 We're working with high-risk young moms, we're working with teens and young adults with cancer, and we're working with college students who are facing loneliness, lack of social connection. What kind of intervention or support might they need to get to a place where they have better outcomes? This episode is proudly sponsored by SIEMPO. Many of you watching have heard of Tristan Harris in the Center for Humane Technology. We've done many episodes on the perverse incentives around screen time and critically thinking about what balance truly maximizes our potential. SIEMPO built a new smartphone interface and browser extensions as the new home screen for humanity. They're at a crossroads looking for a new CEO to come in, or to partner with a larger organization that has the resources to bring this incredible technology to the world. They've built a high-integrity foundation and are teed up for something wonderful. If interested, message the founder Andrew Dunn at andrewatsiempo.co. More info is in the bio. Thanks everyone, and enjoy the episode. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are at the Transformative Technology Conference for our second partnership with them. We are now going to be talking about Hope Lab. We have Margaret Laws joining us on the show. Hi, Margaret. Hi. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So pumped to have you on the show. Pumped to talk about Hope Lab. Before we get there, we love asking all our guests these questions. Are we really all one? Are we really all? Well, wow. That's a pretty deep way to start. I think we are. I think we are. I think you've got the kind of cosmic shirt on that's queuing me to find my place in the universe. But I think so. And I think, look, a lot of what we do at Hope Lab and I think a lot of what brings people to a conference like this is whether at whatever literal metaphorical sort of way we take that statement, we're one at least to the extent that we're really working for one another and trying to help one another and trying to do the kind of work we do, which is to be one with one another to help each other have the best possible flourishing life we can. Yes. I want to hear about your experiences with feelings of the one or feelings of interconnectedness. So are we like here to talk about psychedelic journeys? Are we? You can take that wherever you want, Marguerite. No. I'm going to keep it to the Hope Lab and the Hope theme today. And I think you asked me this question and when I reflect upon what brings me here and what takes me to Hope Lab every day and what sort of drives me throughout my life, it is a feeling of that interconnectedness and of how important it is for me personally to be doing work and sharing myself and hopefully often my gifts with others. And I think that, you know, I often say to people that my work and my life are not distinct things, that a lot of the incredible richness that I have in my life through the relationships that I have, through the people that I meet, through the people I get to connect with through the work that I do, are, you know, keep those things fused in a way that is just I feel incredibly lucky and grateful and I feel grateful to be able to do the work I do every day, but also to be among a community, this community here, but the broader community of people that I work with in health and well-being, that I think really does live that and live that idea that we're connected, we're one and we're trying to make the world a better place and trying to create opportunities for others to have a better, again, more thriving, flourishing life. Yeah, let's dive in. So what is Hope Lab doing, especially in solving this big issue with mental health and well-being? Yeah. Well, so Hope Lab is now, gosh, we were founded 2000, 2001 by Pam Omidyar. Pam, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, really wanted to help young people with cancer have both a better experience and better outcomes. And so Hope Lab was founded to try to use technology, to try to use science, research and technology to improve health and life outcomes for young people. And what we do now is we've broadened that out. We still do some work with young people with cancer. But our mission is to use tech to help teens and young adults have happier, healthier lives. And we're really, really still rooted in science and research. We have a staff of researchers, designers and kind of tech product managers. And we try to bring together some unusual partnerships, including a deep, deep engagement with young people as designers, creators, ideators to try to understand opportunities to and then execute on opportunities to improve health and well-being. Okay. So walk us down this path of how to actually figure out what do young people and adults need to live healthier, happier lives and how do you lever science, technology, research to figure out what, how do you deliver these interventions that help people live healthier, happier lives? Yeah, so we're, you know, we're working right now in a few big areas and I'll start with those. It doesn't exactly answer your question, but I'll come back around to it. We're working with high-risk young moms. We're working with teens and young adults with cancer. And we're working with college students who are facing loneliness, lack of social connection. So we're trying to think about places in society where we have created situations where young people don't have great health and life outcomes. So we've got a lot of young parents who, if they don't get support and help, aren't going to have great outcomes either for themselves or for their, for further kids. Young people recovering from cancer, going through cancer treatment, have statistically much poorer outcomes for the social and emotional outcomes for the couple of years after treatment than their