Right this very minute, there are thousands of survey researchers who are tracking down over 250,000 people across 30 countries as part of the largest sociological study ever conducted, all to find out the answer to this big question: What drives us as humans to flourish? On the inaugural episode of Venture to Flourish, we talk to Dr. Byron Johnson and Dr. Matthew Lee, two of the researchers leading the Global Study of Human Flourishing — a project with the potential to change how we think about everything from health and faith to education and our relationships with each other and our communities.
KEY QUOTES & BIG IDEAS
Matt Lee on what is flourishing:
“So flourishing we understand as complete wellbeing. And it's not just about the wellbeing of an individual, who might not be contributing to the greater good. It's not just happiness or positive affect or feeling good. It's about how individuals and their communities are mutually enriching each other.”
Matt Lee on the value of studying flourishing:
“We've got a larger narrative that helps us make sense of our suffering so we can feel a sense of joy even if we or our loved ones are suffering. I think what flourishing offers us is a way to think about happiness and wellbeing and joy and health and related topics as a holistic kind of integration of all of these things.”
Matt Lee on connection during crisis:
“What people find sometimes is that the depth of relationship in the midst of suffering that is so deep, and it's almost, one author calls it a "paradise of unbroken solidarities", and the natural disaster washes away the social disaster of everyday life. And loneliness has gone, lack of meaning, lack of purpose is gone. And sometimes you find that people, they're a little bit sad when the lights come back on. I don't want to go back to the mundane, disconnected life. And so nobody's advocating for promoting suffering or causing these things to happen. But it does suggest something about the way we've organized our interactions that we've got such epidemic levels of loneliness and depression and anxiety, and that when the switch is flipped, and you see what happens when people have to work together and they do that they find that they're released from that prison.”
Byron Johnson on the need for more social study of faith:
“There's a lot of evidence that shows just being a regular attender is good for you, good for you physically helps you to live longer. And so there are these utilitarian ways in which you could look at, Okay, so if I wanna live longer, I should actually be a regular attender at worship services. That's actually pretty accurate. And so I think there are these benefits that people really don't know about that are byproducts of faith….I think that the academy is overrepresented by people of little faith or no faith, candidly. And so some of this is a direct result of that. I think there is a lack of understanding. And so what people don't have knowledge of, they just don't understand. And so that's why when people like us publish some of these papers, it's like, what? The findings are that clear? It's just shocking to them because they don't really understand how that works.”
Matt Lee on flourishing in education:
"We know from Gallup data that students become less engaged over time, the highest levels of engagement are in elementary school when they're playing together, when they're using creative arts, you learn the alphabet by using finger paints or something. And then we move the arts out of the core classes and it becomes more competitive and more individualistic. So we lose engagement over time so that by the time you're in high school, only four out of 10 students are engaged. And by the time you become a teacher, only three out of 10 teachers are engaged. So there's something about the culture that we're creating as we move students away from the warm, friendly, playful, enjoyable, deeply connected kindergarten experience and into the solitary individualistic competitive experience."
Byron Johnson on importance of studying hope:
"We live in a world where over the last 15 years there's been a dramatic rise in unhappiness, and it's kind of frightening actually. And so if you can say there's a rise in despair and it's happening around the world, what's the opposite of despair? And I would argue hope is the opposite of despair. So why is it that so many people are hopeless in the world? What might we find that distinguishes people who have hope versus people that have despair? And if we can unravel that, what might we be able to provide to the world, no matter where you live?... Wouldn't it be great to know, look, if this is where you are, if you took this scale and look where you are, you're at the bottom end of this despair measure and nothing good comes from that, how do we move you six places to the right of despair toward hope? And what if we could develop apps that could be used around the world that would interact with people and help them make right steps that would prevent suicides or suicidal ideation, that would prevent overdoses, et cetera. If we could do this, what a great gift to the world. And I know that sounds grandiose, but the whole project is really."
***
GO DEEPER:
Read: The Global Flourishing Study (Harvard)
Read: “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert Putnam
Watch: The Global Flourishing Study Launch (Youtube)
Watch: Flourishing and the Global Flourishing Study presentation by Tyler J. VanderWeele (Youtube)
Right this very minute, there are thousands of survey researchers who are tracking down 250,000 people - yeah, you heard that right, a quarter of a million people across 30 countries - as part of the largest sociological study ever conducted, all to find out the answer to this big question: What drives us as humans to flourish? Now, that is a big idea.
So you're tuning into this podcast for the first time, because, let's be honest, it's our first episode. We call it Venture to Flourish, and it's a podcast from Learn Capital for founders, investors, and leaders who are working to build ventures that unlock what we call human flourishing.
