right things. So it's very important to predict and track major trends of tech knology primarily in computing and biotech, that will fundamentally influence how we make major decisions in life in the future so that we can back dated to make the right decisions and policies for today.

    Great, thank you. You mentioned intergenerational. I see my dad JW is in the room. So you made me think of that. So last question. And then we'll have Cory play a brief musical interlude, and then we're going to open up to the audience, ask some questions. Allison, I have some questions for the three speakers. But we'll weave them in a little later. We want to see if you have some questions. So Sonny Bates, if you have a question or others, just raise your hand. So my last question to you is, if a benefactor were to provide you with funding, what do you think is required for us to really integrate happiness and well being into our economic and technological paradigms?

    Yeah, great. Thanks, john. So yeah, so our vision is to Firstly, have a global dialogue with the best minds who can come together and collectively reimagine the future of happiness and how we can integrate central human values into the design of future technologies. And we don't want to settle on questions too early because we feel that it takes a while to have this brainstormed and dialogue and conversation and leverage all the wisdom from different disciplines to come up with the key questions. And we want to evolve the model of happiness world that we currently have, we have a tentative model that is based on the four pillar of being safe being healthy, being loved and being fulfilled. And four views the objective view the collective view, the in the subjective view and objective view with three dimensions, the time dimension, the sustainability dimension and technology dimension. So this is a tentative model and structure that we have to structure the various multidisciplinary domains under which you know, construct in the field of happiness, but we want to evolve this model with along with these dialogues. And then we want to develop an approach that is progressive to work from feature not from the past. So it's gonna be based on prediction of future trends, primarily driven by technology, and how we can better adapt to that from now. And then find the 20% of the you know, the based on the 2080 principle, find the the main factors that influence happiness for the future and focus on how we can amplify it with technology. So there's a lot of discussion that is required to understand human needs and dreams, I think these might not be, you know, this might be a very likely a finite list. And as you know, that AI has scanned, you know, a large data set, and if we direct, you know, machine intelligence, towards aggregating all the human needs and dreams ever happened, you know, in various cultures and see how we can amplify these things and build tools and products to, you know, satisfy these things faster, it will be pretty game changing, in my view, and outcome should be, you know, creating a short term, mid term, long term framework that we can advise governments and corporations on to implement and test.

    Great, thank you, Cory, the accordion player of the year. Celebrate that segment, and then we're gonna open up to some questions to all our speakers.

    Sounds good. JOHN will play interlude music here, except things like that.

    Great, thank you, Cory. Sonny, do you have a question to see who's on stage?

    Yeah, I have a question. I'm trying to figure out how to get in and wait together in some way. And, you know, they're two of my favorites. And, and, and, you know, just just the language and the way that they speak. It just feels it feels so different to me and then wondering, when when Kane was talking about this use of the machine years celebration happening in the future? and wondering we, because we don't have time if we lose the languages, which is something that Wait is that a lot of time studying? And if we lose the culture, so is there perhaps some way to turn this as you talk about this artificial intelligence and see language? learning in some way to make it so that we can capture the languages and the cultures and the richness of them that those that have not been heard before they die? Is there some way that we can we can use and I'm thinking about eo Wilson in this all species? And is there some way to think about how we, how we capture the richness of this very quickly, dwindling diversity, cultural and linguistic? diversity? If we were all everyone is nodding to the importance of community, and nodding to the importance of the collective rather than the individual in terms of, of of creating joy and happiness? So that's my question, either one of you can play with it, if you would, please. Yeah.

    Happy to answer, Sonny first. I think definitely, I, I watched a lot of the talks from Wade and I definitely resonate with everything he said. And I think it's very important to find diversity when we create these utopian futures. When we re imagine these utopian futures can we include the virus virus dreams from all these other cultures that have been somehow neglected in the current development and include them into the new vision of the society that we want to create supported by technology. And also, I think a lot of the, you know, the wisdom from you know, these 7000 voices really help us to enrich our understanding of human basic human needs and dreams, because that's the foundation of how to be happy and and we obviously have Maslow's pyramid and some other models about what his needs and dreams are. But I think, you know, we really need a much wider data set or we need to have a much more diverse point of view of all these needs and dreams so that we can amplify them through technology.

    Yeah, Sonny, I just said that, you know, we have this AI. all cultures are myopic, faithful to their own interpretations of reality in the name for most tribal people translates the people the implication being that the blokes over the hill are somehow savages and the cultural myopia has been the curse of humanity. Because the dawn of awareness and it's something we can no longer tolerate as we try to move toward a multicultural, pluralistic or did the note that these other societies are not some have this digital, you know, with vague comments to make both the nature of being alive these are dynamic living peoples, each culture of which reserves are placed at the Council of human knowledge and wisdom. And these societies again are not fading away as if by natural law, their field keeping up in fact, every one of these cultures is is dynamic and alive. I mean, technology never threatens culture, it can change culture. But change again is no threat to culture, all peoples everywhere through all time are always dancing with new possibilities. For life, it's neither technology nor change that threatens culture, it's always power. And so it's not like these are dead, you know, destined to fade away, these are cultures amic, alive, being driven out of existence, by identifiable forces, which can be industrial that can be ideological. And as I always say, that's an optimistic observation. Because if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can be the facilitators of cultural survival. And, you know, much as important it is, is it is to salvage the lexicon. So since grammar, the languages, they don't do anyone much good if they're just fortified and placed in a hard drive. Now, these, the language is just an expression of a culture, it's a vehicle through which the soul of the feminine material world, so you know that the language is a cater of something deeper. And that's the cultural roots and reality of the people. And we have to come to understand that every culture really does have something to say. And it can be part of an ongoing human project without having to turn its back on the roots of what it what of what, what it is. And, and one of the things we see around the world is the ubiquitous culture, the modern, which is a sort of toxic, as is the Marxist mania of Beijing, right. And education, ironically, plays a great role in that now there's nothing wrong with education, basic literacy and numeracy is essential. But too often, education is not delivered as a kind of conduit to knowledge or skill sets, but rather as a process of socialization. And I mean, just to cite one example of that is, in the case you desert of Kenya, surviving drought is the key adaptive imperative. And one way of doing that is to educate an elder son, which is fine, but the problem is the boys go off to these missionary schools where they acquire a modicum of literacy, but in a context that teaches them to be ashamed of who they are as people. So they come into the school as silence of a rich nomadic pesto oral tradition that goes back 10,000 years, they graduate as clerks. They can't go back because they've been taught to be ashamed. And so what does it mean to go forward? It means moving to Nairobi, and trying to scratch living from the edges of a cash economy. And the interesting thing is that all indices the development paradigm, have increased urbanization, literacy, per capita income. But again, back to the fundamental question that brought the john pose to bring us all together today. Has quality of life improved? And the answer categorically is no.

