 We have many different levels of well-being and the science of well-being and the implications of well-being represented here on this stage. So all the way down here is my colleague, Dan Foy. He works for Gallup. We all know and love Gallup as our pollsters, our data folks. And Dan works on the public sector division. He focuses on partnerships to advance the science of well-being, which I think is a really fascinating way for us to kind of enter this conversation. What does the science of well-being say? Dan facilitates collaborations between external innovators, your leading internal teams, and focusing on things like data collection mechanisms, AI, methodologies, the activation of well-being science across communities, organizations, and the individual level. And Dan also looks at workplace development with federal agencies and really large nonprofit healthcare providers. So he'll have some really terrific insights for us about what the data say about well-being. Then we've also got Mireya Vargas, who maybe took the longest flight to get here. She had a 12-hour journey to come be with us from Madrid. We're so grateful you're here. Mireya is a fellow at the Distinguished Career Initiative at Stanford and has been an Oshoka fellow since what year? 1998. So an OG of the Oshoka fellows and has probably been key in advancing the well-being research and programming that Oshoka does for fellows and externally. You are part of the change makers in Spain and Latin America. And Mireya's research promotes mental health and physical well-being initiatives. And you're really interested in the sort of change of mindset of about one's own mental health. So I'm excited to hear your insights on the individual level and looking at a regional context outside of the United States. How is mental health or well-being viewed? And then finally, we've got to have a clinical expert, who's got 6,000 hours of clinical hours for entrepreneurs and psychiatric care provision. Michael Freeman is the founder of Akona, which is a science-based center of excellence for founder well-being and mental health. Highly relevant to our conversation today. He is a psychiatrist and an entrepreneur. He has served as an executive coach and researcher, focusing on both the business outcomes and the life outcomes of entrepreneurs. So that intersection I think is something that will be very interesting for us to chat about today. Also, the founding CMO of United Behavioral Health, right? So that's some sort of large-scale insights as well for mental health and well-being at the highest levels of behavioral health organizations. And Michael also served on the White House Healthcare Reform Task Force under Hillary Clinton. So we have some experts here today. And I, as our lovely host mentioned, my background is in, I do storytelling for social impact. So I'm interested in figuring out what does the science say? What does the data say? And how can we use that to influence new audiences? Those of you who are here in this room might be thinking about well-being from an individual level as an entrepreneur, the isolation of leadership, how do we integrate accountability and any number of things. But ideally, what we talk about here will reach beyond just this room and into the organizations that you all represent, the work that you do, and maybe if we're lucky, our own care. So I would love to start by exploring a little bit about what we mean by well-being. I think there, we have however many people in this room and we probably have as many definitions or impressions of what well-being is. There's a whole industry around wellness and adjacent pursuits. But that might not be exactly what we mean here. It might be helpful to think through what we mean when we say well-being. So Dan, I would love to maybe start with you from your perspective. When you're working with organizations, what are you meaning when you're looking at well-being data? Sure, it's a great question. So as the biggest well-being nerd on the stage, just empirically, I have an empirical definition of around well-being. So at Gallup, we've been studying questions around what makes a life worth living for a very long time since the 1930s. Our real modern incarnation of well-being research started though in the early 2000s when we launched what's known as the Gallup World Poll. This is an annual global study. We're in over 140 countries a year asking nationally representative samples of the adult population in all these countries, all sorts of aspects about their lives. And when we first set out to undertake this venture in the early 2000s, we were looking for core metrics that would really hold up across societies around the globe. And so we landed on this measure called a thriving scale. It's the Cantral Self-Anchoring Scale for the other big nerds in the audience. And essentially what we do is we ask people all over the world, the first two questions on our survey, how they would rate their lives today on a scale from zero to 10. We use a ladder image. What step of the ladder do you think you stand on? And how they would rate their lives five years from now on that same scale. And so we're measuring both where they are today and where they think they're going to be in the future. And then we break that down into either thriving, struggling, or suffering depending on how they answer. So we started with that approach. It has really good external validity. It holds up, it aligns with World Bank measures, all sorts of other outcome data, sort of things you would expect Scandinavian countries do really well on it. US does pretty well on it, not the best in the world, places like Afghanistan, you have hardly anyone classified as thriving. So it holds up in that regard. But the next step we want to do then is say, okay, well what predicts thriving? And that's where we got at this idea of wellbeing. And wanted to ask a lot of questions to try and understand what determines that outcome. And landed on a set of domains, a holistic definition of wellbeing. That's one point that's really key is it's got to be all-encompassing. It's not just physical health, it's not just mental health. It's got to cover a whole range of aspects. And so we look at things like social wellbeing, how people's relationships are doing in their life, community wellbeing, the place where they live, whether or not they feel it's ideal for them, whether or not they receive recognition for contributing to their community. Certainly physical financial wellbeing matters as well. And then also purpose, which is maybe the most relevant for folks in this room, sometimes we call that career wellbeing. Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? Are you really seeing that your contributions are having the kind of impact you want? And the other insight, so in addition to it being holistic, is that people to have overall high thriving, they need to be doing well across all of these domains. And so if you're really struggling badly in an individual domain, maybe you just lost your job, maybe you have an illness, maybe everything looks like it's going great on the surface, but actually you don't have a lot of love in your life, you don't really have those strong relationships that people's overall scores will suffer. And that's kind of the key insight we take away, is that it has to be this holistic picture of what defines a life well lived. Okay, so then I would like to come to you, Dr. Freeman, if you could share a little bit maybe. So you've just heard Dan describe the sort of, the data picture of wellbeing societally. And I'm curious to know how that resonates with you from a clinical standpoint and how that definition might adjust or shift or what might be similar at an individual level. Thanks, and I'm happy to address that, but first I just wanted to ask a question. How many entrepreneurs are in the room today? If you're an entrepreneur, just raise your hand. Do you self-identify as an entrepreneur? That's great, okay, so I will be primarily trying to share my experience that I've gained working with people like you. But before I do, I just wanna acknowledge what Dan said he actually is the biggest well-being nerd on the stage up here today. I used to be a lot bigger, bad news for you guys. As you age, you begin to shrink. So, Dan, you're the guy. In terms of how I take a look at wellbeing, there's a vast literature on wellbeing. The OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has a set of wellbeing indicators or standards that include elements that Dan talked about and some other socioeconomic characteristics. Gallup has developed a set of standards in the positive psychology literature and in the entrepreneurship literature. There are two different kinds of wellbeing that people measure. One is called hedonic wellbeing, which basically means do you feel good? Do you have positive emotions? Are you satisfied with your life? And there's another version called eudaimonic wellbeing and what that means is do you have a sense of purpose? Do you have a sense of meaning? Are you living up to your potential? So that's the range, but there's a lot of I think convergence around a couple of key indicators of wellbeing. From my point of view, as a clinician, kind of how I think about it is if somebody tells you that all four of the tires on your car are doing great right now while you're driving down the freeway, it's kind of good to know that. But if somebody tells you that there's a 80% likelihood that one of your tires is gonna go flat within the next month, that's a piece of knowledge that's really more meaningful. In the entrepreneurship literature, the researchers kind of distinguish between positive wellbeing and negative wellbeing. And by negative, another way they define negative wellbeing is ill-being. And if you get to the bottom of that, a lot of it revolves around mental health and lack thereof. So from a clinician point of view, I have tend to focus on how do you know that there's an 80% chance that one of your tires is gonna blow up rather than focus on all four tires are doing great right now? And in terms of life outcomes, what's really relevant for entrepreneurs is to know that the relationship between wellbeing and business outcomes and life outcomes is nuanced. It's not one-to-one. This wellbeing equals good life outcomes, wellbeing equals good business outcomes, that's kind of happy talk. It's a nice narrative everybody wants to believe, but it doesn't actually work out that way. It's more nuanced. And so I've been kind of focused on the nuance. Yeah, the avoidance of the oversimplification and the sort of causation versus correlation questions. So Mireya, your work sits a bit at the intersection of the individual experience for entrepreneurs and the social societal implications for change makers overall. I would love to hear what wellbeing means in the context that you operate in. Yes, it's really interesting because I think that all my life I'm thinking about the difference between mental health and wellbeing. And when I was monitoring different projects around Latin America, we found that it's really difficult to understand what is the limit with the wellbeing and what this means in the implication of the cultural complexities. Latin America is a very rich region and you have a different point of view about that affect your personal wellbeing. And in different moments, I was thinking how I can measure different variables to understand better what is wellbeing in this case of social entrepreneurs. And I remember that I was collaborating with the Oak Forest Poverty and Human Development Initiative and they have an area of research that is called the missing