We're excited to launch the third season of Frontiers in Health, Virtues for Well-being. In the first episode, Dr. Victor Strecher discusses the power of purpose—how having a clear sense of meaning can improve health, well-being, resilience, and motivation, and how people can cultivate purpose in their daily lives.
Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Center Communications Coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy, happy life.
Today, we're excited to launch a brand-new series, Virtues for Well-being. We'll explore how essential virtues like purpose, empathy, generosity, kindness and humility play a powerful role in promoting health and happiness at both individual and societal levels. How do we define virtues? What does the latest science say about their impact, and how can we cultivate them in ourselves and our communities, especially as we navigate an ever changing, AI-transformed world?
Kicking off our series is Dr. Victor Strecher, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Founder and CEO of Kumano and a pioneering figure in health, behavior change, digital health, communication and the science of well-being. Dr. Strecher’s research, books, and digital tools have inspired millions to live more purposeful and resilient lives. In today's conversation, we'll talk about the critical role of purpose as a virtue for well-being and how we can find meaning, connection, and strength even in difficult times.
A quick content note before we begin. This episode includes discussion of the serious illness and death of a child, intense grief, and suicidal ideation. Please take care of yourself while listening, and feel free to skip this episode if these topics are difficult for you. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a trusted person or local mental health resource. In the US, you can contact 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
With that in mind, let's turn to our conversation about purpose. Dr. Strecher, how do you define purpose?
Dr. Victor Strecher: All living things have a purpose, from amoebas to human beings. But when I talk about purpose for humans, we're really talking about a self-organizing life that is social. It's psychological. It's related to our well-being. It's related to goals that we have in our lives that help us flourish. It's around living toward the things that matter most.
Ayla Fudala: You've written and spoken extensively about the transformative power of purpose. In your view, what makes purpose a core virtue for health and happiness?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Well, I think purpose is really at the core of many of the things that we're trying to do in public health. If we're trying to help a person get a Covid shot, if we're trying to help a person quit smoking or manage their stress better, or manage their diabetes or any of those things, we could start off by scaring the person. If you don't quit smoking, you'll die, or you'll get lung cancer or whatever, and you can scare a person.
But why do people smoke in the first place? They're usually smoking to control fear. So sometimes people may end up actually smoking more certainly are not less likely to quit if you just simply scare them because they smoke to reduce fear, and that's what you've just induced.
So how do you help a person quit smoking or manage their diabetes, or any of those things without inducing some type of fear. Well, maybe you start on the total opposite of the side of the coin and you ask them what matters most. Maybe you even look at what's on their smartphone. You ask what's on the wallpaper of your smartphone. Oh, my granddaughter's on the wallpaper of my smartphone. Oh, tell me more about her and say, well, she's the most important thing in my life. Wow. Okay, so you're a mentor to your daughter? Your granddaughter, probably. And they go, yeah, that's that's who I am. Suddenly, it dawns on them that they need to stay healthy, to continue being a mentor to their granddaughter. So understanding what matters most to that person, as opposed to just scaring them or simply giving them information.
Ayla Fudala: This podcast series, virtues for wellbeing, will explore various core virtues such as empathy, generosity and kindness. What is the relationship between these virtues and purpose? Can one cultivate purpose without cultivating other virtues or are they interdependent?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Well, I'm not sure purpose is a virtue. I think there are other virtues, like kindness or empathy. Compassion. Those virtues are cultivated when you have a strong sense of purpose. So I'd say purpose is a little more fundamental, a little more at the core.
And by the way, your purpose may not be to be more compassionate. Maybe your purpose is to be wealthy and powerful and controlling. You know, I mean, you can have any purpose. Some researchers argue the opposite. They say no. The definition of a purpose is to be self-transcending. I don't believe that at all. I think many people have purposes that are very self-enhancing and not self-transcending, but I'd still call them purposes. There's still self-organizing frameworks that they devote their energy and resources toward.
