Dr. Vivek Murthy on navigating the holidays safely during Covid-19

Hi everyone. Welcome to the homeroom live stream! Sal Khan here, uh, very exciting guest today. We're going to have Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States. We're obviously there’s a lot of things to talk about, health and mental health related right now in the world for better or for worse. Before we get into that, I will give my standard announcements.

First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. As we saw several guests ago with the professor from Yale, by donating to Khan Academy, not only will you be helping many people, but you yourself will become a happier person. That's what research tells us.

I also want to give a special shout-out to several organizations that have stepped up, and I'm guessing they're now happier organizations because they have stepped up to support Khan Academy, especially during COVID when we were already running a deficit. Our deficits grew, and we continue to run deficits for 2021. So, special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and the many, many other supporters of Khan Academy.

Last announcement, just a reminder that you can get a version of what you're hearing right now as a podcast: Homeroom with Sal, the podcast, wherever you get podcasts.

Now, with that, I'm excited to go into our conversation. We have Vivek Murthy, the former Surgeon General, and now author of "Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World." Vivek, thanks for joining us.

“Hey Sal, it's great to join you! How are you today?”

I'm doing all right. I mean, there's so much I want to talk to you about. Maybe the first thing, I mean just the role of Surgeon General—I remember when I was a kid, and I remember that—that’s what you see. Everett Coop was the Surgeon General, and he had the whole, you know, no smoking campaign, which was great. But I was like, is he a surgeon or is he a general, or is he neither?

So, explain to folks what the Surgeon General is and why is that; why is it called Surgeon General?

“Well, it's a great question. So, the Surgeon General is an individual in the U.S. government who has two roles. One is to number one, provide the public with the best information on health so people can make good decisions for their families. And the other role is to lead the one of the uniformed services in the U.S. government called the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. This is a group of about 6,600 uniformed officers, doctors, nurses, physical therapists, public health engineers, and others who each and every day are working in federal agencies to strengthen public health. And also deployed in times of emergency to help with tornadoes and in the aftermath of hurricanes. We sent them to Liberia to help with the Ebola outbreak, you know, a few years back. Together, you know, the Surgeon General manages these two responsibilities, but it's because of the role leading the Commissioned Corps, one of our uniform services, that is actually why the Surgeon General wears a uniform.”

And lastly, I’ll tell you that the Surgeon General is actually not a general in their rank—in terms of rank—because the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps follows the Navy rank system. So, the Surgeon General is actually a three-star admiral, as opposed to, you know, a general per se. But they don’t call the Surgeon Admiral. But they don’t call the Surgeon Admiral!

And it turns out that you don’t have to be a surgeon to be the Surgeon General! That, in fact, most of the recent Surgeons General, including myself, have been either internal medicine doctors or family medicine doctors. There have been surgeons; Dr. Carmona, who was George W. Bush’s Surgeon General was a trauma surgeon. Siever Coop was a pediatric surgeon.

So, you know, with your former role as Surgeon General and now this book that you're writing together, it seems like this touches on, you know, kind of social-emotional well-being. Although I’ll let you describe it; I'm sure you can do a better job. I mean, it seems like one of your focus areas really has been, you know, not just on the traditional physical health side of things as Surgeon General, but also in the mental. I mean, well actually, I don’t want to speak for you. What have been your priorities when you were Surgeon General, and now what type of change or information are you trying to get out there?

“Well, you know, when I was Surgeon General, Sal, I began my time in office with a listening tour, where I just spent time traveling around the country asking people how I could help. And the issues that I heard from them were consistent with what we were hearing and seeing a lot later, what I was seeing in the hospital as a doctor, which is that the fundamental problem that we have with the opioid epidemic was affecting communities all across the country. The emerging challenge with e-cigarettes at that time was also presenting a great challenge in terms of, you know, clawing back, in fact, some of the progress we had made on tobacco and smoking. And so I focused a lot on those. But the issue around mental health, and particularly around loneliness and social connection, um, came about in part because of these early conversations and because I realized that behind so many of the stories I was hearing, stories around chronic illness, around depression, around addiction, were these threads of loneliness.