dimensions. And I think that this approach is really interesting because they include different dimension that we never think when we talk about the wellbeing in the communities and the people living in the communities. And they talk about the shame and about isolation and humiliation or social connectivity of physical safety, empowerment and psychological wellbeing that includes satisfaction with the life and different dimension, meaningful life and happiness. And I think that we measure this dimension in Chile and Venezuela. I think that I was illuminated more about how we can think about this wellbeing in the case of the social entrepreneurs that works in the community and have to confront different cultural complexities because they have a native community and they have a special focus in the area of the family and many, many of things that is really interesting to understand. But I think that this is one of the aspects of wellbeing and the other aspect is about the emotion and how the emotion impact in your personal wellbeing. And this is a very, very big question because when you sing in emotion like shame in Latin America or maybe envy that is really hard but is really deep in our countries and you have to explore different dimension to explain more about what is wellbeing in these cases. But it's about, I think that emotion and cultural complexities is really important. So I'm struck by the fact that among these three panelists, we hear it crosses a lot of different dimensions when you're measuring wellbeing from a data perspective. You're looking at all of these different sort of pieces of the life pie and over time. Mireya, like you mentioned, you're looking at the wellbeing of social entrepreneurs which what do entrepreneurs do if not solve problems and social entrepreneurs aim to solve social problems which means inevitably you are embedded in or a part of or working to address various issues that might confront you with questions about the dimensions of wellbeing that you may or may not have the cultural competency or literacy to even know how to define much less navigate. And as you were mentioning, Michael, the individual at the individual level there are all of these different sort of places on the spectrum that a person might be and the high level thing that I'm taking away is this complicated seems to be the general consensus. But I do think that there is a value in discussing from what we know our audience members are curious to learn about is the connection between wellbeing and founder or entrepreneurial success. And I think each of you would bring a different perspective to that. And Michael, I would love to start with you on this one just because I know that you've done some pretty direct examination of this question. And I'm wondering whether you feel comfortable sharing some of the results of your studies with the audience here. Yeah, very happy to. And I will in one second, but I just wanted to pick up on what you talked about with the emotion. And I would say for the entrepreneurs in the audience that pretty consistently positive affect, positive emotion, happiness, pride, ambition, things of that nature are associated with higher levels of wellbeing and so, and converse also being true like distress, anguish, depression, sadness, negative emotions are associated with less lower levels of wellbeing. And as a kind of a life hack as an entrepreneur, I would say one skill or technique that you can pay attention to is called emotion regulation. Learn ways like mindfulness, for example, to be able to tolerate distress without being kind of infiltrated by it and to have a more optimistic, positive way of perceiving the world that you live in. Because as social entrepreneurs, you're living in a pretty distressed world. We all are actually right now. And yet two different people can be in the exact same circumstance and have a completely different way of interpreting it and responding to it emotionally. And so at that level, that's where I'd encourage you to focus with respect to the research. What we've done, my, I have a bunch of research colleagues from Gallup and also from UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley. And we studied the mental health characteristics of entrepreneurs and what we found is that there's somewhat of a connection and somewhat of a disconnect between. So it's complicated. It's complicated, yeah. So for, you know, for example, alcoholic drug addict entrepreneurs in one of our studies created, had more patents and trademarks. They had higher levels of intellectual property. So that might be an indicator of success. And we found that people who, well, obviously people, founders who are depressed and anxious are less likely to be able to effectively lead, you know, organizations. So that's pretty, pretty straightforward. But with respect to other kinds of mental health conditions, people with ADHD, with ADHD is highly prevalent among entrepreneurs. That's attention deficit hyperactivity. And it comes in three different subtypes. And one particular subtype is referred to as impulsive hyperactive. And those people, they often get great results and they often get really bad results. And another, one of our findings had to do with bipolar spectrum conditions, bipolar disorder, cyclothymia, bipolar one, bipolar two, hyperthymia. It's kind of a whole range. But people with those mood, particularly mood elevations of a biological nature, again, could have positive business outcomes that were not particularly related to a sense of well-being. They could be agitated, irritated, annoyed, angry, and, you know, doing pretty well. So I would say high level, we found that there's, among entrepreneurs, we found that 38% of founders have mental health conditions of one kind or another over the course of a lifetime. We found that 1.7% have a history of psychiatric hospitalization. 