I'm Evan Baer, managing partner here at Learn. And honestly, this might be the best part of my job. You see, we believe that humans are capable of incredible things. But often we lack the tools or the resources to realize that extraordinary potential. You see, flourishing manifests across a variety of realms: happiness and satisfaction, mental, physical, and emotional health, purpose and vocation, relationships, the list goes on and on. What if we could, for once, focus on the person unlocking those tools and resources that will help them thrive the most. We've got a big hypothesis here, that entrepreneurs should play a leading role in driving human flourishing - the goods and the services that we build. We’ill talk to those already doing this, those who want to do it, and others who have ideas of what problems need to be solved. It's a privilege to be learning alongside you on this pod. I'm really glad you're here.
On today's show, the inaugural episode of Venture to Flourish, will talk with Project Director, Dr. Byron Johnson, a Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at Baylor and his research collaborator, Dr. Matthew Lee, Director of the Flourishing Network at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. That's a lot of words, but in sum, they're a pretty big deal, and kind of the top guys in the world to answer this big question. What does human flourishing mean? And how do we get more of it?
Let's do this. Welcome to the pod.
Guys, it is such a pleasure to have you in conversation on this podcast. Thanks for being here.
Byron Johnson (2:13):
Oh, thank you, Evan.
Michael Lee:
Thank you. Delighted.
Evan Baehr::
Okay, so I'm in this room. We're in a room together, we're on Baylor University's campus, and I see a lot of books. This feels very academic. Yet what we're gonna talk about today is something is underway here, happening between Baylor and Harvard. That is, it's a really big deal. Byron, where are we right now?
Byron Johnson:
So we're in my office in the administration building at Baylor, which is kind of odd for an academic unit. So we're the only academic unit in the administration building, and we have the fourth floor here. And it's just a bunch of scholars from different fields that work here, epidemiology, history, philosophy, sociology, criminology, historians. But we all have one thing in common, and that is we're all interested in the role that religion plays in society. And so we crank out research all of us, and we're pretty productive group
Evan Baehr:
To people who just turned off the pod who think this is gonna be boring, give us a little bit of your background in terms of helping people understand how the discipline that you're involved in is not sort just research for the sake of research, but is it really the cutting edge of so many social issues and challenges to think about? Of prisoner reentry and recidivism. And welfare and poverty. Tell us some of that story.
Byron Johnson:
Sure. Well, on the wall behind you is a picture of a rodeo, and it's an unusual rodeo because it takes place every year in a prison located in Louisiana in the swamps of Louisiana called Angola. And that rodeo raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for inmate programs, and it's an unusual experiment known as one of the most violent prisons in America. And we studied that prison for five years because it's become transformed. A warden went there and started a bible college in the prison for inmates serving life. And that started in 1995. We came in 2012 and studied it with a team of five scholars for five years. And that whole place has been so transformed that people come from all over the world to replicate what happened there. And so we were able to document some pretty amazing findings were violence down, suicides down, and we identified quantitatively what we call identity transformation among inmates serving life sentences with no hope of parole.
Evan Baehr (4:43):
At this table right now also is Matt Lee, a new arrival to Texas. Matt, we're glad you have made the move south from cooler territory of Boston well decorated, lots of credentials, lots of publications. You were a director of a program at Harvard focused on human flourishing. Give us a little of your story and why would Harvard have a program on flourishing? What's that all about?
Matthew Lee:
Well, one of the things that we try to do in the program, I'm still affiliated with it, is to bring the deep wisdom of the humanities to bear on rigorous empirical investigations. So we want to learn from philosophers and theologians, what is it we should be studying and how should we be looking at the interconnections of different domains of wellbeing so that it comes together in a complete picture of flourishing? So flourishing we understand as complete wellbeing. And it's not just about the wellbeing of an individual, who might not be contributing to the greater good. It's not just happiness or positive affect or feeling good. It's about how individuals and their communities are mutually enriching each other. And so what is my contribution to the greater good? And then how do I experience wellbeing across the number of domains? And are my actions helping the community to flourish? And so really, I think we're starting to move beyond some of the narrow framing of wellness or wellbeing that has dominated a lot of social science research that hasn't been as grounded in the rich wisdom of the humanities.
Evan Baehr:
Give us some of the origin story. I mean, why would Harvard care about this topic?
Matthew Lee:
Well I think that as our program founder, Tyler, would tell it, he was noticing some aspects that were not being fully covered in existing research studies and wanting to expand and connect these various domains to get a more complete picture. He's argued that we ought to reimagine health as flourishing. We have lots of studies of health and we have lots of studies of people's financial position but people care about other things. They care about becoming a better person working on their character. They care about finding a sense of meaning and purpose. They care about close social relationships. Harvard, for decades now, has had a very prominent study of happiness. It's not full flourishing, but happiness. And one of the early program directors said, basically, it boils down to love. People who love well, are happy later in life, regardless of these other kinds of characteristics. And I remember talking with George Vaillant when he was head of that project and I've since talked with Bob Walldinger, who's currently leading it up. And it really stresses the importance of what we find in the deep wisdom of the humanities, which is the importance of relationships and how we are becoming better people by helping others become better people. And so this is a longstanding interest at Harvard, perhaps not framed in terms of flourishing and maybe not drawing upon all of the different disciplines to that extent.
