House Calls Podcast

How Do You Build the Confidence to Connect?

With guest Jon Batiste,

Singer & Songwriter

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I'm Vivek Murthy and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I'd like to introduce you to Jon Batiste, award-winning singer, songwriter and performer. Today, we'll be talking about finding courage through friendships. As part of a national college tour to raise awareness of loneliness and youth mental health, I had the opportunity to sit down for a live conversation with one of the most talented musicians in America, Jon Batiste. Jon grew up in Louisiana, part of a musical family playing drums and piano and writing his own songs. His path led him to Juilliard and onward to incredible success: twenty Grammy nominations, including winning Album of the Year in 2022 for his album, We Are. He was the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and composed the score for the Pixar film Soul. For Jon, music is a way to create joy and connection. It's a way to heal. As successful as Jon is, though, he wasn't always someone who felt like he fit in and he didn't always have the courage to perform in front of international audiences. In this conversation, Jon gets personal about the small ways he and his band would build courage off the stage and how that translated to courage on the stage, things as simple as saying hello to a stranger or telling a fellow passenger on the subway “I like your shoes.” To anyone who's ever felt like you don't fit in or don't have the courage to share your creativity with the world, I hope you will see yourself in Jon's story. For all of us, this conversation is a reminder that our friendships make us better. Better artists, better students, and better human beings. We're excited to hear thoughts or questions you want us to explore in future episodes of House Calls. You can always reach us at HouseCalls@hhs.gov House Calls, live with Jon Batiste Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY

What an incredible way to start this conversation. Jon, thank you for that inspirational song.

Thank you so much. Hello, hello everybody. How y'all doing? (audience applauding) Yeah.

And appreciate all of you coming out tonight for this conversation about a topic that really touches all of our souls in the way that Jon's music just did now and that's the topic of human connection. Many of us are aware that we're living through an epidemic of loneliness in isolation in America. It's actually a global challenge. We're not the only country dealing with this, but one of the reasons that I decided to launch a college tour focused on loneliness and isolation is because it's hitting young people the hardest. We know one in two adults are struggling with loneliness right now, but the numbers are much higher among high school students, among college students. We were at a university recently that decided before we came to poll the students to see how they felt about the social connection in their life. And to their surprise, 80% of the students said that they wish they had more social connection in their life. They were struggling with a sense of loneliness. And so I'm grateful that we're here to talk about this because loneliness is much more than just a bad feeling. It is real consequences for our health. When we struggle with loneliness and isolation it increases our risk for depression and anxiety, but it also raises our risk for heart disease, for dementia, for premature death, for stroke, for so many things that we care about, we know are public health issues. Well, it turns out addressing loneliness is also a public health issue. And so that's why I'm grateful to Clara and to Joe Tsai for helping bring this moment together to the Social Justice Fund, to the Barclays Center, and also to MTV and to Active Minds for helping set up some of the booths and other exercises that we have around here for you to engage in that focus on social connection. This is really one of the defining issues of our time. And the question for us going forward is, are we gonna be able to turn this around and build more connected lives, more people centered lives, more community in our country, or will we continue down a path of growing loneliness? Well, I think we should do the former, and I think we can. And that's what we're here to talk about today, which is how we do that. And I'm excited that the way we're gonna do that in part is through conversation with Jon, a musician who needs no introduction, an artist who counts Brooklyn as his home and somebody who I think through his music really does reach people at a deeper soul level. So Jon, I wanna jump into this conversation by asking you about when you first came to New York. As some folks here may know you came to Julliard, you were… You did your undergraduate degree here, you did your master's, but it wasn't necessarily the smoothest transition, right? You came from another state that was far away, both geographically and culturally. During your first few weeks here you passed out in the subway, you were diagnosed with pneumonia, you missed the first two weeks of school. That's a tough way to begin a new life in a new city without a community. So one thing I wanted to ask you is, how did you manage that transition? And for students out there who are thinking, gosh, I'm starting my college life here in New York, this is a whole new life. How do I find support and build community? I'm wondering what they may be able to learn from how you did it.

Well, I would suggest getting a winter coat. That's the first step.