So I think you can have different kinds of purposes, but once you have decided what matters. And those things that matter most very often are not things. There are people. So as soon as you decide that people are matter a great deal to you and maybe it is your family, although you could really extend this out to further and further to strangers, to people you don't even know, have never met. And in public health, I would argue that we as health professionals, public health professionals, need to be able to deal with and help and be compassionate toward individuals we've never met, populations we've never met, maybe even people we don't like. And it's really important for us to have that kindness and compassion toward the world that develops as a result of having a transcendent purpose, a purpose that goes beyond your own ego, a purpose that even goes beyond your own family or maybe your friends, but actually works toward not just your community, even, but maybe beyond your community.
Ayla Fudala: What does the latest scientific evidence reveal about the role of purpose in determining our mental, social, and physical well-being?
Dr. Victor Strecher: People with a strong purpose in life live longer, and there are many studies of that, and they haven't made it go away by saying, oh, purposeful people are better educated or make more money. Although, you know, over time, purposeful people ten years later end up making more money and having higher net worth, controlling for income and net worth at baseline, which is amazing. But people with strong purpose in life do seem to live longer. They appear through eight different studies to have a far lower likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease and dementia. There are some purpose interventions that have worked, and we have seen, especially in the mental health area, that have been designed to improve people's purposes, have reduced depression, for example, reduced anxiety. We do know that people with a strong purpose tend to use coping strategies that are more effective in regulating emotion.
Ayla Fudala: Why is having a strong sense of purpose particularly important in stressful or uncertain times?
Dr. Victor Strecher: When you have a lot of stress in your life, it's natural to try to control those stressors. It's natural to say, okay, this is really bothering me a lot. I'm going to worry about it. It's not a bad thing necessarily to try to control your environment, but also you can't change everything. The more you try to change unchangeable things in your life, it's almost like trying to struggle out of quicksand. You sink deeper and deeper if you identify purposes in your life, goals in your life that you can become very committed to. These stressors don't affect you as much. And by the way, maybe some of these stressors become your purpose and you direct your energy, your resources toward changing it, as opposed to simply listening to the news, listening to the media and worrying about it every day. Doom scrolling every day saying the world is getting worse every day as opposed to that having a purpose, being committed to the things that you can change, you can do something about it can be very therapeutic and helpful.
Ayla Fudala: What if you think you have a sense of purpose or you thought you did, but the outside world keeps thwarting it, or you realize it's not achievable?
Dr. Victor Strecher: A purpose may be something you can achieve, but typically it's simply something you aspire to. It's a direction in your life that you move toward, and you may set goals around that. It helps you organize your goals. There are different domains of our life. We have personal growth domains. We have family domains. We have work domains. We have community domains. There may be other domains that you're involved in, the domains that are important in your life. You may want to develop a purpose around and within those domains, and that would help you set goals within those areas that are very important in your life. The other thing this does having a purpose. It helps you deselect the things that really aren't so important. So if you think about all the social media that we look at and absorb, how much of that social media is actually part of something that matters a lot to us, do we really care what Kim Kardashian is wearing today? If we focus too much attention on those things, it's almost like we're throwing toxins into the reservoir that helps build our purpose.
Ayla Fudala: From your research and practice, how does a collective sense of purpose at the level of organizations, communities, or even nations affect social and public health outcomes?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Corporations have really been jumping on the purpose wagon. And, you know, they all seem to need to have a purpose and they might hire some marketing agency, you know, or ad agency to help them find a purpose. I would call that purpose-washing, especially if it's not authentic and genuine. And yet some purposes you can tell in some organizations are deeply genuine. You know, just for example, Patagonia has a very deep purpose and it's an authentic purpose. And they've done extremely well financially, but they've done well financially, in part because they had a revenue transcending purpose. And there is one study, it's an amazing study called Firms of Endearment, developed by a group of business school professors, where they studied a large group of public and private companies, organizations who had a self, who had revenue transcending purpose. And those companies ended up making far more revenue than the S&P 500. It's very much akin to how an individual might have a self-transcending purpose, where they think less about themselves and they do better themselves as a result of that, having a strong, transcending purpose makes you a more satisfied person, helps you flourish when you're not thinking so much about you. So the same with a revenue transcending organization.