Where people would often say to me, you know, ‘I feel I have to carry all these burdens in my life by myself’, or ‘I feel if I disappear tomorrow, nobody would even care, they wouldn’t even notice.’ People felt invisible. And it wasn’t just the people we stereotypically think of as lonely, perhaps the older individual who’s living at home by themselves, but I was hearing this from college students now who were, you know, surrounded by thousands of other students on campus, but still felt profoundly alone. I was hearing this from moms and dads in neighborhoods where they were, you know, connected to the school, connected to their neighbors, but still didn’t quite feel like there was anybody that they could truly confide in, anyone who truly got them and understood them. And so on it went, whether I was talking to CEOs or nurses and doctors or even members of Congress themselves. I came to realize that loneliness and this feeling of being isolated is extraordinarily common, and it turns out it has profound impacts and implications for our physical and mental health.”

That’s fascinating. And I want to encourage everyone watching! Put your questions on Facebook or YouTube—we’ll, I’ll surface as many of them as we can to Dr. Murthy. But you know, on this question of loneliness, you know we’ve had other guests who’ve talked about trends—social media making at least young people feel more anxious or, in many cases, depressed. Is this in your mind a new phenomenon, or has it always been there and we're just finally unpacking it? Just loneliness phenomena especially.

“Well, loneliness has been with us for ages, for centuries. And I mean, interestingly, if you look back in the literature, at least in Western culture, Shakespeare was actually one of the first people to actually talk explicitly about loneliness in his work, or to reference it. But people have been feeling lonely for thousands of years. But there are a couple things that are different now. I think one is that we, unlike, you know, times in the past where we tended to live in the same place that we grew up, where we tended to have generations upon generations living in close proximity and often living in the same household, we are living in a very different society now—one that is relatively new in the history of civilization—where we are more mobile, where we don’t necessarily live in extended family networks. And the overlay of technology on that has been a mixed blessing.

While it allows us to connect deeply with people and just stay in touch with people we may not otherwise and I’ll be allowed to see as easily, we also find that the way in which we’re using technology often displaces our in-person connection or dilutes our in-person conversations as we bring our devices, for example, to the dinner table or we allow ourselves to be on them when we’re catching up with friends. And then finally, there’s one last piece here that I worry about, Sal, which is I think there’s an element around how our current culture, augmented by technology but independent of that, how it actually contributes to people’s sense of self and to their own well-being.

And what I worry about, Sal, is I think that for many of our young people in particular but really for all of us, what our culture tells us is that we have meaning, we have worth as human beings if we’re successful, and we’re successful if we can acquire one of three things: wealth, power, or fame. And if we acquire those, then we’re held up as success stories. And those are the people we read about in the paper. Those are the people whose biographies, you know, are lauded. Those are the people who are seen as heroes. But the message that we send to everyone in society is that if you’re not wealthy, powerful, or famous, that you are not as worthy. And that is a fundamental problem.

Because I think our fundamental worth as human beings is not extrinsic; it’s intrinsic. It comes from our ability to give and to receive love, compassion, and kindness. And that’s something we’re born with—something I see my four-year-old and my two-year-old doing each and every day because that’s what kids do, that’s how we’re born into the world. But we forget it. Other things that are layered on top of it, we come to believe that if we’re kind, we’ll get taken advantage of, that the world’s a harsh place and that we need to pursue these other objectives, like work, wealth, and power, to have, uh, to have meaning. And that’s a challenge; that’s a particular feature of modern society.”

And is there anything we can do about it? I mean, you know, we could hope that, you know, people somehow start profiling folks who have really content family lives and all of that, but I don’t think, you know, TMZ is about to change or People Magazine is about to change their coverage. Look at this really content father of four; you know, you’ve never heard of him, but he’s very happy. How do we change this? I mean, if you can’t change culture, are there tools that we can do to make it—to mitigate the negative impacts?

“Well, this is what I actually found very encouraging about this topic, Sal. Is that you might think loneliness—hmm, that sounds kind of depressing. It turns out, though, that the reason I think this is a profoundly inspiring and hopeful area is because the opposite of loneliness, which is social connection, is something that we are hardwired to pursue and to build into our lives. We feel better, frankly, when we’re together. We feel safer when we’re together. It doesn’t mean we’re all extroverts, but what it means is that we all need some degree of social connection; we’re better off for it. And because we are hardwired in that way, it turns out that even a little bit of meaningful social interaction can actually make us feel profoundly better for a long period of time.