Practical advice from Jon

First step. You see, I came from a family of musicians who are all self-taught. My dad and his six brothers, seven brothers total had a family band, still have the family band. And then of those seven brothers, there are 30 cousins, imagine. At the time I'm the youngest of all the cousins and you know with black families you always put the young cute one in the front and sing and say sing and dance. So I started picking up instruments so I could hide behind the instruments as a natural introvert, but it just is such a deep thing that you reminded me of growing up in that environment, being surrounded by so many people. And then at 17, I came to New York City for the first time, auditioned for Juilliard. I found out about Julliard the year before that and I auditioned, and that was a funny story. But I got in to Julliard and when I came here the first week, the orientation for students, I was in the subway and I started to feel woozy and then I fell out and I was like, "Okay, that's what they mean when they say if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere." I mean, I fell out, it was a trip. So I didn't have community here, needless to say not like I did back home and to have that happen in the first week of being in the city, the way that I developed a community was a lot of times through those sort of experiences. I discovered that I had a long lost cousin who lived in Harlem. And that was the one person that would visit me in the hospital about two weeks I was in the hospital. And from there I started to meet other students who were a part of the programs. There were many different programs, music, dance, drama, there's opera, there was all types of different folks that I would go and blur the lines of. So that's the first thing I would suggest to anybody who's new, get outside of your algorithm, get outside of the space and the thing that you think you're there for. Find a way to connect dots. Get outside of your algorithm and connect dots back into it. Find all of the different things that may interest you and even things that don't interest you. Just find people and find ways to really and truly see what it is that they're up to with a genuine curiosity. So needless to say, for me, that was one of the first things that really alerted me to the fact that I was alone out here and I needed to figure out a way to connect with people, not just as a means of entertainment or recreation, but if I was gonna stay out here, you gotta have your tribe if you will.

Well, I'm so glad you found your tribe. And it sounds like part of how you did it was through a mix of curiosity and courage, right? That you were curious and it probably took some courage to go and engage people in conversation and to learn more about them. And I wanna ask a little bit about that courage part because when I talk to students in different parts of the country, many of them say, you know, it's not so easy these days just to go up to someone who might be listening to music on their earbuds, who might be looking at their devices and just start a conversation or to do so with somebody who's eating by themselves in the dining hall and just go up and start a conversation. But tell me like, how did you summon the courage to start those kind of conversations? And I'm curious how you cultivated that.

We did a thing with the band that I eventually formed and we called this exercise, throwing yourself in the water. Another one of our band mates would call it, getting your rejection in. So we'd be like, whether it's in the subway or we'd be at a performance or any sort of social gathering, be in the lunch room or wherever it was. And this was all in an effort to get over a natural sense of stage fright that we had. And a sense of feeling like, oh man, when we go on stage it doesn't feel as free and as uninhibited as it does when we are practicing. How do we make it feel a lot more connected to the people? And we learned that, well, if we figure out how to connect to people off the bandstand it would translate to the bandstand. So one of the exercises that we did and this is before we would play music on the subway for people for free, we would go up to people and I don't necessarily recommend this, but this is what we did, and I'm an introvert and it's not my natural state to do that. And we would just ask somebody something very banal and mundane, like, what time is it? Where are you from? Start with things that don't have necessary follow up. You see those are nice shoes. Just straightforward, no necessary follow up, but it's a communicative and you can tell if somebody really wants to talk to you or not. You under… We have enough of a radar emotionally to understand that. And I believe that those little things led to us being able to say, okay, now I'm comfortable enough to play my instrument on a subway platform for people who don't wanna come and hear a concert necessarily. And then it evolves. But I think that's a big part of it. The safety of a community and a campus and that environment is really just finding there are always entry points in a day. If you look at it like the law of average, you might have one or two moments in a day, 24 hour span where you could see, I could have said something to that person. I could have connected, I could have maybe got rejected. But it's like a muscle, it's like anything else. And eventually you start to realize techniques and ways of connecting with folks and engaging in conversations and even being the one to initiate conversation.