peers. And then finally, you know, we've got this epidemic of loneliness, social isolation, anxiety, depression, suicide among college students, young people in that age group. And so in each of those situations, we're trying to take a, you know, a deep human center design approach, so to really work with young moms, kids in college, young people recovering from cancer treatment, to understand where are they now and what kind of support do they need, what kind of intervention or support might they need to get to a place where they have better outcomes. And how do they see that? So how do they see the path or the opportunities to get from, you know, where things are not so great to where they can have much better outcomes? And we leverage the power of research and science to do that. So we have a team of researchers, and that team will go deep into the literature and what's known in the science about things like social connection, loneliness, positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, all the things that we've been working with that can, in an evidence-based way, show improvements. And then bring those together with that design work we've done with young people where we've deeply understood how they live their lives, what they care about, what motivates them, what brings them joy, what their challenges are. And through that iterative process, the team will work on interventions and building an intervention that in some way, most of the time, at least so far, always involves a tech element. And often there's probably a couple reasons for the tech piece of it. One is because that's where young people are. They're engaging with technology in their day-to-day lives. And second, because we want to try to build things that can scale broadly and be affordable. And one of the ways to do that is by leveraging the technology that young people are using every day. I have so many questions for you. Yeah, so anyway, I'll stop babbling and let you ask some concrete questions. Let's break it down. Yeah, let's begin this process. So then we have an example like at-risk moms, and we have this body of literature that has all these different ways to come in and make interventions around mental health and well-being. So then you have to do a process of figuring out the current, you have to figure out how is that person an actual at-risk mom. You figure that out. Is there like some database that you can pull at-risk moms from? And then the next thing is how do you decide on what kind of intervention? For someone that is like an at-risk mom versus someone that's a child that has cancer versus someone that is just someone that's struggling in college with the mental health anxiety issues, et cetera, depression. So there's a whole suite of literature that has to be parsed for the right sort of interventions, for the right sort of person. I mean, this is very complicated. So let's get in. Yeah, let me try a couple of ways we break it down that I think will help you understand it and others understand it. So one concept we use is we talk about reverse engineering health. So we think about a health outcome we want and then we think about the behaviors that contribute to that health outcome. So what are the behaviors that are going to make somebody more likely or less likely to have a positive health outcome? To be less lonely, to be more connected, to be less anxious, to have a better trajectory with their baby. And then we look at the psychology that acts on those things. And then we think about how technology can impact that psychology. Okay, so let's have this example of the mother and her child have some sort of an at risk situation. And then the intervention. So how do you know that there's an at risk situation happening? Yeah, and then how do you calculate the proper intervention? Well, that brings in partnership. So in that case, the at risk moms, the young moms we're working with, are all engaged in a program with an organization called Nurse Family Partnership. So they're all engaged in this program and they've been chosen for that because they are low income and high risk. And they've generally grown up in poverty and they have delivered a baby early in their life. So they're pregnant early in their life. This is the template. So that's the template. So we're starting. And then we're looking at this question of, what are the things that we can understand from the science and from the experience of the program that are most likely to lead that mom to have a positive outcome? And in this case, one of the things that we learn, and it's kind of simple, but it's probably related to a lot of what we're talking about here today, is learning to set work towards and achieve goals. That's something that you and I might take for granted. But a lot of the technologies that we're seeing out there for all sorts of people really are helping us to try to do that. To try to have healthy behaviors by learning to set work towards and achieve goals. So the aha for us in this program was that if we could build a really engaging technology intervention tool, in this case, it looks like it takes the form of an app that could help those young moms do that in places in their life that were really important to them, that that would result in them having better outcomes in all kinds of way. It helped them be more likely to get an education, be more likely not to harm or risk their child, be more likely to read to the kid all the things that you want to see happening. Okay, and then so then there's a targeted intervention that happens to do one of these goal-oriented behaviors that maximizes their life outcome and the life outcome of their kid. So then you send how many of these a week or like. Yeah, so then what we do is we build that and test it. So we work with partners. We actually brought a tech partner