    So Sunny, it's, it's Robert, can I just jump in for a minute? I think what what you pointed to, and I think what Cain and Wade are talking about, too, is the, the drive toward atomization. And this delusion, we would say, in the Buddhist world, the delusion of a six separate self, that atomized and moves around in the world without relation to other selves, as opposed to being completely intertwined with never separate from the rest of the world. So these cultures that we're talking about are collective beings that were described in terms of social structures, where sharing is absolutely essential, is the opposite of where we're going. And, you know, kailen mentioned Maslin hierarchy a couple of times. Well, Maslow's Hierarchy has as its top tier, self actualization. It's an atomized view of existence. So I think what we want to do is keep calling out the way in which the fallacy of the of individualism has infused every culture and what we're doing there are thrust forward and brought back as well.

    And Robert, this so right, because I mean, if you think of the whole kind of democratization of opinion that the internet has brought the, the culture of self, even the, you know, the so called attack on Congress on January 6, it was sort of, you know, a coup d'etat by cell phone. I mean, the people got in there, and they mostly wander around taking pictures of themselves. I mean, there, there is this extraordinary kind of Cult of the individual, which, which is kind of antithetical to the, the nature of life, as I've experienced with indigenous people around the world. And, and one of the things that is so poignant about back to this idea of reciprocity is that climate change, it's important remember, climate change has become humanity's problem. Wasn't caused by humanity. It was caused by this really narrow subset of humanity that for 300 years has eaten the ancient sunlight of the world. And most societies played no role in the creation of the problem, but are dealing with the consequences every day. And for them, it's a very different scenario, because it's not a technical challenge. It's not an economic opportunity. It's not a political debate. It's an existential and psychological crisis, because they believe they're responsible for the well being of the world, that their rituals and ceremonies maintain this delicate balance of life. And so when things go wrong, it's their fault. So climate change in these societies is very, very pregnant, because it's something beyond their control, that in many ways they're addressing more proactively than we are. I'll be it with ritual and prayer and desire.

    This is such a rich discussion. So let me just reset the room because we've had a number of people join in who may have missed the beginning. The topic is imagination and action and tonight's session, we're talking about happiness. We have three amazing speakers, Robert, Wade, and Kieran and we're talking about what is progress? Has the quality of life increased? What's happened with the importance of relationships, and as you just heard, the illusion of a separate self that has guided a lot of modern cultures. So let me encourage you, if you're new to clubhouse to raise your hand, if you have a question. The way it works is you raise your hand at the bottom of the screen, and you can come join us on the stage. We'd love to take any questions. And if there aren't any questions, john, and I have quite a few. But we just want to open it up, given the amazing audience that's here and see if any of you have questions for the speakers.

    Gareth and Chris, you have questions now, Eleanor,

    and Esther.

    And Esther.

    Hello, yes. I mean, I can go first if, if that's okay. Sure. Yeah. Well, first, I just wanted to say thank you so much to all the speakers, Robert Wade, and cayenne. It's been absolutely fascinating to listen to you. And my question is about happiness in the animal kingdom. Now, I think, you know, we would probably agree that humans don't have a complete monopoly on happiness. I'm sure. Many of us have seen those videos of soldiers coming back after a long time away. And their pet dogs are going wild with euphoria. You know, I'm not embarrassed to admit it always brings a tear to my eye. But I assume that we will probably say that a creature maybe such as an ant, doesn't experience happiness. Now, I'm not an expert. So I'd love to hear your answer to that. But also, so my question is, where in between? Does happiness arise in evolution? And what does this tell us about human happiness?

    Where it arises in evolution? Whoa. No, I've never heard that question before. So hopefully, Wade, or Katie know all about it. Well,

    I would just say, you know, Robert, I would say that, look, we all know that we are of an animal nature primordially. And we know that animals clearly have any number of emotional reactions, many, which were only just coming to discover whether it's communication between elephants over distances, we can say the same thing, but the botanical realm, and I used to work as a kid as a logger, if I had been told that the plants actually communicated in this sophisticated way, chemically, through the mycelia such that A mother tree would disproportionately you know, spread the product of photosynthesis and respiration to you know, etc, etc. I'd say You're crazy. So we're learning more and more about communication in the natural world. But that said, I think it's hard to disagree that something happened to us, you know, this notion of some flash of the imagination slash to the spirit. Some Juniper fuse of the imagination, as my friend Clayton said about that cave transformed us into you know, conscious beings have a sword that whereas other creatures may communicate, they may have what we would call consciousness, but clearly it is It doesn't seem to be an existential dilemma to a dolphin or to an elephant. I mean, you know, physical threats clearly are. But you certainly don't get the impression that, you know, dolphins have the need of services of people like Robert. But, but

    not so far now.

    But but we certainly do. And God bless them for it, you know, so I think I think you can get yourself in a bit of a pickle trying to deny the obvious that there is something about us that evolution gifted us and part of that is that is that, you know, awareness and community, as we discovered with COVID is, is to the human social species, what T's teeth and claws are to the Jaguar, I mean, that's what was so moving about COVID, a pathogen 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, literally commentator a biology, but at the same time that broke down the networks of community and relationships that are the very foundation of the well being of a social species. Yeah, no,

    I have to say that this is amazing question. And I've, I think we thank you very much, Chris. I think a lot of the happiness research has brought us back to the roots of, you know, we being a social animal, and I think the the findings that, you know, from Roberts study, and also from many other studies, you know, the need of community, the need of quality connections, the need of finding our tribe is very much, you know, linked with our animal roots. But humans are also unique, I think, you know, we are a species that are search for meaning. And we we search for purpose, and we also learn to express through art, you know, art was creative expression was invented before language and was before any of these industrial innovations. And we are also a very curious species that we have this desire to figure out problems that are bigger than ourselves, like, what is the origin of the universe? What is, you know, the gravitational wave, and somehow these questions, brings some kind of satisfaction to us. And I think all of these elements are extremely important to consider when we are building a society where our work might become irrelevant, right? If If labor is replaced by machines, and, you know, we are finally liberated for the first, you know, first time since forever, that we don't have to work and, you know, how do we fill our time with activities that are meaningful? And and I think that is kind of a fundamental question to think about, as well. You know, how this happened is, you know, what role happened is playing in a evolutional evolutionary path. And what is the future of that?

    Great, thank you are our Juna, do you have a question? And then,

    as I definitely

    you're saying,

    I buying ice cream?

    Arjuna. We can't hear you. So maybe come back to you in a minute. You're in a bad spot?

    Yeah, eating ice cream. right back. Okay,

    that's what ice cream does to you. Okay,

    yeah. Great. I'll be back. I'll be back. Yeah,

    we'll get I'll be back in at some point. All right.

    Esther, did you have a question?