I really love that actually what you used to do because those small, seemingly small questions that's really vital. If you have social anxiety of any sort, sometimes the desensitization that you get from those kind of small steps can make a real big difference. And just like it translated over to how you performed for the rest of us it can translate to how we show up in the rest of our lives as well. And this is really vital at a time where I think where a lot of people are struggling a bit with how to break out and form connections with others. In fact, just by a show of hands, how many people here know someone in your life who's struggling with loneliness or isolation? Yeah, it's almost everyone. And I'll tell you this, wherever I am in the country, talking to rooms of whether it's 20 people or 2000 people, the same number of hands go up, the same percentage of hands go up 'cause this is incredibly common. But it is… You used the word at the end, muscle, right? And that's exactly right. Like our social skills are like muscles. And I was talking to a group of students just earlier this evening who were sitting up here in fact, and one of them said, well, during Covid it felt like we… Like that muscle atrophied a bit, it got weaker, right? Because we weren't using it as much. And we hear that all the time, even for folks who are in their forties, fifties, sixties, there were many people who felt like it took some effort to get back into engaging with people and socializing with friends after the worst of the pandemic was over. But when that hits you at a really critical phase of your social development when you're in high school or middle school or college, then it can be tougher to recover from that. But exercising that muscle is really vital. And so that kind of small steps you talked about are essential 'cause one thing I think that I've also realized in relationships is, the relationship risks that we regret the most are the ones we don't take. Even if it sometimes stings a little bit to get rejected when you ask somebody if they wanna sit next to you for a meal or if they wanna go out for lunch, often the pain of feeling lonely and not having any outreach at all and not knowing if people want to engage with you. Sometimes that can actually be even worse. The not knowing, if I had just maybe asked, maybe the outcome would've been different. So whether someone says yes or no, whether they give you the desired response or not, your muscle continues to build. And that becomes really powerful when it comes to future social interactions.

And I must say the sting of rejection fades after some years. Trust me on that. It's much better, don't worry. It's beautiful.

Well, I'm glad you said that because I think Jon, and I suspect that many people will look at you as this incredibly accomplished, you know, highly decorated artist and say, "He has never been rejected. He hasn't had to deal with that. It's all worked out well for him. He's famous and well-known and everyone loves Jon". But you know the real story is more complicated than that. So one thing I wanted to ask you is, this experience of being well-known, of being famous, it's one that increasingly people see as a part of success, right? And something that more and more people are striving for. But tell us, what has your experience of fame been? Has it been positive, negative, mixed? And I'm curious how you've dealt with it.

For me, when I think about fame, the first word that comes to my mind is a job. It's a job. And it's not the job that you necessarily signed up for unless you signed up to be famous. It's like, say you wanna make cakes and then you make cakes and you get really good at doing that. And then people say they want more cakes, give me more cakes. And then you start to see the opportunity to service more people. Then you have to decide how much is that worth pursuing and it becomes at odds with the decision to just become the best baker that you can be. So it really is a decision that splinters at a certain point, it goes in. And it's not to say that you can't service more and more people and still bake cakes, but there are things that you have to do for the job of fame that have nothing to do with baking cakes. And I think the pursuit of it is something that I would recommend to 99.9% of people that are pursuing it to not pursue it. I think it takes a very special person to seek fame just for the sake of fame and to do good things with it entirely. You can do some good things, but in service of the job of it, it requires you even if there are things that are an affront to yourself and your craft and other things that you really want to put your time and energy into, like your family or conversations with elderly people in your community or volunteering and becoming a person who can be of service in your community, sometimes you gonna have to go to the photo shoot instead or you gonna have to go to the event or you gonna have to do this or that and that. So I think that it's a job and I think my experience with it has been one of doing as much as I can to use it and not let it overtake me. And eventually I think that everybody comes to a balance. It's a natural balance based on what you desire and what it is that your initial goal was in the first place. But I do think that for those who see it from the outside, there's an illusion that it just means access and celebration and it's a very fickle job. So I think that that part is misleading a lot of folks.

That is really well put. And I think there's also perhaps the illusion that when you're famous you're never lonely because you're universally loved or loved by so many people. And I'm curious, how do you deal with loneliness these days especially given that you're in the public eye a lot and that's probably a little bit more challenging to do, but what strategies do you use in your life to stay connected?