called a Yogo in that has a really interesting platform. They're gamers and behavioral scientists. So they've got this behavior change platform. They can build white label products. And we worked with them to design and build this platform. It's called Goal Mama in this case. I love that name. It's funny, it's good name. That's a great name. So Goal Mama, yeah, we decided it needed to have, yeah. We're thinking about Goal Papa actually. I love this. So then we build this and then we have to test it. So we have to actually understand a couple things about it. We have to understand whether the young moms to whom it's targeted or for whom we've built it like using it. Is it exciting? Is it engaging? Is it something that they want to use? And then we need to understand basically whether it's working to get the results that we're trying to get. Does it keep them in the program? Does it get them more likely to do the things that we want to see them do? Like finish school? Like read to their kids? Like have healthy nutrition and stay off of drugs? All those things that we're trying to accomplish to have to? Is it like self-reported that they're achieving these goals? Or like how do you know that they're achieving them? Yeah, I mean in this particular program, and this one's not, each one of these programs that if we're going to describe a couple of them is a little different. We will, yeah. And some of it depends on who the partner is. So in this case, this was a partner that had a program in place. And what was interesting about the program was even though it was targeted at teen and young moms, it did not use digital at all. And so 40 years ago, that wasn't a big deal when this program started. There wasn't any digital. Nobody was carrying around a phone. But fast forward 40 years to today, you have a program that's targeting teens and women in their 20s. And if you don't deliver it to them digitally, it's going to be very hard to keep them engaged. And so in this case, we were really looking at, how do we actually meet the needs of today's young moms and do that in a way that's going to be really resonant with them? So our team spent a lot of time out with young moms in the field. So we went out into their homes, we shadowed them, we talked to them. Then when we engaged them in the design and then tested with them. So a big, big important piece of what we're able to do, I call HopeLab, we call HopeLab a social innovation lab. What we're able to do is run this lab where we can take a principle like, you should really have your target users, in this case young moms, deeply engaged in designing and developing the product. We can do that. We have the luxury in some ways, we're not out trying to hit quarterly earnings. We've got a little bit of flexibility in how we can work. And so a big, big piece of how we use that benefit and how we use that flexibility is to engage young people at every step of the way, designing, developing, testing the stuff that we work on. Okay, let's give an, this is just, I really want to try and synthesize this into some sort of like a concrete understanding of exactly what's happening with the moms that are at risk. I'm going to do my best and you tell me if this makes sense and we can move on to the other ones. Okay, so a mom is at risk maybe having a child a little bit too early. Maybe she's a young mother, et cetera. Let's say 18 year old and has a child. Doesn't have a lot of social support in her life. Doesn't have a lot of social support. Well, yeah, this is huge, absolutely huge. This is life trajectory changing in interventions. That's why this is extremely important. Okay, then there's a bunch of literature around ways to cast these interventions into people's lives, depending on who this person is exactly. That intervention comes in and it comes in in a specialized way for different, again, these different cases that you are listing that we'll get to in a little bit. In this case, it may be something that is some sort of a digital notification for them to dive deeper into like a reading with their child or take the child to some sort of an educational place or to get these goals around like what do you want to achieve in the next year or in the next three years? Maybe there's somebody that you go and meet with. But so it's these different sort of strategies around kind of like becoming their like self-actualization coach in a sense. And for not only them, but literally the child that they need and the social fabric that may not be conducive to them in this case or their friends and family, et cetera. It's again, it's life trajectory changing. Was that okay? That was great. But I will add something that's really important and it's important both to the understanding the story but also I think to what we're doing. So in this particular program, the person does have an in-person coach. It's a nurse and the person, the young mom meets with that nurse every couple of weeks. And what's interesting about this is that when we set out to design this, one of the principles that was really important to us and was really important to the partner in the project was that the technology wasn't meant to take the place of the person, the technology was really meant to amplify the relationship between this nurse and this mom. And I think a lot of the things that we're seeing develop in the space of coaching and connection, we care a lot about the human touch and the human element. And one of the things for me just in my career and in my career with digital health and digital interventions over the past couple of decades has been to really think about how do we do a better job of combining the human touch with the power of technology and digital. And so one of the most interesting things about this program is that in this project that we've worked on is that what