    Yes, I do. It's, it's less a question. It's brief. It's, it's more like a conversation prompt. But, and forgive me, I joined late, so but I'm just thinking about happiness. And, you know, if you think about it, it's like, you have to be unhappy at some point to be happy. It's, it's sort of inevitably not a steady state. I mean, you're happy when you finish climbing the mountain, you're happy when your loved one comes home. But then it sort of wears off. It's almost like an addictive drug you need you need more and more and more. Whereas, and so I'm trying to think what what is the better thing to strive for than happiness, which almost inherently is, is short term in some way. And the thing I'm thinking of is purpose, which is, you know, happiness is better than it was. Whereas purpose is more focused on the future and getting to something even better. And it's, it's the thing we're going to lack I think when when we start having no work to do anyway, I'd love to hear some insights on that question.

    So I can say a little bit about that. And by the way, after you and I were in the same college dormitory together, I just discovered when I heard you on clubhouse a couple weeks ago, but

    OMG, I'll follow up later

    we were, we were but you know, one of the things in my world, the the world of psychological research on happiness, they kind of divided into two big flavors he donek, wellbeing and eudaimonic well being. And he done it wellbeing is exactly what you're describing about just this, am I happy right now goes up and down all day long. And eudaimonic well being is this sense, it could be a sense of the future of purpose, it could also just be a sense of meaning right now. And so the best example, is the parent who is reading to their three year old reading Goodnight, Moon for the 20th time, and the parent is exhausted, after a long day and good night Moon is, is no longer thrilling. But that experience of sitting with your child. And reading that book one more time, is one of the most meaningful experiences one can have in the moment. That's the quintessential eudaimonic well being. And I think that what what we've seen is that what people can do is build a kind of bedrock of eudaimonic well being that helps them weather the ups and downs of unhappy days and moments and life crises.

    I could, if Robert, going back to your Buddhist path. I mean, I my father was not a religious man, but he was very wise. And he used to just say to me, there's there's good and evil son, take your pick and get on with it. And what he was really challenging was the sort of Christian idea of dualism that you know that there's good and evil that, that if we just work hard enough good will triumph over evil. And of course, the Dharma doesn't suggest that. And, you know, sort of you ask the question, for example, the obvious question of Gods all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? If you ask that question, in medieval France, you're burned at the stake as a heretic. But when Lord Krishna was asked by a student, Lord Krishna said, Why Does God Exist? You know, why? How can evil exist if God's all powerful, and his response was to thicken the plot. In other words, good and evil always coexist. And, and one of the big lessons I learned in life is that you never win, you can't expect to win, you know, so that if you recognize life, not as a path to a destination, but simply as a path to a state of mind, which, which is of course, the whole point of the fourth noble truth, then then you become like a mountain, the wind can't shake, you know, you win some you lose some disappointments sort of fall off your back, like rainwater, just as great moments of ecstasy slip away into the mist. And meanwhile, you still have that choice put to you by your father, what side you want to be on, pick it and get on with it. And so, you know, Peter Mathewson, the great writers said, anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous. And he had in mind people like Mao, and Hitler and Stalin, but but what he was really getting at is the is that realm of desire, that if you, if you if you don't expect to win, you keep going. And that's why I certainly find that even though I'm not old, but I'm not young, I'm 67, I still retain exactly the same joy and enthusiasm and idealism that I had when I was 20. I really do. And it's not because I haven't faced disappointments in life or, or failures in life, it's just that I never expect to win.

    Well, and that and from the Buddhist perspective, it's not getting attached to outcomes, what you're getting joy from is the path and the journey, that if we get attached to outcomes, we're lost, because we can never control the outcomes, but we can manage our intentions and how we walk a path.

    And I think, to me, that is, in a sense, and muchyou certainly would suggest that the essence of happiness, you know, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, there's this great libertarian, I think his name is no sic, a philosopher, who taught was called Do you know him? Robert? He knew. Yeah, he taught a course called the meaning of life. Well, if you taught a course in the meaning of life, you know, um, that you probably get five students turning out but then Lowell lecture hall was filled to the gunnels with 2000 kids taking this class and he did this kind of imagine that story, imagination kind of exercise. Every class was just okay, what do you what do you need to be happy, and he conjure up this, it could be wealth, it could be sex, it could be achievement, whatever. And he would visualize this, and at the end of the class, you realize, nope, that doesn't do it. You know, that won't do. And at the end of the day, you realize that that wasn't the path to happiness at all. Right?

    Yeah. I think I think it's, it's very interesting because we've been thinking about this for long Time, you know, the different culture probably interpret happiness differently because in Chinese culture, for example, happiness most likely means something much longer term. And if we detach our, you know, kind of interpretation of happiness from language, I think there is a difference between temporary short term happiness versus the long term happiness and for short term happiness, the question is, you know, what are the conditions that creates a perfect moment? You know, I've been trying to build my life around extraordinary moments and trying to understand what are the life I think of my life? You know, try to think of the best moments in my life, and how can I nourish my life around those moments and create those conditions that, you know, create more moments like that? And the second question is, what does it mean to have a good life? And I think that is the longer term question, which has been a fundamental philosophical question since beginning of humanity, I think that is probably one of the best questions we can ask ourselves, especially under the context of, you know, future technology trends, and, and how, how we can, you know, create products and tools to enable, in our vision for such a good life. I think these are two separate questions, and it's very important balance between the two.

    So we have others who have expressed interest in asking a question his distinguished panel, I'm just going to go down the list, Gareth. And I hope I'm saying your name right. Do you have a question? And then Eleanor?

    Is California. Thank you, john. I think I'm becoming a big fan of yours now. And thank you for the panels and very enlightening, I just want to draw on the comments been, but not specific. Questions, because coming on culture, countries, who might be the catalyst that can actually challenge people to ask the right questions, so that we can all work towards the same goal. Thank you. That's Gallup. Question. Thanks.

    Super, maybe Eleanor, do you want to ask your question? And we'll put these together?

    Sure, um, my name is Eleanor. And it's more in general, what workflow but also mentioned here earlier in the, in the discussion about, you know, being in lockdown here, and, you know, the title of the room right, in challenging times. And my question is more? How can we bring or find, or train up maybe happiness again, after a series of event of series of challenging events. For example, I've I've had, like blood clots twice, both my leg and my lung, and, and now I've been locked down here for a year, and just reading all the news. Now, of course, it's tough. And, you know, with the vaccine, and people who are getting more blood clots and so forth, so how can I start trailing up just finding little happiness again, because like, Killian also mentioned here earlier that Yeah, but you know, asking ourselves for the purpose and, like, that's their humanity strengths. Right. So, are there any tips to try to practice it up again?