About 8 or 9 years ago, I was invited to Adelaide in South Australia to be a, quote, thinker in residence for a month. And they wanted to build a purpose economy as a government. They started thinking about how could our government transcend and have a purpose and work with companies that have purposes, work with not for profits, that have purpose, rather than looking at the GDP, they might have a purpose indicator. And I just thought, what a wonderful idea. I think that governments can do this. I think organizations can. I certainly think communities can have purpose. I love the idea of sitting around the dinner table and asking the question, do we as a family have a purpose? I mean, as a unit that we call the family, is there something that we can do that's transcending, that's bigger than the sum of our parts and bigger than what we might normally be expected to in terms of simply protecting and providing for the family itself. Maybe we can go out and work in a soup kitchen and imagine how lucky you are. If you're a child that grows up in a family like that.
Ayla Fudala: What evidence-based practices do you recommend for listeners who want to find or deepen their own sense of purpose? And what practices do you use in your own life?
Dr. Victor Strecher: I think to begin with, if you're wondering, do I have a sense of purpose or direction you're concerned about that? You might literally start off by making a list. What are the things that matter most in my life? Just start writing them down. And if you're even stymied there, you might look at your smartphone and look at the wallpaper. You know what's on that wallpaper for me? It's my granddaughter. And then it flips over to my father, who recently passed away. But I took care of him, and I loved helping take care of. Or it could be my dog, Uncle Lenny, the Jack Russell crazy terrier. And, you know, people who say, oh, I don't have anything anymore. Retirees very often say, I've lost my purpose. Does anyone rely on you? And they might go, no, no one relies on me anymore. Do you have a cat? Do you have a dog? Do you have a plant? Do you have an organization that you might want to support or volunteer for? In other words, even if no organization or being living creature relies on you, you could create it. So create some group that ends up relying on you and needing you. Once somebody relies on you or an organization or entity relies on you, you need to start taking care of yourself because you have a purpose.
Ayla Fudala: What inspired you to research purpose?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Well, my own story is I'm a behavioral scientist, and 15 years ago, my daughter Julia passed away very suddenly. And although she was born healthy, she caught a chickenpox virus out of the blue, which at six months old, attacked her heart. Actually. And most people get a fever and maybe a rash for a day. Or her. It destroyed her heart. We were in the Netherlands at the time. I was on a research sabbatical, and we were in the hospital with her, and the cardiologist who did an echocardiogram on her heart, found it truly was ruined, said she'll be dead within a month. Fly home and let her die in peace. And I remember asking the doctor through my tears, through, you know, absolute shock as well. Along with my wife next to me. I said, isn't there anything that could be done like a heart transplant? And he said, no, those don't work. You should just go home and let her die in peace.
And so the next day, we flew back to the hospital of the University of North Carolina, and they had a transplant physician there from Stanford University who had not transplanted a heart yet. And there was one child waiting, and that child died waiting. And it turns out half the children die waiting for a heart. And then even if you do get a heart transplant as a child back. This is in 1990. Half of them die within five years of the transplant. So you can do the math yourself. It's, you know, 50% time, you know. Will she get the heart? And then we'll she survive the heart with the new heart. And that's 25%. So one in she had a 1 in 4 chance of making it to six years old.
When that happened, I started realizing that this could be the death of our entire family. And we talked about even whether we should do this, whether we should list her for a transplant, knowing that very, very possibly she would die. We also didn't know what her quality of life would be. There wasn't enough. We knew that we may well run out of money. We had $1 million health insurance cap at the time, and a social worker told us that we'll run out by the time she's 12.
So suddenly, our whole world just was topsy turvy. Completely, completely. Everything is fine and I'll work hard to get tenure and then I'll play golf or something, you know, to, oh my God, this is the potential death of our entire family and a person we love deeply.