So just think for a moment about the last time, perhaps, you were in the grocery store or in a coffee shop, and you said, uh, passed on a kind word to the person at the cash register, or when they actually asked how you were doing and then paused to listen to what the answer was. You know, those are moments which make us feel good because they make us feel seen and heard. And they can last— that feeling of feeling seen and heard can last with us for hours. Similarly, when you have a friend who calls, let’s say unexpectedly, you get a call from your best friend, and you have a five or ten-minute conversation, that can leave you feeling great for a long period of time.

So the way we rebuild connected lives, the way we re-center ourselves around a culture that recognizes our worth is intrinsic and grounded in our ability to give and receive love, is we do that by leading by example. We do that by allowing ourselves to, in small ways initially, reach out to people and enjoy the fruits of human connection. And here are some simple ways we can do it. So like first, for example, we can keep 15 minutes a day aside to reach out to and connect with people we care about. Could be a phone call or a video conference call; it could be writing to somebody that we love, saying, ‘Hey, I’m just thinking of you, and I want to know how you are.’

The second thing we can do is we can make the time we have with people really count, and we can buy improving the quality of it. And the way we do that most readily is by eliminating distraction when we’re talking to others—that's our cell phone, that’s our computer, if we have a tendency to check email or the news while we’re on the phone. And the third thing we can do is seek each other out, looking to serve one another. It turns out, silent from ourselves to the other person, and we also reinforce to ourselves and remind ourselves that we have value to bring to the world.

And this is so important, Sal, because when people become lonely for a long period of time, what happens is they lose faith that they actually have any value to bring to the world. They start to feel that they’re lonely because they’re not likable, and they also find that their focus ends up being excessively on themselves because they’re worried fundamentally about safety, which is what we all worry about unconsciously when we’re lonely.”

Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And I mean, there's two things that I just heard because when you kind of reach out to someone and especially show gratitude towards them—and this gels with our conversation we had a couple of days ago, actually last week about, you know, the science of how to be a happy person—you know, not only do you show that person that you see them, you appreciate them, they feel less lonely, they feel more safe, but it's also there's good research that makes you happier when you show that gratitude towards other people.

You know, question for you. I mean, you are very—I'm assuming, um, you know, you are accomplished in all of the very traditional ways that we just mentioned that we shouldn’t highlight people—but you are accomplished in those ways. What do you do to, you know, not lose your balance? You know, I'm sure when you were part of the administration you saw a lot of, you know, classically type A people who are work, work, work, work, probably not taking the 15 minutes to kind of call up their cousin and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ What do you do and how do you coach people to try to balance things a little bit more?

“Well, it’s a great question, Sal, and let me tell you that I stand, you know, here before you as somebody who’s not done it well for much of my life. And in fact, one of my motivations to work on this subject area, one of the reasons I was compelled to go into it, is because I myself was experiencing a deep well of loneliness, and it was very painful. And I felt that not only during childhood, which was a real challenge for me in elementary school, but even during adulthood, when I was Surgeon General and actually in the few years that followed it. And what I realized I had done so is I had always prioritized and cared about the people in my life. They were always, you know, from a stated perspective, my top concerns.

But the way I was actually living my lifestyle was not consistent with those priorities, right? So, there was a gap between my stated priorities and my lived priorities. Work was actually my top priority, and I came out of my time in government after serving as Surgeon General for a few years. What I realized is that in an effort to focus wholly on work—thinking, ‘Hey, I don’t know how much time I have in office, I want to get as much done as I can, you know, and contribute as much as I can to public health’—I made a critical mistake, which is that I assumed that I would be better able to do that if I gave all of my time, including that time that I spent with family and with friends.

And it turned out that hurt me. Like in the long run, it probably reduced how much I could actually give to the job because it meant that I was cutting myself off from one of the most important sources of fuel that we have in our lives—and that is our relationships with one another. So, here’s what I do now. Now, when a friend calls, I pick up the phone, even if it’s just for 10 seconds to say, ‘Hey, can I call you later?’ Because just hearing their voice is powerful, and it’s much more powerful than declining the call and then sending them a text later saying, ‘Hey, can I call you back?’

The second thing that I do is I create space in my life now that is free from distraction—and technology often—that's in dinnertime with the family and bedtime when I’m, you know, me and my wife are putting our two children into bed. But it’s time where we’re just focused on each other. And the third thing that I’ll mention to you is something that I formed in my life called the Moai, and Moai is something I write about in the book. It’s a Japanese concept actually that began in Okinawa many, many generations ago. But the idea is that they would take a group of young children, put them together and say, ‘Now you are a group—your Moai—and you are responsible for each other. You have to look out for each other.’