    Eleanor, I could, I could say a bit in response to that. Which is, you know, it sounds like you've been through some major health challenges, and, and that, you know, on top of the pandemic, just compounds things hugely. But I think and, and it's hard when your health isn't as good, but that probably the, the thing that we know makes us happiest is when we can invest in things beyond the self. Because, you know, one of the problems with illness is it gets us very focused on the self we have to be but when you can, when you have energy, if you can invest in in people beyond you, and, and in things causes that you care about things that you love, beyond the self, that that tends to bring a kind of contentment. That helps a lot and helps you whether the slings and arrows of health problems and pandemics.

    Great, thank you, Rob. But you also mentioned earlier that correct me if I'm have not understood it correctly, but happiness kind of decline as we get older and we lose some of our health is that Do you think that's relatable now, for people being at home throughout the pandemic, you know, being hit by COVID? Or having blood clots or so forth? Can we actually face this time earlier on if we're facing a lot of diseases as young people?

    Yes, I mean, one of the things that that when we one thing we found in our research is that couples who were people who were having more health problems, were less depressed, if they had someone with them, if they had people who they felt really had their back doesn't have to be a partner, they want to be married. But if they had at least one person who they felt was really there for them, that the literally day to day pain was less, even in the face of illness, when they had someone else there. And they've done all these wonderful experiments where people are facing painful medical procedures, and having someone there to hold your hand, specifically someone you know, is is like administering a mild anesthetic. So that is to say that human connection actually has these physiological effects that help to mitigate some of the some of the distress that comes with health problems.

    Thank you. That's amazing. I had no idea about that.

    I'd like to like to offer something to following up on what Robert said. And this is dangerous, because Robert is the actual director of the program whose results, I'm quoting here, the Harvard study of adult development and the prior director of the program. Dr. George Vaillant. He's he said, book happiness equals love the centerpiece of all of our well being happiness, long term thriving, is human connection. So when we find ourselves in times of stress, in times of illness, the thing that brings us back is that connection, and it's so easy to forget how central part of our lives, that is, when we don't get to see our friends. And yet, at the same time, it's relatively straightforward to reestablish those connections, by deliberately calling people putting it on the calendar to reconnect to friends, setting aside time to do that deliberately, as opposed to showing up at work where you bump into colleagues, or bumping into people on the street. So that's a big, big part of it. And the more we do that, the more we reconnect with our network of associations and support, the better we're going to feel overall. And another thing which may help is people talk about dopamine and dopamine being like this pleasure chemical, but doping means pretty subtle, it's, you get dopamine, when there is a difference between what you expect from the world, and what you get. And when what you get is better than what you expect, then boom, you get this little jolt of happy. So that leads us to this hack, which is that if we lower our expectations, and if we're happy with the fact that holy shit 120 billion people are dead, I'm not. So we are the survivors. And you are the endpoint of by some accounts, 150,000 generations of hominins. And they are stoked that you're alive. And you are here. And I'm hoping my ancestors are too. So just rejoicing in the fact that we are here and how unlikely that is, as opposed to where's my super yacht, which is always alternative possibility. That is something that can potentially make us happy at any moment. And that feeds into a gratitude practice. And if you have something like that, the clinical evidence is pretty clear. It helps a lot, just like even one. So people say do it once a day, but even once a week, their clinical results were pretty dramatic. The people just get happier when they focus on what there is, the things that they can be grateful for, as opposed to what there is not, which is a potentially infinite storage, but there's an even bigger infinite store of stuff that there is like mitochondria that work all day long without you telling them to. So those are two useful things and to quote Lord Krishna, again, we are entitled to our labors but not the fruits of our labor. So we do what we can to create the circumstance for happiness and leave the rest to whatever happens and keep our expectations in a place that will keep us happy with what we have. Hope that's helpful.

    super well, first of all Eleanor. This is Alison, I just want to really thank you for asking that question. Because as Jen and I put this topic together for tonight with these three wonderful speakers, I think it is a time when lots of people are not feeling happy. And it's very, very important to connect this to individuals journey around happiness. So thank you for asking that. And we have 15 people who've been patiently waiting to ask questions. So I think Nasreen, you're next, you have to unmute yourself and then and

    I'm back from the ice cream when you're ready.

    Okay, well, you've kind of moved in the queue. I do that that's okay with you. Can we do need to go ahead of Massereene or can we?

    No, no, that's okay. But

    if you PTR, you'll get everything back in order.

    Okay. Thank you.

    Go ahead.

    Thank you so much, everyone, for being here. Thank you so much to you and for sharing your, your talent and your experience with us. My name is Mr. Green, and I speak five different language. I was born in a land of Buddha. And I was able to survive modern day slavery. When I was very young, nine or 10 year old, I was a child labor for textile industry for a few years, and I was able to survive that. And I came to understand that the garments that we use to sue was washed away many times before it will arrive in were well known sharp. And you know, the suffering, and our blood and tears would be washed away also. So not even one piece of thread will tell the story. And my question is like, how can we use technology to tell the story to eradicate modern day slavery? And right now I see that technology is being used mostly by Rich people to make them more rich, such as Amazon and Elon Musk is those are the people are very perfect example. So and my question to you Kion is like how can we use technology to bring basic, basic human rights to all those 40 million people who lived and experienced very similar to, to me, and they don't even have access to food and clean water and shelter and education and clean environment? How can technology bring these basic human rights to all those people who are unseen and unheard right now, and especially those are the people in my part of the world, in India and Nepal, Pakistan's, we are really, like experiencing intense amount of slavery and, and we just feel so helpless. And, you know, humanity has sold that they have given their power to greed, and, and control and negative energy. But I do have a feeling that maybe we can use the technology mindful way, which can tell the story of the of the products that can really tell the truth to the people. So the world knows who made their clothes who made their phones, or who made their coffees, you know, and, and provide those service to the people actually, who makes them and not put them into a cage and not put them into a like in a continual cycle of suffering. So thank you.

    Yeah, thank you very much nice rain? It's a it's a very profound question and deep question. I think, as I mentioned, you know, the technology magnifies who we are and the existing economic system we have based on consumerism, and poverty, productivity is not sustainable. And I think a lot of the problem that you mentioned, is rooted in in that non sustainable trace and trajectory around productivity and continue to produce more. And that's why we are at a time to really re imagine, you know, what are the fundamental human needs and dreams that we want to support in this new economic paradigm that is supported by technology. And I also agree that, you know, in in the current, you know, big technology companies, there is a lot of drive, that are based on toxic metrics, such as in what I mentioned, the ads model, but that is fundamentally rooted in how you know, the adequacy in our economic principles to explaining fundamental digital values. And that is a problem to be fixed in economics and not in technology. So my fundamental view is that we influence the technology we build and not the other way around. And we need to go back to ask ourselves, what are the values and systems we want to build, and guide the technologies to build those systems that can accelerate, and scale those values, and not to be slave enslaved by the type of the tools and products that we build. And also, I think it's very important to think when we look at happiness and joy, if we're talking about a joy economy, it's very important that this economy can scale and it is sustainable. So you know, there is a balance between short term and long term goals. And there is also a balance between elitism and also, you know, the, you know, everyone you know, how everyone can benefit from from this new economic paradigm. And my vision of, you know, how we can integrate happiness into the new economic matrix is when we think about supermarkets, where we have now built in a, we have built economy that created 50 different types of pasta sources that don't really bring more joy. And can we build a platform or a trading system that, you know, exchanges, tokens of love or affection? Or how we can connect better with each other? And if we are free from the nine to five, you know, work schedule, and how can we feel these hours with fulfilling and joyful activities with with each other? That brings meaning and fulfillment? I think that is a fundamental outcome of how this new economic paradigm should think about. Yeah

    So, you guys for the, for the next few. This is what I suggest we do. Let's take four questions in a row just for people to see give their question. And then two or three speakers. Just write down things that resonate with you that you may want to respond to. So we won't do questions one at a time. So Terry, did you have a chance to ask a question?