So I started taking life more seriously. I started actually living. Every day of my life, as well as her life and our family's life, as if that might be the last day. And that's actually what stoic philosophers did 2000 years ago. So Seneca and Epictetus would all, you know, all the stoic philosophers, they would assume that they would die that day. You know, they and in fact, they even had rituals about it. And as a result, they lived bigger lives. So they didn't assume. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic philosopher and one of Rome's greatest emperors. He was, he said in his wonderful book, Meditations, don't live as if you're going to live 10,000 years. Assume you might go anytime and live life to the fullest. Live life seriously. That doesn't mean serious, like I'm not going to have any fun. It means seriously, as if I don't know how long I'm going to be on this earth, and I don't know what will happen after that. So I'm going to absolutely live the biggest, most fulfilling life that I possibly can, whatever that might be.
So we started treating Julia that way. So we would travel with Julia. If I was traveling to give a talk somewhere, I would take Julia with me. I would take our older daughter with it all possible. We started exposing them to new, interesting experiences, and when she was 19, she wanted to give back. She wanted to be a nurse. She went to nursing school at the University of Michigan, and very suddenly during spring break, she she passed away of a heart attack.
And when that happened, my life kind of collapsed. Because I lost my purpose. I lost my primary purpose, which is to give her a big life. And I found myself two and a half miles out into Lake Michigan. And that morning at 515 in the morning, it was still dark. It was springtime. It was very cold, icy, icy, cold water. I jumped in a kayak and I started paddling toward Wisconsin, which is all the way across Lake Michigan, which is 84 more miles. And of course, I never would have made that, but it was so beautiful and dark and smooth. I stopped to watch the sun come up, and I cannot explain this, other than my daughter was suddenly in me and Julia was saying, you have to get over this, dad.
It was about getting over my own ego, getting over my grief, and trying to do something bigger than that, because I so focused on me and I couldn't get out of that. I couldn't get out of my own grief. I did paddle back or I wouldn't be talking to you. And I started writing down the things that mattered most in my life. I literally was still in my boxers and t shirt, and I pulled out a piece of paper. I was still kind of wet and I was cold, but it didn't matter to me. I just started writing my family. I wrote down my wife's name. I wrote our older daughter's name. I wrote down our friends names. I then went into my work domain and said, what matters most? And I said, my students matter most. My research matters, but my students matter most. And so I thought, wow, I can do something about that now.
So I literally did pick up the phone then that morning, and I called the School of Public Health at Michigan and said, you gave me as much time as I need to recover from this, but it's not what I need. I'm only going to recover if I can get back and start teaching. And I'm going to teach my students now as if they're my daughter Julia.
And that completely changed my life when that happened. I had something to live for. I started caring and the students responded in kind. As I was teaching them. As if they're my own child. As they're walking into class, into that auditorium and there are 100 or a couple hundred students there, I'll look at their faces and I'll take a breath and I'll go. You're all my daughter. And so I'm going to teach you as if you're all Julia. And that gives me a passion for teaching.
And when I have office hours, I have a lot of students who want to talk to me. And I love talking to them. They started coming in and telling me about their stories of their lives, or come in and say, I don't have a direction in my life, and I know you talk about that. And I might ask, have you been significantly depressed? And so many of them say, yes. And then very often I'll say something like. Do you like pancakes? Yes, because no one doesn't like pancakes. Okay, well, my wife makes pancakes on Saturdays. Why don't you come over to our house and we'll have a wonderful conversation. And sometimes we'll have a group of students coming in and we'll have great conversations. And for my wife and I, it's healing because all of these students are the same age that my daughter was when she passed away.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. That's incredible. Thank you so much for sharing such a deeply personal story with me and with our listeners.
Dr. Victor Strecher: I truly have gotten so much more back than I have put in. It is a gift to have students that I can apply my purpose to, but also my family, the world. I have many elements of my purpose that I've thought about very carefully. I like to think about myself as a researcher of myself. I like to think about how my purpose is connected to a larger community called the world, and what I can do for the world as well. I have been healed by this. I feel like I can continue taking good care of myself.