So, they were making an explicit commitment to one another to be there for each other. And what I realized in 2018, when I was at a fellowship retreat with two close friends who I loved dearly but rarely ever see, is I realized that as lonely as we were all feeling, that we would not end up truly reconnecting the way that we needed unless we made an explicit commitment. So, we said to each other, ‘Why don’t we form a Moai?’ And we—the commitments we’ll make is once a month we’ll video conference with each other, we’ll make it a point to be real with one another, to talk about the stuff that matters, especially the things that we don’t talk about often with our friends—our relationships, our finances, and our health.

And we also made it a point to say if something comes up in between those calls, we’re going to reach out to each other; we’re gonna have a text thread and we’ll just ping each other, and we can just get on the phone for five minutes, you know, to talk through a difficult situation. We’ll do that, but we’ll make a commitment to be there for one another. And in the last two years, Sal, that Moai has changed my life. It has been an incredibly, uh, important anchor for me and my two Moai brothers, Sunny and Dave. We start each other through so many challenges over the last few years. It wasn’t that we weren’t friends before that, but the difference, Sal, was in taking these implicit commitments around friendship and making them explicit, and that made all the difference.”

I love that! I mean, I think I’m gonna start—I’m not joking—I think I’m already making the list of who are the two or three people I need to join my Moai because, you know, I’ll share on my own side, you know, I couldn’t agree with you more about the, you know, this this delusion that that many folks have that, you know, if you’re already working 40 hours, that you’re gonna be able to do your job that much better if you go to 50, 60, 70, 80 hours—it’s just going to deplete you. I remember the first job I had out of business school; I was at a hedge fund, and I was ready to, you know, I thought I would have to work seven or 80 hours. And my boss—it was only a two-person firm—he said, ‘Sal, our job is to make good decisions, not a bunch of bad decisions, so go home. Don’t think about work. Connect with your family.’ And this is before, you know, I had just gotten married; I didn’t have kids at the time. But that’s what gave me the time and space to actually tutor Nadia, and that led to all of Khan Academy.

But, more importantly, it actually did balance me out. And so I never forgot what Dan—Dan Wool—it was called Wool Capital did then. And then I would say about five years ago, you know, various stresses just started to really get to me. And I started, you know, I started getting claustrophobic in planes. I started—and—and that’s when I started, you know, just going down a similar journey, although I’m learning a lot from your journey of investing. You know, that’s when I started meditating regularly; that’s been transformational for me. Um, and I didn’t do a Moai—I think I still need a Moai, but, uh, last year I started getting a group of a broader friend circle of friends.

We have a—it used to be we used to meet in the park, but now we meet over video conference every week, where we discuss things about life. You know, so there’ll be a topic around, you know, parenting or tough love or perception versus reality. But we’ll dig into what, you know, what makes us tick, and they’re these, you know, these double- or triple-click conversations versus what you normally have at a gathering. But I really like the Moai concept with a smaller group that you really are family in the best sense of the word, yeah.

Because I’ll tell you what really makes a difference here—like in whether people feel lonely or connected is really the quality of those connections. And the thing is, all of us, regardless of where we grew up, what culture we’re in, or how old we are, we all have three core needs: we want to be seen and understood for who we are; we want to know that we matter; and we want to be loved. Right? That is true of all of us. And the thing is, when you can be in a relationship with someone, a friendship, a romantic relationship, where you feel like you can show up as who you are, where you can—don’t—you don’t have to put on airs—you can truly be yourself—that’s extraordinarily powerful.

And you know one of the great ways, um, that we can actually create and experience that kind of connection is actually by listening. And I mention this because so much of our emphasis in modern-day society is on action, right? We have a friend who has a problem; we’re thinking, ‘Okay, boom! How can I fix it?’ Um, we've got somebody else who’s not even a friend—a stranger, you know, who raises a concern or says something wrong; we want to know, ‘Okay, how can we correct them? How can we get them the right answer?’ We’re very action-oriented, but in that, sometimes what gets lost is the power of listening.