Evan Baehr (8:25):
You had a few words in some of your description and contrast that a layperson may think of as synonymous with flourishing, joy, happiness, satisfaction. I'd love to just get a brief from you guys, a primer on what do we mean by human flourishing and maybe how does it stand in contrast to what we think might sound similar, like joy or happiness?
Matthew Lee:
So we can experience joy and happiness. I mean, there's a distinction to be made there. Sometimes people can experience joy, even emit suffering. We've got a larger narrative that helps us make sense of our suffering so we can feel a sense of joy even if we or our loved ones are suffering. I think what flourishing offers us is a way to think about happiness and wellbeing and joy and health and related topics as a holistic kind of integration of all of these things. So anyone who's been a parent knows when you're up at 3:00 AM changing diapers, your physical health might start to suffer a little bit, but your sense of meaning and your sense of connection might be enhanced. And so we wouldn't say that we're always happy in those moments and even the next day when we're exhausted at work.
But we would say that we're making a conscious choice to trade off one domain versus another. And that overall, we feel that that's the kind of flourishing that's appropriate to our circumstances. And so we can flourish in almost any circumstance. And I think, again, flourishing suggests a kind of healthy growth. It's not runaway growth like cancer. There's unhealthy growth, and then there's stagnation or languishing where we're not growing at all. So we continue to grow in a way that enhances the growth of others around us. And if we take it more broadly, the health and wellbeing of the environment, the natural environment. So we can think about flourishing as not being extraction so that I'm becoming happier at the expense of someone else, or I'm feeling more joy at the expense of the natural environment, but it's sort of mutually regenerative. And so all flourishing is mutual and all flourishing is shared in some way.
Evan Baehr (10:49)
To further contrast it with some of those more economic approaches. Some things I've heard you guys talk about before might be some questions around the number and quality of relationships you have of frequency, of religious practice, of some kind, even practices like forgiveness towards other people. Those are things that I would have to imagine if there's some DAVOS seminar on how are countries measured on economic indices, like, I'm sorry, did you just ask about forgiveness, like go see your pastor on that one. But tick through some of those areas that feel really in contrast with some of the more traditional approaches.
Byron Johnson:
You mentioned that word forgiveness, I'll tell you a quick story. So I was studying this program in a prison in Houston, and it was a faith-based program. And one of the participants in the program, I had interviewed him a bunch of times, and he had always maintained his innocence that he was in prison for a double homicide. And he came to faith while in prison and still maintained his innocence. Well, as it turns out, a pastor from a church was going into the prison to work with a group of prisoners, and this guy was one of them. And he's preaching about this in a sermon. And a woman approaches the pastor and she said, I want to ask if this person is in your program. Well, there are 150,000 prisoners in the state of Texas. He was one of the handful in that program.
And she said, he killed my daughter, my 16 year old daughter at some point. And the pastor said, Would you like to meet him? And she said, I would. And she said, Because for the last 15 years, I've hated that person. So they set up this victim offender
Matthew Lee:
I'm reminded of a summer I spent in graduate school working at the Disaster Research Center, and I was transcribing all of these interviews they had done with people who had gone through a disaster, earthquake or flood or something.
Evan Baehr:
This sounds like a dark time for you.
Matthew Lee:
Well, no, but this is the great, this is what I was going to say about the joy of studying deep flourishing and not shallow forms of happiness, is that for a lot of people, and there's actually a large body of literature on this now, that for many people, daily life is a kind of social disaster. We are disconnected from our neighbors. We don't know them, they don't know us. We feel alone. We're trying to entertain ourselves to death or something. But when the flood comes and the power's out and we need food and we have to find water together, now all of a sudden we're drawn together around a common set of purposes.
And what people find sometimes is that the depth of relationship in the midst of suffering that is so deep, and it's almost, one author calls it a "paradise of unbroken solidarities", and the natural disaster washes away the social disaster of everyday life. And loneliness has gone, lack of meaning, lack of purpose is gone. And sometimes you find that people, they're a little bit sad when the lights come back on. I don't want to go back to the mundane, disconnected life. And so nobody's advocating for promoting suffering or causing these things to happen. But it does suggest something about the way we've organized our interactions that we've got such epidemic levels of loneliness and depression and anxiety, and that when the switch is flipped, and you see what happens when people have to work together and they do that they find that they're released from that prison. So it happens in prisons. I did a lot of work with restorative justice, as well. And these are each sort of little miracles when you see people being, well, they're releasing themselves and releasing each other from the burdens that they've been carrying in this unexpected way that you think, Well, I wouldn't have predicted that. But after you see it a hundred times, you say, Maybe I would predict that, but because I have a different lens on what people are capable of and what flourishing really means.
Evan Baehr:
Why are these questions not better or rightly only reserved for philosophers and theologians? Because some people might hear these things like, Oh, that's really neat. These nice kind of guys sound like they're sort of pastors. They want us to forgive each other. But what we're about to talk about is many multi-million dollar scientific rigorous investigation that is, this is not chicken soup for the soul, this is serious.