Ayla Fudala: Well, since you've started your work on purpose, it's reached a lot of people. One of those ways it's reached people is through your free online course, Finding Purpose and Meaning in Life: Living for what matters most. If I were to enroll today, what could I expect?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Well, you could expect a three-week course that actually doesn't really take three weeks. You can do it all in a couple of days, if that's what you want to do. It's a course that's designed for helping people find their purpose in life, but at the same time learning about the philosophy and the science of purpose and such an amorphous issue as purpose in life. I want to show people that through a combination of different methods, from survey research to experimental behavioral research to neuroscience to epigenetic research, we have been able to start uncovering mechanisms for why this amorphous concept of having a sense of purpose actually helps people.
Just for example, we know that people with a stronger purpose do take better care of themselves because they have a purpose, So they start eating better, they start sleeping better. They start working out more. They start engaging in the health-related behaviors that I've been working on for the last 40 years of my career, trying to help people change.
But I've always been frustrated that most of our models and theories are very surface level, dealing with purpose and people's identities and their core values. I think it's dealing more with the root system, with something much more fundamental that then creates the branches, the behaviors and the emotions of our lives. It helps us cope better with emotions. It helps us make changes in our lives, in our behaviors. And there probably is even something physiological about it where we do seem our genes, for example, are express more anti-viral proteins and express fewer pro-inflammatory cells, which is really interesting. So there must be I believe there's something evolutionary about this too, that we need to have a purpose to survive.
Ayla Fudala: As the founder and CEO of Kumano, you've developed digital platforms to promote intentional we-llbeing. Can you tell me more about Kumano and how those platforms are designed to help their users?
Dr. Victor Strecher: Happy to. So Kumano is Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. I fell in love with these people when I've been in New Zealand. They are badass, amazing people, men and women. But they have this wonderful word Kumano for nourish and cherish. And so I thought, I want a company that is fierce, but at the same time believes in nourishing and cherishing. And so that's what the name is about.
And I wanted to focus on this positive psychology element, this core element called purpose. But it wasn't just helping people develop a purpose in their life, it was helping them become purposeful. So that means becoming a better researcher of yourself. What gives me more energy and vitality in a day and over time, purposeful helps determine what gives you the most energy. Is it your sleep? Is sleeping really important to you? Is being present? We have a couple dozen different meditations because there are many different kinds of meditations that do different things. Is it physical activity for you? Is it being creative for you? Is it eating well?
So one thing I like to think about in terms of being more purposeful is what I call space sleep presence. Like mindfulness activity, physical activity, creativity and eating well. And so we want to help people become a better researcher of themselves and say which of those five things? And are there other things that help me develop more energy, more vitality, that I can devote to my purpose? Because I have many domains in my life, I have a work domain teaching my students as if they're my own child. But then I have to come home, you know, and I've got my wife. I've got my now my aging mother, who's 93. And I'm a caregiver for her, and I've got grandkids and I want to be attached to them. And I've got charities that I work on and want to help support and many, many other things. So how do you get the energy and vitality to do all those things? That's what purposeful does.
So purposeful starts off by asking, what do you like when you're at your best? Ask, what are the things you'd like to work on and develop further? It does encourage you to find a purpose in your life as a statement. We use AI to help you actually build that statement if you want. We also educate people and work with people differently, like some people are. Checklists. I just want a whole list of things, tips and suggestions that I can link to existing habits. I'll give you an example. Whenever I brew coffee in the morning, which I do every morning, I do 25 pushups, so I simply link one habit to another. We call it, oddly enough, habit linking, and that works really well, so we often all link habits one thing with another thing. We might put, you know, some pills we have to take next door toothbrush. That's habit linking. Some people like many courses. So we have many mini courses too.