Separation of church and state. There's a lot of things that you do for your job that you leave at work. And I think that we've been able to go to incredible places. I remember the first time that I brought my family to the White House and I brought my grandfather who's 95, and he had a lot of choice words to say to the president, but rarely is there opportunity for those things to blend like that. But that's one way that I've found for me, it roots me if I can take my entire family with me, which is impractical most of the time and not the most realistic or logistically sound advice, but it's what makes me feel good. It makes me feel whole and I'm rooted and I got all my 11 family members and my nephew running around the White House and doing all of that. And I love it. So for me, if I can bring them together, great. Otherwise finding the things for you, and this could be, doesn't have to be fame-oriented, it could be you know you have to push hard in a direction for your job to get things done and to execute and to move forward. And then finding ways to leave it behind completely. Whether it's breathing exercises, whether it is goofy dumb games that you may play with a friend of yours, whether it's a sport or whether it's coming to the Barclays Center to see the Liberty play. I'm just saying there's things that we see as recreational that are lifeblood, that life force energy, the things that lift us, be the simplest things. I have a friend of mine who I call whenever I don't wanna talk about anything and he feels the same way. And we just talk about the most random things like haircuts, could be… That was the last conversation. But finding that rhythm, it's really like a pattern. What are the patterns? We know oftentimes what are our patterns for productivity or what are the patterns for us that we have to go through in our job or our schooling or anything that we have to do. We know, okay, I wake up at this time and I go through this and I do this and I have to do this and this. Now what are the patterns of self-care? What are the patterns of separation and unplugging from that thing? We don't treat ourself as well as we should when it's coming in regards to that. So it's just a matter of being conscious and it's so surprising and oftentimes not what you'd expect, but your patterns are your patterns. This is what fuels you, it's what feeds you. Just find it and be as serious about that as you are as about everything else.

Well, there's so much I love about what you just said, but in particular this idea that our skills in staying connected to other people and nurturing our social life is just… Are just as important as the skills we build for work and I think that is really well said and is really valuable I think for everyone here to hear because I think a lot of times when you're growing up and when you're in college or leading up to college, you're sort of taught that there are all of these skills that you have to gain in terms of engineering or math or English literature or history or economic skills that will help you do your job well. And 99% of your efforts should be there, otherwise you won't be successful. But it turns out when you get on the other side of that, you realize that when we don't have the skills at building healthy relationships, it's staying in touch with our family at having that conversation with a friend about seemingly nothing but really about everything, then we actually suffer and we can't be our best. And so our relationships with one another are both a performance enhancer as well as a buffer to stress. And for that reason I think they're just as important as anything we may learn in college. How to build and maintain and sustain those relationships. I'll also just say the very, very first time Jon and I met you actually had your family with you, right? This is in LA when we were both doing an event together and it was such a joy to meet all of them 'cause most people will just come by themselves. But it made… It was beautiful actually to have the chance to meet your family. And I think that's something that's worth doing. It reminds me when I was in residency training, I was going through these really intense emotional, physical experience where spending a hundred hours a week plus in the hospital taking care of patients with serious illness, you're seeing people die literally every week. It's an incredibly intense moment. And I was one time where I was taking, I was on the oncology service and I was taking care of a number of patients, six of whom were my age. They were in their twenties at the time and they all had stomach cancer that was advanced. And every day I would come in and I would talk to them and it would just hit me. I was like, that could be me. And I made a decision that time that even though like we got paid very little as residents and like I didn't have a lot of money. I was like, I need to fly down to see my parents and my sister really often. Not like twice a year the way I used to, but like every chance I get, even if it's just for a weekend or even if it's for 24 hours. And yes, that was like a big commitment in terms of time and money, but I look back on that, I'm like, that was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. It was forced by a incredibly intense emotional experience. But to your point about trying to bring your family with you, spend time with them, integrate those dimensions of your work and and family life whenever you can, that feels an like an incredible valuable lesson you just shared with everyone.

And that goes for chosen family as well. You know, there's something about time that you really keep me into with your story. Time is so fleeting and there's so much that we think we have when really all we have is the present. So if you think about it in terms of value and the present being the most optimal value, then who you spend that time with, who you're with is so important. You can't always plan for something in the future 'cause things are changing, the future is uncertain and the past is gone. So, who am I with and what am I doing right now and how can I make that constantly be something that's not just feeding my work or my productivity, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Jon, I wanna talk about music for a moment. Something you obviously are well versed in and you and I have talked in the past about the fact that music is more than about the sounds you hear, but it's an incredibly powerful source of healing as well. And as a doctor, I feel like we need more music in our lives. More times where we can come together to hear music as a community. And that does have an incredible healing power. But I wanna understand and want you to share if you can, what gives you the belief that music is so healing? And can you tell us a little bit about how you've experienced the healing power of music?

Yes, yes, yes. I think music is one of the things that, if you hear a sound you just… (piano playing) We are hearing that. We can all agree that we are hearing a sound. We can all agree.