3% of the founders that we studied in the Gallup panel. Gallup has this panel of about 60,000, 100,000. People that report regularly, professionals who report regularly and there's a sub-panel of those who are self-employed. And we, with Gallup's collaboration, were able to look at 1,000 entrepreneurs. So it was a representative sample across the entire United States. 3% of those people had made suicide attempts. So that's a big number. So a lot of distress. And then what about the entrepreneurs that don't have any mental health issues? We, in a different study, we looked at their family members. And what we found is that asymptomatic entrepreneurs tend to come from families where there's a lot of mental health conditions floating around. So an asymptomatic entrepreneur was twice as likely than a control population to have a parent, sibling, or child with a major mental health condition. So what I want you to know about that is that mental health differences are normal for entrepreneurs. You have a different kind of DNA. You're, not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Everybody can, most people can hold a job. Some people can lead a team or an organization or a club. But very, very few people can start and grow a business. And it's because of basically brain differences, mind differences, that you have personality traits that distinguish you from managers and job holders that's 50% genetically transmitted. And it's associated with all of your superpowers, but also with your vulnerabilities. Isn't that just the darndest thing? The older I've gotten, I have learned that in each dimension of life, the things that I have the greatest strengths for are also the things that I can become maladaptive, our greatest strengths, if not channeled in the best or healthiest or most productive or most beneficial way, can get in our own way. I also think it's interesting that from what you're saying, mental health differences are normal for entrepreneurs. That doesn't mean that we can necessarily say if you have this, then you will succeed as an entrepreneur. If you experience X mental health or mental illness, then you will not succeed as an entrepreneur. So that sort of picture of complication becomes a little bit clearer, but we still stop short of saying that we can be prescriptive about it. Yeah, exactly. I didn't ask how many investors are in the room. Are there any investors? Okay, one, thank you for joining us. Oh, two, Joshua. Well, I would say, apropos of that comment, don't make any investment decisions based on what you imagine the mental health of the person you're talking to might be. You're gonna make the wrong choice. Make your investment decisions based on the fundamentals. Do you believe in the founder? Do they have an investable team? Is there a market opportunity? Is there a way to get from here to there? Is there a competitive advantage? The things that you usually look at when you make investment decisions, and then deal with the mental health afterwards. I'm fascinated by the notion of the sort of cultural, what leads to stereotypes that we have about particular mental health conditions, or personas, or associations that we might make. What you just said reminded, I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is very much in the news, and the idea that there's an individual who cultivated a particular appearance that may or may not be associated with a particular type of mental health, I think brings up questions about the sort of cultural identity that influences how we perceive well-being and success. And I'm curious, Maria, from your perspective, you mentioned a little bit about the cultural differences and maybe specific to Latin America or specific to the folks that you're working with. What are you, knowing what you know about well-being for social entrepreneurs in Latin America and in the United States, what does that tell you about how cultural influences play a factor, or play a role? We finish two research about the two kinds of social heads of entrepreneurs. One was with the IDV Lab and the Well-Being Project, and we explore about the situational of the high-impact entrepreneurs. And it was really interesting because this is a kind of the entrepreneur that have a lot of pressure for success, and it's difficult because they have to do it everything that they can to succeed because this is the promise. When you find a found and you put this found, put money in your initiative, you have to succeed. And this is the result that they expect. Anna, we was exploring with 100 high-impact entrepreneurs in all the region and was really interesting because the worst that we found was the 80% of this kind of entrepreneur have a symptom of burnout. They live a situation of burnout and did have a different kind of implication because it's really stressful in the case of Latin American people, you have your family, and the family is the center of all the things that you have in your life. And in this kind of initiative, you have to lose the connection with your family because you have to make results and produce the money. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Absolutely. And it's really difficult because you lose your connection with your rituals, your practices, and all the things that you do to maintain a level of well-being. And around 20% say that they have a low well-being and 66 million levels, and around 28% have psychological malice and moderate was 72%. And these have a consequence and we have to think in this when we put the high-impact entrepreneurs in this rise to succeed, and it's really difficult to understand. In the case of social entrepreneurs was completely different. We finished the research three months around, and we found that in this case, the problem is more about the pressure and anxiety. The challenge that the social entrepreneur have to confront is different and put a lot of pressure and you can find that it's a stress, the pressure and anxiety is very high in this case. And it's the same entrepreneur, but the challenge is completely different and the support in the case of social entrepreneur is different. I see that if you don't have your rhythm and your rituals and you don't have your relationship support, you is very difficult to maintain a good level and succeed in the way that is expecting for you. So I'm hearing again the nuance between and among folks who are social entrepreneurs and experiencing varying levels of either continued dedication to the protective factors of their own mental health, which you describe as in Latin America the rituals and the idea of family connectedness. We know that the experience of connectivity, human connection is a huge protective factor for well-being across a lot of dimensions and that can butt directly up against what is required of entrepreneurs, which is that you often disconnect from everything else that you're doing to hustle, hustle, hustle, right? The self-imposed pressure or the externally imposed pressure, sometimes the family imposed pressure, whatever it may be, there are external factors that can complicate or potentially get in the way of us sort of caring for what we know to be our protective factors, right? Dan, I'm curious to know, hearing what both Michael and Mireya just mentioned, you have experienced kind of at each level of how we practice or build a discipline for well-being, whether it's as an individual leader at a company or an organizational partnership level or the sort of broader societal level. And I'm just kind of curious, listening to these comments, how do you account for holding onto the protective factors or building to support them or amplify them while mitigating or minimizing the exposure to the things that we know to be more detrimental to well-being? Yeah, that's a great question. How do we solve it? That's what I'm asking you. How do we solve it, Dan? So it's complicated. Unfortunately, I'm gonna take those levels you mentioned in reverse order, starting with the community level and working back down to the individual. We do work across all these levels in our work at Gallup and a lot of this through partnerships with other organizations as well. We do a lot of work. Anybody heard of Blue Zones out there? Watch the documentary. It's pretty great. You should watch it. We work with Blue Zones on all of their community transformation projects that they do around the U.S. And so this involves going in and really trying to do a diagnostic of what's going on in a community. Usually this is at a city level, mid to large-sized cities that they're coming in and they're saying, we wanna be a Blue Zones. We wanted to make this transformation happen. And their team is working on doing an initial assessment of all of the things across the city, the policies, the built environment, the different access to healthy spaces, access to healthy food, and trying to come up with an individualized plan for what they think the city needs. Gallup's piece when we come in then is to put that to the test. And really, you've probably heard in some of these sessions things like participatory modeling or participatory action. How do we get the actual people we're trying to serve? How do we get their opinion? I like to think about it like democratizing expertise. How do you go out and actually ask people what they need instead of giving them what you think they need? And that's our piece of this puzzle is coming in and doing surveys across the community using the models I described earlier and trying to understand across these different dimensions of wellbeing at a really nuanced level, at a neighborhood by neighborhood level within a city, what are the high priorities that really need to be focused on? Where are you gonna get your biggest return on the kind of effort that you're putting forward? Where are you gonna have the greatest impact for this community if your overall goal is to boost wellbeing in that community? And so starting with that as a baseline and then continuing to come back over time and measure that and say not just, hey, here's what we thought we needed, here was the template and the blueprint, but we've invested a lot of money in these kinds of programs. Is it getting better? Is it working? If not, let's focus on something else and figure out why it's not working and move on from that. Can you give a couple of examples of what some of those programs might entail? So maybe different priorities that have emerged from different communities just for this sake so we can kind of get a picture of it? Yeah, absolutely. So a couple examples, one project we're just kicking off is actually in Fort Worth, Texas, we're looking at food systems there. So this is a community that's worked with Blue Zones for a number of years, they're more of a mature partnership. And one of the things that they've learned over the course of their study is that access to fresh and healthy foods, particularly for lower income immigrant communities is a real challenge that they have. You've got the sort of bodegas on the corner, a lot of junk food, no real green space availability, you just don't have, there's not a whole foods down the street, right? And people wouldn't afford it if there was one. And so we're going in and we're sort of breaking from the survey approaches and we're actually gonna do a lot of qualitative work, trying to understand those local food systems and trying to get at things like health behavior models around what are the norms and practices, the self-efficacy around access to healthy food, where are these barriers? And then how can we help local food banks, other organizations that are