This episode is a conversation with two experts combating our current loneliness crisis: Ron Ivey and Monika Jiang.
Ron Ivey is a writer, researcher, and strategic advisor to business, governments, and philanthropies with a focus on social trust, belonging, and human flourishing. Ron is currently the Managing Director of the Humanity 2.0 Institute and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program where he co-leads the Trust and Belonging Initiative. Ron also currently serves as a Fellow at the Centre for Public Impact, a global think tank seeking to re-imagine government and restore relationships between governments and those they govern. In 2017, Ron established a consultancy, Rembrandt Collective, to shape business strategies for trust, alignment and social impact. For the past two decades, he has served as an advisor to executives in organizations including Preston-Werner Ventures, Fox River Partners, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Vatican, IBM, the World Bank, the White House, and the Aspen Institute. Previous to his consultancy work, Ron served as a policy advisor in the United States Senate. Ron also serves on multiple advisory boards, including the OECD’s Trust in Business Initiative, a global effort focused on restoring trust in business, and the Paris based think tank Up for Humanness, researching ways to restore social cohesion.
Monika Jiang, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, has always walked the line between feeling estranged and belonging. Her journey, marked by oscillations between aloneness, loneliness, and connection, has profoundly influenced her personal and professional life, shaping her into a visionary who senses what wants to emerge as we move closer to ourselves, each other, and the world. Professionally, Monika has made a significant impact at the House of Beautiful Business. Here, she helped build a global community of 50,000 members dedicated to a life-centered economy. By curating and hosting transformative gatherings, she helped business leaders imagine and transform themselves and their environments. Collaborating with brands like Google, Porsche, Salesforce, and Volkswagen, Monika led a team responsible for thought leadership content, brand strategy, and innovative event design, creating an "alternative temporary world" for exploration and change. Monika’s deep desire to move from loneliness to oneliness inspired her to found the initiative Sharing Our Loneliness. This initiative aims to raise awareness about the paradoxical power of loneliness to reconnect us with ourselves and others. Through intimate gatherings, writing, and speaking engagements, Monika cultivates spaces for dialogue, connection, and community, addressing loneliness as a personal, collective, and societal challenge. As an independent consultant, Monika helps to elevate and deepen insights, engagement, and impact of community-focused businesses and organizations. Additionally, she is a teacher in training with Humanize, an evidence-based program focused on fostering emotional and social skills, and she practices these skills based on social neuroscientific research at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin. Above all, Monika is committed to bridging divides, asking essential questions, and stepping into the realities of others to make more feelings known, more faces seen, and more voices heard.
In this episode we talk about:
The loneliness of growing up in a multicultural household
How the experience of shared loneliness can actually bring us closer together
Current research on loneliness
The systemic neglect of social cohesion and connection
How loneliness is experienced differently across generations and cultures
The need to create cities with shared spaces
The stigma of discussing the shame and suffering that comes with loneliness
Embracing the discomfort of loneliness
How AI and new technologies are shaping loneliness and belonging
The connection between awe and loneliness
To learn more about Monika’s work, you can find her at:
Website: https://www.monikajiang.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monika.jiang/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monika-jiang
To learn more about Ron’s work, you can find him at:
X: https://x.com/ronivey
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monika.jiang/
Linkedin: https://fr.linkedin.com/in/ron-ivey-0bb9a33
This episode is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/) and the Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)
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