Yes. (audience laughing) That's a very powerful response. Not much, I can't even think of anything in the world that we can all agree on. Anything. There's not even one thing that I can think of in the centers of power in the world that more than half of one side agrees on with the other side. That's crazy. The centers of power that govern our entire planet. And we can't even get more than half of one side to agree with the other half. And then you get music and you get to the point where music, where it's like we are all hearing sounds together. The power that lies in that moment, what can be transferred to the people and then to the people in their lives and exponentially. So that's a powerful moment. That's a moment that I think we take for granted. We have taken for granted for many, many decades since the beginning of the recorded music industry, I would say. And that's not an indictment to the recorded music industry. Obviously I've had success as a career musician and I believe music as a career is a viable vocation. I believe in that. But I'm saying music is more than just entertainment, especially in times like this where you see the power of what could happen in a moment where sound is emitted, people receive that sound. Now what messages, what values, what experiences are being attached to that sound and what could they be? What are the possibilities of that? What is that opening up in people? You've had so many years lines of stories, lines of people who have had experiences, spiritual awakenings with music. Just you read our great leaders in the biographies of great leaders and you find always some connection to music. Whether playing music or music fueling a thought or a movement or idea. I mean, I could go on and on about it, it's just, to me it's very clear, it's very evident. I've spent many years trying to figure out a way to get to that in the most pure sense. And obviously having success as a musician is one way, but I think that there really needs to be a very sharp turn back to the basics of what music making and what expression in communities was before it was put on a t-shirt or on a CD. And I think if we did that we would see a lot of impact that could come from that equal or more to what we see in politics.

Absolutely. Beautifully said. (audience applauding) Well, I couldn't agree with you more, and I'm thinking for the students who are here today, when they think about their immediate environment, college campuses, how do you think we could use music as a way to build community on college campuses today?

We used to do that and get in trouble for it.

Well, if it was good trouble, I think it's all good. All okay.

It was, it was the good trouble. It was a beautiful thing. I really believed that we had a vision for something that I think still applies. My band, we were called and still called, Stay Human and we used to do a kind of these processional performances, marches, we called them love riots, love riot 'cause sometimes we would play and it would start off with five or six people and then that could turn into 100 people spontaneously gathering around this musical processional. And then we would move, we would march just like Brooklyn United was playing and marching. Actually, Brooklyn United and I played shows together. They've been a part of love riots we've done, I love, love Brooklyn United. But back in the day, it would just be my friends and I on campus and we would play, people would gather, and then sometimes we would march, eventually we would end up going into, maybe it was a building or sometimes we'd poke our head into a classroom. Other times we would leave the campus and go down into the subway and that's where the subway performances started. But I think that anything that is within the creative context, and there's not any harm done to anybody, but it gives people an excuse to gather. And the vibrational frequency coming from that gathering is one of love, of one of welcoming, one of togetherness. It's not a protest, it's not any sort of means of trying to convince or proselytize or force anybody to do anything, but just be, I think there's a lot of room for that on campuses across the country, a lot of room. And I think students can start it. You don't need to have any sort of edict or mandate to do that. You can create it on your own and you can create safe boundaries for it. And you can create a space for people to join you. And you could create a ritual, which is really what it is. It's just a musical ritual

That is beautiful. And you're right that people don't need to wait for permission to do that or for some law to pass, per se. If we can create gatherings around positive forces like music and sports, which can bring people together and have such a powerful experience as one, those can help forge powerful, powerful bonds. As our time draws to a close here and I know we may have a time for a few questions and answers from the audience. I did wanna ask you one last question, Jon, about technology, which is perhaps when and certainly when I was young, like we didn't have that kind of social media platforms and other technology for interaction that many students have today, but it presents sort of a mix of opportunities but also challenges. And one thing, and this is something we hear about all the time, when I travel a lot of students will tell me that, look, I see some benefits of being on social media. It can keep me connected with old friends, find out about events that are happening on campus. But on the flip side, sometimes I just find myself comparing myself to other people all the time, feel worse about myself. Sometimes I feel worse about my friendships as I see people doing things all the time without me. And it also just takes a lot of time and attention away from in-person interaction and from schoolwork, sleep and other important parts of life. So I'm wondering if you have any tips that you could share or experiences from your own life about how you manage technology in your day-to-day and particularly social media?