involved in this work really target for specific communities, for Vietnamese immigrants in the Fort Worth Dallas area, how do we help them have more access to healthy food? So that's one side of the coin. Another example, this isn't a Blue Zones project, this is more of an individual initiative we're doing in the city of Detroit where we've gone in, partnered with the Detroit Chamber, a lot of other philanthropies in the community, did a very large study looking at equity and access to city services and outcomes and what predicts whether or not somebody wants to stay living in the city of Detroit. For anyone who's read a newspaper in the last 10 years, they know that Detroit has got a problem with population drain and really challenges in the inner urban core. And so going in and trying to understand again in sort of a neighborhood by neighborhood level, is it the education system? Is it access to job training opportunities? Is it access to mass transit? What are the things that are really driving whether or not people feel satisfied where they live? And then because we've brought all of these partners to the table, we've got around 30 organizations that are participating in this work. We have some that are very focused on education policy and teacher training and development and increasing graduation rates. And so we're looking at the data for them at a school by school level. How do we tie people to the schools that are in their local communities? How do we help them understand whether or not people feel safe, whether or not they have access to transportation to get to school, whether or not they think their kids would be better off going to a school in a different area. Tough question to ask a parent, but we're asking those kinds of things. And then trying to give them that data so that they can say, we have limited resources. Where are the areas where the need is the most acute, where we can come in and really focus and try and make that kind of change on a systems level. So I'm curious to know, based on this notion of the different dimensions of well-being. So if, for example, you feel satisfied in your particular area, a lot of us, we've all sort of are emerging from or have emerged from the forced isolation of the pandemic and being sort of geographically isolated where maybe we were not previously. So there's been a shift in terms of who we interact with on a day to day, our strong bonds, weak bonds, whether we're going, whether we're taking time to go to the store and we have access to healthy food and we're cooking or we're engaging with our looser ties on a daily basis. Given the shift that's occurred, I'm curious to know, and I would like to hear this from both you, Michael, and from you, Maria, are there, what have you seen emerging from whether it's post-pandemic universe or what have you, about the ways in which we, as individuals, can kind of shore up our satisfaction and overall well-being based on things that may be external to Michael's point, or I'm sorry, to Dan's point, like the environment where we are living, maybe my school, my kid's not going to a school that's as good as I'd like it to and there's not as much access to good restaurants as I'd like, and therefore my work as an entrepreneur facing the things that I face, I'm actually maybe less able to weather the storm, as you mentioned, that kind of, what is it that kind of enables us to power through or navigate through some of the challenges of being an entrepreneur? Right, that's a really great question, and as I think about it, and Dan, as I think about what you just said, I can appreciate this well-being from two different vantage points. One is well-being as a social impact, one well-being as an output, and what you focus on are sort of policy-driven interventions that have, that increase the likelihood that populations will experience well-being, and that's things like access to good food or proximity to green space and blue space and abatement of noise pollution or air pollution. Rule of law has popped up over and over again as a predictor of well-being on a population basis, sense of safety and security. So you can look at it at that level, but the other question is what about at the level of the individual and particularly in our post-pandemic world? And at the level of the individual, as I said before, straight up positive emotion is one of the main drivers of well-being. So how do you get positive emotion? Well, positive emotions a lot derive from endorphins and oxytocin, and endorphins and oxytocin, these are brains. You know, you're oxytocin. Love endorphins, love endorphins, love oxytocin. Well, these are like pleasure chemicals in the brain, if you will, that are stimulated by things that happen between people. So all of the icebreakers that have been happening at this conference are all really great. And what, for me, the effect of the icebreakers has been that we're getting these little endorphin pulses. Every time you touch somebody, you experience endorphins and or oxytocin, oxytocin. So the pandemic had this effect of forced isolation, forced separation, and we, and it happened in conjunction with the emergence of collaboration software. So these video chat platforms like... We tried to do the metaverse. Yeah, the metaverse, it's not, they're not done with that one yet. But Google Meet and Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Skype and all these things had the effect of giving us the illusion of being in touch with each other where you're in touch except for you can't really touch that person. And I think that that has, I mean, it's not that I don't really think this, it's been demonstrated that that has been a significant driver of feelings of isolation and despair and depression and things that lead to negative well-being. So I would focus on just the healing power of