    Carrie do and ask a question.

    Yeah, it'd be happy.

    And if you could make it short, and we're going to do four in a row. Yep.

    I had more time, I'd make it shorter. Okay, happy to. I came in, during happy ants and good night moon in the powerful story of Nazarene and I hope that day becomes true soon, where every dollar we spend has the least amount of negative impact in the world. Yeah, quickly. In 2003, I spent the deepest sleep in my entire life. I was in a room in Washington, DC, surrounded by books. And it was if I had absorbed through osmosis, the great adventures throughout the world. But the fact of the matter was, there was a speech being warmed up the day before. by one way, Davis, who was working through his TED Talk, his TED Talk began with the words, you know, so conversationally, except everything that followed, I didn't know. And then it ended with a collective well being and the wisdom of collective well being. Wade spoke about the atmosphere. And I wonder if his early observations of clubhouse could maybe bring together some collective wisdom in a way the atmosphere is intended to where we could keep and capture that collective wisdom, and do a better job, all of us participating in preserving the wisdom of mankind there within us a question.

    Great, thank you, Terry. event, I think, Dr. Ali, we already heard from you. event, you have a question?

    Yeah. So I would just like to quote, Gandhi, and I would like to see what you think about that. So Gandhi has a very famous, you know, saying, which goes happiness, this when what you say, what you think, and what you do are in harmony. And that really speaks to me that alignment of what you say what you think and what you do, being in harmony, and maybe in that, you know, in that context, also authenticity and what your thoughts are in terms of how that pertains to true, you know, happiness. Thank you.

    Thank you. And then I'm not sure if I'm saying it, right. Is it Mally?

    Miley?

    Miley, beautiful name? Do you want to ask your question?

    I'm sure and I'll keep it very short in general. So open it up to anybody who'd like to chime in. But one of the things that just I personally struggle with is an autoimmune disease. And so I'm also single, so being quarantined alone for over a year. And battling with an autoimmune disease has not been easy. So what advice would you give someone like me or anybody else who was maybe not only been along through quarantine, but also battling with an ongoing illness that may Cause ups and downs in depression and whatnot. And just how do you find happiness and all of that? This is my land I've done speaking.

    Great. And then next after you, Liz, one of the moderators of the room, do you have a question list? All right, Matthew, going to you, Matthew, do you have a question?

    Yeah, I had a question, john. Hi. Yes. My question relates to complex systems. And I'm reminded of an essay that Michael Creighton wrote in 2005, on Yellowstone National Park, which addressed the founding of the park in the very early years of the 20th century by Teddy Roosevelt, and how everything that the park rangers did in the following 50 years to try to improve the ecology of the park actually had an almost contrarian effect. And maybe when we talk about creating happiness through technology, that the same complex systems apply. I'm reminded also that in dealing with COVID, which sadly has produced 3 million deaths worldwide, but in fact, we ignore aids, which has produced 37 million deaths worldwide, and in 2019, killed 700,000 people in 2018, killed 600,000. But sadly, most of those were in developing countries so had been fundamentally ignored by the West. Well, it's not fair to say entirely ignored but but had been perhaps swept under the carpet in comparison with our reaction to COVID. The second thing is that personal happiness is so many people have said is the absence of materialism is found I'm sorry, in not in materialism, but in the absence once suffering has been removed. So once we remove disease, ill health, lack of lack of wealth, lack of a roof over one's head, lack of food, then genuine happiness comes from relationship. And in many ways, what we've seen with Facebook and tick tock and social media, is that real relationships have have been torn apart by them in many ways, as I think some of the studies at MIT have shown. Great, what the speakers have to say about that.

    Yeah, thank you, Matthew, and then Max, our jazz musician. Did you want to ask a quick question and then we're going to go to the speakers.

    Oh, somebody else asked it thank you, though,

    I'd like to add a quick thought before we go to speakers. If I might have john

    Sure Arjun

    I was doing some I was doing real life happiness research in the field earlier, buying a screen for myself and my wife. And I had a couple of thoughts I'd like to run by you first is I'm curious when you research happiness? Does the thought ever fleeting, you Lee occur to you that happiness might be the wrong metric. And I was trying to think of a good analogy I was I was thinking if you went to a if you went to a big Hollywood producers house and saw Oscars on the wall, and you might go Oh, Oscars are the key. But actually an Oscar is just an icon of something else. You don't get an Oscar just for an Oscar, you get an asking because you did something else. And I'm wondering if happiness might be a little like that, that it's the kind of byproduct, the almost, almost kind of unintended, byproduct of something else. And that's one point. Second thing connected to it. I noticed that a lot of the metrics we use as potential precursors of happiness are external. I mean, we mentioned in our debt just today, we've mentioned popcorn, we've mentioned chocolate, we've mentioned, you know, even purpose is it can be you could see as an external, because it's something that involves your participation of the people. We've talked about relationship. But even when we talk about Buddhism, it involves affiliating to something that pre exists. And I just, I haven't done academic research. But I've written several books connected to this theme where I did a lot of interviews. And it seemed to me the conclusion I came to is that happiness is or wellbeing is most Connect mostly connected to something completely and utterly invisible and, and really not measurable at all except by anecdote, which is more of a state of being than anything that we could we could measure a state of being that's really unconditional upon anything external. So that's just a thought I'd like to pop in.

    Yeah, no, thank you. So tours are three speakers. You heard from five people, is there anything you want to react to? or build upon? Or directly answer?

    I guess I would just jump in there from the very the last speaker action is that, you know, happiness and joy. I mean, you know, if you think your image of the most uptight Puritan what is the definition of Puritanism? It's the, the vital fear that somewhere somewhere on or somebody in some way at some time is actually having fun.

    That's that's sort of a definition.