Matthew Lee (16:50):
What I could offer there, is that we do need the humanities. And so we have neglected, as we've invested in other areas, I think we've neglected some of the support that we could offer to the humanities to tap into that wisdom more deeply. But what social science offers is the ability to predict. And so we can take this wisdom and say, Okay, if we're going to offer to people the idea that building moral character will have good outcomes, does it actually have good outcomes? So we just published a study where using a workplace sample, we find that high moral character does predict a lot of wellbeing outcomes, including lower levels of clinical depression. So these are not just self-report findings. These are substantiated by a clinician who's got a set of criteria, but also various wellbeing domains that are self-reported. So we can say that it's a good thing to work on becoming a better person. And now we can show through the methods of science that it has these effects.
Evan Baehr:
So it's moving from maybe a theological ethical command, like you ought to forgive, into a different take on the same question, which is, when you forgive, you're happier, you flourish more. So it's almost like, Hey, let's set aside some of these massive, complex theological questions about who God is and the texts about God, et cetera. And let's just be practical. Let's think about, So you wanna flourish, Here's what we know. Is that how you guys think about it?
Byron Johnson:
Yeah, it's funny because there's, as Matt knows, there's a lot of evidence that shows just being a regular attender is good for you, good for you physically helps you to live longer. And so there are these utilitarian ways in which you could look at, Okay, so if I wanna live longer, I should actually be a regular attender at worship services. That's actually pretty accurate. And so I think there are these benefits that people really don't know about that are byproducts of faith. And these are not one or two studies. There's a massive literature that supports that. And I was thinking, Evan, when you asked that last question when I was in grad school, I remember saying I wanted to study religion within sociology. They were like, Byron, that's a career non-starter. And so we would advise that you look at something like economics.
And I said, Well, look, the fact that there's so little done is a reason that we should take a look at this, wouldn't you agree? And to that point, they didn't have a good comeback. And so I think that the answer to your earlier question is, we've neglected so much and I know that Matt feels this way, and I do too. And that is that we're trying to make up for decades of oversights on things that really are important. So yes, gross national product is important, and we don't deny that those variables aren't. But there has been a neglect that we're trying to remedy.
Evan Baehr:
I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about functional medicine and just following the history around why mainstream medicine wrote off homeopathy or alternative treatments. And it almost feels like there's kind of a scandal there. There was a coordinated effort to only talk about SSRIs and not about meditation, or you can talk about any vertical and healthcare. And I wonder, is there an analogous scandal here, which is like, why have the big brains of social science not been looking at the data to just unpack some basic things about what leads people to be happy and fulfilled?
Byron Johnson:
It's a great question. And I think that the academy is overrepresented by people of little faith or no faith, candidly. And so some of this is a direct result of that. I think there is a lack of understanding. And so what people don't have knowledge of, they just don't understand. And so that's why when people like us publish some of these papers, it's like, what? The findings are that clear? It's just shocking to them because they don't really understand how that works. But thankfully, there are people like Bob Putnam who wrote the book "Bowling Alone" and other books where a respected heavyweight like that says, Look, really half of all social capital is spiritual capital and it's found in houses of worship. And so now you've got thousands of scholars scratching their heads when you have something like that happen. And so what Putnam has done for something like social capital and spiritual capital is what I hope that we're on the verge of doing here.
Evan Baehr (22:12):
In the category of scientifically driven, seriously backed, elite, credentialed, cited writing, thinking and evidence in this category, there's something really big in the works that you guys are at the helm of. Tell us about the survey. What is it and why is it such a big deal?
Byron Johnson:
Well, Matt came to us from Harvard. He just got here, literally. And the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard is kind of like the epicenter of research on human flourishing. And about three and a half years ago, they convened a meeting, and Tyler Vanderweele, the host, and they brought together a few scholars just to talk about flourishing from different fields. And that was where this project was kind of birthed. And Tyler and I had a conversation because I have worked with Gallup. I'm a Gallup fellow and I've been working with Gallup since 2000. And because we've done so many national surveys and Tyler Vanderweele was making the pitch that we need to take our work and go higher, we need to aim higher, and where possible, we need to do longitudinal studies that are more rigorous than what we've been doing. And so then we had discussions during the break about, is it conceivable that we could do something that's never really been done before? Could we do a longitudinal study, not just a snapshot at one point in time, but could you track people around the world over time? Is it even possible? Is there the technology to make that happen?
And so we had this conversation and we said, Let's just run it by the Gallop people to see if there's a network in place that would be possible to field that with this many people - so a quarter million people - that we could track all around the world. And so Tyler and I just, in a three day workshop had these conversations that led to a series of meetings that took place for the next couple of years. And that was what happened. We pitched it to a few foundations and they were interested and we convened a couple of meetings and we wrote a big proposal. And next thing you know, three years later, we have one of the largest studies ever funded. And so the first global study of flourishing, the first global study of its kind period, but this one on flourishing and spirituality and religion, a big part of this study. So yeah, we're excited about it. We're almost a year into the project, about a year into the project. It's a five year five wave. So we'll be collecting data from these same people over the next five years, and with a team of close to 50 people working on it. And when I say 50, that's not the people in the field, that's just the researchers writing papers. There's a global field team that's out actually collecting data right now all across the world.