Two things immediately came to mind, one is to become genuinely curious to the point of obsession about something. And you know it is less about figuring out, okay, this is my goal, this is what I'm trying to reach. And more just find something that really drives a passion and curiosity. Maybe it's design, maybe it's something to do with the environment or identifying every species of dog. It could be anything. There's so much in the world and I encourage you to find something that drives your curiosity because I'm sure there is something, there's so much and that's a real, real… It's a beautiful place to be because curiosity and passion breeds inspiration and it breeds emotions within us that are the opposite of self degradation and comparison. So that's the first thing that I think. And the other thing that I've had that's really helped me is to get outta my head and get into my body. And for me that's dance. But it could be running or it could be some form of physical activity that you have yet to discover. And generally these things, whether it's curiosity of delving into something and wanting to learn about something or the physicality of life and the physical, the use of the body in that way, it takes you out of social media. It takes you out of comparison with others in that way that you do through the screen. And ultimately it's how we're wired. We're wired naturally to pursue something, have an interest in something. We're wired naturally to use our body and to want to be physical. And the beauty of social media is it connects us all. But the danger and what's led to so much loneliness and separation is that it takes us out of our ourself and we think this is more real than this. And that's not true. That's the opposite of true. That's a lie. So don't get caught in the illusion. And I think this generation is a generation of superheroes 'cause to deal with that, to deal with the shutdown of Covid, to deal with the incompetence of certain aspects of our world, to deal with all that and to have so much optimism, so much ideas, so much presence, that generation… This generation has a presence and a identity and a strength. So I just applaud everybody who's coming up now.

Well, thank you for that Jon. (audience applauding) And I always say for the reasons you mentioned, we need this upcoming generation to be at their best, to be strong because there are big problems that we're facing in the world that all of you are better aware of than anyone. Climate change, the challenges of economic inequality. The other challenges, we still have ongoing challenges with racism and discrimination in our communities. There's so many challenges we still face and we need people who are thoughtful, who are optimistic and who are strong internally to be able to have the resilience and fortitude to deal with these challenges, but one thing I think that is very clear, and this is true from the science as well, is that when we are on our own trying to manage these challenges, it's pretty overwhelming. But when we are together and there are few types of adversity or hardships that we can't manage, that we can't mount sort of a counterforce against and actually be victorious. So we can take on a lot as a species when we're together, but when we're alone, even routine levels of adversity can feel really overwhelming. And that's one of the reasons whether you desire to be a musician in the future, whether you wanna be an engineer or a doctor, whether you want to be a writer or whether you want to be somebody who's a social activist, a policymaker or somebody who takes on these systemic challenges. We all need each other. We all need the strength that comes from our relationships and our connections to one another. So to tie this up, I just wanna make sure that everyone, just to pluck a few themes out of what Jon has shared so beautifully with us, one is just to remember that in this effort to build a connected life, it's the small acts that make a big difference. Not necessarily the grand gestures, it's a phone call you make to a friend who you know really well just to talk about haircuts, right? Or the the act of courage to stand up to a stranger and say, I like your shoes as Jon did and with his band mates. It's those small acts that build your connection muscle. The second important theme here is just to remember that it's about the quality of your relationships, not the quantity. One of the challenges of sort of the digital and social media age is that it's somehow convinced us that the number of connections we have is what matters. The number of followers we have is what matters. The number of likes we get or the number of people who repost our posts. That's what conveys our social value. But the reality is that it's the quality relationships. Even if you just have one or two friendships, if they're people you can be yourself with, people you can show up for when they're in need. People who will show up for you when you're in crisis, that's all you need. You don't need 500 people who may recognize your name but have no clue about who you really are. And the final thing just to remember here is in this effort to build connection, this is something that we are all struggling with to some degree or another. So if you're out there and you've been struggling with loneliness and this whole time you've been thinking for months or years that, gosh, everyone else seems to be doing great. They seem to be living really happy lives and they're going out all the time and hanging out with each other, and I'm the only one sitting here at home struggling alone, that is absolutely not the case because we have become professionals at putting on masks and making the whole world think that everything is okay in our lives. But this is one of those moments where we realize that actually each of us is suffering behind that mask. And it's okay to take it off, to put it down, to look at each other and to honestly say, yes, I've been having a tough time, and maybe we can help each other. And that's what we have the chance to do. And every time you stand up and you reach out to somebody either with a kind comment or just to check in on them and see how they're doing or just invite them to have a meal with you. Those small moments are ones where you're inviting them in to diminish the pain of loneliness and to build connection together. So I'm gonna turn it to Clara because we have a couple of audience questions that we're gonna take.