And when we’re able to be fully present with someone, when we’re able to give them the gift of our full attention, when they’re able to then share and be open with us, that’s an extraordinarily powerful experience. And what we tell somebody when we listen deeply to them is we tell them, ‘I see you; I understand you; you matter; and you are loved.’ And that’s why listening is one of the most powerful forces we have in forging strong connection.”

No, I love that! It's super, super powerful, and you’re exactly right. You're exactly right! It doesn’t seem like an action in the traditional sense, but it actually oftentimes leads to a much deeper relationship than any form of action, and actually, you know, better outcomes.

There's a ton of questions, I’ve been—I’ve been monopolizing you with all of mine, and I have many more, but obviously, as former Surgeon General, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. I think everyone is super well-versed. You know, we had Dr. Fauci on here on, you know, when we might get a vaccine and the various therapies. So, you know, I think folks know about that, although I’m curious if you have any perspectives that you haven’t heard, but you know there’s a question here from Facebook, for Christopher McDade: With this pandemic, it’s affected a lot of people’s mental health. How would you recommend dealing with this now that we are isolating ourselves? It goes back to everything we’ve been talking about. Loneliness is one thing, but also depression and other issues can be exacerbated. What are your views there?

“Well, first of all, I want to thank—I thank him for his question! I mean, that’s absolutely right. I think many people are struggling more during this pandemic. You know, keep in mind, human connection is healing, and at a time of great stress, what we typically do is we seek out more connection. We pick up the phone and call a friend; we go visit someone we care about. And the fact that we can’t do that now I think has exacerbated that stress. It’s why you see high levels of depression and anxiety; it’s why you see actually opioid overdoses and alcohol use also on the rise.

But I do think that in this moment, we can actually find healing once again in social connection; we just have to look for it in a slightly different way. So even though we can’t, for example, go and visit a friend or get together, you know, for dinner at a crowded restaurant the same way we used to, we can actually see friends in safe ways outside, for example, if we’re getting together and we’re masked and we’re distanced from our friends, and we’re outdoors. You know, we can create safe spaces to interact with one another.

The other thing we can do is to keep in mind some of these ideas that Sal and I were talking about earlier around 15 minutes a day, keeping that for—to interact with and to reach out to people you care about, making sure you make that quality of the time count by eliminating distraction, looking for ways to help people in your network, whether that’s a neighbor who might be struggling because they’re, you know, worried to go to the grocery store, or a co-worker who might be having a hard time teleworking and homeschooling their child, and maybe you just dropping off some food will make all the difference. These are small but powerful ways to serve that can actually help boost our mood as well as strengthen our connection.

So the last thing I’ll just mention here, because it’s counterintuitive, is actually the importance of solitude. And you might think, ‘Gosh, if you’re looking for human connection, why is solitude important? Isn’t that the opposite? Isn’t that being alone?’ Well, solitude is about being physically alone, but it’s actually a state of calm aloneness, of joyful aloneness. And it’s very different from loneliness, which is a subjective state where I feel pained about my lack of connection, and I feel the connections I need are greater than the connections I have. And the reason we all need some solitude in our lives, the reason we have to actually recapture our ability to be comfortable being alone for some periods of time is because it is in those moments of solitude that we allow the noise around us to settle.

It’s when we re-center and re-ground ourselves; it’s when we reflect, and when we allow ourselves to just be in a world that is constantly moving faster and faster. And when we can approach other people from a place of being more grounded and more centered, we’re more able to listen deeply to them, we’re more able to be present ourselves and to share ourselves rather than constantly worrying about what the other person is saying. You know, I say this knowing that for many people, finding an hour or two to meditate every day, for example, might be way too much time. But solitude can come in many shapes and forms and sizes—it can look like meditation, it can look like just time where you’re sitting on your front porch and letting the breeze blow against your face, it could be a walk in nature, it could be time in prayer, it could be time spent listening to music that soothes you.

But however it is, and for however long it is, we need those times of solitude. You know, I’ll leave you with this wisdom from my nephrology professor in medical school. This is one of my dearest, you know, mentors—her name is Dr. Peggy Bia. And you know, when I used to think I’m too busy, you know, to create time for solitude in my life, I would think of her because she was a busy mom, teacher, doctor, and hospital administrator. But what she would do, even though she didn’t have much in the way of time, was recognizing how important those moments of solitude were.