Matthew Lee:
Well, in consistent with what we were just saying earlier about what are we doing for our own happiness? What are we doing to promote the happiness of others? This project is about giving the data away to everyone else who wants to use it, and the code that we're using to run our models so that everyone can see what we've done and then they can enhance it in some way. And so it's really a gift to the world. And I think that's probably something that was appealing to the number of funders that pooled their resources to make this happen. One couldn't have done it alone, but a number of Templeton philanthropies in the Fetzer Institute and some others pooled their money to make this happen. And probably in part because it is a gift to the world, this is a data set that will become available for everyone to use in an open science framework. So we're being transparent and there's a lot of concerns about replication and the replication crisis within social science. And so this project not only is unprecedented in terms of the longitudinal approach and the scale that it's operating, but also this truly transparent process.
Evan Baehr:
Give me some of the basics on it. So it's a survey of questions and it goes to who and for how long, and what does it look like?
Byron Johnson:
Yeah. So there are 22 countries involved in this study. And maybe your listeners, they would identify as the 22 most populous countries in the world. That's fairly accurate statement. And they could say, Well, why just 22? Every country adds a significant burden financially. And so we're interviewing people face to face, some through smartphone technology, some through tablets. These interviews last 22 minutes, there's a issue of fatigue if you go beyond that. And so when we started designing an instrument, we had a bunch of questions and scales that had been validated in previous research. And so they kept coming back. It has to be cut and it has to be cut. And then, so this was so painful to cut good questions that you know need in there and then to have them say, You need to cut yet again. And so we've just had to trim it back and trim it back to get it down to a 22 minute interview.
Evan Baehr:
And there's the filter there we've gotta get to at most 22 minutes, that's our cap. And you guys have this bank of a few hundred questions. You've gotta whittle it down to way smaller than that. And is the frame there, you're trying to pick the questions that you think will have the greatest explanatory value of flourishing.
Byron Johnson:
So for example, if you wanna measure depression, there are scales that measure depression, but we don't have the luxury of including 12 questions. So now we have to pick the one or two best questions to measure depression. So if there are weaknesses in our study, it's that we only have one or two questions on depression or one on suicidal ideation. We preferred more, but we just had to cut in that way to be able to pull it off. And again, when you're interviewing people, it takes time in the field to interview them. And there's just so many things that come into the equation when you're trying to field a project of this kind. Imagine India, 10 different languages that we're using just in India alone, and the translation issues surrounding that, that's why it's taken us so long to get it right. And so the methodology is just incredibly thick because we wanted it to be just right.
Matthew Lee:
And the input that was gathered from scholars around the world. So someone will find something that's missing and say, How dare you.
Evan Baehr:
And you were explaining to me there's one take on this, which is like, oh, you know, administer on Facebook, it's a few minute quiz. You could do 22 countries in a few hours. This is a very different kind of research project. So you send these people out, they may hike up into the mountains and meet the same lady five years in a row. This is a very different deal.
Byron Johnson:
It's a very different deal. And so we have a rigorous methodology for sampling so that we'll have representative data from these countries. So we just didn't, it's not like some of the surveys that you hear about where people can opt into a survey and yeah, you're right. People in remote villages in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from a city, we're actually going there to talk to those people. And then during the year, we have activities where we stay in touch with them so we don't lose sight of them because, as you can imagine, people move. And so we want to stay in touch with people throughout the year. So it's a mammoth undertaking to track a quarter of a million people.
Matthew Lee:
And the importance of a representative sample as opposed to some of these convenient samples or people who are self selecting is then you can generalize to the country as a whole. You can say within a certain margin of error that this holds for this population.
Evan Baehr (30:50):
Let's fast forward as ways that this data are coming back in your team of 50 who are just doing the analysis and its open source so the whole world can be doing analysis. What are some of the types of claims or inferences that could be made in a few years from now based on this work?
Byron Johnson:
Well, we have so many different constructs that we're looking at. And so really people will be able to write from this data for the next 50 years. Hundreds of thousands of papers will emerge. And so it's like, what's the thing that you're most interested in? Because there's no end to the possibilities since we have so many different things that we're looking at. One of the things that I'm most interested in, because I get asked this question a lot, what would that study have looked like if you had done it with a population that was largely Islamic? Because most of our research deals with samples that are heavily Christian, for example, because they're based here in the States. And the answer is, I don't know, because that work has not yet been done. So because our numbers are so significant, we will be able to look at all the great world religions. And so how do people respond to flourishing from different religious traditions or no tradition at all? What about the atheists that are in our sample? How are they doing on these indices of flourishing? These are fascinating empirical questions that really have not been tackled in this way before. This is the first thing, Evan, that comes to my mind. But there's so many other ideas.