Yeah, so these are questions that the audience have submitted. So on behalf of the audience, let me ask the first question to Jon. Do you still have friendships from your college years? With a busy schedule what do you do to stay connected with your friends and family?

Yes, yes. So my closest friendships are actually from those years. I have a great relationship with folks who I went to college with and a few from before. And the way that we keep in touch is we make a point to 'cause I'm usually the one that's getting in the way. So I've decided to do certain things that are a part of the schedule. And it's really just for that purpose and feeling that that void in life of having those times for us to stay connected 'cause every relationship is work, every relationship takes effort. If you don't put the effort in, then it won't continue in the way that you'd like it to. So that's really been a… It is been a discipline. We talked about building a muscle and that's one of the muscles that I encourage you to build and continue to focus on. It's not something that's necessarily about how much you can progress in your career, but it's important, trust me.

Great. Okay. So this one is for Vivek, Dr. Murthy.

Vivek is fine.

Okay. I see so many people estranged from community, neighborhood, family, and even themselves. It feels like this has been building for some time. Perhaps the pandemic was a tipping point. I'm wondering if any, if you can see a path to collective reconnection. If so, what are the first steps we can take individually?

Well, I'm glad you asked Clara because I do think that we were struggling with loneliness long before Covid. Covid poured fuel on that fire, it made it a lot worse. It pulled back the curtain on what was really an epidemic for years in our country. And it was driven by a number of things, just declining participation in the institutions that used to bring us together. Social organizations, civic organizations, religious organizations, recreational leagues. Also the impact of technology has not always been uniformly positive. It's had a lot of benefits, but it's had sometimes costs as well in terms of reducing the chances for interaction. And in the case of social media, sometimes changing the quality of people's relationships with one another. But I do see a path forward and that makes me hopeful, which is that number one, this desire to connect, it's really deep. It is baked into our DNA, it's hardwired into our systems and it's why we still gravitate toward one another even in difficult circumstances, and it's why we're all together here today. It's why when we travel to college campuses around the country, we see hundreds and sometimes thousands of students coming out to talk about how to rebuild something that they're feeling a deep hunger and craving for. But finally what gives me the most hope is that people aren't waiting for a literal act of Congress to figure out how to rebuild connection. Thank goodness 'cause God knows when that would come. But what they're more doing is finding ways to build community in their own lives. They're starting to summon the courage to reach out to old friends who they lost touch with. Just to say, hey, I know we haven't been in touch, but I've been thinking about you. I wanna know how you are. Or they've been putting more effort into staying in close touch with family members who they perhaps took for granted or started to drift away from, but realize they're more important than ever. I've seen college students and high school students start efforts on their own campuses to create opportunities for students to get to know one another. Not just as skill sets or as resumes, but as human beings to understand more about each other's lives and stories. We need to tell each other our stories more so we can understand one another. We need to do that in school. We need to do that in the workplace. We need to do that in church and synagogue and our mosques and temples and we need to do that in our neighborhoods. That is how we get to know one another. And finally, I think about this, the fact that of all the experiences that we have and we always see that time is something that we're all lacking, right? Everyone's looking to add that 25th hour to the day to try to expand how much we can do. But it turns out there is a powerful tool we can use to actually stretch time. Do you know what that is? It's our attention. If I sit down with Jon and the two of us have a fully present conversation for 10 minutes where we're actually looking into each other's eyes, we're talking honestly about what's on our mind. We're just being open and real with one another, that can feel more powerful than an hour with both of us being distracted, talking to each other on the phone, but also checking the scores on ESPN, looking at our inbox, Googling to see what the latest news is. And look, we all do that. I've done that many times. I'm not proud of it and I've made it real concerted effort to stop doing that and to start singletasking in my… When I'm connecting with other people. But that's the power of what our attention can do, is it can make that 10 minutes feel like half an hour because that time really counts. So all of this to say that we already have an invisible movement of human connection that is building in our country. It's those people reaching out to friends and family, helping classmates, supporting neighbors. And part of our task now is to make that invisible movement visible, to have open conversations explicitly about what we're all trying to do, rebuild connection in our lives, rebuild connection in our communities. And if we do that, then I firmly believe we can rebuild a foundation of society that'll allow us to take on big challenges, have real dialogue and do that because we're building that all on a foundation of strong connection with one another. And with that, I wanna turn it to Jon to close us out with one last piece. House Calls, live with Jon Batiste Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY Thanks for joining this conversation with Jon Batiste. Join us for the next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.