true authentic connection with other people. And they can be, if you're an entrepreneur, you know, when you're in the early stage of your organization, it's a very tight team and it's a really positive, warm experience. But also friends, loved ones, family, people that are not part of your enterprise. Yes, thinking in social entrepreneurs when the pandemic began, we remember that we have a program in online to talk with social entrepreneurs because they live a real crisis because they be inside house and they lost- Social is literally in the name. Absolutely, and lost the connection with the community that is the sense of life of the social entrepreneurs. And I think that maybe the best thing that we can do it was talking and talking about emotion, talking about the dreams that they have and the images that these dreams present. And I think that at the end, the loss of purpose for the social entrepreneur is really, I think that with the pandemic was really critical because they feel that they lost purpose in the life because they don't have the capacity to connect with the people in the community or the people that they are attending in their initiative. And it's really difficult to find purpose when you are isolated and in your house and with your family. And it's really difficult to live. And I seen that the pandemic show us our, I don't know, weakness in many sense. And in many ways, I think the pandemic created for the sort of average person what probably many entrepreneurs had known all along, which is that sort of experience of being isolated because you've either got, like you said, a lean team to start out with. And I wanna jump to some audience questions because we're getting toward the end of our session. And one thing that's come up a couple of times in a couple different ways is this notion of the stress that we experience by virtue of the fact that we are entrepreneurs often working on small teams managing all of the elements ourselves or with a small number of people. And I think a lot of folks are curious whether there are ways that we can sort of balance or navigate the sort of drive to achieve which I think could be connected to our sense of purpose. So maybe in one way that in and of itself is a bit of a protective factor if we think that what we're doing is worthwhile. But then the more challenging side of it, which is that notion of having to do all the things yourself or having to manage this sort of very large plate of all of these different things. And are there ways that we can, I don't know, kind of shore that up for ourselves? And that's open to any of you. Well, I would say stress management and coping skills are very important. Number one on the list is sleep. Make sure to just get a full night's sleep every night. That goes by the wayside and sleep deprivation just makes you more vulnerable to everything else. Number two on the list is physical activity like daily exercise. Daily exercise has been shown in just repeated studies to be as effective as antidepressant medication across the board. So that will put you in a good mood. I think number three is to maintain your social universe. And then to delegate, if you really are an entrepreneur, if you're a leader of an organization, you can't do it all yourself. If you're a craft person, then you can run a small like cottage industry type of enterprise. But if you're a growth oriented entrepreneur, you have to be able to delegate and learn how to do that. And then as I said, mindfulness, two people can experience the same stress in very different ways. And so if you can regulate the ways in which you react to stress, have a different toolkit for coping with stress, that also helps. Dan, I've got a question for you because a couple of folks have asked about what are there, and if so, what are there? What clues do you have to indicate that we have an idea of the structural changes that might be needed, whether it's organizationally, governmentally, that we could make for companies to promote founder and staff well-being? Like what structures do we need to change and what are the changes we need to make? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you got to that because I really appreciate my fellow panelists here who have such expertise on the individual level we're gallup coming from the top down, more so here. And one of the things that really strikes me when we're talking about entrepreneurs and new ventures and social investment is hopefully all of these entrepreneurs are gonna be successful, which means eventually you're gonna need employees and managers and an organizational structure around you in order to scale, in order to be sustainable. And that's where a lot of our research does come in, is looking within organizations and trying to understand in best practice organizations where a really high percentage of employees think that the organization cares about their well-being. And that's actually a question we do ask are an organizational clients. And if you look at an employee who strongly agrees that their organization cares about their well-being, they have a 90% chance of being fully engaged in the work that they're doing. That in turn- This is huge to prevent burnout. Which is huge for preventing burnout. It's also huge for performance, for retention, for safety, productivity, all of these other metrics that have been studied extensively. And so many organizations are focusing on the human capital, on trying to drive performance, on innovative performance management techniques, and they're neglecting well-being still. Or they have a primitive notion of what well-being really means. And that's where- You offer a yoga class for employees. Exactly, there's a yoga class and maybe there's healthier options in the vending machine or something like that. Great, great place to start. What we