Matthew Lee:
And to that point, how does a member of a particular religious tradition fare in a country where that religion is not supported versus in a country where it is. So the generalizations that we will make will be context specific, and that's something that's been missing from studies of just one country. We can compare the nature of the social container that is housing the individuals flourishing. I was also going to just briefly suggest that it's helpful for us to think about, well how do we want to organize all of these 50? Is there a common kind of approach? And the answer is that we're using an outcome wide methodology where we're going to be looking at the same set of outcomes, the same set of covariants, and then each team is going to take their particular predictor and then we'll be able to compare and contrast within countries and across countries using the same kind of methodology. Does love, for example, predict 17 out of 40 outcomes, or something like that. And how does that compare to some other variable that we've got in our data set? And so that kind of approach helps us to tell a story that's not the final story. Someone can come in with a completely different - there's pros and cons of outcome-wide methodology, but it gives us the basis for having a kind of coherence to the narrative that we will offer and then we invite others to do something completely different.
Evan Baehr:
To dig deeper in this space, check out one of Byron's recommendations, a book by Bob Putnam called "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community." Check this quote out, he writes, "The timing of the internet explosion means that it cannot possibly be causally linked to the crumbling of social connectedness described in these books. Voting, giving, trusting, meeting, visiting and so on had all begun to decline when Bill Gates was still in grade school."
There's a few questions in the survey that I want to come back to, but as a side point in terms of why I personally and why I think our listeners are interested in this space, is to say, as we uncover areas where humans are not flourishing, where they're languishing and we say, Oh gosh, it just weighs on me so heavily that in this particular area, let's just say in the area of forgiveness, let's say that you guys find in five years from now, people that regularly try to forgive others report significantly higher flourishing in their life. Let's just assume that for a second. And yet almost no people actually report that they are regularly forgiving other people. So we'd say, okay, as masters of the universe, we'd wanna sort of incept on them forgiveness skills. And I'm an investor and an entrepreneur and so the tool that I often carry is let's build companies which give us an excuse to take brilliant, hardworking people in great cultures to work really hard to try to solve that problem. Let me put this to you, Matt. You said something earlier referencing someone else, it was something like most people's experiences are social disasters, and I'm just curious about this. We are, most of us operate in market economies. We can buy and choose services that we think will lead to our wellness. We can enter and exit relationships that we think enter our wellness. We can choose places of worship that we think, why are we not doing better as rational beings making voluntary choices to be more flourishing. Why do you think it's so low now?
Matthew Lee (36:04):
Right, that's a wonderful question. And I'm thinking about an app. We have a flourishing network, and I'm blanking on the name of the app, but there's an app that's basically offering practice at how to connect with the people in your inner circle, your friends and your closest friends and your family, and connect with them regularly. I'll send you the name so you can put it into the podcast, but we don't as a matter of just daily habit, do this in this way. So this app invites us to check in regularly at a deeper level. And I'm reminded of Marty Seligman who helped to reestablish a kind of positive psychology, has this great activity on expressing gratitude that he always used with his students. And I started using this with my students, and it was just transformative. The student would write two paragraphs about why they are thankful to someone who has made a difference in their life.
And you don't just send it in an email, you hand write it, you hand it to the person and you read it to them. You make eye contact, you hand it to them. And many students told me when I was using this exercise with them that it was one of the most emotionally powerful interactions they'd had in their lives. Oftentimes, both people are in tears by the end of this. And I say, Well that's interesting because all you did was express gratitude. Why is that so rare? Well, thank you. We say thank you, but to go into detail and say this is how you've changed my life, this is how you've loved me into being is really powerful. And then I say to the students after this sort of debrief conversation So will you do this again? And they say, Never. I won't do it again. It creates that kind of sense of vulnerability, like I wasn't in control, I started crying and it's just not normal. So they would say, Well it was a little odd to do it, but I said, Look, my teacher's making me. There's nothing I can, can't not do it. So sort of giving them permission to do the thing that wasn't part of their socialization experience. And then when they did it, it was powerful but unsettling. And so if it became a more regular occurrence, then it would be more natural to keep doing it. But it's almost like you have to assign them to do it in order for them to do it because it's just so contrary to what we're used to.
So why is that? Why not have an educational process that feels more like kindergarten throughout K through 12 and college? Because we know from Gallup data that students become less engaged over time, the highest levels of engagement are in elementary school when they're playing together, when they're using creative arts, you learn the alphabet by using finger paints or something. And then we move the arts out of the core classes and it becomes more competitive and more individualistic. So we lose engagement over time so that by the time you're in high school, only four out of 10 students are engaged. And by the time you become a teacher, only three out of 10 teachers are engaged. So there's something about the culture that we're creating as we move students away from the warm, friendly, playful, enjoyable, deeply connected kindergarten experience and into the solitary individualistic competitive experience.
