Rick Hanson

As a quick sidebar, I had this interaction with Gabor Mate about this and

He said as a physician and biologically trained person, if you take a species of bacteria from one Petri dish and you put them in another Petri dish and they flourished in the first Petri dish and they start to die in the second Petri dish, you don't blame the bacteria.

You look at the culture.

And in much the same way, we need to look hard at our culture right now and look for ways to

address toxic influences in it and to bring in more influences that are pro-social and healthy.

Are you guys parents?

We have an adult daughter and son.

Yeah.

I was surprised it was only 60%.

Yeah.

Well, I relate to this question and I spent a lot of time in schools actually.

And there are definitely things we can do at the individual level, like you did with your kids, John.

And there are programs in schools that increasingly, you know, are helping kids to be bully proved and,

to build up mindfulness and self-worth.

And they often will use different words because those words even sound a little too left coasty for some people.

You can do that.

And I say, as a guy who spent a lot of time watching, you know, what really goes down on the playground and at the end of the day, those individual events and experiences occur inside of larger systems.

that often have a lot of hierarchical and cultural pressures in those systems that also have upstream causes in poverty, class, culture, racism, and so forth, and then upstream pressures with their parents.

So to address those systems, and this goes to the Global Compassion Coalition, et cetera, and what we're doing here with Pods Fight Poverty, to address these real issues, we have to move

beyond the merely individual level.