Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Rider and Michael, thank you so much for joining us here today for such a very important topic that I know is on, you know, everybody's mind these days. But I want to start riter with you to ask you, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what brought you to Athens and actually what, you know, why are you doing the work that you're doing?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. And one, thank you for hosting us at this amazing school. It's really a pleasure to be here. It's very inspiring.
Thank you for this opportunity.
We are here in Athens, Greece, because of Verita International School and the amazing work that they're doing to bring social, emotional and ethical learning, or sea learning, into their school system. So my name is Ryder Deliloy. I come from Emory University at the center for Contemplative Science and Compassion based ethics. So these mouthful programs are so big because they have so much richness. So we are here to engage with a deeper approach to supporting the well being of students and staff. And we're taking steps in a meaningful way to provide substantive programming at the school site, but also sharing that message, because c learning is freely available throughout the world, and it is being, it is a harbinger of this global movement of compassion.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: So by talking about compassion and bringing programs like this into the schools, what do you hope will happen?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm going to get a little science based for just a moment to set the stage for that response in terms of what I hope is going to happen.
There was a really cool study that was done at Harvard University, and it occurred in the 1930s, and it's called the adult development study. This adult development study brought a little over a thousand Harvard students and a little over 1000 non Harvard students. And it brought them together to understand, what is life? How does life function? What are the factors that lead to a good life? So every year they would take a multiple hour survey. Every second year they would do a strenuous physical screening, health screening, and every third year they would do in person interviews. You span that across 80 years, multiple generations. So their kids, their grandkids, and now you ask the question, what is the good life? What does it mean to lead a life of flourishing, of well being? And you know what? It's not. It's not how much money you earn, it's not what college you went to. It's not the likelihood for incarceration. It's not any of these factors. It's not even diet, how many desserts you didn't eat, that week, the number one factor that contributed to longevity, how long a person will live, was positive relationships.
And here's where this plays out. Now, I take it a little farther, and I say this, all right, look at my own life. What are the most important relationships that I have? The people that have stuck around when things got hard, the people that stepped in with compassion, as we define as alleviating the suffering of others with tenderness and care. Those are the people in my life that matter. Those are the positive relationships that lead to my well being, my flourishing.
What's powerful to that is we recognize that compassion is a skill, because underlying all of those profound relationships is this innate ability for compassion. Now, here's what we can do with our kids at our schools, is we can develop that as a skill set. We can train in compassion. We can take what is our evolutionary heritage, pro sociality and compassion, and extend that to others. And that's what we're doing at Veritez school.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: And speaking of Veritas, and, Michael, you are the head of Veritas. And so tell us, why a little bit of the context of, you know, wearing Athens, Greece. Obviously, writers coming from memory from the United States. Why here? Why did you bring him to Athens?
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Well, I opened Verita international school here because I have a bit of a heritage in Greece. I'm actually a graduate of ACS, a proud graduate of ACS. And I felt that Greece not only is a beautiful place to live and a beautiful place to raise family, but I felt that it could really benefit. And it was really open to having a school that really focused on the.
These different ways of educating the students, not just to focus on academic excellence, not just to focus on scores and test scores and their college interests, but also focusing on developing the child's well being, their emotional intelligence, their ability to self regulate, their ability to have resilience.
I saw before I came here, the rate of stress and anxiety skyrocketing in the United States. Not only the United States, it's actually the number one disease around the world for teenagers from 16 to 24.
I saw, post pandemic, how this even escalated, not only to stress and anxiety, but thoughts, suicidal thoughts, unhealthy lifestyles. And I really felt that these issues are not being addressed in traditional schools. These soft skills, these skills that are outside of academic academics were not something that schools were taking a look at and deciding, how can we support the children in developing these competencies.
So when I opened the school here, I made it a priority for myself to really find the expert that really can bring those expertise and competencies to the school. And before we even opened the school, we made it a priority to make sure our teachers, to make sure the ethos, the strategy, the mentality of our school was founded in emotional excellence as well as academic excellence. So we really integrated our teachers into this philosophy, into the understanding that we're not just teaching the kids to go on and do well academically, but we wanted them to have a sense of well being. And well being to us was academic success, economic success, but also to be able to be resilient, compassionate, kind citizens of the world.