    And, and, and finding joy is truly a conduit to happiness, to get to the initial question, focused on the ethnos sphere. And whether you know, clubhouse is a new network of meaning, I guess it is, I'm a bit of a neophyte at it, but it did strike me. One thing that is maybe interesting to people is that technology, when I say there's no threat to culture, it's amazing how the internet has become kind of a global campfire around which indigenous people can gather. And it's very empowering. Because they no longer feel alone. So all around the world to connect or communicate with the Kibo are in touch with the Inuit who are talking to what happened, you know, in, in, in Mexico, and so on. So it's become a very much a tool of, of empowerment. And I just would finally say on on the issue of you're somebody, that whole imposition of national parks was all part of, you know, Terra nullius, the idea that the American continent was empty of people, and therefore we had to empty it. And we forget the extent that Teddy Roosevelt, the hero of the conservation movement, was a great hater of Indians, who he called a pestilence to be removed from the body of the earth, john Mueller spoke viciously against the original inhabitants of Yosemite as he strove to make it a park. In fact, I have a soupy friend of mine from bread, tells the story of a great great grandmother, who was hoeing corn at bread Angel Falls at the bottom of the Grand Canyon when it's kind of fat guy with a mustache warmed up to her and ordered her out of his Park. And that was Teddy Roosevelt. And of course, I have the soup I had lived there for four generations. So this is few comments on a bunch of the questions.

    Yeah, so my comments is also, I think, interesting mentioned on social media, definitely, I think, a lot of the, you know, the, the widespread use of social media is distracting us from from joy. And my view is that, fundamentally, it is still the, you know, the matrix that we're using to afford revenue generation for how we design technological products. And because today, we our revenue generation is based on ad revenue. So therefore, social media is inherently designed to kind of, you know, get more attention from the consumers. But if we can change the fundamental economic model and revenue generation model, then technology can be used to maximize joy and, and, you know, during the pandemic, if without zoom, we will all feel super low, and not be able to connect with pretty much anyone and the longest pandemic in history lasted for 200 years, with a vaccine and without, you know, any, any kind of type of way to connect with, you know, a large group of people. So I think technology is a neutral tool, and it's really we influence how we want to build it and how we want it to go. And the fundamental gap is really how much we understand what brings joy and happiness and how we can guide technology to amplify that. And in terms of the right metric, it's also a great question. And, and I think our current understanding of what does happiness mean? Or what is joy mean? or What does a good life mean is, it varies a lot, from culture, to culture, from person to person. And that's why we need to do this research and figure out, can we find a more consistent understanding of what does happiness mean and how we can amplify it in the future. And there is definitely this balance between the inward and outward journey, you know, they're looking into your spiritual needs, to your, you know, to understand what, how we can be how we can integrate more moments of this holistic connectivity with you know, the universe versus in the outward journey of finding your tribe find your community find your purpose and meaning, and also the individual versus systemic view where, you know, how can we build systems and technological platforms that creates a calming environment or environment that encourage creativity and a smart city that encourage quality, connect, quality connection and serendipity and all of these are possible. It's just how we wanted Do in how we want to create all these things. So, so my fundamental view is that, you know, we influence technology and not the other way around. And, and what is missing is our fundamental understanding of joy, happiness, well being all these fundamental problems and questions, not, you know, the technology that we created.

    Robert, did you want to comment anything? Can you?

    Yeah, a couple of things. One is event I love the Gandhi, quote, happiness is one what you say thinking doing harmony. And it makes so much sense. Because what we know is that psychologically when you are at war with yourself, when you're when what you say Think and Do are at odds with each other, or countered contradict each other, there's tremendous psychic energy used up and wasted in those contradictions and in trying to maintain those contradictions. And so it makes a great deal of sense that happiness, or a kind of equanimity, would be when we can bring those things into alignment as much as possible. And I often wonder, when we think about so much hypocrisy that goes on in the world, and particularly in our political life, how exhausting it can be, it must be. And, you know, Matthew, I just wanted, I think what you said about complex response. Oh, and I just wanted to say that this, this idea of complex systems, and that when we try to improve, we make things worse, that one of the things we don't talk about with technology is that, yes, it's a tool, but it is a tool that cannot replace human interaction. And one of the things we're trying to understand in our research is what exactly is it that human interaction online, provides, and that human interaction in person provides. And there is something we think of as emotion regulation, where we literally regulate each other's emotional arousal, usually in very helpful ways. And much of that seems not to be able to happen online, it seems only to be able to happen in person. And so one of the interesting questions as we come out of this pandemic is, what can we identify as the some of the unique things that happen in face to face interaction that cannot happen through technology, no matter what we do with it? And finally, Arjun? No, besides wanting to know what kind of ice cream you ordered, this idea that well being is a state that's Connect not not connected with anything external, the Buddhists would say, That's absolutely true. But there is real suffering in the world as we know. And so what we're talking about is, is the extra layering on of suffering, which we humans do to ourselves, over and above the real cancers, and the real traumas of life and the unsatisfactoriness of life. And it's important to distinguish those because, you know, we think about my lay suffering with an autoimmune disease, that is a real suffering. And that does that is something that we cannot simply imagine a way or meditate away. And so, what the Buddhists talk about is the layering on of optional suffering. And that really doesn't have to depend on external factors. Okay, that's all I'm gonna say,

    So Alison, she's gonna go next facilitating but I just want to remind people, you're an imagination action. We have some great speakers here today. This shows on happiness. Next week, it's on space. We have an astronaut. We have a guy building a habitat for the moon. We have a exoplanet astronomer, we have someone from JPL. We have an MIT professor that teaches a course on exoplanets next week is space. The week after that is we have the chief medical officer from the company materna that made one of them vaccines. That should be a great one. And we also have Juan and Rico as a futurist and the founder of Wired Magazine, who's very focused on bio, and they're going to be talking about life sciences. And then the week after that, we have Ed Boyden, who is one of the leaders on the brain optogenetics and a disciple of his who's gone off to run her own lab, to blue Lena. That's gonna be great. And in the coming weeks, we have two Hollywood experts talking about movies and the metoo movement and Black Lives Matter and what that means to them. We We also have a longevity expert who did a study on people who are centenarians. We also have someone from the Salk Institute, who's doing important work on sleep and circadian rhythm. So tune in every Tuesday, six 8pm, Eastern Standard Time, imagination, action. And all these shows we record and we we make them into podcasts and, and we have a website, you can see all our speakers imagination in action dot club. So Allison, thank you so much for your leadership here, along with all the others who are helping them make the show happen when you bring us home.

    Thank you so much. Well, let me just also point out one thing I love about John's imagination and action is it goes into the wee hours of the evening, which is particularly kind of those of you in London, but the other speakers to hang with us in the audience as well. But we love to answer all the audience questions we can. So if it's okay with everybody, what I'd like to do is take questions from the six people. Now five, who are left on stage with questions, and then hear from each of the speakers. And then I have one last question to the speakers. And then john will close us out with music.

    Alison? Yes, I'm terribly sorry. It's Wait here. This was scheduled six to eight.