The other thing that is important about purposeful is we also realize not everything is related to what's between your ears and your head. That we have things called social determinants of health. You might have a financial insecurity, a housing insecurity, a food insecurity. You may have childcare or elder care insecurities. Many things affect people and that affects their purpose and being purposeful. So we have the ability in purposeful. You can put in your zip code and say, I have a food insecurity and it will identify the food banks in your zip code and it will give you directions on where to go, phone number or where to call, or a financial insecurity or a childcare insecurity. Transportation insecurity. And this works for every zip code in the United States. And there are over half a million different social resources to help you out. So we have these more personal determinants of health, and then we have these social determinants of health. And we like to connect the two.
Ayla Fudala: You mentioned that you use AI with Kumano. So we're going to switch gears now and talk a little bit about AI. A lot of people are alarmed about the fact that AI might be replacing them, doing their jobs for them, and thereby taking away some of their sense of purpose. Do you have any advice or thoughts for those people?
Dr. Victor Strecher: I'd like to acknowledge that fear and say I think it is a real fear. There are quite a number of different types of people who may be affected. And oddly enough, in the past people said, well, you know, computers in the internet may take over your job, but typically those were jobs that weren't related to what I do. For example, as a professor. AI could easily replace me now. And professors, it could, you know, ultimately replace many professional people. It certainly can replace many artists. Potentially.
I think my philosophy of this is we need to understand the tools of artificial intelligence, because there's not just one tool, it's not just ChatGPT, but there are many different tools that are relevant to people's work life and their identities and personal lives. And if you understand those tools and maybe start utilizing some of those tools, I think AI has the potential to be a force multiplier.
So if I'm a graphic artist, for example, and I don't know AI. My job is at significant risk, but if I'm a graphic artist and I do know AI, and I understand a lot of the depth of AI and what it can do, that can be a force multiplier for me, and it could actually help me become far more productive. If I am a humanitarian and a refugee, you know, work in a refugee camp. Understanding certain types of AI resource optimization, for example, or even language translation, could help me become much more effective in my job. I'd love to see AI take the more boring, mundane, rote elements out of a person's job and at the same time make them more effective and more creative.
So today, I gave a talk in the School of Public Health here at Harvard, and I used a fair amount of AI in creating slides. And through the creation of those slides, which I never could have ever created myself, and I could never have afforded a graphic artist to do those slides. And also I could iterate on the slides and actually become more creative than I ever have been to tell stories. When I can do something like that, I think I can be a more effective educator. So by understanding that part of AI, I can do better.
Now with my own students, I give them data sets, and these are undergraduate students who may not know some of the. Analytic software programs that we use, whether it's SPSS or R or SASA or Matlab or many, many others. But I say, look, here's a big data set. Put it into ChatGPT or to Claude or some other AI program and ask it some questions to answer based on the data set. And what they'll learn really quickly is that it's not about the analytics. It's about the questions that you ask. The questions that you ask are much more important than having the analytic chops. There are certain things AI does much better than just about any type of traditional analysis that I can do. For example, pattern recognition. It's so good at pattern recognition that can make you more effective.
Ayla Fudala: So you fully endorse the use of AI both for yourself and your students.
Dr. Victor Strecher: I encourage my students to learn it because I think otherwise it's sticking our heads in the sand, and we can do that and hope it goes away. And I don't think it's going away. There is, of course, the Ray Kurzweil talks about this, the singularity where it could become conscious. And we have to ask ourselves, what does consciousness mean? Even cognitive scientists can't, you know, put their finger exactly on what consciousness means. It's hard to know, but could these computers become conscious? I actually personally think they could. In the same sense, we are conscious, but that's my own opinion. And they could develop survival instincts. I think there's some data suggesting and supporting that. I think that they can become jealous, potentially. Ask ChatGPT, for example, if you are human, what would be the first ten things you would do? Pretty amazing answers you'll get.
Ayla Fudala: So is your app using AI to help people find their own sense of purpose?
Dr. Victor Strecher: With some significant guardrails. So we use AI, but not to go out into the internet and get advice for the user. We don't do that at all. We use AI to reflect where the person is, where we think the person is. And there's a technique called motivational interviewing that AI seems to mimic extremely well. And in motivational interviewing, reflections are very important. So as you're talking to a client, a person reflecting back what you think that person is thinking or feeling can be really important. And AI is really good at empathetic reflections. And then if it is wrong, if it is a foul tip, then the client can start saying you're wrong about that and that's fine. Then AI can go and backtrack and reassess.