Evan Baehr:
I wanna pick up on this example and push you guys a little bit on the theory of social change behind all of the work that you guys are doing. Let's keep playing out this example. So we know we, let's just assume that if you more regularly forgive, you produce greater human flourishing, flying your example. Let's just say actually a number of people have tried it. They experienced a moment of great flourishing and then they said like, I'm not gonna do that again. So if that's like a heuristic, a mental model that some people run into, what could happen out of the work that you guys are doing that breaks through that, that leads more people to try it for the first time or more people who've done it once to try it again. Is that how you're thinking about the theory of change?
Matthew Lee:
So another way to ask the question is what is it that creates a stable disposition in a person so that they practice? This becomes an ingrained habit. And this, to go back to what Byron was sharing earlier about religious service attendance, there's something about the rituals and the habit of showing up that is itself formative of this disposition or this kind of character. So we have to have opportunities to practice regularly, to make it normal and to make it part of who we are.
Byron Johnson:
I just think there's such a tendency, Evan, for us to isolate ourselves in this society that we live in. And I don't wanna blame technology for everything because some people do that, but it's clearly a part of it and you see it all the time with a family sitting together around a table at dinner and they're all on their phones, but there's a sense in which we naturally pull ourselves away. And I think that's why things like regular worship service, it's not all about the faith. It is a part of that faith, that's a key. But being together realizing we need each other, the accountability that comes with being together.
Matthew Lee:
And the joy of worshiping. We were touching on that previously, the act of singing together. Except for me, I'm not the great singer.
Byron Johnson:
Well, this is the other thing, too, we talked about Evan with you earlier, is the arts and the role of the arts in flourishing. Now that's not a part of our project, but it may be a part of our future projects. The role of music. That too is missing from our study. Again, we couldn't capture all the things that we wanted to, but the study has already galvanized a community that's reaching out to us to say, Have you considered the possibility of this? And we're saying no, but we'd like to consider with you. So where this will all lead, we don't know. But we feel like the corridor between Cambridge and Waco is gonna be an important one for us to not only continue this project which is, as I said, a five year, but we hope to, it will be renewed for an additional five years if we can keep it going for 10 years. It's already an unprecedented study. But what if we could keep it going for 10 years, 10 ways of data? Could we keep it going indefinitely?
Evan Baehr (43:02):
I'd love to hear from each of you. You probably have a lot of favorites. Tell us about one question in the survey that you're most excited to see the data from.
Matthew Lee:
Well, while Byron's thinking, I can tell you that there's a question on love and care that I'm particularly interested in and will be working with a small group to explore in greater detail. And we know from both the deep wisdom of the humanities and the mountains of evidence from social science, that loving relations - I alluded to the other Harvard study that's been going on for now, I think seven or eight decades - and the critical importance of love and care for the full flourishing of human beings, both the person that we love and that we allow them to love us. I think that kind of two way street is really - people flourish in all kinds of miserable social circumstances if they are loving each other.
Byron Johnson:
So I guess one way of looking at a question that jumps out is the question on hope. Because we live in a world where over the last 15 years there's been a dramatic rise in unhappiness, and it's kind of frightening actually. And so if you can say there's a rise in despair and it's happening around the world, what's the opposite of despair? And I would argue hope is the opposite of despair. So why is it that so many people are hopeless in the world? What might we find that distinguishes people who have hope versus people that have despair? And if we can unravel that, what might we be able to provide to the world, no matter where you live? And I think some of the questions you've been asking us today, we don't have the wherewithal to answer because you're wanting to know what will this data allow us to do real quickly?
And we'll need to bring other people into this to help us answer that. But wouldn't it be great to know, look, if this is where you are, if you took this scale and look where you are, you're at the bottom end of this despair measure and nothing good comes from that, how do we move you six places to the right of despair toward hope? And what if we could develop apps that could be used around the world that would interact with people and help them make right steps that would prevent suicides or suicidal ideation, that would prevent overdoses, et cetera. If we could do this, what a great gift to the world. And I know that sounds grandiose, but the whole project is really.
Matthew Lee:
And identify what is universal - hope might turn out to be something that's universally important and correlated with all these other outcomes, but then what is culturally specific that enhances hope? And so we're not necessarily going to have one set of 12 rules of life or something, but we might have, these are the resources and these kinds of cultures that enhance hope. And then if you do that, you see some other positive outcomes.
Evan Baehr:
You may not quite be the Peterson 12 Rules, but relative to comparing this to what a lot of people would think of hope, love, temperance, any of the greater classical virtues, I think to a lot of people, it's like I took a great books class as a freshman or I go to church on Easter, that world. But I mean, what comes to mind, I love playing around with the sort of metabolic health CGM wearable space, and there's this company called Levels. And so in that case, what you're trying to do is move this - the lagging indicator is this score they give you called, it's a metabolic health score. You want overall resting low glucose level and you wanna have not a lot of peaks and troughs. So then they kind of give you all these things that you can try. Some of 'em take a lot of work, sleep for nine hours a night, really restful sleep and all these different things.