    Yes. Feel free to drop

    Unfortunately I have to drop out of another obligation has been

    Yeah, you probably have an honorary degree to give or feature ed to go do some mystical dancers on, you're amazing. We're so proud to be affiliated with you. And we'll record we'll edit this and get you something that will go along with the many podcasts and videos and other things you do. Wade, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, very much. Thanks, Robert.

    Thank you.

    Wonderful to be with you all. Thank you.

    And I'm going to need to sign off shortly to is there some way we could do a kind of closing and then people could hang out longer if they want to?

    I think that's a great idea. Maybe we should do that. JOHN, maybe we should, you know, do a quick round of closing and then people can hang out for more? No, yeah.

    Yeah, we'll take the questions from the people who've been patiently waiting for quite a while, which I think is now down to 1234, or five of you, then we'll hear from the two remaining speakers. And then john will close this out. And anyone who wants to stick around as Welcome to so Liam, I believe you are next? You have a question?

    Hi, thank you so much for hosting this room. I have an acknowledgement and I guess I just want to acknowledge for me, happiness is a present moment experience that is experienced in my body, and in my heart. And, and like in this moment, I actually feel nervous speaking on stage and I have hunger and I have other things that maybe wouldn't go in the category of happiness, but I'm speaking similar to what some other people had proposed. That I think there's joy inside of just experiencing meaning. And and that even just, you know, being in a room with let's see here, it looks like there's 100 other people, you know, having these conversations and connect connecting is your hearing Miley story, hearing Massereene story, um, you know, touches my heart. And and there's, there's a flavor of happiness in that in that connection. So I'm just grateful to be I think clubhouse has been fabulous in allowing us and me to feel in a moment, and to connect in with tribe, and to have human interaction. And I think it's an example of technology that allows that. And I guess I just want to speak and say that I think that that this meaning, or happiness, or joy is something that's accessible at any time. For me, I access it through gratitude, love, and all. And no matter what's happening in the world, I can hear a bird. I can hear my son. I can breathe a breath. And it's fucking amazing that I can't. And so I'm just so I'm in I'm in that space. Maybe it's a little bit of a hunger headache that's making me emotional as well. But, but I just wanted to name that that we, you know, we're here and this is a ritual space that we are creating. And I think it has a vibration that that can go out. So I don't know if there's a question in that, but I wanted to share that. And if others want to comment on that, that'd be great. But thanks.

    Thank you, Leanne. Thanks so much. Leah, do you have a question or comment?

    I do. I have a very quick question. And I'm glad Robert is still here. Because I think it's mostly for him, but probably others. I'm curious about our potential for happiness. And, and my, and whether it's attached to if there's research that shows us that it's attached to our very early experiences, even as far back as the womb. That's it. Thanks.

    property, you there. I think Robert mentioned that he may not come here. Okay, good. Great. Wonderful.

    I was waiting until we collected all the questions. Is that what we should do? Okay.

    Allison, do you want to go down the line and collect the questions?

    Oh, my Lord, do you have a question?

    My question is, you know, I'm a single parent. And right now we're in the middle of a pandemic. And we've been, you know, it's been such a challenging, challenging time for me to be a parent, in this moment, because I'm typically the parent that's like, traveling the world doing all this, you know, like, you know, carrying the weight of the world. And the kids right now are having a very difficult time in dealing with themselves. So I'm having to deal with a child that's like, Okay, how do you expect me to take on the world? In this moment, if you can't help me help myself? why I've never had to deal with this, this experience. I've never had to deal with the experience of like, actually taking on the world. And, you know, having my son was like, my best friend my entire life. And like, you know, now I'm having to deal with somebody who's completely a different human being, because now he's 17. And how do I help myself? Help him help us take on this challenge that we're dealing with, in the middle of a pandemic? I mean, like, this has been such a challenge for me, like, I know how to do things. But this is not the norm. Thank you.

    Got it. Thank you. Hello. Wow. Sam, do you have a question?

    I do, I do have a look. So real quick, my name is Sam Goodman, I'm a dad. As my what I do is, I help kids with real life skills that I get, I got a 14 year old daughter. And I was like, I don't want her to grow up without real life skills to lead a fulfilled life. And we've been talking a lot about happiness. And I spent years researching RC, Robert, is one of the one of the expert sources in this course, I put together so big props to Robert what he's done. I put all this stuff together. So kids at 10 would get the latest in neurology, biology, psychology, nutrition, and genetics. You know, the stuff that I wish I knew when I was 10. And the idea is, and think some of the things that we teach, or that show them is like, you know, charging this point, happiness is is a is kind of the wrong metric, because it's a fleeting thing, whereas fulfillment is, is is a longer lasting. And whereas, you know, what is it that I think it's, it's, it's Dr. Ekman, who talks about like the 16 different types of happiness. Please look up the 16 different types of happiness because there's a whole bunch of different things and to Colin's point of two different cultures, it's, it's different, what means to have a full life. And I, my, my point is, like, at the end of the day, we're all humans. And at the end of the day, humans are 99.9% genetically identical. We are all I tell the kids, you are all unique humans. Now the unique part is like what you do

    Hey, Sam, this is running a little late. If you could get to the question, that would be great.

    Yeah. You could just ask the question without sharing too much.

    I apologize. Okay. My question is, there are countries that are looking for the wellbeing metric instead of the happiness metric, instead of it being GDP. And my question is, what can be done in order to push that? The well being being the metric versus the happiness Because ultimately, we all want to be feel good and be happy. So it's the metric of fulfillment, or well being over happiness. Super.

    Thank you. And then Matthew, and Mark, if you can each had a quick question so that we can get to our speakers. Yes, Matthew. Perfect.

    Thank you for having me. Happy Tuesday. I'm happy that I have found anger in my life, anger and resentment, because happiness cannot exist at the same time as anger and resentment. And I had a question for everyone to understand of understanding, releasing anger and resentment through forgiveness can ultimately create space for happiness. So is there any sort of formula or practices that you've given people to help them go through anger and resentment, potential issues, and to ultimately find happiness? Because I've found it in the last month now? I'm done speaking.

    Wonderful in Mark, you have the last question. Mark. Oh, me?

    Oh, me. Ah, can I make an observation or a comment to build on that last statement? Sir. I collect quotes. And one of my favorite quotes, which push all the other quotes away, I think from a woman who started the forgive project, and she said forgiveness is accepting the apology will never receive. And you can do that with. I've done that with deceased parents. And when I realized that they came from a place of fear, my grudges went away. And I apologize to them for holding them. I'm not sure that made me happy, but sure, maybe. I'm done talking.

    Great. So thank you, Robert, and Kevin, for sticking around from Boston and London. We'll give you each the closing word. And then john will close this out with some magical music.

    speakers.