It's a new world that our kids are graduating into. And we really need to give them skills outside of what was traditionally required for them to be successful, to be happy, and to be well adjusted. And so we really reached out to Ryder. We asked him how he could come into our school, how he could help us integrate his program in our school, how we could set up the community to be engaged and involved and a part of this. And already I'm seeing what's happening in Greece currently with the rays of violence among teenagers. I mean, this is something that, when I lived here, was not even a speck on the imagination. And now I'm seeing that incidents are happening on a weekly basis where kids are participating in activities that are detrimental to themselves, detrimental to their well being, and creating broader issues within the country. And so it was important and it was really meaningful for me to try and at least bring a piece of this to our community. And with your amazing support and your willingness to engage and be a part of this, I'm hoping we can really have an impact and make a difference.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, we talk about in the school here at ACS, as we talk about conscious global citizenship and really as a way of helping kids to develop a purpose or identify a purpose from a very young age, which eventually they will then grow to position themselves to be problem solvers rather than problem contributors or staying neutral. And then at the same time, through empathy. You talk about compassion, I talk about empathy, really build that resilience and what they call the soft skills, which for me are not soft skills at all. They're so necessary nowadays to be able to be, for somebody to be successful in the world out there and at the same time be well, emotionally and physically. I think these are so important, but practically writer. So we are, now we're talking prevention, perhaps even intervention. Can you give us just some ideas of some practical things that you might be teaching? And is this for teachers alone or does it involve parents as well?
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Great questions. Yeah. And this is where the rubber meets the road. Right? It's in the application. There's a lot of schools that have beautiful posters about kindness and compassion and empathy and principled and balanced and all the international mindedness traits. But to see that take action typically arises when you're not sitting on your butt listening to someone talk. So that experiential learning piece is important. We see this in the IB, we see it in project based learning. We see it in expeditionary learning. You know, there are many ways in which this arises, but it's experiential. And the experiential piece arises in association with others. Right. We're interacting, it's the human experience and we're capturing that. So, setting the stage correctly, we have to really look at what is the purpose of school and what are the structures of school. Do we want to make good automatons that are capable of sitting down and passively doing what they need to do? Or do we want to create people that are prepared to deal with the complexity and navigate the challenges and sophistication of a world they're going to inherit? We've been talking about that for a while, yet school moves at a glacial pace. We're very, very slow to turn that dial. So I think there's this broader piece of schools trying to attend to the needs of society.
The problem is, is that society is changing a little too fast. And one of the underlying issues within societal change is the phenomenon of epigenetics.
So I'm going to reference that just a little bit because I think this will help me segue into real strategies.
A landmark study that was done between Kaiser Permanente and the CDC center for Disease Control had 17,000 individuals within this study. And it looked at the instances of health effects. So obesity, diabetes, heart disease, all of it, just basically every smattering of health issue that you think you have. And then it looked at this other column and it started to see some patterns. Individuals who had all these health related issues also started to line up with some of these conditioned or sociological issues, such as parents who had addiction, such as parents who had been divorced or incarceration rates, or had experienced abuse, physical abuse or sexual abuse. There are ten ACES scores. So ACE is adverse childhood experience.
And if you have a child walk into a school that has four aces or more, they are 32.6 times more likely to have behavioral issues. That's not 32%. That's 3260% more likely to have behavioral issues than you would otherwise, what that means is that there is an epigenetic correspondence three generations down the road. So, grandparents, I've been at parent meetings in Columbia where they have said, hey, our recent history has not prepared us for figuring out how to be parents. What do we do? I just went to your national library that had a beautiful expose on democracy that was 1960s, early 1970s. You also have parents who have, incredibly, been exposed to trauma, and that trauma lives in the body. There is a very high correlation between autoimmune disorders and the experience of trauma. Unless we address the elephant in the room, which is resilience, we are not going to be able to take that step towards compassion for self and others. What we do is we build those basic tools, and we talk about resiliency strategies we use from the trauma resource institute. Help now. Strategies. Help now. Strategies that allow us to move from a dysregulated sympathetic response where we're fight, flight, or fright mode. Those kids that experienced that violence recently, they were completely hijacked. That person who cuts you off and you slam on the brakes all of a sudden, now you're hijacked. The problem with being hijacked, amygdala hijacked, is that it's really bad for paying attention. It's really bad for learning. It's really bad for relating to other people. And if we ride that a little too long, too hard, too fast, it becomes our norm. That chair drops in the classroom, and all of a sudden, some kids are triggered. It's because they're right there all the time, ready to go. That's a problem. Becoming aware of our sensations, because the body feels things. We have this incredible thing called the vagus nerve. It transmits from our brain through our body, into our abdomen. So those kids who have those tummy aches, that's neurochemical saying, stop digesting, stop worrying about this, because you're in a bad situation. And the stomach feels it. What's fascinating is that it also works the other way. We have a hundred million neurons in our gut biome. We have millions of neurons in our heart. When you feel that warmth and that cozy feeling when you connect with someone after not seeing them, like I saw today when you both saw each other, it was beautiful. You exchange serotonin and oxytocin, that is mirror neurons, so we can build strategies to become literate of the body. The sensations that arise when we're feeling, oh, I'm scared. Something's going on here. We can bring ourselves into a regulated state so that we're not worrying about a future we can't control or a past we can't change.