it's really trying to do is to say, how do we use this human to do the things that humans are really great at and how do we bring technology in to really amplify that? And so in this case, we've got these young moms who are meeting with these nurses and now this technology tool helps everybody connect more, connect in between visits, be more efficient, track what's getting done, set goals. So that's I think an important nugget of this. Huge key, I love that. This is like you just described, the human still being in the loop for a deep emotional psyche to psyche interaction is so crucial, especially if it's happening weekly. Let's move to the next one because these are very important. Like I was just saying, like these are life trajectory changing interventions and that's what I love about them. You just view it like someone's life trajectory going like trying to get to as much of their peak thing that they're blueprinted for gifting into the world and sometimes people are just going like this until they die instead of going up in the least amount of time and you guys can, in a sense, intervene and help people get up. We're all about this at the show. So we have this next one which is so it's young people that have been diagnosed with cancer. So the intervention that we developed, the product is called Vivibot. So what we were trying to do was we were looking at this problem and the problem was poor social function, lots of anxiety and depression as kids are coming out of, young people are coming out of cancer treatment, teens and young adults. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. It's a big identity formation time in life and so you were a football player and then you became, you know, then instead of whatever that identity had been, you're now a cancer patient. How do you get out of that? How do you get back to a new normal identity? So that was a big piece of it. There's a big piece of it around, it's just tough, you've been out of school, you've lost connection with your peers. So there's lots of reasons that explain it. And so what we wanted to try to do was to, we knew that, we knew that there was documented scientific evidence that anxiety and depression were higher that social function was poor for these young people. And so we really wanted to see if we could do something about that. And so we got, again, got together a lot of young people with cancer going through cancer treatment and we spent time with them developing about a dozen concepts initially. And we ultimately converged on one concept which was a way to deliver a positive psychology intervention because our science team had determined, boy, a lot of the things that young people are experiencing during this time, if we could teach them the principles and the skills of positive psychology, gratitude, mindfulness, we could help them have less anxiety and better outcomes. And then the other part that was really interesting about it was the form factor. And so we've ended up developing a bot, it's a chat bot called Vivabot. And it could have been in-person groups that met together. That's what we thought it might be initially. It could have been an app, but it could have been some way of connecting them with someone who'd gone through something similar to what they'd done. And the insight that we got from the young people was a really interesting one. And it was, right now, the people in my life, I'm so thankful for the support that I have in my life, but when I'm not feeling so great or when I need to vent, I can't go to them. They either, people either feel sorry for me or they don't want me to feel bad. And I just don't feel like I can be, I don't feel like I have a non-judgmental place I can go. So if this thing could be kind of like a person, but not a person, not another person, that would be great. And that insight led to the concept of making this bot, which is a person like, it has a chat with you. It's a chat bot. So- With juxtaposing this with what we were just talking about. Exactly, which is interesting. And actually hearing that, that big insight from the young people was a really important one, which is I need something that can be non-judgmental and that I can interact with. And I can, at three in the morning, if I'm feeling low, I can go out there and there'll be somebody to talk to that won't judge me. And so Vivabot was built and the two big things that come out through the bot are a chat which introduces and teaches positive psychology skills and then videos. And the videos are of other young people talking about the experiences that they've had going through cancer. So they're really wonderful, first person, young people talking about this is what happened when I had to think about fertility or this is what happened when people kept telling me you should feel grateful because you're better. You're not gonna die. Yeah, yeah. So the bot and the intervention juxtapose those two things and deliver them for the young people and they have access to it 24 seven. And the exciting thing about Vivabot is just last week we actually released in the Journal of Medical Internet Research a study showing that it significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety in young people with cancer. So one of the important things for us at Hope Lab is that we do the scientific validation and testing of the work we do. So that was published last week. We were really excited and proud about that. And we have now moved Vivabot to a formal home outside the lab. Think of Vivabot was in the lab. Now Vivabot, we want Vivabot living out in the world. And we've partnered with an organization called GRIT, G-R-Y-T and they're the biggest online community, social community for young people with cancer and their families and loved ones. And so Vivabot is now available for free for young people with