    Go ahead to

    Oh, yeah. Thanks, Robert. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of comments and very interesting views. And I think that is exactly the reason why I find this topic of happiness, so fascinating, because our understanding and definition of happiness definitely vary a lot. And when we read the title of the talk today, finding happiness in challenging times, I think everybody probably also interpreted differently. And that's why we need to come together and reimagine how we can accelerate this in the, you know, the new technological era, that technology can be designed with happiness in a mind and, you know, we can build happiness by designing future systems. And I think we talk about, you know, the present moment, that brings joy and how we, you know, the body mind alignment and, and how it triggers kind of a different feelings in us and, and, you know, there are researchers who have tracked using MRI machines, in people in love and you know, to see the brain reaction of comparing people who are in love and versus when they are not, and, and we can definitely, you know, measure the order different simulations to us when we are in a moment of joy in the moment of, you know, perfect happiness versus when we are not, and figure out how we can scale those moments serialized. And there is a mentioning of potential for happiness. And I think that is very big thing for me, because I definitely believe that the two element for happiness is absence of suffering, which Robert mentions that, you know, obviously, if, if we're also bringing today you know, with the pandemic, this is an objective obstacle that we all need to overcome and illness and, and diseases. You know, historically this has been, what humanity has been dealing with, and, and that the second element is the potential and how can, how can we build tools and systems that unleash human potential and a good a good example is the creation of Olympics. So I don't know if there is a indication of potential for happiness when we are in the womb. I mean, it's definitely interesting thought. But I think human naturally thrive for potential and that that differentiates us from other species. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, when Chris asked this question about evolution, in our human species, has this unique desire and curiosity to figure out something that is much bigger than ourselves, such as in the origin of the universe and trying to go into Mars and parsh part of our fulfillment, meaning come from this in a bigger question. And, and I think there's definitely something about the potential for, you know, this extremely deep feeling of happiness, that we are holistically connected with a bigger self or the oneness of humanity and, and a lot of it is his spirituality as well. Because, you know, spirituality is different from religion, because religion, were created very much to avoid suffering and integrating stories to kind of tell people how to feel better with with, you know, suffering the happening life, but spiritually, spirituality is actually asking the right questions, and, and instead of finding solutions, I think a lot of the potential about happiness is really about asking the right question. And finally, you know, there is a comment around anger and, and, you know, the neck negative energy versus happiness. So, the philosophy of Tao is very much about the balance between the two. And, and we are, as human race is always in this opposite side of in opposite energies. And the reason why we are trying to integrate this, you know, institute that reimagine extension of opportunity is also to balance the, you know, School of assault that is focused very much on risk mitigation. And in terms of reducing energy, I think the most important part is that we are always going back to a happier state, right? So depression is basically sustained state of sadness, and, and at least I find in myself that I definitely go through phases of, of sadness and depression. But the point is that we are getting out of it. And that trajectory is really important and is the key. So I think we are trying to build that trajectory on a much larger scale, and also finding ways that we can use technolog technology to help us, you know, make this easier and better. Alright,

    so there are only two things remaining. Robert, if you have any closing comments that you want to say, in building off of the questions or anything you want to ramp up with, and then Cory is going to play us out. And, Robert, thank you for being with us so long, and we're going to edit this down into something that's ready for primetime.

    Okay, let me just, I'll try to be brief. First, I want to address what you said Leann about the joy and experiencing connection together. And I think that what we see over in so many settings, is that there is the the sum is so much greater than its parts. When you sit in meditation with people in a room, everybody is quiet, with eyes closed, and yet there is something so powerfully collective about it. And what you're pointing to is something happening tonight on this call. Leah, you asking if the potential for happiness is attached, even to early experiences, Yes, for sure that our early experiences lay down a lot of patterns about whether the world seems safe and hopeful, and optimistic. And some of us have the luck to have those experiences when we're young and some don't. And there is a lot of trauma as we know. And there is good help for people with trauma to try to begin to recover that sense of hopefulness and optimism about the world. And then just to touch base milea about what you said that you have this 17 year old boy who used to be your best friend, and now he's this snarling teenager. And yes, you know, this is not the norm. But also what you're seeing is what you know, we all see, which is this isn't what I signed up for it this person is changing in ways that I didn't sign up for. And I think one of the things that might both both my research tells me and my clinical work and my zen, is that the more we try to hold on to things that and keep them fixed when they're changing. The more we all suffer. So, you know, enjoy this new snarling 17 year old. And, Sam, I just want to say that one of the ways we prioritize well being is to teach our children the way you're doing it. You know, we know there's good research on socio emotional learning in schools, and when we teach kids about this is what a feeling is. And this is what anger is like. And this is how you can work with a conflict with someone else in your class, that all those things go an enormous distance toward helping kids grow up into healthier, happier adults. So what we do with kids is the best investment we can make in happiness as adults. And I want to just say, Matthew, congratulations on finding your anger and your resentment. With all this talk about happiness. It's easy to imagine that everything is sweetness and light. And we all have anger and resentment. And so really, what the best practices are, both psychologically and spiritually is to face toward those things to really accept them, see them for what they are not as scary as when we push them away. And then when we face towards things like anger and resentment, it opens the way for happiness. But trying to push anger and resentment away will only make it come back harder. And finally, Mark, thank you for the quote, forgiveness is accepting the apology you'll never receive. I think I'm going to use that. I like that a lot. So that's it. Thank you all.

    Great. And in closing, imagination in action, Cory? What are you gonna play for us?

    Thank you guys so much.

    I was thinking of playing smile, actually written by Charlie Chapman, who I go to LA all the time to perform and always think they should have a statue of him away from the movie stuff. But he did write a tune smile. And I would just say, on his wall in my own life on happiness, I mean thing that I've always got the most happiness of for sure is just I'm always someone very competitive. And I always set goals. And I set out to achieve them. And achieving major goals that you said, I think, to me, is the greatest way to get because it's true fulfillment that you have achieved something like my national championship when I was 15. And then when I won that I wasn't, I made sure I didn't get too happy. And I said, Now let's go for the next thing. And I went for a world championship and then I wanted to win World Championships on different accordions and then I went to for a Guinness World Record, I'm always looking for what's next that I can achieve. And that's, I know that that at least in my life, that's been true happiness. And then you can spread out your knowledge to those upcoming accordion players or others trying to achieve something in their own life.

    Robert would argue that it was the relationships along the way that also gave you happiness. Yes.

    finger back.

    So here's a smile.

    Wow. Thank you, Cory. Thank you, john, for organizing us. Thank you, Kay and Robert and our amazing speakers. Thanks to all of you who stick around and join us next Tuesday from six to eight. Thanks, everyone. Have a happy week.

    Thanks everybody.

    Thank you, everyone. Thank you, john. Nice. Thank you, Alison. Thank you, Robert. Thank you Keyun. Have a good night everyone. We're going to close the room down now.

    Good night.

    Good night.