We're also then building off of that, that resiliency piece to create a resourcing, so that even though you guys can't see each other every day after a long time and give each other a hug, you can simply remember the person. If you pull open a phone and you have the ability to be present with that, you can change your biochemistry and elicit that nurturing response just by remembering that. Those stories that we tell, the movies that we watch, the songs that we listen to. But a song isn't going to change us in terms of building resilience. It is the direction of our attention that will build that, and the creating of those neural pathways that will substantiate it. And we do that not when we're stressed, when we've just gotten into the car accident. We do that in advance so that when we get into the car accident, I can look around and say six things that are blue, or I can drink that sip of water with great presence to shift from that sympathetic to parasympathetic response so that I can rest and digest. When I do that, I also get to move from my amygdala to my prefrontal cortex, which gives me readiness to relate to others in the situation around me.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: You mentioned that there's a lot of unfinished business in terms of trauma. And you mentioned the early 1960s, seventies here in Athens. But with all the things going on in the world right now, the kids, they're living a lot of this trauma vicariously in many situations and in some situations, very close up with their family members and whatnot. So it's constantly there. It's not something that they can put aside. So in that sense, how important is the partnership between the school and the parents? Because, I mean, I strongly believe in a systemic approach. It's gotta be everywhere, you know, in the systems, the government systems, in society, in the parenting, in the school, because it's very easy, you know, for teachers. And I don't know about you, Michael, but I hear it all the time. Teachers are saying, I gotta teach this subject. I gotta get the kids to pass those exams. I gotta get them to the next level. When do I have time to do anything more? But yet they find themselves being more caretakers, intervening, trying to prevent things and so on and so forth. How important is that systemic approach as far as you're concerned?
[00:16:07] Speaker C: I also see our parents reaching out quite a bit, really asking for support at home and how they can better manage and how they can better care for their kids. It seems to be an escalating problem where the parents are losing control or don't have the time, or don't have the knowledge and wisdom of how they can care for the kids and ultimately care for themselves so that they can show up more effectively for the kids. And that is. That is something that I. That I do encounter quite often at my school.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Two pieces to this. One, we'll talk a little bit about burnout. The other we'll talk about neuropathway development. So I'll use another research study to help with this. Actually, I'm going to do two. One is you can take a male ratified and you can subject them to the stimulus of smell of roses.
Every time they smell those roses, they receive an electrical shock. And that happens a few times over. It doesn't have to actually happen quite a bit for things to change in terms of their neural pathways. Neurowiring. When those male rats have offspring, babies, those babies never have contact with the male rat. When those babies smell the smell of roses, they also exhibit a stress response. So the body remembers. Now, equally important is the capacity for plasticity. Just as we turn on these epigenetic markers, we can turn them off or we can activate new ones. We have great agency in that, in that way, we have the ability to transform this. But your comments regarding now and also a systemic approach, neurons that fire together, wire together.
It's also the type of attention we cultivate is based on how we, and where we direct our attention. So if we direct our attention towards prosociality or virtuous things, we're going to develop that as a condition or operant conditioning factor.
If we direct it in other ways, such as constantly being distracted or constantly being worried, whether it's social media or newsreels or so forth, we are going to create that conditioned response within us. Some of this comes down to that burnout condition of agency. Do we have agency in directing our attention and where we want to? We also need a broader perspective to understand the things we can't control and the things we can't. And in order to do that, we need to cultivate self compassion. So in our center, we have an adult based program called cognitively based compassion training. Cognitively based compassion training is the most research based compassion training program available. And we're a really good company with a lot of other prestigious universities engaging in what we call in what is collectively now known as the science of compassion. So about ten years ago, there were maybe 600 peer reviewed research articles about mindfulness. Well, all right, mindfulness could make a better basketball players with the Lakers and the bulls, but it doesn't necessarily lead to well being, pro sociality, human flourishing. It may make you a better executive, and it may make you better at studying for an exam, but that's not the mission of this school or most schools that I know of. The mission is to be a prepared citizen, a community member, and that requires the development of these other competencies and skill sets. So that other comment that you made, though, regarding this systemic approach, almost like this triangulation.