And then one of their tips, one of their ideas is 30 minutes before a meal, drink a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. Now that is unpleasant when I do that, it basically cuts my glucose spikes in half. A Jolly Rancher or a bowl candy would give me a 60 point spike. I have the ACV an hour beforehand and it cuts in half. And I don't know that we're gonna have that kind of precision out of this, but directionally, instead of drafting on my memory of Aristotle as a freshman, if you guys are giving me some just orders of magnitude, sort of like, hey, what we see across a quarter million people is people that on a regular basis incorporate some even few minute effort that gives them hope. List one thing that you're thankful for today and that you hope could be true in the future. A little short exercise. Is that not potentially the ACV analogy. Is that not the little thing that actually moves the needle? Does that resonate with you guys at all?
Byron Johnson:
Yeah, it really, really does. And hey, I'm a runner. I've been running for about 35 years and recently I've been having some knee issues. So I went in, got an x-ray, they go, There's nothing wrong with your knees. I go, Fantastic, but I still have pain. So I went to a physical therapist and they asked me how the pain was, when it happened and how long it lasts. I said, for the first mile of the run. And they asked other questions and the physical therapist said, I know the problem. She goes, You have tendonitis in both knees, here's what you're gonna do. And she gave me the exercises, this was like six weeks ago. I've been doing the exercises religiously, the stretching, and I'm running without pain. It's another way. If someone could help me run, that really adds meaning and a lot of things to my life because it's a real outlet to me. What if we could help people say, just take 10 minutes a day and do this, and this is gonna really help you. And so that physical therapist didn't think a thing about what she did for me, but for me it was a huge thing because I thought my running days are over.
Byron Johnson:
Well they're not, I get to keep running. And so I think if we're just not built as social scientists, Evan, to know how to answer the questions that I think you ultimately are asking us, but this is why we need each other to figure out how to do that. Because it would be a benefit if we could help people in those ways. Here's a short remedy to this situation you find yourself in.
Matthew Lee:
Yeah, and there's a body of literature that we can build on. And so we've already talked about gratitude, so that would be one practice that's pretty straightforward, easy, low cost and maybe one that we neglect in our pursuit of our own individual achievement or self-actualization or something. So if we practice gratitude and it becomes more regular, we create what Barb Fredrickson has called positivity resonance. And I'm thinking about Bob Chapman, who's got this great book called "Everybody Matters," talking about what he does in his corporation, he's a CEO ,and offering people the opportunity to express gratitude to coworkers who have helped them. And starting our meetings with that. And what that does in terms of what Fredson would call positivity resonance now, instead of being out of alignment and maybe having a conflict with each other, now we're in tune with each other. Now we can listen to each other, now we can become more innovative. And there's been some research on innovation in even the tech sector, the team, the work groups, the teams that practice more loving and caring relationships are the most innovative because you're not worried about your idea being stolen, you're not worried about being ridiculed. So offering people some simple practices like gratitude can help build this kind of positivity resonance, which is the building block for healthy relationships.
Evan Baehr (51:37):
One way maybe of describing this, it just came to me, could be something like putting the spotlight on and validating the humanities. It's no longer a debate over which philosophers or theologians we love. Hey, it's like bring 'em all to the table. Yeah. We're gonna ask a set of questions. So a quarter of a million people around the world, everyone loves the empirical method. We're gonna present the data. And I appreciate your recognition of your limits. You guys produce the data, you analyze the data, but then listeners, you guys pick up the baton. Are those new ways that we lead our companies? Are they ways that we lead our places of worship? Are they new kinds of laws or public policies we explore? And what I love is that we're touching areas that feel deep and personal, and questions about God and religion. And for so many people those are so scary.
And what's exciting, particularly in sort of a naked public square ecumenical sense, is you guys are giving us the language based in data and empirical studies to ask some of the greatest human questions that I feel like we've not been able to talk about among polite company that can really move the needles. So I'm just so excited with you guys and we look forward to following the journey and finding some ways to, as these insights are coming into the market, who are the entrepreneurs, investors, and other leaders that are picking these things up and sort of evangelizing them - little "e" - to the world. Great things will happen.
Byron Johnson:
Well Evan, we look forward to partnering with you. Your listeners won't know that you and I go way back. You are a student. I was at Princeton a long time ago. And so we look forward to working with you and learning from you as help us move outside of our comfort zone and how can we think about taking what we're doing to another level. We're gonna need help from you and others that you know in your network.
Matthew Lee:
And these kinds of questions help us think Yeah. About what we're doing more deeply and in a different way. So thank you.
Evan Baehr:
Matt, Byron, congrats on the project and thanks for being with us.
Evan Baehr:
Thanks for tuning in to Venture to Flourish. If you know someone who should be listening to the pod, would you do me a favor and just send them a link and check out the site learn.vc/flourish. There you can subscribe to our newsletter, read transcripts, find related articles, and even upcoming events. And hey, on a personal note, I'm really glad you're here. There are a lot of parts of my own life where I feel like I'm languishing, so I love your interest in the topic and look forward to figuring out what we can achieve together. Signing off is Evan Bear from Venture to Flourish.