cancer and those who love them and support them. And people can go out and give it a try and please refer anybody who you know who might benefit from it. So that one's been really exciting. Wow, wow, yeah. I love this. I love the second one being so much different at Hope Lab than the first one that like at-risk moms are so much different than children or young adults that have cancer that are going through cancer treatment and that are in such a part, like when you talked about their identity becoming that, that like really resonates because it's such a formative part of your life and like if you can't get out of that foreign parts because like if you go to jail when you're young or if you, but like cancer is another thing but like- Or have a baby. Have a baby, like at-risk, yeah. There's all, yeah, these are, that's a very interesting way of putting it that there's all these different types of things that can happen that are stimuli on your life that are in many ways hard to see as some sort of like a treasure, like a trauma being a treasure. But once you do get through that process of seeing the God in it, the source in it, the unity in it, the love in it, the awakening, the further evolution of consciousness in it, then it's so hard to see that because here we are being healthy 27 years old and trying to compare that to having a child too earlier, having cancer so early. But it is in a source, it is in a sense source creatively expressing itself and finding these beautiful adventures of consciousness. It's so hard to view it that way though. And- Well, and it's one of the things we talk about though at a principle higher level is, we're trying to help think about this period of adolescence and young adulthood instead of as one of risk, negative risk as one of great opportunity. And so there's a piece of the, when you talk about identity formation, there's a piece of all the work we do when we work with this age group which is all our work now is focusing on teens and young adults that really is about that, right? It's about identity formation and about opportunity and about this sort of this notion that there's lots of risks that happen around that time of life. How can we actually help take that, that propensity for risk taking or for risk that goes along with that phase of life and try to sort of turn it to the positive? And so this notion of the opportunity for flourishing versus the risks of terrible things happening is really something important that drives us. So you've really hit on it. I love that, yeah, seeing it as opportunity for flourishing, catalyzing that opportunity for flourishing rather than trauma that can send us down and depression, spiral, all these different, this is such a profound way of viewing it. Okay, and this was another very interesting just a way of explaining like this is a completely different class of intervention that is in a sense like a somewhat of a bot that's accessible anytime for someone to be able to talk to. And actually this also reminds us of just the recent episode we did with inner allies and that could be something that Hope Lab could potentially explore partnering with as well. These interventions, the array of mental emotional health interventions that come in for maximizing well-being at these critical pivotal times is exploding. That's why we're here at TransTech. There's still a third one that we're gonna explore here. And this one is blowing up in our world. It has a lot to do with these devices. It has a lot to do with the attention economy and the business plans behind them. It has a lot to do with the way that we are, just it feels like where our biology has not caught up with cultural evolution and here we are stuck in the exponential technology age with primordial brains. And then you have all these college kids that are like looking at people saying like, they have 10 million subscribers and I have nothing. And then we kind of like forget that we're all unique colors on the color wheel uniquely blueprinted for different things and that it's not about the comparisons about the inner adventure and happiness. And so what the hell do we do about depression and anxiety with young people? Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about what this project we're doing in this intervention that we've created. Cause I think it won't answer that question, but it gets to a lot of interesting points. And in some ways it raises like everything we do, it raises as many questions as it answers. So we decided we really wanted to enter the space of teen young adult mental well-being. And we wanted to characterize it as broader than health or sort of mental illness, but mental focusing on mental well-being. And so we looked at this question of what contributes to the current state of teen young adult mental well-being or lack thereof in the US. And we did this thing called a systems map, which is a very interesting process. And without going into that in detail, a number of places on that map emerged loneliness and lack of social connection. It emerged in the area you talked about, which is this area of social media. It emerged in communities and people having less connection to community. And so we decided we wanted to kind of go down that path and see whether there was something that we might be able to do that could look at. So the way we look at this is we think of loneliness and we don't think of it. Science shows that loneliness is a precursor to and predictor of depression, anxiety, and even suicide. So it's upstream, as we would say, in the healthcare world. But it's really important, because if you could intervene at that point, then maybe you could stop some of the depression and anxiety that we're seeing escalate in society. That's actually your key essence of Hope Lab is everything upstream, as far upstream as