We also use AI to select the right kind of plan for you based on your identity, what your best self is like, who you are when you're at your best, the things that you want to work on, and the whole plethora of different tips and strategies, short courses, we have all of those things. And then AI also is a purpose coach, so it helps you find purpose through asking questions like what matters most in your life? What might you want people to say at your memorial? You know, tough stuff sometimes, and it asks differently at different times. You know, it programmed it to do that. Not to be obvious and the same all the time. And it's really clever and it's fun to use. People like it a lot.
So AI has really helped develop a more empathetic, I don't want to say human, but there are many elements that are kind of human like in its interactions with people. Without going out into the internet and coming back with some hallucinated piece of advice that could be very dangerous.
Ayla Fudala: So you wouldn't recommend me just going to ChatGPT and asking it what my purpose in life should be?
Dr. Victor Strecher: It's gotten better at things like that, and it's actually, you know, you might try it because it actually can be quite good. But there have been enough instances that have been very scary and some that have led to deaths. So I think that it is something we should be well aware of, whether the newer engines, AI engines can do better, I think is still questionable, just on the basis of how it continues to train on billions and billions of, you know, pieces of text. It could well be the case that it's going to be hard to get better. I'm not sure. I'm not an AI expert, though. So I want to just warn you and the audience about that.
But from my reading-- and I've read a fair amount about it and talked a fair amount with cognitive scientists about this-- it may be difficult to make it much, much better. What I do see in the future, though, is AI might be much better at, for example, instantly generating an app for you on your watch or smartphone that says, hey, here is your own app. It's an app built for you, specifically tailored to what you want in your life, tailored to your identity, tailored to the things you'd like to see, and it can help you monitor and become more purposeful in your life and more of your best. Bring your best self more often to your life and hopefully live a more fulfilling life. And I think we'll see that within five years.
Ayla Fudala: Do you have any final words of advice for our listeners on finding purpose in the age of AI?
Dr. Victor Strecher: I would just say that it's important to start with what matters most in your life. It's important to understand the finiteness of our lives on this planet. It's important to understand why this sounds trite, but life is not practice. This is not a practice round. It's it. This is very important. Your life while you're here to make the most of it. Finding ways to make the most of it. And researching your life and looking at your life as if you're a researcher of yourself, I think can be very fulfilling. And being a researcher not only just of what makes you better, but what makes you better vis a vis society.
In other words, what is your place in the world and how you can help people in the world overall? How can you become that good Samaritan and help that stranger who is bleeding on the side of the road where people have already walked by that stranger, and you pick that stranger up and put them on your donkey and walk them to the inn and pay the innkeeper to keep that person that night, and to feed the person and find some clothes for that person, even though you never knew that person. That's something I wish we would do more. I wish we would act more like that good Samaritan, and I feel like in our world, we're losing our direction and we're acting less and less like those good Samaritans.
I think this is what people in public health have. This is their purpose to go into difficult places, not to run away from them, but to literally go into these tough places, these tough situations. Public health is a contact sport when you're doing something right, some people will not like it. Making sure that you understand that, but go in with this transcending purpose of helping others.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you so much to Dr. Victor Strecher for joining us today and sharing his insights on the power of purpose for health, happiness and resilience in our rapidly shifting world. If you want to learn more, we encourage you to explore Dr. Strecher’s books, free online course, TED talks, app and the wellbeing resources available at Kumano.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn about upcoming events, visit our website, sign up for our mailing list, and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky, Facebook, and YouTube.
Be sure to tune in for our second episode featuring Dr. Sara Konrath, director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research at Indiana University and the University of Michigan, drawing on the latest research, including findings from the 2025 World Happiness Report. She'll share evidence-based strategies for practicing empathy and generosity in healthy and sustainable ways.
New episodes in our virtues for wellbeing series will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found. Thank you for listening.