From Blue Jeans to AI to Love – Let’s Keep Innovating
Let us work together to increase the number of love-informed actions and make them the default mode of action and reaction.
Dear San Franciscans,
I invite you to join me in growing the World Love Forum (WLF), an urgently needed innovative way to implement love as a public health intervention to prevent violence and emotional distress, shift harmful social norms, and inspire love-informed actions in everyday life.
This mission builds on more than 20 years of work in preventing violence and depression and represents the next step in scaling innovations that have their roots during my time at Stanford University.
Why love and why now?
In a world faced with uncertainties, love is a time-tested entity that has enabled humans to survive challenging conditions.
Love is an integral part of our humanity; it is at the core of what makes life meaningful. But we have yet to realize its fullest potential as a large-scale social innovation in response to some of the biggest social challenges of our time – violence and hate, social discord, isolation and emotional distress.
Love is more than a message on a greeting card; it is also more than a bouquet of red roses.
Love is a prosocial emotion that can be translated into positive actions that promote health and wellbeing. Love can be understood, innovated upon and scaled – through behavioral sciences and public health. By infusing love-informed practices and policies in our homes, schools, workplaces and media channels, we will create positive shifts on individual and collective levels.
Why San Francisco?
From blue jeans to AI, San Francisco has long been a global hub of innovation. But innovation does not have to be limited to technology; the city can also lead the way in advancing emotional well-being.
Living here has revealed the city’s heart to me: neighbors greeting each other with smiles, Night Ministry clergy offering support to those on the streets, librarians eager to help, bus drivers guiding passengers, and so many others.
These are just some of the many people whose kindness I have been fortunate to experience.
This everyday kindness and connection, combined with San Francisco’s legacy of the Summer of Love, provides the perfect foundation for launching the Year of Love—a movement to grow meaningful love-informed actions and build a world anchored in love.
Not Just for Believers
San Francisco is named after Saint Francis of Assisi. Regardless of your views of the Catholic church, or any organized religion for that matter, I invite you to consider Saint Francis from a secular perspective – for instance as a teacher or philosopher.
Even if you eschew spirituality, his timeless message offers a powerful, yet underutilized action plan: “Where there is hatred, let me bring love...”
These are widely relatable goals that address what ails our country and the world at this time. Surely you recognize the value of bringing love where there is hatred. Surely there is room for more kindness and compassion in everyone’s lives.
Social Innovation
Just as hate and discord can be socially contagious, so can actions informed by love.
What social changes might come about if we brought love where there is hatred and violence?
Motivated by love, what if we brought hope where there is despair?
Motivated by love, what if we brought joy where there is sadness?
Imagine the changes across the city, state, country and world when love-informed actions increase in number and become much more commonplace – in the same way that Levis, Uber, and AirBnb have become part of everyday norms in so many places.
How might life look for you and your family when there is a net increase in love-informed actions in all domains of your life – family, school, workplace and social and mass media?
This would reduce violence, hate and despair. It would turn the tide on Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” and improve living conditions.
Urgent Innovation is Our Only Option
How long must we live with school shootings, hate crimes, bullying and interpersonal violence within families, schools and workplaces?
How long can people endure high levels of chronic stress that harms their emotional and physical health and their closest personal relationships?
We face complex problems requiring urgent, innovative solutions and cannot continue on our current path – characterized by unhealthy social environments, discord and division.
To this there are two possible responses: stay on course with uncertainty, fear and anxiety about the future; or implement large-scale efforts to put love into practice.
The best option is obvious.
When people reflect upon their lives, love — in its multitude of forms — is what they find most meaningful.
Love and emotional health are closely connected: the more we have love in the world, the more we advance emotional health.
Given this, if we organize our lives and societies around love—both as a means and an end—we can face the future knowing we have lived the most fulfilling lives possible, individually and collectively.
Death is inevitable. But what we can control is the quality of life we experience before we die and the conditions under which we raise future generations.
Take the Next Step
Change begins with consistent actions, both small and large, that ripple outward to create lasting impacts. The World Love Forum (WLF) will lead this process by developing a research-informed core curriculum on love and emotional health. This curriculum will be accessible to schools, community groups, professional organizations, and media creators, supporting the widespread diffusion and adoption of love-informed practices.
One of the WLF’s most innovative strategies is using entertainment education to disseminate and promote the adoption of these practices on a large scale. By embedding behavioral vaccines, i.e. skills such as kindness, compassion, self-regulation and healthy management of emotions into entertaining content across television, radio, and social media, we can reach people of all ages in an engaging, stigma-free way.
Imagine a current-day equivalent of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood modeling constructive behaviors for managing fear, anger, and frustration while shifting harmful social norms. Only now, it would not be limited to one specific show in one specific language or geographic region, but infused across entertainment across all countries in various languages. This proven approach overcomes barriers such as stigma, high costs, and personnel shortages that are associated with traditional skills training.
Earlier, I demonstrated the viablity of disseminating behaviroal skills essential for healthy relationships through a proof-of-concept I conducted in Ethiopia. This was funded by UNICEF and the American Psychological Foundation.
By training serial drama (i.e. soap opera) writers and producers to incorporate emotion regulation and conflict resolution into storylines, we were able to deliver and model actionable skills such as taking a "time-out" to de-escalate conflicts to 20 million listeners.
Imagine leveraging these methods globally, much like toothpaste campaigns that promote oral health. With strategic investments in entertainment education, we can advance love-informed actions as a behavioral vaccine against violence and emotional distress—for mere pennies per person.
Let’s start by making 2025 the Year of Love in San Francisco, and then extend it to its sister cities and beyond.
Together, we can build the world you wish for - for yourself, your children, and generations to come.
I forwarded this column to a friend of mine who is a practicing Catholic. And I asked her what prayer of Saint Francis you were referring to. She did not know. Can you give us more information about that prayer?