Whenever she was about to walk into a patient’s room, she would go to this thing to wash her hands—and for 20 seconds, she would just allow that warm water to run over her hands. And she would take a deep breath and she would remember what she had to be grateful for that day. Maybe it was the hug that her kids gave her when she was leaving the house. Maybe it was a medical student for whom an idea finally clicked when she was teaching him that morning. Maybe it was the opportunity to participate in the care of the patient whose room she was about to walk into. And then, taking another deep breath, she would turn the water off, dry her hands, and walk into that patient’s room feeling more grounded, more centered, more clear about who she wanted to be than before.

And that is the power of 20 seconds of solitude. We all have 20 seconds in our life, but it’s important for us just to remember that power of that solitude, and moments like this, when the world is turning around so fast, when there’s so much uncertainty, we need to anchor ourselves. And moments of solitude, our relationships with one another are some of our most powerful anchors.”

Vivek, I gotta tell you, you have a future in guided meditation! Like, I could just take snippets of what you just said, and I was feeling it! I’m not kidding! I'm not trying to— I think there’s something very powerful in even just your answer itself about—you're right, you know, I felt that warm water over my hands and I was like, ‘Yes! I have to feel the gratitude!’

But you're so right, and it—I don’t know, it appeals. So, you know, a lot of people think that I'm extroverted because I can sometimes appear, but I'm very much an introvert. And you know what the notion is where you get your energy? And I need that solitude, but you're exactly right: solitude versus loneliness are not—the are not the same thing! You could be lonely in a—in a crowd, as you said, on a college campus, in a room at a party. You can feel very lonely. In fact, that’s often when I feel the loneliness the most—uh, versus, uh, when, you know, I’m alone or when I’m with a very small group of folks.

But it’s a super powerful idea. You know, just one more question. I know we're limited on time; there's so much to talk about here. Facebook: Michael Graves: How profoundly does rejection, in a general sense, affect one's loneliness/depression? Is there a way to mitigate the feeling?

“Well, I think rejection is so powerful and so damaging because it gets at the core of whether we have worth as human beings. When we feel rejected, what we’re hearing from someone else is that you don’t have value, that you’re not worthy. And this is especially challenging for young people whose identity is developing. Now, this doesn’t mean that we, uh, you know, can’t go through life and figure out how to deal with disappointment, right? But there’s a difference between disappointment and feeling rejected, right? Disappointment is, you know, I wanted something to work out in a certain way and it didn’t. Feeling rejected is failing, ‘Gosh, I’m not worthy; I’m not valuable.’

That’s what, you know, the situation is telling me. And we, I think, can raise our children to deal with disappointment, but what we have to do—what’s so important for all of us, whether we’re talking about kids or adults, is to know where our worth fundamentally comes from. Because that should be a deep root that we cultivate and build and nurture over the course of our lives. It should be a route that’s—that’s not shaken, you know, by circumstance.

And we all have challenges. Like, I—I struggle with my own self-worth, you know, a lot and have over many years. It’s a constant effort for me to remind myself, you know, during low points in my life where my value truly comes from. But this is actually where friendship is so important, because when I was in college, and I asked, uh, I asked somebody—actually going on a college classmate’s from one of these late-night philosophical conversations that you tend to have in college. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think a friend is?’ And he thought, paused for a moment, he said, ‘A friend is someone who reminds you of who you are when you forget.’

And I’ve always remembered that definition over the years—that a friend is someone who reminds you of who you are when you forget. Because we all need mirrors like that; people who can show us not just who we think we are, but who we truly are, who can remind us of what we bring to the world that’s so special; maybe it’s our humor, maybe it’s our insight, maybe it’s our compassion or our kindness—maybe it’s all of those things. But we need those reminders.

You know, I’ll just say that this whole topic that we’ve been discussing, the subject around connection and mental health and loneliness, this whole book, you know, that I wrote on the subject, that while ostensibly this is about the topic of connection, what it’s truly about, and what I came to realize toward the end of this writing, is it’s really about love. It's about the question of how do we build lives—and truly a society—that's more grounded in human connection, but really in love. Because the two forces that are fundamentally, uh, you know, driving us in our actions—and you can see this on display in the world—are love and fear. And the fear manifests a lot as anger, as insecurity, as jealousy, as rage.