possible, interventions for maximizing well-being. I love that. So what we did was we thought about, okay, we went out, did a lot of interviews and a lot of discussions with kids. We ended up focusing on college just because of it as an inflection point. So we talk about, this is a time of change. And also because there's been this huge, as you've read about in the news, this huge challenge in college campuses. So one statistic is there's been five times the increase in demand on college counseling centers as there has been increase in college attendance. So five times. And so the colleges can't keep up with that. And it does raise this question of, gosh, what is causing this huge demand for services in these college counseling and mental health centers? And so we began to look at this kind of health outcome, behavior, psychology, technology map that I talked about a little bit before. And we ended up deciding that we would try to create an intervention that was targeting loneliness or the opposite of loneliness, social connection. Again, after spending a lot of time talking with young people, understanding how they characterize and talk about loneliness, hearing them talk about things like no one ever taught me how to make a friend. It's just really interesting things that I think are things that we have changes that we've seen in society that my experience online and my experience in real life don't connect the way I would like them to. That it's hard for me, I feel lonely, it's hard for me to reach out and make a social connection with other people. It feels too risky, it feels like I'm gonna be rejected. And so there was a lot that came into this whole concept of if we could help young people both learn how to make social connections, but also have the skills that they need to process rejection, to process challenges, that that might be something that could have an impact on anxiety and depression. And how do we do that? And so what we did was we went back, we'll take you back to where you were earlier in our conversation. We went back to the science and we looked at what are the pathways that we think we might be able to impact between loneliness and anxiety or loneliness and depression? How might social connection and learning the skills of positive social connection be a buffer to loneliness and be an antidote to loneliness, anxiety, depression? And so what we ended up doing was designing an intervention, which this one takes the form of an app, it's called Nod. And we just actually launched it in a randomized controlled trial on the University of Oregon campus about a month and a half ago. So you're gonna have all the University of Oregon kids wondering if they're all out there using it right now. And basically what it does is it plays with this idea that I talked about earlier of young people, teens and young adults, their brain is wired to take risks. And so we thought, well, what if you could actually use that and create a series of positive social risks? So what if you could create a game or an experience for young people where you give them a set of social risks to take? And it can be a social risk as simple as go sit down and talk to three new people at lunch today or make eye contact with people as you walk across campus or bring somebody something from the dining hall, be the friend you would wanna be. So social challenges, which may seem simple but are things that people aren't doing or feeling like they can't do. And then give them the tools to process their feelings, their experiences and do that through them having the opportunity both to reflect on them. So we give, like a lot of the meditation and sort of wellness apps, teach reflections, give people the opportunity to do that processing. And then teach the skills of self-compassion so that as they're having these experiences, if things don't go so well, they learn this skill. Also part of a lot of what we see out there in the world of mindfulness apps of learning self-compassion. So we package this together into an intervention and we're testing that intervention. And what we're doing is we're asking the question, does it decrease loneliness? So we're doing pre and post tests on loneliness. And then does it decrease feelings of our symptoms of depression? And we're doing that test as we roll it out. So we designed that with interestingly another company called Grit. This one's spelled G-R-I-T, it's based in Denver. It's a theme, it's a huge theme. It's a theme, it was a trendy thing for a while. So that company, Grit, that organization has a portal on college campuses called U at College. So they were an interesting partner for us because they were already reaching out to college kids. And we worked with them and kind of in their sandbox to design this intervention visually to make it interesting to young people, to get the language and the kind of syntax and the way that jokes, the pictures. So we did that design work again, tested it with lots of young people. And now the test we're going through now is really the test of can this intervention have an impact on loneliness among these first year college students? And we'll have a little bit of information about that in the early part of the year. It seems, again, very common sense that by nudging people into the very small social-emotional-intelligence interactions that they will decrease feelings of disconnectedness and separation and increase feelings of interconnection and well-being, less depression, less loneliness, et cetera. Like, and it's just so interesting that again, your essence going in this direction of the most upstream early life interventions that help catalyze people's futures love that about Hope Lab. At the same time, it seems like if you go even more upstream than you guys fixing symptoms is even more upstream is the root of the issue