really encourage organizations to do though is, and for the finance types in the room, you're gonna love this, is to do an audit of your well-being practices. And I'm serious about this, but looking at saying, think about, again, we've got a five-factor model that we like to use, whatever model you want, a holistic model of well-being, and say, what are we doing with policies? What are we doing with incentives? What are we doing with facilities? What are we doing around communication, recognition for employees? Within each of those domains, you're probably not doing something in every domain. You're probably over-indexed to some aspects. Maybe you've got great physical well-being benefits, but you're not really doing anything around community well-being. Maybe you're doing a great job with incentives. There's an exercise reimbursement program, but are you recognizing people for running their first marathon and telling the whole company about how great that is? And so there's so many opportunities, sort of, right there on the table for organizations to start with. The second piece and the harder piece is really about the leadership on down modeling that change and empowering managers who often are not comfortable talking about well-being with their direct reports. They do not, that's not their job. I'm here to manage their work. I'm here to make sure they show up, make sure they don't steal stuff out of the back and do all of these things. And having those kinds of holistic conversations about what's going on in somebody's life, that's a skill that managers and leaders need to learn, and there's ways to teach those sorts of skills. So that would be my points to think about as you're growing your enterprise, as you're having success, is how are you gonna start really building strong structures and the scaffolding across the people that are gonna make that organization run so that the people on the front line who are doing the day-to-day work can thrive within your culture? I think that probably is a good place to help us wrap up. We do have one question here that I'm just kind of curious about, I think is a quick answer. Are there publicly available well-being assessment tools that any of you would recommend? There are many of them. Yeah, there are many of them. The one that is commonly used is called the WHO-5, and it's developed by the World Health Organization. Five questions. It's been used in lots of populations and you can compare yourself to, yeah, or you can compare one population to the next. But there are about a dozen other ones too, but yeah, there are a lot of them. Can I make one other comment on publicly available data? It's come up a couple of times. Loneliness, social connections. We made some jokes about the metaverse a moment ago. Gallup is actually, right now, earlier today we had an event in DC announcing the release of our first official statistics on global loneliness in partnership with Meta, who sponsored this research. And it's some really interesting findings. The full report comes out next week. Freed download. Encourage people to look at that. Just a couple of quick headline findings coming out of that. One in four people around the world, adults globally report that they feel lonely, often or always, which is a striking thing to think about, right? That's one of us on this stage. If we're talking about one in four would always feel lonely. And interestingly, we actually see a reverse relationship to what you would normally expect, which is that younger adults are more likely to report loneliness than older adults when we look globally. And then the report will go into all sorts of additional details around the kinds of social connections. Meta of course would love it if it was all digital connections that were really successful. What we actually find, Michael, to your point, is in-person human connection far more important. And so another thing I've been thinking about in this conference is a lot of these digital tools and new innovations that are out there, how are they bringing people together in the real world? Because that's where the real impact is gonna happen is between humans. I agree. My take on it has been that these digital mental health apps actually make mental health worse. I think that we have a publication with social, Stanford Social Innovation Review in Spanish that we published a recent article about the well-being in the social entrepreneurs that is a very good level of information. And I think that I will invite you to review the webpage of the well-being project that they have for many tools that is really interesting to explore in the field of inner well-being and social well-being and different levels and use different indicators and apps and many things that could be really useful. So the thing that I have taken away from this conversation has a lot to do with what we've typically called the weak ties, but in actuality, what we're learning, and I'm really excited to learn more about this research that you all have coming out, Dan, is that this notion of that in-person connection which we lost a little bit of when we left the office and were at home, right? My barista, I would find myself all of a sudden, I'm in a five-minute conversation and she's like, can you, I have to take more orders. But there's the hunger that we have to connect with people even if it's not about something that is relevant to every other facet of our life, the connectivity, the ability to maintain those connections as we're doing entrepreneurial work, as we're navigating social situations or issues that we're trying to improve, keeping those front and center feels like that seems like, while it is complicated, it seems like that is one takeaway that we can all agree on. So thank you all for bringing your expertise and your insights, we really appreciate it.