But we see the love manifesting as well, as kindness, as compassion, as generosity, as concern. But all of us have the ability and the, you know, the capacity to be driven by love or fear. And the question that I think about most often when I look at my own kids and I think about what the world will look like for them is I think that the world would be more hospitable to them, more encouraging, more supportive, more nurturing if you and I and everyone out there does what we can to tip the balance in the world away from fear and toward love. And to do that by the words we choose to speak, by how we treat other people, by the issues we choose to work on, as well as the topics that we choose to raise our voice on and stand up for in the public square.

That's fundamentally what this is about, and when I forget, you know, at times, just how powerful that love can be, what I think about is a—this 10-second exercise that Fred Rogers actually used, famous for doing during his talks. And if you have 10 seconds, I’ll just walk you and our listeners through it right now. If you take your hand and you just put it on your heart, and you close your eyes and take a deep breath and just think about the people in your life who have been there for you during your highs and your lows. Think about the people who have supported you, who’ve taken care of you, who have listened to you, who have understood you, even at times when you weren’t sure if you were worthy of friendship and love. Think about the people you turn to in moments of pain and in moments of joy and feel their love just washing over you, filling you with peace, filling you with happiness, filling you with joy.

And open your eyes. What you felt in those 10 seconds—that was the power of love. And that love is most directly experienced through our relationships with other people. And as a doctor who has written prescriptions for many, many medicines over the years, some incredibly powerful ones that are the result of amazing science, I will tell you that there is no force more powerful; there is no medicine that is more healing than love. And we all have the ability to heal because we all have the ability to love! You don’t need an MD or an RN behind your name in order to participate in that healing process. That I think is at the heart of what we need to do right now to help strengthen our families, our communities, and ultimately our world.”

No, well thank you for—I mean, that was incredibly powerful! I don’t want to ruin what you just said! I mean, you should just drop the mic at that point because there’s so much in there! But I think what’s powerful about what you just said, and even the exercise is, you know, you’ll hear even in, you know, cheesy movies, you know, ‘Love is the what runs the universe’ or whatever, but you’re like, ‘What do they really mean?’ But I think your definition of it is a very tangible one, and it actually was a bit of an aha that you’re really—you are right! At the end of the day, almost every action is really driven by love; every thought is really driven by either love or fear.

And that, you know, even when you said that, I started thinking about some of my own thoughts or my own actions, and immediately I started being able to classify them—no, that’s a fear one, that’s a loved one! And maybe that fear one I should do something different because that’s not a great motivation. Uh, but no, what you’re saying is so powerful! I mean, I think, you know, maybe, you know, you should be the meditation general or something like that. And maybe a future administration, they will, um, introduce some type of mindfulness for the country because I’m not joking; I wasn’t kidding!

What, you know, even that last exercise—you’re really good at this! I mean, I think, and I think you’re good at it because it comes from a place of genuine authenticity and love, which is a very, very powerful thing. So, you know, Vivek, thanks so much! I know we’re all out of time; we went actually way over time. This was really powerful, but thanks so much for this! And I encourage everyone to check out "Together" and, you know, just try to figure out ways to lead a healthier, more robust, you know, together, less lonely life.

“Well thanks so much, Sal! It was so nice to be with you and thanks for your interest in this subject and for everything you’re doing to help support families during this time! I must tell you, and I want to encourage all of your listeners to support Khan Academy and to contribute what you can. And you know, I’m a beneficiary myself because my two kids—they love Khan Academy, especially Khan Academy Kids, and they’re constantly asking if they can be on it. So, you’ve provided a reward for a kid! So now if we wanted to brush their teeth or take a bath, and we say, ‘Okay, you can watch Khan Academy Kids for a few minutes if you brush your teeth!’ So, thank you Sal for the parenting help!”

Good, good, good to hear that! No, thank you so much! Of course! Take care then! Be well! See you!

“Well, thanks everyone for joining! Um, yeah, that was a great conversation, and I—I wasn’t joking with Vivek that he should do some—whatever you want to call him—meditations or guided whatever. But I thought not only did he have some really good insights about, I think, a very important issue that goes way overlooked for most of us, uh, but also, you know, very tangible ways of—of dealing—of kind of working through it. So thanks for joining. The next of our live stream is going to be—we’re going to have, not as good of a guest, it’s going to be me, and then I’m going to—you can ask me anything! So, see you tomorrow at noon Pacific time! Talk to you later!”