So what I would look to, and I see some instances of this in communities, is the role the school plays, which schools play a big role. Kids spend more time in schools than they do with their parents.
Additionally, though, that reinforcement of those, again, neurons that fire together, wire together. Right. You want to be good at piano, do piano a lot. You want to be good at math, do math a lot. You may have some exceptionalities, you may have interest, but those pieces grow and develop as we nurture them. So as parents can develop the skills themselves to reinforce them in their home environments, they can also develop the skills for them as well. But you made a very important comment that I think is also the case for parents as well. And that was Marzano did a study. Marzano is a researcher of education, and he did an extensive study. I think most of his grad students did this, where they inventoried all of the school required from when a kid enters in kindergarten and when they leave in 12th grade. And you look at all the math, all the science, all the so forth, and you add them all up, all the textbooks, all the curriculum, and you get 15,000 hours of school. That needs to be done.
But then you actually look at the calendar, how long does a kid actually spend in school? And this is if. If kids all learn the same way, which we know functionally does not happen, but if they did, they would require 9000 hours. What do you do with that difference of 35, 40%?
You deal with school, which is, you have a huge range of needs and you have limited resources. Whether you're the most elite of private schools or the humblest of public schools, that is your reality, and you have to make decisions. Now, we have been inculcated as a society to believe that the nicer car and the better apartment is going to lead to happiness. And the data from Davos and World bank says no. At a certain threshold, it does not lead to greater degrees of happiness.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Also, our brain is wired to get bored of things like that. So you need more and more.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: We want the dopamine hits. We want those, and we're not aware, we're not present with it. So we can gain agency by becoming.
It's weird to say it this way. Masters of our own self, we can direct our attention. We can cultivate the relationships we want, and we can create flourishing within ourselves and others. But that teacher and parent piece, unless they experience this themselves, unless there are structures and supports built for them, it's not going to happen naturally because there's so many things we're battling against. You know, we have that evolutionary heritage of negativity, bias. We love to worry about things. In fact, that's what kept us alive in the prehistoric ages. Great. We just apply that now for when our cell phone breaks or our car gets scratched. That undermines our wellness and we lose perspective. So I think there's a powerful journey that we're on with sea learning at Emory University, and that is we're working with our curriculum, which was inspired by his Holiness the Dalai Lama to build a more compassionate and ethical world. Two individuals took that inspiration, Peter Senge out of MIT Systems Lab and Daniel Goleman, who wrote emotional intelligence. Literally, the founders of these fields said, we need Sel 2.0. And they created the very foundation, the framework of C learning. So C learning is unique because it provides resilience and trauma informed care. It provides systems thinking and ethical discernment. It provides attention, training, and awareness. Awareness of how my behaviors impact myself and others both now and into the future. Not just can I study more, and it also provides compassion for self and others through the journey that Michael is on at his school. Those kids, right from the very onset, are receiving an equal balance. The academic rigor is there. They're learning their arithmetic, they're reading their writing, but they're also learning how to navigate the challenges of the world. And if you can start there, the outcomes are significant. And I'll just reference this. I'll turn it back over. James Heckman was a Nobel winning economist, and he won that Nobel Prize in economics because he looked at a study that was done in the 1960s at Ypsilanti, Michigan, where a teacher took sel competencies with a group of very poor students from the inner city, and they taught them. They also had their control groups of teachers that weren't doing the same thing. But what was fascinating is they tracked those kids, and those kids had greater lifetime earnings, less likelihood of a divorce, greater high school completion without suspension, greater college attendance, all of the things we want for our kids, social, emotional, and ethical learning has greater predictive ability than third grade literacy. And we know this at our heart. The thing that we have to do is untrain, because we teach like we were taught and we parent like we were parented, and it's time to break that cycle. And I had the secretary at your school, Michael, yesterday, reference something to me, and she said, I'm so glad you're here. I was too hard on my son. I just walked into the school just right away. I was too hard on my son. I was like, ooh, how do I hold that? How do we hold that self compassion as parents when we're a little too hard on our kids when we have these weird external expectations of success? So I sat with her a little bit, and I held that because it was very vulnerable to bring to the table. And I said to her, yeah, you may have been a little hard on your kid. How are they doing? Not so well. How old are they? Oh, they're 23. They're struggling a little bit right now. I said, yeah, it's tough. It's tough because sometimes we want to go back and we want to change things, but we can't.
But then I said one thing, and I hoped to provide just a little bit of compassion in that moment for this mom who was so vulnerable.
I said, it may have been hard, but do you think maybe you were a little less hard than your own parents were with you? And immediately she said, yeah, I was definitely not as hard as my mom was with me. I said, that's good enough. That's good enough, and your child will be a little less hard.
We have our vulnerabilities, we have our limitations, and sometimes it's good enough. So there's a real power to the work that we're doing.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: I think it's important to distinguish between compassion and empathy and self compassion and pampering, because I think sometimes with parents, we just want to fix things for our kids. We don't want them to go through difficulties. We don't want them to be upset. We don't want them to be sad. And I ask, and I say, why not? Why can't they be sad? Why can't they feel bad about things and work through it and get through it, rather than trying to rescue them from something? Because life isn't going to be rescuing them all the time. They need to learn that resilience, right?
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Can I honor that point?
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: I just want to. I want to build something very important to that. You look at our society. And you talked about the violence, Michael, that you're seeing around you and many, many individuals have. Unfortunately, reality is that our fear based response, that negativity bias, amplifies that a lot, right? So the actual instance, data wise, is not typically bearing out. Nevertheless, when I see a person suffering, it is almost immediate that I experience empathy. Because we're mammals, that's what we do. We look at a person suffering, we experience empathy. Empathy is the portal to compassion. When I experience an empathetic response, I activate in my brain as though I were experiencing pain myself. So when my daughter falls and skins her knee, I see that I experience the pain. But if I can't do something to alleviate that distress, that suffering, it's really unbearable for me to hold, and I have to fix it. But if I go to her, I put a bandaid on, I put my arm around her, I can extend that to alleviating her suffering. Now, there will come a point where she's going to fall, and I can't be there to hold her. But even the cognitive tool, the contemplative practice of reflecting on that, the power of prayer, the power of aspiration, will change my physiology so that I experience a compassionate response. Empathy activates in the same region of the brain as though I were experiencing pain. Compassion activates in the region of the brain associated with the limbic system, our emotions, and our prefrontal cortex. We can do something with it. We're not incapacitated. We have the ability to make change. And our fundamental function is to shift from empathetic distress to compassion, and we can build some of those skills. We know that we have learned through adversity. We know we have learned when we faced hardship.
We need to help our parents manage empathetic distress because it's unskillful. Compassion without wisdom could be very damaging, debilitating. It can cause so much harm for themselves and others and lead to that chronic distress and burnout. Sometimes the most compassionate thing to do with discernment is to navigate skillfully. So we need to also cultivate wisdom. And that is a fundamental reason why c learning is different, is because we are developing systems thinking, ethical discernment, and ultimately wisdom to combine with our innate capacity for compassion.
[00:28:36] Speaker C: You know, my title at this school is director of happiness, and I sometimes bump into, well, you know, my kid can't be happy all the time. What is, what, what do you mean? And when I say that, that really comes from a place of, you are happy because you know that you can face any challenge that comes your way and pass through it. You can pass through it in a wise way. I think wisdom is a key word here. You can pass through it in a way that's for your better, for your well being and the well being of the people that you're engaging and interact with. So obviously there are a thousand joys and a thousand sorrows in life. We're all going to face that. But how do you move through that? How do you step beyond that? How do you go past that and how do you share that with your community and your. And your family and the people that are close to you and that that really is what the director of happiness represents for me. And I think that. I think it all comes down to the compassion piece. I agree with you.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: This effort of C learning is a global effort, and it's one that we are inviting individuals to bring to their school to train facilitators. We do this freely. So c learning is accessible and available to all. The team behind it and the amazing affiliates globally are the ones who are implementing it. So I would be remiss to say that you referenced rider and so forth, but I play a very small role in this movement for compassion. That is, c learning and the center for Contemplative Science and Compassion based ethic are guiding. And I also want to offer and acknowledge our executive director, Doctor Tenza Nagi, who is the developer of both programs and leads. His work and inspiration have created such impact and also the C learning and CBCT teams.
[00:30:14] Speaker C: Peggy, you were mentioning earlier that you have 63 different nationalities at our school. I also have 61 different nationalities at my school. And I think that puts us in a very unique position to have a significant impact and really to influence not just this community here, but to have a circle of influence that is much broader than a lot of schools. And I think this opportunity with Ryder and I think what he's offering us and what he's been providing our school and our students is so valuable and so meaningful that I'm so grateful that you, you too are looking at this and bringing this. And I know this has been a part of your ethos and a part of who you are and what you want to do. And it's some really meaningful, powerful work. And I've seen it in the five years that we've been practicing the Se program at our school. And I know how effective it can be, not only for the students, but for their families and for the community at large.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And as a microcosm of the world, you know, schools, I think that's a good place to start. Just one more thing, because I know we will be remiss if we don't mention this, but in light of AI and all the changes that are happening in the technological arena and how fast everything is, and social media and all the influences the kids have, I, for one, was really relieved to see that in Greece now we have this cell phone policy, no cells in school. And what was really surprising to me was how well the students took to this. And, you know, which tells me that they needed permission not to be on their phones, right? While everybody else was doing it, they were doing it, but now that nobody's doing it, they don't necessarily need it. Can you talk a little bit to that social media influence and what role that's played in everything?
[00:31:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, if you look at the developing brain and young children, I mean, there's two periods of life in which the brain is developing rapidly. One is zero to three and the other is eleven to 14. The eleven to 14, though, is coupled with puberty. So you got a whole other concoction going on. It is incredibly damaging for kids to isolate in those ways, and it has. Leading to that epidemic that Michael referenced of mental health. So instances of isolation, lack of purpose, suicide ideation, death by suicide, that is becoming increasingly prevalent and is very, very serious. It is unfortunate that social media and its design is almost the antithesis of that human flourishing piece that I spoke about. Positive relationships in that way, it's creating very unreal expectations.
My daughter spoke at the Interdevelopment Goals summit last year, and she was ten years old. She spoke about self compassion for body image. That's real. To be able to address that needs a certain awareness and vigilance associated with the unrealistic imagery that they're receiving, or the unrealistic expectation that if a body looks a certain way, it yields happiness. So being able to confront that requires some underlying tools and skills that those individuals need. The structure of not having cell phones or limiting social media, yeah, that's helpful. But ultimately, our kids need to make mistakes so they can learn from them, because eventually they're going to not be in the home. Eventually they're going to be in an environment where they don't have to be restricted. So I am much more in the area of learning, of growing and developing and building those structural pieces, than of taking it away, because we've got to navigate it. With that said, the other prompting that you offered in terms of AI, navigating AI in the world of social emotional learning and development of compassion is a really interesting piece, and I want to give a nod to my brother for referencing. This is what underlies AI, is still an algorithm. It's still a computer code. His suggestion, and I think there's something quite brilliant to this, is we need to embed values of compassion in this robust way. Everything I've talked about is this. Compassion is an outcome of many of these inputs. If we can embed the logic model with resilience, discernment, compassion for self and others, attention and awareness, we can then begin to make sure that that is the operating conditions by which we navigate artificial intelligence.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: So you're suggesting that they embed within the algorithm.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Yes, the imperative of compassion, which would.
[00:34:35] Speaker C: Really create a different consciousness around it. I think that would be amazing.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: It would offset. I mean, this is a radical revolution, because all of the things that we have built our society around, quick fixes, easy consumption, the other major effort, and this is, again, a nod to a gentleman named Mark Greenberg, who is a founding member of social emotional learning in Kaslan. He developed the Paths program. He said there are two opportunities for social emotional learning that he sees as critical for the future generation. One is in civic education, literacy, civic engagement, really understanding it. The second is in sustainability. So we're doing some work right now with the underdevelopment goals and UNICEF and a really powerful organization called 6 seconds that does a lot with emotional intelligence. And we are working to create something called the climate of emotions, where we build literacy related to sustainability, so that we don't have to be paralyzed with the inaction or the distress of our dying planet, but instead can cultivate a literacy of emotions so that we can navigate with resilience the steps we need to take. And I think there's some real pathways forward here.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Ryder and Michael, for joining us here today. I think this was a nice surprise to have you with us, and I looked, look forward to future work together.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: Thank you for the work you're doing, and thank you for this opportunity.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: Yes, thank you, Peggy. Really an honor to be here. And I'm really glad that we could share Ryder with the world and what he's doing and what he's bringing to our schools. Thank you, Ryder.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: Thank you, Michael.
