Dr. Vivek Murthy

There are very few doctors I know who, there are no doctors, I don't know, let me put it this way, who got into medicine and were inspired to become a healer so that they could chart more or do more administrative work or spend more time on the phone with an insurance company fighting over a prior authorization.

People do that because they have to, they're forced to, because they are fighting to get their patients what they need.

But this is the kind of administrative burden that we need to increasingly root out of the system.

This is one of the places also where I think AI, if used and designed well, can be helpful in medicine and in public health to reducing some of that administrative burden and helping instead free up some of that time for us to do the human work that needs to be done, not just in our clinics and hospitals, but out in our communities as well.

I think, let me describe a vision that goes even beyond social connection.

I think what we are in desperate need of is...

a conversation about what kind of world we want to live in, what we want it to be centered around.

Do we want it to be centered around traditional models of achievement?

Do we want it to be centered around acquisition of wealth and fame?

Or do we want it to be centered around people?

See, I think that many of the challenges that we're facing in the world today, not just in health, in terms of political polarization, economic challenges we're facing, I think many of these trace themselves in part back to a deeper spiritual crisis that we are going through, not just as a country, but as a global community.

This is a crisis where we have created a model of success rooted in...

fame, money, and power that is now driving society, that is shaping the world and the path that young people feel they need to not just walk, but run down.

But the reality is that money, fame, and success in that traditional way, money, fame, and power, if you will, there's nothing wrong with them inherently, but they don't intrinsically make us happy.

And so the question is, what has been missing?

What is increasingly missing in many of our lives in this modern paradigm of success?

What's missing are the factors that drive fulfillment.

And those factors are relationships, service, and purpose.

I think of those three as a triad of fulfillment.

And all three of those require other people.