being separation. You're born into the world and it's all about separation. The United States culture, these college campuses roar with economic separation, political and social separation. Because this is the world that we've bred, it's no longer understanding every breath of air, every sip of water, every bite of food and the interconnected process of that, every word that's exchanged between people. Just look back at indigenous people and the way that they still live today and that they used to live 100,000 years ago in their deep animism with their environment and with each other. And when you look at that and you try and bring that into metropolises and into the most upstream when the child's born into the world and the social fabric around us, it will make it so that all the other symptom issues go away. Do you feel like the most upstream issue is our tendency towards separation and our disconnection? Yeah, it's so interesting to hear you play it out this way because one of the things that has really been striking to me about this particular project has been that the statistic is basically that two-thirds of college kids say they felt very lonely sometime in the past. One month I think we asked her a couple months. And that's kind of incredible because to your point, if you think about what that says about us as a culture and what that says even, we had one of our interns who wrote this great blog piece, which you should read on our site about just think about what that means. As I sit here in my hall of other students in this class, I look to my left, I look to my right, we all feel lonely. We all feel like we don't have social connection. And yet here we all are together. And for some reason that's the condition we find ourselves in. And so to me, what's interesting, and I know to our researchers, I was talking with one of the, with our director of research operations, this notion of this epidemic of loneliness is really an interesting thing to your point for us to delve deeper into because if we're delivering our young people to college, all feeling disconnected and lonely. Disaster. What does that mean for how we're engaging and behaving as a society? And it can't, I totally agree with you. We say, okay, great. Now we have them, two thirds of them are lonely. Let's see if we can do something to try to help fix this now. Let's see if we can do something to get them in this teachable moment when they're just starting college that maybe will help them get to connected to some people so that they won't have that experience through college. It doesn't obviate the need to do something earlier, but it definitely, and it definitely gets you thinking when it's that prevalent, what is it that? The most upstream. Yeah, and what is it that we are as a society telling young people about themselves or about... What is the social fabric of existence? If really they're getting to that point and thinking... I am disconnected or I don't have enough to offer. Yeah, I don't know what my gifts are. No, the social fabric helps people accelerate them finding their gifts instead. Last question that we like asking our guests on the show. We've done such a great job on Packing Hope Lab. At least I feel, given the short time, and maybe we can do more epic conversations into what exactly more Hope Lab as well as other important organizations around the world like you guys are doing, like all of the partners that you listed as well are so interesting. The last question is, what do you think is the most beautiful thing in creation? Wow, huh, the most beautiful thing in creation. You know, this is sort of like the, this is the question that somebody asked the other day when we were doing an icebreaker, which is sunrise or sunset. And I think that, I think for me just to sort of, as I go through my day and my life and reflection, a friend of mine says she makes sure to watch the sunset every day. And I think that for me, just this revelation every night and every day that we've sort of got a new beginning, that there's a moment of contemplation, the sunset contemplation, and the moment of new beginning in sunrise. I think that phenomenon, I don't know if that captures me. And it grounds me in a way that I sort of get the opportunity to really think about intention and sort of how do I, how do I not let that go? And how do I remember that there are these opportunities every single day to have and really, you know, operate on intention? Yeah, yes, yes. There's my deep thought for you today. Thanks for prompting it in me. Ooh, this has been so fun learning more about you and Hope Lab. Thank you. Thanks, Margaret. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Wow, thank you so much. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciated. Check out the links in the bio below. It's hopelab.org. Check out that link in the bio below. Also check out the other links in the bio below. This is very important. We got to figure this out. All of these topics that we talked about on the show with what Hope Lab is doing, have more conversations with your friends, families, coworkers, people online about these subjects. Check out the links in the bio below to transformative technology conference and all of the incredible things that they're doing here and all the organizations that are a part of this. Check out those links in the bio below. Thank you, Brady Springer, for co-producing the show. Great, I appreciate you, brother. Thank you very much. Also, support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you believe in in general. Support them and help them grow. You can find all of our links in the bio below to simulation. PayPal, Patreon, cryptocurrency. You can design cool merch and get paid all those links in the bio below. Check those out. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace.